Ever wondered what it takes to train the show stopping tricks you see frisbee dogs and stunt dogs perform? In this episode Sara and I talk about training big moves — what to think about, how to break them down, and what you need to consider to keep both you and your dog safe. 

 Transcription

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau, and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast, brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today I have Sara Brueske here with me to talk about teaching your dog fun, active tricks for a stunt dog routine. Hi, Sara. Welcome back to the podcast.

Sara Brueske: Hi, Melissa. Thank you for having me.

Melissa Breau: Absolutely. To start us out, do you want to just remind listeners a little bit about you and kind of who your furry crew is?

Sara Brueske: Yeah, absolutely. So I have a big crew of dogs. Currently I have 10 dogs. Seven of those are in double digits. So they were X style on dogs. And that's where a lot of my material comes from, is those dogs.

Those dogs and I worked at Purina Farms together for many years performing for the public as well as going to, like, halftime shows and in front of school children and all sorts of different fun things. It's a wide range of dogs. I have a Boston Terrier, Shih Tzu mix named Edgar, Belgian Malinois, Australian Koolies, a Border collie, a Border Staffie, some mixed breeds, like just a kind of hodge podge of different dogs that make up my crew. My three active training dogs are Vibrant, Cake and Pop Rock. So two coolies and a Papillon, and they are between 2 and 4 years old.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. And because it's relevant, do you want to mention how much they weigh?

Sara Breuske: Oh, it is very relevant. So my biggest dog is that I would do these tricks with. She was 57 pounds at her working weight. She's 10 years old now, so she doesn't do these tricks anymore.

But she was the biggest I would do these tricks with. And then at some point I got bruised and beaten enough where I said, you know, I'll stick with the smaller dogs. My preferred weight range is cake is about 35 pounds. And that's a really good weight, I think, for these tricks. Same with Vibrant. And then of course, Pop Rock's five pounds. So she's like a little feather compared to these guys. You don't even notice.

Melissa Breau: Yeah, yeah. So what kind of tricks are we talking about here when we're talking about, you know, stunt dog skills, what do you kind of group in that category?

Sara Breuske: So when I envision, like there is no official stunt dog category. Right. So I'm envisioning the kind of crowd appealing tricks where the dog is kind of using your body in different ways. So they could do a rebound, you could do dog catches.

You can do like different stalls where the dog balances and perches on a part of your body. So a way of making a fun kind of crowd inspiring routine and not using a whole lot of props. We do have a foundation trick in there that is leading up to a box jump, so the dog jumps off of a box for you to catch them. And that could be done over a jump or something along those lines too. But yeah, they're just basically tricks that are meant to show off your dog's athletic and kind of power and wow, an audience.

Melissa Breau: I know you mentioned the Purina stuff earlier. What got you kind of interested in this stuff and got you doing all this stuff.

Sara Breuske: So most of these tricks are actually foundation tricks for different disc dog freestyles. So the body perches, we call them stalls in disc freestyle.

And so that's where the dog perches on a part of your body like your back or your feet. And a lot of times those tricks are incorporated into a disc freestyle routine. We might do like a disc juggle when they're up there, or we might use that as a foundation for a vault where the dog jumps off of our body to catch the frisbee. Some of them are setup moves.

So like a rebound is a setup move for a disc dog move, like a vault or a flip. It's just a way to help your dog collect. But we can have some really fun variations with those too. So they all come from that. And so my job at Purina and elsewhere for the longest time was performing frisbee routines, freestyle Frisbee routines for an audience. And so I always try to incorporate the most awe inspiring tricks. And that's where a lot of this came from.

Melissa Breau: I think a lot of times people look at this kind of stuff, right, and they're absolutely impressed, but they just can't even picture how you start to break some of this stuff down. They just feel like really big moves or really exciting things. Can you walk us through how you think about that? Like how do you break these fairly dramatic big movements down so you can actually start training them?

Sara Breuske: Yeah. So, you know, a lot of it comes down to your dog just has to be willing to get into your body space and you're, you know, and incorporate you into the moves. So most of these tricks start the same way we teach a dog, catch first, because it's a pretty simple trick to teach and it helps your dog get comfortable moving into your space and including you in that trick.

You know, we spend all this time teaching dogs not to jump us on us. Don't jump on us, Jump on us. And now we're like, oh, hey, no, it's okay if you jump on us. So we break that down just like we would any other behavior. We try to find the little itty bittiest pieces, reinforce that, and shape it into the behavior that we like. But generally the biggest hurdle with a lot of these is just getting the dog okay with kind of bashing into a little bit and the handler kind of used to it maybe?

Melissa Breau: Yes, absolutely. So I know you're a big fan of kind of location specific marker cues and thinking about your reinforcement in strategic ways. Can you talk a little bit about how that factors in here? How do you think about placement of reinforcement and choose between some of those different strategies when you're thinking about these more extreme skills and what you want them to look like?

Sara Breuske: Yeah, there's a lot that we can do in regard to treat delivery, reinforcement delivery. We do teach everything with food first. So even if your ultimate goal is to move to doing Frisbee with these tricks, we don't want to start with the Frisbee like we used to. That was kind of the old school way of teaching a lot of these is just put the Frisbee where you want it. The dog will do the behavior that we want. But, you know, my journey has shown that that doesn't always result in the best form of that behavior or maybe the safest form for dog and handler.

I was just telling you that my little 25 pound Zuma, my border collie mix who got me started in frisbee, she had that type of foundation where I just held the disc where I want her to get it, put my leg in the way, and she'd jump on my leg to get the Frisbee. But that ultimately she was my hardest hitting dog when we were playing, and I ended up with more bruises and scratches from her than any of my other dogs because she never had that foundation broken down to food rewards and showing her how to properly collect, how to properly push off of me in a safe way.

And so because of that, we use the food reinforcement, teach the behaviors that we want so our dog is a little bit more thoughtful before we bring out the frisbees or something that might cause them to go super high drive. And then based on that, we can change our reinforcement strategy and location based on what my dog needs. A lot of dogs, when they're just beginning, we really want to push that enthusiasm a little bit more because they're uncertain, they're uncertain about jumping onto us.

About that collection. And so we're gonna use a lot more treat tosses to help restart our dogs, reset them so that they're approaching with some speed, and then that moving treat acts, or it helps their prey drive come up a little bit, enthusiasm comes up even more. And we can use that to help make it more fun for them at the beginning. But if you have a dog now that is just absolutely crazy about these tricks and just kind of flying at y'all left and right and willy nilly, we can use more rewards in place.

So if my dog is jumping on my lap now, but they're immediately jumping off to get that reset reward again, I can slow down and start rewarding just for my hand, or maybe I'll have them do a situation day before I call them up. So there's different strategies as far as that goes. And one of my favorite things, if I have a dog that's having trouble, so one of the big things we'll talk about in the class is the mechanics and the movement of the dog while they're doing the tricks.

So I don't want them just hitting me and then kind of falling off for a rebound, right. I want front paws, back paws, push off in a circular pattern. And that's going to be the safest for the dog and help prevent a lot of slipping or any kind of injuries. And so for that, we need the dog kind of looking out away from us. And so most dogs, we can use a treat toss to help encourage that in the foundation stages.

But some dogs, they really struggle with that. They just want to watch your hand move, and so they end up looking at you too much, which kind of prevents that push off that we're looking for. And so we can use a place to reward for that. So I've done a lot of food bowl, send the food bowl after a rebound to help counteract some of that handler focus that dogs can develop.

Melissa Breau: I like that. And I like kind of thinking about those different pieces and how much you kind of maybe have to adapt them based on the dog that you're working with and kind of what they're showing you and their inclinations towards the tricks.

Sara Breuske: Well, and the handler, too, because a lot of times I'm like, well, you just hold your hand down low so the dog can't see it.

You just fling that treat out there. But a lot of people have troubles with that, and they just do a whole arm movement. And then now the dog's stuck looking at their arm. And so I'm like, okay, let's get the reward off of you because it's a challenging mechanical skill. We've never had to do that skill before, so. Yeah. And it looks probably very different than any of the other skills that we've taught our dogs or ourselves.

Melissa Breau: So in addition to kind of tailoring the specific learning strategies that you're going to use based on the dog, do you also think about kind of which skills you're going to teach which dog? Are there things that are just like foundations? You teach them to all of the dogs that you want to do this kind of stuff with, or are there pieces that, you know, you kind of pick and choose?

Sara Breuske: I'm not going to teach that dog this trick because I don't think it's good for them based on that dog. Does that make sense?

Melissa Breau: Yeah, absolutely.

Sara Breuske: And some of that comes with experience. When I was, you know, starting out, all of my dogs learned all of the tricks and all of the variations, and I kind of learned that I don't particularly like doing footstalls with a 35 pound dog anymore.

Like, it's not my favorite thing. And so then it makes me kind of not look forward. Even though it's a really cool trick and a lot of fun, I'm at the point where I'm like, you know, that's a lot more work than I want to put in for the payoff on that trick. And so my papillons learned a footstall, but my Koolies, my current Koolies have not. Just because I'm getting older and I don't want to have to crack my back and do yoga after every training session anymore. But younger Sara was all about that.

Melissa Breau: Absolutely.

Sara Breuske: And so part of that is handler preference. And so that's why I've kind of designed the class to be able to do different variations. Not everybody's going to learn a footstall, but if that is something that you want to teach your dog, then we can take the stalls and then move it into a footstall where somebody might just want to go, no, I just want to do a back stall. It'll be easier for me, easier for my dog. And so that's the variation that they'll focus on.

Melissa Breau: Okay, so we have the skills. Right. What do you think about when you start putting things together? So when you're building out a routine, whether it's a Frisbee routine or just kind of starting to chain some tricks together, what factors are you considering and what are you thinking about and how do you make some of those choices?

Sara Breuske: I do a lot of flow. So I don't want to have to stop my dog. I don't want to have to adjust a whole bunch. I want one trick to kind of move into another trick in a nice flowy way. And so for that reason, I always want to incorporate some spins. I want to think about which direction the dog is going to be facing at the end of one trick, and what trick can we go into that after that.

The other thing that's kind of important for me is, you know, often when we're doing this, these are pretty difficult tricks for our dogs. It's a high, high energy trick for the dogs, and so we want to be able to reinforce our dogs. And so when I'm building a routine, I want reward points in there. And so, you know, where can I put those reward points in? That still keeps the flow.

Especially if you're thinking about doing this for, you know, performance for, like, school groups or something like that, or, you know, your local community, you want to reward your dog as you're performing, otherwise your performance might start to slip. And so you want to be able to sneak those rewards in where it doesn't hinder the performance. So that's actually a big factor when I'm building a routine, thinking about which behaviors I might have to reinforce more than others, and how can I get that reinforcement in where it's going to help keep that behavior as fresh as it possibly can.

Melissa Breau: How do you think about, you know, kind of safety is in all of this. You know what I mean? Like, especially when you're thinking about bigger moves, obviously there's more risk.

Sara Breuske: Right. Like, that feels fairly inevitable. But, you know, are there things that you try to do or try not to do to improve the likelihood of keeping everybody as safe as possible? Yeah. Where you're practicing matters. So we need really good traction and we need good padding on the floor.

So, like, those foam mats are the best kind of situation. Practicing outside on the grass, not frozen ground, is a good situation. Making sure your dog has good traction is really the most important. And then, of course, make sure your dog is athletic and fit. So overweight dogs, you're putting just a lot more. Even if they're just, you know, three, four pounds overweight, that's a lot more weight on their joints.

Every single repetition. Other thing is keeping things limited. You don't need to do 30 rebounds in a session. Like, that's absolutely crazy. You can do five, and you do five a day, and that's fine as long as your dog is fit. Make sure. That they're evaluated from a vet. We don't want dogs with orthopedic problems doing any of these moves. And we don't, you know, the larger the dog too, the more weight that's going on their joints as well.

So we gotta be a little bit more aware about the larger dogs and how we're practicing with them as well. And of course, age growth plates are important too. Yeah. No teeny tiny baby dogs and no. And we can do a lot. So I've said okay to some puppies joining in the class. We just are going to change the dismounts and we're going to change the number of reps.

So I teach my baby puppies dog catches, really low dog catches. And then I'll start teaching stalls and stuff too. But I always build a dismount kind of platform for them to get down versus jumping down. So we can absolutely modify these things so that they are safer for young dogs. And I love that it does teach some body awareness.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. Okay, so the class, we've kind of mentioned it a couple times in passing here. Can you share a little more about what's included in the class who might want to consider joining you? Prerequisites that should be taken into consideration. All of that.

Sara Breuske: Yeah. So I have kind of tried to steer away some larger dogs. Again, it's going to be up to the handler. So if you are comfortable getting beat on by your larger dog, then go for it. Absolutely. It's going to be a handler preferencing for sure.

As far as what your limits are and what aren't know this is a very handler inclusive class. So you're going to be involved in these tricks. There is no way to go around not being involved in the tricks. Your dog's going to be jumping on you, they're going to be pushing off of you and a lot of the foundation. We can stabilize you by having you sit and you know, kneeling and that sort of thing.

But that is definitely something to think about as a very physical class. Other than that, we are going to be talking about dog catches, we're going to be talking about about body stalls, rebounds, arm overs, wall handstand, which is always a crowd pleaser, standing up on hind legs. And then we will be talking about cheating tricks together as well. And then one thing I do want to mention is that if your dog has these tricks, we can definitely go on to different variations of them.

So if your dog has rebound, we can start working on generalizing that rebound to other body parts or we can add a hoop to it. So there's other things that we can do with those tricks.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. Any final thoughts or maybe key points you want to kind of leave listeners with?

Sara Breuske: No, other than that these are some of my favorite tricks in the world to teach dogs. I think they're just so much fun to play with your dog in this way.

And so I hope some people join me and see how fun it is. And maybe if you like this sort of thing, get involved with Frisbee as well.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. All right, well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Sara.

Sara Breuske: Thank you for having me, and thanks to our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Bronagh to talk about agility handling. If you haven't already, subscribe to the podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available.

Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty free by BenSound.com the track featured here is called Buddy Audio Editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training.

 Credits

Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called "Buddy." Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!