Precision heeling and contact heeling may seem similar in some ways - but they're also very different. Join me for a conversation with Denise Fenzi on when she uses which one and how (and why) she approaches training both!  

 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 we'll be talking to Denise Fenzi about heel work and contact healing.

Hi, Denise, welcome back to the podcast.

Denise Fenzi: Hey Melissa, how you doing?

Melissa Breau: I'm doing pretty well. And yourself?

Denise Fenzi: I am doing just fine, thank you. Excited to chit chat today.

Melissa Breau: Do you want to just start us off with a little reminder of kind of who you are, who your dogs are and what you're working on with them?

Denise Fenzi: Sure. I'm Denise Fenzi. I have three dogs right now. I have my oldest, Brito, he's a 12 year old terrier who just kind of runs amok. I have a three and a half year old Xen, a Belgian Tervuren who is working on Mondio skills.

And actually I have Crystal Wing here this week. Shade is coming, Sarah from Australia and we're playing games with the dog. So that's actually, it's kind of a fun week. I'm taking a little break from that and then my dog's training nonstop, so that's cool. And then I have a young border collie which is super cool because I'm exploring a new direction. So I'm learning about herding and I'm also doing generic training with him. Obedience and just stuff, just general skills. So fun to have a young dog again.

Melissa Breau: Always. Do you want to talk us through a little bit, kind of what the differences are between precision heel work and contact healing, maybe what they look like and why you need both of them?

Denise Fenzi: Honestly, they're way different from each other and it's important for people to understand why they're different, especially if they want to learn one of them.

Precision heeling is very much a dog sport competitor skill. The way it is taught these days, it's about exact position, like not an inch forward, not an inch back often. Most of the time it has a very heads up appearance to it. It doesn't have to, but I would say most of the time it does. The dog is expected to as much as possible tune out the environment.

Like I'm not saying the dog, you pull it out of the car and go into precision heeling, but once you do start working, the expectation is the dog gives you 100%. So it's very precise. I think it's very pretty. Not everybody loves it, but that's okay. And it takes a long time to teach. It's because you're teaching pieces on pieces on pieces. It's very hard to balance out the qualities of enthusiasm and joy and precision.

It's. It's a very challenging skill. And maybe when you start teaching it six months in, you're like, wow, this is a process. And it is to try to keep it so that everybody's having a great time. Heavy, Heavy. Used in obedience, the protection sports, FCI obedience anywhere that you're going to need precision, heeling, agility. People will definitely teach it. And they teach it because they want a way to get their dog from took off the leash to the line.

Usually they'll teach both sides, left and right, with heads up, ignoring the world. And it's kind of a… We're starting now and generally there's a sit. Not always, but there's a sit when you stop. So it's a nice setup and it teaches a lot of dogs. We're working now, we're doing obedience, and you put some time into that skill. By comparison, contact heel is not used in competition with the exception of the ring sport.

So that's pretty limited. It involves physical body contact. So in most, but not all organizations, you do not want body contact in healing. Informal precision heeling. Contact heeling is the reverse. I want the dog to press on me for my interests. The dog cannot press too hard. I don't mind if I have to actually rebalance my weight because the dog is pressing that hard. The dog does not need to look up.

They might look at you and that's fine. But the critical piece that the dog needs to hold on to, they have to do exactly one thing. Their body needs to touch you. That's it. There are no other parameters that are required. Now you can do all kinds of stuff to make it work better for your purposes. Like you might have contact heel, where the dog is only allowed on one side of your body.

My personal contact heel. The dog has 360 degree rotation. They just cannot lose contact. You might have contact heel where the shoulder of the dog needs to be against your, let's say, knee, thigh area. I told my dog any part of his body could contact me. Now, I'll just tell you right now that was an error and I'm sort of paying the price on that because his preferred contact heel is actually his butt against my leg.

And that makes it really hard to walk because I keep stepping on his front leg. So, you know, words of the wise maybe don't allow that, but that's how I taught it. And in part because I want him to be free to rotate around me. That means if I'm standing still and somebody walks behind me, he is absolutely free to rotate around my body in contact the entire time and watch them.

So precision healing is a bunch of rules. It's a bunch of I want you to do all of these 100,000 things. Contact Healing is the reverse. It's exceptionally few rules. It's just these couple of things, and that's because they're used radically differently. Precision healing is a game, it's a sport. It's a fun thing some of us teach our dogs. I don't think anybody would try to take their dog out in public and do precision healing unless they were practicing the skill.

It's very impractical. The dog's not looking where they're going. Contact heeling is the absolute opposite. It is a practical skill that a lot of dogs would benefit from. So, for example, if you have a reactive dog, you probably want a word that says, look at me. And the reason you want that word is because you might realize the dog's about to have a really bad time and you want the dog to look at you so you can stick a cookie in front of his nose and get out of there.

That's useful. But contact heeling allows your dog to lean on you and tell you what the problem is, because they can rotate all around. Sometimes your dog is agitated, but you don't know why. If you have contact heeling, you're going to know why, because your dog is going to look at the thing and they're going to lean on you. And you will very quickly learn by how hard they're leaning, how their brain is doing.

So my own dog, if he wants something out there and he thinks he can have it, he leans harder on me. If there's something out there that is disturbing him, he leans less hard. Very. As a matter of fact, that's when he's most likely to lose contact. So that's really good information because I will use contact heeling. If Melissa, if you came to the ranch and I just saw you, you pulled up in your car and a heads in with me, and I came over, hey, how you doing?

And we chatted for 15 minutes. I would have my dog in contact. So that means he can kind of do what he wants, but lean on me. And it frees me up 95% of my brain to our conversation. If I put him on a down stay, I can't really free up my brain because I have to keep an eye on, make sure he's actually holding that down, stay.

But in contact, I would feel the moment he left my body. So kind of practically I can come up and I can chat with you, but if suddenly I notice a change in his body and so I look down and I notice he's staring at a cow or something like that, that gives me the information I need to adjust. And the nice thing is, because he stays in contact, I can back up.

I don't have to say anything. My backing up will automatically pull. Pull him back and away from whatever it is. And I can just keep right on backing up until his body position. The amount he's pushing me, where he's looking, what his ears are doing, tell me that this is actually a fine place. So it's. Think of it as a mobile mat. That's one way you can think about it.

It's like a mat behavior where the dog has full mobility, except they're on their feet, they're looking where they want, and I can reach down. My dog is tall. I can kind of scratch his head if I want. All that. One thing, do not leave my body. I like contact. I've also used between my legs and variations. But the nice thing about contact is you actually can walk.

You can move around with the dog between your legs. You can, but that's a little harder, a little more awkward. So I think, in a nutshell, those are the differences when I think about contact. Heel. Yes, it has a dog sport component, but that's not going to impact most people. I think the value for most people is behavior, work, judging the dog's readiness to work. Where is the dog choosing to look?

Because if I put my dog in contact and he's just staring at me, that's pretty clear that there's just nothing interesting in the environment. He's not even taking that time. He's ready to go. And then I'm going to flip him over to heel, formal heal, and we're going to go to work. But if I go somewhere, especially somewhere new, and he's in contact from the tip of his tail, barely hanging on, and his little nose is stretching as hard as it can to a tree 10ft away, I know exactly what's going on there.

He is telling me where he's at. Now what I do with that information's up to me. It doesn't mean I necessarily go to the tree, but I might. I mean, it just depends. But I have the information. If I had him in heel, I would not have that. What I would have is conflict. He'd be in heel position. His head would be up, his nose would be twitching, and I would feel the fight.

I would feel the conflict between him trying to be a good dog and wanting to sniff. He comes out of the car, I always put him straight in contact. It's just automatic out you go, contact with me. So he leans on me and he's. He tells me. Tells me what he's doing, how he's doing. And generally I keep him in that position. Like when I go to the vet, I walk him in contact into the building, because I'm going through doorways and light areas to dark areas.

And then I sit down and he stays in contact. Even if I'm sitting, even if I'm laying on the ground, he would stay in contact. I don't generally use that in public, but I can sit. He stays leaning on me. Now, I can also sort of reassure him with some petting and massage. If I want, I can get up and move to another area. He's going to come with me.

There's no getting up, no getting down. He's just in contact. He can hold that for a very long time because nothing's. The expectations are low. You wouldn't do that with precision healing because the dog is looking up. That would be exhausting. Contact heeling is actually quite relaxing for the dog. They're just leaning. And a lot of dogs just enjoy that physical contact, so you can take advantage of that.

So if you're going to teach both, which one do you start first? Which one do you teach first? Are there any similarities there around the foundation skills? I can certainly imagine, you know, dogs may be getting confused, especially in the early learning phase, if you're trying to teach both at the same time. I actually do teach both at the same time. So. But there's the thing is I teach formal healing on my left, and I teach contact on my right.

And dogs are so contextual, the way they're looking, looking up sideways to your right is just not the same as looking up sideways to your left. So I haven't really had a lot of problems, especially because informal healing, the reinforcement comes heavily from my hands and my up body. Like up look up. Everything is up in contact. Most of the reinforcement actually comes from out there.

So on the ground, in the environment. So the dog pretty quickly differentiates, oh, I'm on the right hand side. You're not actually interacting with me a lot. You know, you're putting me in position, but I'm looking out versus on the left. My demeanor changes, my hand position changes. The games we play change, and everything is about looking up. So I actually don't think it matters which one you teach first or if you teach them simultaneously.

The only advice I would give people, if you're going to teach both, and if you need both, really consider one on the left, one on the right. Now with the puppy, I've not taught the puppy contact healing because he has such a good downstay. It's such a border collies can hold a down stay for an hour and not really have a thought about it. It's just so natural for them.

So right now, my inclination would probably be just to put him on the down, because he likes that a lot. If I do teach him, in his case, he does have formal healing, both left and right. So in his case, I would probably want the heeling first and then the contact. And I would probably teach the contact heel across the front of my body first. So you've got left formal heel, right formal heel, sideways against my knees.

That's contact. And that would be a pretty easy way because it's taught the same. It doesn't really matter what orientation you start it with. It's just you would start it oriented across your body. Are there similarities kind of in the early phases of what that looks like to teach, or are they very, very different? No, a lot of similarities, actually, because I find it's easiest to start it with pivots, whether I'm doing heeling or contact.

Having a solid pivoting skill where the dog holds their front end relatively still and moves the rear end around, I mean, I don't even know how I taught healing before I did that. Not necessarily the formal thing on a disc, because when I do precision healing, or what I call pocket hand, I use my hand as the disc. But the point is the dog is rotating around my hand.

So having a dog that either puts their feet on a disc and rotates around their feet or puts their nose in your hand and rotates around your hand doesn't actually matter. The idea is that the front end is stabilized and the rear end is moving. That is a super useful skill, and I use it for both. So for both contact, I'm going to do that. But what's really going to change in the beginning is where I'm reinforcing.

So right from the start, with the contact healing, I'm reinforcing out away from my body. With the dog's head level and down in heel position, I'm reinforcing up high and next to my body with the head facing straight up. Those are dramatically different. And even within one session, I would have no qualms about going back and forth, stepping over the dog, switch sides. Now we're doing the other one.

Now we're going to go back to the first one. I think the dog would have no trouble making that connection. If we focus in on precision heel work for just a minute. I think a lot of people tend to get stuck about the phase you're talking about, right? They've got maybe some pivots or a little bit of movement and the food's still in their hand and then they just kind of plateau, right?

They like hit that point where they can't figure out like how to get more forward movement or how to get the food out of their hand and kind of where to go from there. So how do you work on that? How do you work through that phase where you know, you've got a cookie and the dog can pivot, but you need some, some more to it, you know, I used to teach, I was still available.

I have a six week class on precision heeling. It's very, very detailed and it has a lot of emphasis on those first steps on a platform, on a pivot disk. And it emphasized that precision to the point where we lost movement. And the problem with the loss of movement was a loss of joy. And so for some people and some dogs, I think it became discouraging the way I'm teaching it now.

The way it's set up in my workshop, both are basically pocket hand methods. Both get you to the same place, but with the workshop method, there's a lot more movement right off the bat. That actually is really important because for dogs it can be much more of a game. So that alone, I think has really helped with the issues of getting stuck. The dog's like, where's my disc?

I've been on it for weeks. We didn't use a disc, right? We did it with your hand. And movement is part of the game. So you've already thrown a cookie out, dog came back, came into position, you're already moving. So I think the way I'm doing it now in the workshop is a lot easier, easier on people because the dog has already developed the habit of movement and is often moving in 80% of the time you're in your session, which is not true of the way I used to teach it.

So that, that's, that is going to make a difference. The other thing is people need to accept that it's going to look messy. Those first few days are going to look messy. And that's okay. Don't get stingy. Allow the messy, give the cookie. I don't care how ugly it looked, allow the messy, give the cookie. And then over time, if it's not getting better, allow the messy, give the cookie, go in the house and think about it.

Don't tell the dog anything because you're doing it wrong. I just put you. I'm just going to tell you that right now. If the dog isn't figuring it out, you're doing it wrong. And that's okay. You're doing it wrong because you haven't learned yet. And believe me, I'm teaching a new sport now. I'm doing it wrong all the time. And I guarantee you, I think I'm doing it right every time or I wouldn't be doing it that way.

But acknowledging and recognizing that I'm doing it wrong is what causes me not to take it out on my dog. I don't say no to my dog. I might say lie down because that stops the movement. But I don't get on him because I know I'm doing it wrong or he would be doing it right. So I think the big things here, one, accept that it's going to be messy, and that's okay.

Stay engaged, stay happy, keep that food flowing, and don't like, oh, it's all wrong. If you're going to shut down, do it when your dog isn't there. Like, don't let your dog see that and go back and review. There's a bunch of little tricks about, you know, you. You give your dog the hand to touch, they touch it. Now the food quickly switches over. So in any exercise, sit down, come.

Anything you do where you're using a lure, the trick is you. You lure, you lure, but when you can, you stop luring, you offer the target, and you reward quickly. So that is the same. If you stay with the lure in your hand too long and you don't start that process of, let's call it shaping, the process of getting rid of the food, which is kind of what you're doing, it gets harder.

So there are heeling methods where you hold a cookie for six months. And what I tell people is that is fine for developing the muscle memory of whatever style it is you're trying to get. So you're trying to teach the dog that you can hold your head really high, your feet can go flipping around underneath you if you like the style. And you do that for a really long time.

And what it does is it builds up the muscles in the dog's front and in their neck so that they can hold that position. But it's important for people to understand that as soon as the cookie's out of your hand, the dog didn't learn how to heal. They learned the body mechanics to make it possible to heal. Now that the food is out of your hand, you're actually going to teach your dog how to do the skill.

However, you didn't waste that six months because the dog was still developing useful body mechanics. I don't do a lot of that. I earlier rather than later prefer to get the food out of my hand because I think it keeps the dog just enough off balance that they don't think it's the finished exercise. And when you stay at something for a long time, it becomes the end goal of the exercise.

And then when you try to raise criteria, there's a lot of confusion because you could have thousands of repetitions of the last step. And you know when you go to thousands of repetitions. So Bob Bailey is a very well known trainer and he says when you have 80%, you move on. And the reason you're moving on at 80% and not 100% is because at 100%, the dog is like, sure of themselves and it's very hard for them to offer something else because they've locked in.

You at 80% have a dog who's generally going in the correct direction, but still flexible. So you don't want to wait too long. It's not like it's a disaster if you waited a long time, didn't get the food out, it's okay. I mean, you'll get there. But the messy stage will be messier, I think, than it would have been if you'd kept the dog slightly more flexible. And like with my puppy, he's a tricky dog to train.

The border collie, very, very sensitive to failure. Extremely sensitive to failure. He doesn't want to guess. He hates shaping with a passion. He just wants to be told what to do. And that's fine. I can accommodate that. So the start of his heeling journey was the same way. I do it generally, right? It's pivoting, it's pivoting around my hand. It's all kind of the traditional stuff, but as soon as I added movement with the hand, he really shut down.

He had a really hard time. He would do it. But I've never seen such a miserable looking, skulking dog. And I was like, this is, this is not great. I mean, this is beyond messy. This is unhappy. Like I don't care if the position is messy, but I do care if the dog is unhappy. And so I just changed direction with him and I made it a game called if my hand is there, you better touch it.

Because if you don't, it's a game. Remember, it's just a game. You touch my hand, I throw your ball. So I gave up the food and I just made it a game called touch my hand, throw the ball. And then I started holding my hand in such an angle, which is basically the pocket hand position, but a little bit higher. So if he went out of position and I offered the hand touch, he couldn't touch it.

So he started to self train from something he understood adding the movement and that worked for him. So for him, it needed to be more fast paced, it needed to be more of a game, it needed to be more of a challenge where he understood what the challenge was. So there are challenges which have to do with raising criteria where there's really no way for the dog to know what the challenge is.

But I can give a super clear example. So today I was working on a game where I sit in a rolling chair. This is hugely entertaining. I'm sure this will show up on Facebook. And he sits between my legs facing me, right? And then I have my feet. I can either push hard on my left foot and the chair will twirl around, or I can put to the.

To the. What direction is that? That would be clockwise. Or I can push hard with my right foot and the chair will twirl counterclockwise. Or I can push down with both feet equally and I'll shoot backwards. So the game is find front. He knows how to find front and sit in front. He's very good at it. All of a sudden, I'm twirling the chair left, I'm twirling the chair right.

And you can just see his little brain going, right, I gotta, I gotta go, I gotta go, I gotta go. So usually he stays in such a way that I can't escape him. Like he can move at the same speed I can twirl. But today I was able to back up slightly and then twirl. And he was, let's call it chasing my knee. And to get to front position, he would have to get around my knee and in and sit.

That's exactly the kind of game that he loves. And the reason he loves it is he knows the goal and it's hard, but he also knows how to get there. And it has to do with trying just a little harder figuring out, you have to back up slightly, get inside, come inside. Right? So I don't know if you can visualize that, but it's a game with a clear end goal.

It's get to front position. And he has the physical capacity to do it. And oh my God, we were having fun. So he's chasing me around the room, trying, and as soon as he gets around my knee, I stop. That's he won. He sits, I throw the ball. But I can tell you it's not about the ball. So for him, adding the movement to the precision, it wasn't enough to eat cookies.

It wasn't even enough to have balls. It was the lack of knowledge of what's the game here? I don't understand the end goal. How do I find front? What is the front? And that became actually the goal is touch my hand. And you're only going to succeed at touching my hand if you're pretty damn close to it, because I only offer it for one second. So down comes the hand and if you're in the right place, you're going to win.

And for that dog, it changed everything. So sometimes that's just a training thing, right? Like you're training the dog in front of you and you're always thinking, what. What makes sense for this dog and for this route. I've trained every other dog I've had pretty much right down the line. The way I did it in the formalizing hand position workshop. This dog, new route, new direction, and it made sense for us.

Very fun. So other than the... Well, you talked about a bunch of different pieces there. So are there other things that you have tweaked or changed in the workshop recently or anything that's kind of different from the class that's worth mentioning that we haven't talked about? The really big thing is the degree of formality in the class versus movement. The workshop is all about movement. It does not require that the dog have a disc behavior.

It's anybody can just walk in and do it. You can do it with an A wiggle puppy. It's not a problem. Much easier for a newer trainer to adapt. And it's a video style. I use three different dogs, three different sizes. I use a little, a medium and a large and an old. And then it's very much movement based, but you can see the difference. So right away, you're bringing the dog into heel position very, very quickly.

Moves very fast. The class, much more methodical, systematic. I show probably a hundred different breeds of dogs. I mean, just there's so many dogs in the videos, but there really is a heavy emphasis on a dog being on a disc, developing comfort there. And some handlers and some dogs just did not thrive with the lack of movement. It's just a little too much formality. So it's something to think about.

I mean, for some people you might be like, wow, that sounds like the best class on the planet. Go buy it. It's in self study, you can have it. But if you're like, no, no, I would actually much rather use movement and flow, then really consider the workshops because in one hour you're going to really master the concept and be moving forward. The class is hours of lecture and video clips and there's something for everyone.

But the workshop is broken into several steps. It's like step one, step two, step three. But I get through all the steps in an hour easily showing multiple dogs. And in prior times that I've taught the intro one, most people got through several steps and were able to show me more advanced skills. Now this time I'm actually teaching the second level. So that doesn't include that. Now you can buy that because we made it available as a prerequisite.

You can buy that one at any time. But it's not a live running class. It's just a self study that's available for a limited period for the same amount of time as the second level. But if you've done either the class, it doesn't matter if you've worked through several steps of the class or you've worked through several steps. Even if you have not finished it of the workshop based precision heeling workshop, you'll be fine to move over to the second level video based workshop for the formalizing your hand position.

It's okay to go from the class to switch over to the workshop. You won't have any trouble keeping up. So to switch back to talking about contact heeling for a minute, obviously precision heel work, there's a lot of upkeep involved in keeping that behavior crisp and put together. Does contact heeling require that same level of upkeep? No. I mean, the thing that's kind of cool about contact healing is once the dog knows it, the rate of reinforcement is relatively low and it's often generated by the environment.

So your, your best friend is two blocks away. Your dog loves your best friend. The act of moving towards your best friend with your dog in contact and getting to your friend and then releasing that would be a very, let's say, a common reinforcer. So environmental reinforcers are easily the name of the game in contact heeling. So if you have a dog that you know loves to sniff everything, then that would be a better choice of reinforcer than food or toys, because you want the dog connecting with the environment.

That's the point. That the dog can look around doesn't mean you can't ask your dog for attention. You can for sure, but the point is that the dog can be accessing doggy interests, doggy things, and telling you where their doggy brain happens to be. And almost always, if I'm out and about, then if my dog is telling me with every fiber of their being what they want, I'm probably going to give it to them.

If. If it's safe. If it's not safe, I'm going to back way up because that's my way of telling the dog, you're not going to get that. That's why I'm backing up. But if I'm going forward because there's a toy on the ground, fine, you can have it. If there's a decoy out there and you want to be sent to bite, that's fine, too. If you contact, you contact.

I'm going to send you. Today I was working on a hold and bark and he was holding a toy. So I'm like, you have to give me contact healing, and when you're ready, drop that toy and I'm going to send you and you can play the game. But almost all of my work at this point comes out of contact. It's just. It's my default. It's my default in bite sports.

Nobody else does that. My dog does a stand at my side before the retrieve. He does a stand at my side before I send him to bite. People are like, that's insane. That's so unstable. I'm like, no, quite the reverse. It's exceptionally stable because he's leaning on me. And that connection makes the stay way easier than a dog lying down at your side whose elbows are creeping up and who's starting to. They forget you exist. When he's leaning on me, I have control.

Melissa Breau: So we've talked a little bit about kind of why it's beneficial, right, to have the dog in contact without requiring eye contact or a specific precision position. Is there more to be said?

Denise Fenzi: There are some advantages that are a little bit less obvious that people would also get from having that as an option. Well, this one, I mean, this is just a Denise thing.

I really enjoy my dogs in contact with me. And so if they come around the front, I really like being able to reach over and massage their head. And I find it very soothing and very calming for both of us. So just personally, I love when I go to the vet and sit in a chair that my dog kind of tucks himself up against, actually. Well, he's a big dog, so over my knees, and I can scratch his head and hug him.

And I personally really like that. And the coolness factor is off the charts, because when your dog is walking one direction and he's interested in something that passes you and he flips around, he's not walking the other direction. I just think that's super cool. I just love the way that looks. So how's that for an answer?

Melissa Breau: I like that answer. So part of the reason we're talking about all this, right, is that you've got your webinar on contact healing coming up July 3rd, and your workshop on precision healing is, like, just happening now.

So when this comes out, it won't be too late for people to grab it. Do you mind just talking a little bit more about kind of what's in each of those? And maybe who should consider signing up the contact heel webinar if you've ever struggled, like, to teach loose leash walking.

Denise Fenzi: The problem with loose leash walking, there's actually the criteria is what not to do. Don't tighten the leash.

The criteria of what to do is very tricky, especially if you don't want to walk the whole time. Feeding the dog. Like, you actually just want to have a walk. So it's not a bad choice if your dog is one of those busy dogs, like, can we play now? Can we eat now? And you're like, could we just walk? The dog's like, fine, then I'm going to take you out like a skier, right?

That's the way they, you know, because some of the drive your dogs, everything is fast. They're fast with you. They're fast away from you. Contact heeling is a job for the dog. It's something for them to do. So that might be an absolute winner if you have a busy dog and you're like, this exhausts me. I always have to pay attention. It puts the responsibility on the dog.

And it's what I want you to do, not what I don't want you to do. So I'd look at that. If you have behavior issues or you just have a young dog and you're trying to figure out, is my dog curious about these things? Is my dog afraid of these things? Really, really helpful for behavior work because you don't have to carry a mat. But you have not only the same advantages, you have more advantages because you can physically just move backwards if the dog is too close, or you can move forwards, or you can move sideways.

You can do all kinds of stuff that physical contact. Once you learn what's normal for your dog, you get tremendous information. So if I'm sitting and chatting with you and my dog suddenly rotates around my body, that's a cue to me to pay attention because something just happened behind me. I love that freedom. I mean, especially with Xen. I don't know how I would function without that skill.

I use it a lot for behavior work. It's going to be super useful for any size dog, small dog, big dog, big, bigger dogs. If you want to be able to walk and move. The problem is with certain dogs, you're going to step on them. So that's something you need to think about, is the size of the dog for what you're doing. If you want it for dog sports, really useful, you know, if you want some way to tell your dog outside the ring, we're going to wait.

Now you can relax. You're welcome to look around. As a matter of fact, it's a good thing to look around because I want you confident when you go in the ring. We're just going to stand here and acclimate together. We're at a dog show, so you don't get to go see the things. And I can't have you lunging every which way or pulling me. But you can stand here leaning on me and take your time.

And then when I say let's go, we should be good to go. I used it today. I was talking someone through the skill I wanted them to use. So it's like an instructor talking to a student. And my dog leaned on me, so I didn't have to do anything with him and I could have that conversation and he understood. So if you are in situations where you have an in live class instructor and you have to keep putting your dog back in a crate or on a down stay, and you have to have fights about that hugely valuable skill, now your dog is leaning on you, you're having your chat, you're both relaxed now you can go to work.

So I just think it's kind of a generic, across the board, helpful, useful thing for many folks to have in their repertoire. But like everything you have to teach it, you have to maintain it doesn't work if you don't put in the time. But if you're listening to this podcast, you're a dog person, I mean, we can just start with that, right? So that means that you don't see dogs the way your neighbor sees dogs.

Well, that's not true because Sarah Owings is my neighbor. So that was a terrible analogy. But your. Your neighbor's probably not Sarah Owings. So most people have dogs in a different way than a person listening to this podcast. And under those circumstances, you like training dogs. So this is a useful skill for kind of anyone to play with and see some nice results. Anything you want to mention on the Precision Healing workshop, I think that's much more specialized.

That's because either one, you're a dog trainer, so you think it's super cool and you're never going to compete, but you just like the way it looks and you want to see what you can accomplish. And I'm all about that. I love that. If you actually do plan on competing in a skill like rally obedience, freestyle, IGP, any of the sports that include significant obedience, you're not going to be.

You're not going to have an easy road if you don't teach proper precision heeling. The old days where dogs kind of just sort of plotted along at your side, those days are gone. And the reason people taught precision heeling with heads up dogs that are looking at you don't see the bunny that just ran across the field. And in the real world, in competition, stuff is happening out there.

People are walking by with their dogs, kids are dangling hot dogs. When your dog is staring at you, they're not seeing those things. So it's really, really good for that, I don't think. I just don't see your run of the mill, average pet person teaching it as a useful skill. It's fine as a trick if you want it for that, but you want to just train, then take contact heel. Go. Go with that one.

Melissa Breau: Excellent. All right, any final thoughts or key points you kind of want to leave folks with?

Denise Fenzi: No, I'm excited to be teaching these things. This is. These are fairly popular. The Contact Heel is a fairly popular webinar and I get a lot of feedback. People send me a lot of videos and such saying it's very useful to them. So I hope people take a look at it and make a decision if that works for them.

And the Precision Heeling pocket hand is now pretty mainstream in the dog sports world. A lot of people use it in variations of it. So it's a great. It's a great starting point and can pretty much dovetail into almost any healing method when you're ready excellent.

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

Denise Fenzi: Thank you for having me, Melissa. Thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in.

We'll be back next week, this time with Tracey McLennan to talk about how to train like a tester, a lesson she learned from her background in it. 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 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!