Gia - session 192 - more jumping, and Gia does her first line!

 Gia was a bit tense today, so we started out with a nice, long, stretching walk to help relax and stretch.  That definitely helped!  Once she was relaxed, I was able to ask her to move off my leg on circles at the walk and trot, which were fairly easy.  She was a little tense at the trot, and tried to canter a few times, but nothing terrible.

When the trot circles were good, I started approaching one of the crossrails with poles that was set up.  She was a little fidgety and crooked at first, but I kept circling until she was coming in straighter.  I think she really likes the jumping, because once she realized that's what we were going to do, she was pulling me towards the jumps!  We worked on the crossrails several times in each direction.  Sometimes, she had really nice jumps, and sometimes she didn't.  I just focused on presenting her to the jump as correctly as possible, and then staying very still while she figured it out.

Since that was going fairly well, I decided to see how she felt about take a line of jumps.  A line of jumps is typically 2 or more jumps in a row.  In this case, I had a crossrail, then a few strides, then a vertical.  She was a little clumsy at first, and not very straight, but by the end, she was starting to figure it out.

I finished our ride with more halt transitions.  It felt like she was getting those a little bit quicker today.

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