 In today's exercise, we're going to be talking about our shock absorption system, and having your shock absorbers in play when we canter is really important, but I think the best place to start is at the trot. Now the shock absorbers that we have are going to be our hip, our knee, and our ankle. We would like to have them in the middle of their range of motion. If our shock absorbers are in the middle of the range of motion, they can both come up and down. So I'm going to exaggerate that a little bit, and I'm going to really let my shock absorbers go. So if you look at my knee and my ankle, you can see there's a fair amount of movement in them, and as I come past the camera here you should be able to see that. So you're going to allow there to be some looseness. Now the hip is a shock absorber as well. And when we sit the trot, our hip needs to absorb the shock. In order for our hip to be soft and supple, we have to have a strong core. Otherwise, what ends up happening is when we absorb, try keeping our hip soft and supple and try to have it absorb the shock, it ends up being locked because it feels like it has to do the job of stabilizing. The core is actually our main stabilizer. So when I sit here, what I'm going to do now is, instead of being loose, I'm going to think of having some tone in my core to allow my hips to open and close. So it's important we have a little tone in our abdomen so that we can allow the hip to stay soft and supple. If I try staying loose here, what ends up happening is my hip can't do its job and you can see my horse didn't like that so much. And the tone in the abdomen causes you to feel like you're riding the lift. So I think about the up, up, lift, lift, lift, lift.