Do you find your dog tends to fall flat as you continue to raise criteria in training? Or maybe you have a dog that is SO enthusiastic that precision feels like an impossible dream? Join us for a conversation on balancing motivation and precision in your sports training. 

 Transcript

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 we'll be talking to Petra Ford about balancing motivation and precision when training our dogs. Hi, Petra. Welcome back to the podcast.

Petra Ford: Hi, Melissa. Thank you for having me back. Always appreciate it. Always a fun time.

Melissa Breau: All right, let's start us out. Can you remind everybody a little bit about you, kind of who your dogs are, what you work on with them?

Petra Ford: So I compete in, primarily in competition obedience. I have Zeal. He's retired. He. He's almost 13. I actually did some rally with him, which he absolutely loved and we had a blast. And it's just now he's struggling to sit and, you know, those old dog things.

And then Zayna is nine, so I compete in obedience with her. And Zesty is 5. He just turned 5, so he's also competing in obedience. They both have their championship. Zesty, I would still consider is green, you know, relatively green and inexperienced compared to Zayna. And that's it. I'm dying for a puppy, but I am controlling myself.

Melissa Breau: I cannot believe your youngest is five.

Petra Ford: I can't either. It's so sad.

Melissa Breau: Oh, man, I hear you. So I mentioned during the intro that I wanted to talk about how you work to balance motivation and precision in your training. Right. So before we dive too deep, can you share a little bit about why it's important to have both and kind of how you're using the terms?

Petra Ford: So I think I used for sure. I would say that more than likely I use. My definition of precision is probably way different than the vast majority of people. If when we say precision, it tends to have kind of like a negative connotation. Right? Like it's nitpicky, it's perfectionist, it's putting a lot of pressure on the dog. It's really hard. And if you think about it like that, then that's probably how the behaviors are going to end up being for your dog. I don't look at them like that at all.

At all. They're just behaviors, right? No different than any other behavior. They're just silly pet tricks. Because really, in the big scheme of things, this is like not world peace. We're just. And the dogs have no idea what we're doing or why. We're just giving a cue and they're trying to figure out what we want so they can get the cookie or the toy. So I need to protect precision for obedience.

But I feel like if I make that, if I put pressure on that, then my dog's going to feel pressure from that. And I don't want that. I want my dogs to think that quote unquote, precision behaviors are super fun. So that's how I teach them. That's how I perceive them, that's how I want my dogs to perceive them, and that's what I strive for. So basically, motivation is I motivate everything, including precision behaviors.

If anything, I motivate them way more heavily than any other piece that we work on. And obedience is not inherently self reinforcing. So to make it fun to keep the dogs excited about it and motivated, that's up to us, right? That's our job. And to incorporate that into every piece of our training so that our dogs have fun doing it.

Melissa Breau: With a young dog, which one do you prioritize?

Petra Ford: So I'm always prioritizing. I can't really say one or the other because again, to me, precision is not necessarily a separate thing, right. So if I know, I already know certain behaviors are going to be more challenging than others. So those behaviors I'm making super fun right out of the gate. So if I have a little puppy and I'm luring it around with food, right, to keep. Because initially that's what I'll do.

I'll lure my puppy into fronts and feed and I'll be like, yes, wow. And I, you know, I put a lot of energy into it and fun into it. As a dog gets a little older and I'm not luring, I make sure that the more challenging behaviors that I create a positive condition and emotional response around them. So I make sure the dog has a super high accuracy rate.

I make sure I break it into teeny tiny pieces so the dog can't be wrong. And the dog is right all the time. All the time. So the dog's like, yeah, I'm super confident. I know how to do this. I break everything down into teeny tiny pieces for that reason, every behavior. And even as I'm building those tiny pieces into a bigger behavior, I make sure that the entire time my dog is confident and my dog's having a good time.

If my dog starts to struggle a little bit, I'll immediately go back and break it down again. So every time my dog trains, everything they're doing is very successful. Everything they're doing has a high reinforcement rate and everything they're doing is in their mind. It's just a whole bunch of games and tricks all strung together seamlessly.

Melissa Breau: I know you kind of shared that you build motivation into your precision behaviors directly, but what factors is it about precision training that can sometimes lead dogs to, you know, lose motivation or you can kind of see that flattening?

Petra Ford: Yeah, well, that's super common. So if you want to take a front, for example, some oftentimes people don't train front thoroughly enough so that the dog is fluent. Right? Meaning the dog can hit front no matter what. The dog really and truly understands it to the point where it can be correct 95% of the time. So the behavior is not thoroughly trained. And then they put it into the chain.

Right. So let's say you take something like a retrieve. Typically, a retrieve would be more motivating than maybe some other exercises. Right? So the dog runs out, gets the dumbbell, runs back, and it comes to front and it's crooked. And then the trainer says, no, no, no, front. Or maybe they don't say no, but they just adjust and adjust and adjust. Right. And they do that every time.

Well, what's going to happen? The dog's not going to want to come back because every time it comes back, it's wrong and it doesn't know how to be right. And it's, you know, we're fussing over it. And so that spills backwards into the whole exercise, and the whole exercise starts to get demotivating. So I would never. I don't ever incorporate fronts into any chain until my dog's fronts are really, really solid.

So the dog can do them perfectly in front of me, stepping laterally and rotation. And then I back chain them. So, meaning I sit the dog a few feet back from me and then I ask them to front, or I sit my dog further back and ask him to front. And then maybe I'll send my dog around a cone and ask them to front so that by the time I'm putting the front into the chain, there's a pretty darn high likelihood that my dog's going to hit front, front, and they're going to be right.

And so therefore, they're going to want to come in to me because they're going to be right a whole bunch of times. If I'm not 100% sure and I want to help my dog, then I'll use something like an aid maybe to ensure my dog is correct, you know, or as my dog's coming in, I'll say something or use a little hand signal that I've taught them that helps them come in correct.

So the biggest issue is basically error rate, right? If the dog's failing constantly, it's not going to want to do it. You wouldn't want to either. And then the human gets frustrated, and then that frustration carries down to the dog on top of it, and then it's just not fun. And that's why I think precision gets a bad rap.

Melissa Breau: Can you talk a little bit about how having a clear communication system, you know, fits into this picture? What do you do to kind of create that clear communication system with your dogs?

Petra Ford: So I think the first thing is I have a very clear end picture. A lot of people go awry because they don't have a clear end picture. I know exactly what I want the end picture to look like. Now, that doesn't mean I strive for that immediate. Like, I go for that complete end picture on day one.

I'm shaping it right. I'm heading in that direction, but I always know where I'm going. I also believe in black and white. So people. It's super common that people, in their minds, they're helping their dogs because they feel like precision is nitpicky. So they have this thing in their head, it's negative. So they're like, well, that's close enough. I'll accept it. Good dog. And then one day they're like, well, dog, why do you keep sitting crooked?

Dog's like, well, because you've told me for a year that that's correct. And now the dog's, like, completely confused and demoralized because you changed your criteria. So I'm always heading my dog in that direction, and I'm saying to the dog, that's correct, or if it's not correct, then it's on me to do something different to. To make sure my dog is correct. So that's my job, right? That's not the dog's job.

It's my job to break it down or to communicate it more clearly. I'm super clean with my markers. Every class on week one, I write a whole lecture on clean marking and 99% sure that almost everybody doesn't read it, because in their mind, because people really believe they're marking cleanly, right? And then inevitably, telling everyone repeatedly, you're not being clear with your markers. Right? And markers are really the only way we're telling our dogs that's correct or not.

So if we're not using them correctly, we're confusing the heck out of our dogs. And then your handling has to be clean. So people have zero awareness of what they're doing with their hands, what they're doing with their head, their shoulders, their hips. Right. From a dog's perspective, words are not that meaningful. Physical cues are extremely meaningful. Physical what, what we do with our body is like screaming at our dogs.

So if I'm constant, if every time my dog comes to front, I use my hands to help the dog front, then I go in the ring and my hands are at my side, my dog is going to have absolutely no idea whatsoever how to front. Right. Because to the dog that's drastically different. Or if I use a platform for front for two years and then one day I remove the platform and my dog's going to have absolutely no idea what to do because without the platform, the picture looks drastically different.

So I'm super conscientious about what I'm doing with my body, like to the nth degree. Like my facial expression is information. Every single thing you do with your body is information. So I. That's what I really strive first to help people with is get their handling clean, get their. Make sure they have a clear picture of what's right and what's not. Make sure they're using their markers correctly, make sure they're breaking the behaviors down and helping the dog so the dog can be correct.

So the dog has a high success ratio, which builds confidence. So in addition to kind of that clear communication system, you mentioned something there I'd like to talk about a little bit more. So you kind of talked about breaking behaviors down. And I've seen in a few places that you do that even, you know, kind of with well known behaviors and with some other bits and pieces. Do you mind just talking us through an example of how you break something down even when it's a well known behavior?

Ready? Yep. So one thing I do very routinely is healing. So I will just do forward, right turn. Yes, feed. Forward, right turn, yes, feed. I'll do that like three times and you'll see my dog's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, right turn. Cool. And I'll do that with the left turn and I'll do that with the about turn and I'll do that with halts. And I actually reinforce a fair amount, which nobody does during the normal piece.

Right. Because those are pieces that people just. Well, now my dog knows it, therefore I no longer need to reinforce it. Well, if you think about doing a full healing pattern, that's a really long chain. And if you never reinforce those pieces in between, the dog's going to get bored. The dog, it's just going to get flat. The dog's not going to be motivated. The dog's just like waiting for the end because it knows it's not going to get any reinforcement until the very end.

So why would they put more effort in? There's no reason for them to do that. Let's say directed jumping. Very, very, very often I send my dog to the go out. I tell my dog to sit, sit, and I immediately say yes. And my dog runs towards me and gets the toy. People have a hard time understanding that, right? Why am I. First of all, they're afraid my dog's going to lease forward.

Second of all, after you sit the dog, you must jump the dog. No, you don't have to. How am I going to keep that turn and sit? Highly motivating if I never reinforce it? Scent articles is another one. This gives people a stroke. And I do this all the time to keep their confidence up. My dog runs out, finds the correct article. The second they pick it up, I say yes, and I toss a toy through my legs.

And when I say yes, my dog by definition, is allowed to drop that article. And my dog does because they're allowed to. And they run through my legs. And people are like, oh, my gosh, your dog's gonna, you know, wait to see if you mark or not. Your dog's gonna start dropping the article. No, they're not. Because my marking is clean. My dogs understand that if I do not say yes, you keep going.

And they do. I can release them out of the pile four articles in a row. And on the fifth article, I say nothing and my dog will run to front without any hesitation whatsoever. But again, if I'm only ever feeding after the finish or after the front, the pieces in the middle, they're just gonna get flat, they're gonna get weak. They're just not gonna be that fun for the dog.

So for the dog's entire career, I'm reinforcing all the pieces. And I reinforced the beginning of an exercise. So with a broad jump, I'll say, wait till take a step. Yes. Give my dog a cookie. Wait, take three steps. Yes. Throw my dog a treat. I'll reinforce the middle. So I send my dog over the broad jump. As soon as my dog lands, yes. I toss a toy out all the way over to the other side.

Right. And a lot of times that's what I do. The majority of their training on the exercises, and I just work front side separately. So, for example, on a broad jump front, I can just back chain it Or I can just practice the mechanics of that front by sending a dog around a cone and I'm off to the right and my dog has to practice their front that way.

So now I'm not. Now I don't have to keep doing the whole, you know, the beginning and the middle with no reinforcement, just to practice the end. I can practice the end separately. And then, yes, sometimes I put it all together, but I'm constantly balancing it out, right? So if I put, if I do the full exercise today, for sure I'm not doing the full exercise tomorrow. And yeah, so it's just constantly balancing all that.

Melissa Breau: Do you tend to, and this was not in my questions, but do you tend to train the pieces, the different pieces for the same exercise on the same day with the idea that you're eventually putting together? For example, would you work jumping and then the go out or vice versa as separate pieces because you know tomorrow you're going to work on them as a full exercise?

Petra Ford: I think it depends on where the dog's at and they're training. Like if I'm teaching, I teach pieces individually. So for example, I would teach my dog to run to the go out. That's one piece separately. I'm teaching the dog the mechanics of a turn and sit completely separately. I'll teach my dog how to do the jumping piece, right? So sit them there and do the jumping. And I don't have to do those on the same day. I don't have to do them in the same session because I'm just teaching the individual pieces only if I have two pieces and those two pieces are fluent, super solid, like my dog understands them extremely well.

My dog does them correctly, consistently over time, and my dog does them the way I want them, like happily, with speed and animation. Then I'll consider putting those two pieces together, right? If I have a dog that I consider fully trained, which the two dogs I have now are, so they know all the exercises. They're able to put the full whole chain of the exercise together with a high level of accuracy and understanding and speed and animation, right?

So no, I don't have to. Like today I might just send my dog to the go out reward touching the go out and reward sitting a whole bunch of times. I don't have to do the jumping. They know how to do that. Like I might not do that for a couple days. You know, I might. I don't. Typically I don't even practice that separately at all because the jump is highly reinforcing for them and it's not a big deal for them.

So it doesn't necessarily have to be done on the same day. The different pieces, no, I don't like. Today I might send my dog over the broad jump and throw the toy five times. And then maybe two days later, I might practice the broad jump four front separately. And maybe a day or two later, I do a little. I'm doing some chaining, and they'll do the whole thing.

It's not a problem. But I think it's not a problem for them just because that's how they're taught from day one, right. I'm not relying on doing the whole chain all the time to teach it to my dog. My dog knows, my dogs know the pieces. I've put the pieces together. They understand that. And then if I just do a piece, it's not like they forget how to do the whole exercise. They're just used.

Melissa Breau: What other aspects of kind of how you structure training really do you feel have an impact on creating that balance between motivation and precision?

Petra Ford: So I think that, for example, when I'm teaching something, my dog has to think. So if you think about yourself like the last time, you learned something that you have never done before, right? So I'm always doing new things, so that's always fresh in my head.

So when I first learned something new, I'm slow because I'm thinking, right? I'm like, okay, so like a year to go. I want to get into indoor rock climbing. And so my friend and I wanted to learn how to belay each other, which is basically just, you know, prevent you from falling. So you have to tie a knot in its simplest form. I have to learn how to tie a knot a specific way, right?

So the instructor's teaching it. He teaches step one, step two, step three. We do it. We muck it up. I'm slow as molasses, right? And even once I learned it, like, if I. Then a week we'd come back and I'm like, oh, God, how did that go again? And it's really slow. And. And that's perfectly fine because I'm learning it if I do it routinely. So if I'm tying that knot multiple times a week, every week, week after week, month after month, before you know it, I'm going to be tying it super fast.

And I don't even have to really pay that much attention. I can be having a conversation while I'm doing it. So it's the same with our dogs. So sometimes people feel like they're teaching it and they need to teach it fast so they, like, get the dog really aroused. And the dog's like, ah. And they' like, do it fast. And the whole thing's a big disaster. Well, because the dog can't think right.

So I, like, I allow my dogs to do it slow. When Zeal learned stuff, it was so slow, I wanted to poke my eyeballs out. But that was just. He didn't want to be wrong. And he's like, no. He's like, hold on a minute. I'm thinking, okay, fine. So he'd do it painfully slow, and I just let him do it. And then the more. More repetition he had, the more confident he became.

He would just innately become faster and faster and faster. Right. All on his own. So does that mean I didn't add a little more arousal over time or play more, you know, do more tugging? Well, yes, over time I did, but after he learned it, because if I did it too soon, he would actually, like, if I tugged and said, okay, we're going to heal. And he'd go, hold on, I can't heel right now.

And it would be like. It felt like 10 minutes of him sneezing and stretching and doing all these shenanigans to lower his arousal. Because he's like, I need to think, and I can't think where you just put me. So that is a really intelligent animal, right? Other dogs are like, well, you put me here, so I'm here. And they don't have the ability to say, but I can't think right now.

So it just becomes a big mess. So, you know, like a Navy SEAL expression is slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. Right? So let my dogs learn it slow. They start to get. As it gets more fluent, it gets smoother and smoother and smoother. They get more confident and gets faster and faster. So that's one of the things I do. I manage their arousal. I want them to be aroused enough, obviously, so they're, you know, engaged and into what we're doing, but not so aroused that the wheels are coming off.

Because that's not conducive to learning. Right. Once they've learned it, like, now my dogs are fully trained, I can put them in a much higher state of arousal and they can still do their work because they know their job really, really, really well. So I don't know. Is that what you were. Am I. Did I answer what I was looking for?

Melissa Breau: You hit. You hit it on the nose.

So part of the reason we're talking about all this, right? Is that you have the new class on the calendar. Do you want to talk a little more directly kind of about the class itself, maybe what you're covering in that class this term and who should consider signing up?

Petra Ford: Yeah. So I think any level can sign up. Right. Beginner. Because like I said, I do these things from the beginning.

So we look at games and different things to make all the pieces really fun and keep them motivated. If you have a more advanced dog, this is a perfect opportunity to pull those pieces out and put a lot of drive and animation back into them. I go over how I teach quote, unquote, precision behavior so that we change kind of the definition of precision and just turn it into something.

So it's really about the pieces, Keeping all the pieces super fun. Keep maintaining motivation for all the pieces, and therefore precision and motivation really kind of get wrapped up into being the same thing. And just to help people change their mindset about precision so that it's not something bad or it's not something negative. And so it's something that the dogs just really like to do. And then they're having fun throughout the entire exercise versus the dogs are usually fairly happy at the beginning.

Then, you know, their attitude kind of dips in the middle towards the end, and then at the very end, like, finish. They're like, finish cookie now, because that's really predictable. So. So, yeah. So that's what we're doing in this class. Yeah. And I. To me, that's super fun. I think that, you know, maintaining the pieces keeps the dogs really engaged and really interested and motivated to do obedience, because, like I said, inherently, it's not reinforcing.

So it's really our job to keep it fun, and we can absolutely do that. It's just, you know, not training the old way the way we used to, which is just teach the pieces and do the whole chain over and over and over again.

Melissa Breau: Yeah. So that's not the only thing you have on the calendar right now. Do you want to plug anything else or talk about your other classes at all?

Petra Ford: My other class is my Open Fun Foundations class, which this is a first session time ever. I have a TA, so I think that's super nice for people, especially silver and bronze. It gives you an opportunity to get feedback from Debbie, who's been my student for an incredibly long time. She has literally taken every single one of my classes multiple times. Every single one of my workshops, every single one of my webinars.

She's been my assistant at camp, so I think she definitely has an idea of how I train. So she's an excellent resource. And I think my third class is maintaining engagement at a distance, which is always super challenging for people. So we do tons and tons of games there. So the dog stays engaged as we leave them, and when we turn around and look at them right before we ask them to do a position change or something like that.

And I don't know, I think I have a workshop running right now on Engagement Cues maybe. And then, I don't know, I just finished. What was the other workshop on? Oh, I just finished one. Coming up on fronts and finishes. Oh, on a webinar next week on developing a training plan that's for anybody, really. Any sport. Yeah. So I have a lot of stuff out there. You got a couple things.

I can't really keep track half the time. Fair enough. All right, any final thoughts or key points you kind of want to leave folks with? No. I think the main thing is that obedience can be fun. It can be fun and it can be highly motivating. Fun for you, fun for the dog. You just have to change your mindset and precision can be fun. All the behaviors can be fun. And like I said, in this class, we cover tons of tricks and games and fun, easy things to do to make that happen.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. All right, well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. As always, thanks. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back this time next week with Sara Brueske to talk about updog and the various games you can play with your dog and a frisbee.

If you haven't already, subscribe to our 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 bendsound.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!