Gia- session 780 - dressage lesson with Suzin

 Gia and I started out with a nice, stretchy, relaxed free walk in our lesson today with Suzin.  When I picked her up to medium walk, we did a few halt/walk transitions, and a little bit of rein-back.  Then we moved on to walk/trot transitions.  I had to do a few of those over, because she was against my hand, but they did get better.  We worked on a lot of exercises to help with straightness, like shoulder-in, leg yield, circles, changes of direction.  I had to be more aware of my seat bones, and making sure that they were equally weighted, or a little more weight in the inside seat bone.  I noticed, at times, that either my hips would freeze up, and then my seat bones didn't really touch the saddle at all, or they would get "stuck" in the outside.  Those discrepancies led to Gia being more crooked, and doing things like throwing her haunches-in.  When I focused more on equal weight in my stirrups, equal weight in my seat bones, and equal, but light, pressure in my reins, Gia was MUCH more obedient.  We were even able to get a REALLY nice canter tracking right (including the up and down transitions).  It wasn't quite as nice to the left, but it was pretty good.  There were only a few small bucks at one point, but they did seem half hearted.

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