Water holding capacity has been studied on Longissimus dorsi muscles of growing rabbits reared in intensive system. The research work has been conducted on 48 carcasses, 48 h post mortem, by performing the same analyses which have been found useful for the assessment of water holding capacity in pork meat. Two different water compartments are detected by Low Resolution Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (LR-NMR), having long and short proton relaxation times, T2a and T2b, respectively. Relaxation time T2a has been associated to protons of water less tightly held by meat structure itself with respect to water having relaxation time T2b. In addition, LR-NMR provides the relative amount of water having these two different relaxation times. The parameter a is defined as the ratio between the amount (P) of water with T2a and the total amount of water detected in meat by NMR [a per cent