All The Kings' Horses

 Gia and I had a dressage lesson with Suzin today.  We kept it pretty simple and just worked at the walk and trot, mostly on transitions and keeping Gia together.  She felt a bit tense, like she might have a little tantrum, when I first started with her.  I worked on getting her to stretch down, and just feeding her small amounts of info.  Not too much that she felt the need to explode, but enough that she knew she needed to keep doing something.  When I picked her up to the trot, I sat the trot at first, until she let go of some of the tension and gave me a trot that I could post to.  Then we worked a lot on positioning, to help get her straighter and more obedient to the transitions.  She ended up giving me a lot of nice moments of suspension and throughness! 

 I worked with Gia in the arena today on her flatwork.  She had yesterday off, so I decided to ease back into the work today.  I warmed her up with some stretching and straightness at the walk.  At the trot, we also worked on straightness, as well as some transitions when she didn't quite feel right between my hand and leg.  Once she did feel good, I added some halt transitions, as well as a little rein back.  She was good at the halt, but a bit resistant to the rein back. I had planned to work on her canter on the lunge line in the Pessoa, but she felt pretty balanced at the trot today, and I felt something that I can't quite explain that led me to believe that the canter might not be too bad under saddle.   I started with the canter to the right.  I waited until I had the trot going well, and her nicely between my hand and leg, and balanced.  Then I asked for the canter.  We did a LOT of transitions back and forth between canter a...

 I took Gia to the Sedgefield jumper show today to school around.  I started out lunging her in the Pessoa, and that made a HUGE difference with her!  She was MUCH quieter, right from the start.  She even walked fairly nicely out to the lunging area.  She had much less trouble staying on her feet and keeping herself together.  She did get a bit frisky when I asked for the canter, but she settled down eventually.  Every time she bucked or kicked out, I brought her to a quick halt, then moved on.   Under saddle, she was a little anxious at first.  Once the walk felt more relaxed, I asked for the trot.  When I started to post the trot, I noticed she got more anxious and thought about bucking, so I decided to try sitting the trot.  That made a HUGE difference in her as well.  For some reason, sitting the trot did not elicit any naughty behavior from her.  And, once she felt more relaxed, I started posting again and she wa...

 We free jumped Gia again today.  This time, we sent her jumping in the opposite direction, but everything else was the same.  She was VERY excited to jump again!  She had stood at the fence watching the others jumping and waiting for her turn.  I think she was studying, because she definitely seemed more prepared this time around.  Usually, we will hand walk a horse to the chute every time, but Gia was ready to do it all by herself (although a little too fast at times).  We pretty much just had to hurry up and adjust the jumps before she could get around to jump them again on her own.  She was even doing really well about figuring out her mistakes and how to correct them.  She came through one time and had too open of a stride, so she chipped in to the second jump pretty bad.  The second time through, even though she was still fast, she quickly figured out that she had to shorten her stride to make it fit.  It was really impressive...

 I decided to do some free jumping with Gia today.  It's been a while since I last free jumped her, and it wasn't that great.  She was very uncoordinated with her feet, and was also a little slow.  This time was quite different!  After the first couple of run throughs, just going over poles on the ground to get the idea, she was excited, and it didn't take much to get her going.  She had a hard time figuring out when to take off for the first jump, so I had to put a ground pole down, which helped immensely.  She also had a hard time fitting in two strides between the jumps.  She was getting about 1 1/2 strides!  As the jumps got bigger, she was starting to figure it out, and by the end, she was fitting in a nice two strides between two very big jumps!  She ended up getting up to 3'9" with a 4'8" spread!  

 Gia and I had a lesson with Suzin.  We primarily focused on transitions between walk, trot, halt, and rein back.  Gia was really responsive to all those.  I did have to work a little bit to keep her soft, but she was pretty good.  She was also really good at keeping a consistent shape to her body.  We also got to work a little on collecting and lengthening her stride.  The big challenge is to do it without losing the tempo - either getting too quick or too slow.  We practiced changing the number of strides between two set points in the arena (after first determining the average number of working trot strides between the two points).  The goal was to get more or fewer strides between the points without allowing Gia to speed up or slow down.  She did super at the lengthenings!  Collecting her without slowing down was a lot harder, but we did manage to get a little bit. She did throw in a little tantrum in the middle of our work at on...

 I took Gia down to CDP today to meet with Cameron for a chiropractic check up.  He said she was very muscle sore on her right side, so he recommended acupuncture in addition to her regular chiropractic adjustment.  She LOVED it!  She was so relaxed and really enjoyed the session.  She was completely zenned out when I saw her.  Hopefully, I will notice a difference in her ride tomorrow!