In this episode Ashley walks us through why she's turned to conditioning to help her young dogs develop impulse control, body awareness, and precision — and how she's adapted it to help any dog that would benefit from strengthening those three skills.  

 Transcription

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breaux 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'll be talking to Ashley Escobar about impulse control, body awareness and precision throughout conditioning. Hi, Ashley. Welcome back to the podcast.

Ashley Escobar: Hello. Thanks for having me back.

Melissa Breau" Excited to talk about this stuff. So to start us off, do you want to just remind everybody kind of a little bit about you?

Ashley Escobar: I am Ashley and I share my home with a few border collies and a few Australian shepherds and my children and participate in a variety of sports, mostly agility, but we do a little bit of everything from conformation to dock diving. The kids just have me going in all different directions these days.

Melissa Breau: Fair enough. So let's kind of start with the basics, I guess. So what do we mean when we're talking about, you know, impulse control, body awareness and precision?

Ashley Escobar: This is something that I've been kind of playing around with the connection of since I have gotten some newish teammates to me with my border collies. My youngest border collie, Teal, who it like she lives and dies by agility. So anything that might be agility, like the dog knows when I put on the shoes that I'm gonna wear to go to the agility field in the backyard, right?

And she just, you can just see the wheels turning in her head, right? She just starts getting so excited. So. So I've been playing around, she like is climbing up on me because she heard the a word, right? Been playing around with, using fitness and impulse control to really help kind of keep her in an optimal thinking state whenever she gets aroused. And so I, because I like the dog training part of every sport more than I like the sport itself, right?

Like I like being able to break it down and train the skills involved. I feel like I went back to kindergarten with my dogs and my client dogs that are easily aroused because we've gone back to the most fundamental game of impulse control, right? Like back to the food games and your hand food choice games and just kind of started playing around with it and building from there and adding in some fitness because playing food games with a very intense working line border collie is just not enough to keep their head in the game.

So you have to give them away. They have to move their bodies and having the rehab background and vet med and stuff. So I wanted to make sure that I could try and tie in some precision movement. But In a way that the dogs had clarity with their proprioception, right? Because where I'm asking them to take dog walks at really high rate of speed, speed and make these tight turns and can you think about it?

Can you have precise movement and be like, have the spatial awareness, right? Have the proprioception to maneuver your body in such a way that you can do that without sustaining an injury. So obviously that's the goal always, right? Like, we never want our dogs to get injured, but what are the tools that we're giving them to be able to do that? Right? And we live. I live pretty close to Jacksonville, so every year we go, I make my husband go watch the training days at the football field.

Like, I don't want to actually go see the game. I want to go watch the training stuff because the rehab in me is like, I want to see what exercises they're doing this year and what kind of drills they're doing. Because all they do in off season is spend time conditioning these athletes to have the spatial awareness and the proprioception because the last thing they want is a place player to have an injury.

So I like being able just to kind of tie it into people and dogs and kind of see what's happening there. But I think I've totally gone off on a tangent here with that question, but that is what I mean with impulse control being tied into all of this. Because it really all comes down to can the dog make the choice to think in that moment of excitement and arousal.

Melissa Breau: So what are the benefits? Like why conditioning, why are we playing conditioning in to teach these two concepts instead of, you know, relying on our other sports training or relying on maybe teaching them independently or, you know, some other way.

Ashley Escobar: I have found, especially with Teal, that giving her. I have to add movement into it. So if I take the choice games and I put it at a jump or I put it at some tunnels or something related to agility.

It's like we go from Choice Games 100% thinking. And then there's her favorite sport and it's just a domino effect in the opposite direction. Like the little meter goes from like 0, 10, 150, right? So there's a, there's a gap there. So I was trying to think about this methodically. Like how can I bridge the gap for her where she can have some movement but we're not like full on all the like juicy, fun, exciting movement stuff, but we still have control.

And so for me that's kind of a no brainer with the fitness because I incorporate so much of their warm up. I mean, I'll spend 30 minutes warming up a dog and doing little pattern games and stuff. And I just kind of started when I shifted it all to impulse with movement, I started to see a lot more clarity from my dog. I felt like my dogs had less questions, right?

Like they were asking me less questions on the field when they would start getting really excited. And the biggest thing that I noticed is they had such spatial awareness of their bodies. Like the turns went from being good, but now they're like really tight and the lines are tightening up and the movements on the contacts have been the biggest thing for me because sometimes you watch playback video and you're like, man, like she was like totally weight shifting on her left when she took that dog walk.

And she didn't straighten out until she was almost on the down ramp. And now I see my dog completely think like she thinks about her approach on the dog walk. It hasn't slowed down any. But you can just see that her spatial awareness and her proprioception in speed has leveled out is probably the best way to put it. And I attribute all of that to her having this fundamental, really solid foundation of impulse control and tying it into these fitness games where she gets to move and condition her body so that she knows how to move her body.

Because every dog is so different. So I, you know, my Aussies move their bodies in a very different way than my border collies. And from border collie to border collie, they move their bodies in a very different way. And dogs with tails and no tails and short tails and just so many variabilities go into that. So I think it's so important that we spend the time to teach the dog in front of us how to move their body and what ways they're comfortable doing that.

Can you kind of dive a little deeper into that? So like how. What do we mean? We're saying we're kind of using conditioning to teach these skills. Can you share what it really kind of looks like in practice? So what it looks like in practice, let's say the. So tight turns. Tight turns are a big thing. On agility, we'll just use agility for an example. But it fits into every sort of sport that you do that your dog is actually moving.

Conformation. We use it for that too. But it's such a slow, like they tend to have a little more thought in that. Right. Because it's not. You normally don't get a dog that gets over the charts excited about going into this breed ring. But for tight turns and agility, right, I need my dog to be able to collect. I need them to be able to load a lead leg.

I need extreme rear end proprioception and drive to be able to tuck their rear end, contract their core muscles and their obliques and dig in and make that turn. They also have to lean. We get some neck muscles involved in that as well. We get shoulders being activated as the inside shoulder is going to kind of drop down and the outside shoulder is going to load and push the body around to the turn.

So we can replicate that in a very slow, controlled manner with having the dog in full thought go around some, around a cone or around some cavaletti poles and changing the surface of that, putting some unstable equipment on the floor that the dogs are moving around and getting them to move their bodies not in a medial plane of motion, right? Not forwards and backwards, right. They're actually having to make the turn.

And can they make this turn around a garbage can, let's say. That's all I have. Can they make this turn? Now they're not wrapping blindlessly, right? Like, I want intentional foot placement, no cross stepping with their limbs. I want them loading the inside leg and pushing off with the outside leg to balance. And can they do that with a bowl of chicken on the ground, or a handful of chicken in my hand or toys all on the ground and me breaking up pieces of chicken and dropping it into the dinner bowl and not lose their form of their body carriage and their posture and go dive over for the bowl or not even dive for the bowl, but can they still keep their head in that exercise, in that moment with their most delicious treat being dropped into a bowl?

You'd be surprised how many dogs cannot do that. Something goes out the window, right? Like it might be their head flies up. And when their head goes up, then their abs are no longer contracted and now we don't have the reach and the drive with the front and the rear limbs and they lose proprioception. They bump their shoulder into the trash can. I mean, it becomes a trickle domino effect of wheels falling off, if you will.

And that's in what I consider a safe space, right, because that's our con. That's at home, that's in conditioning. Like nothing's gonna get torn or tweaked in that moment. But if you, if you can't hold it together in a studio, how can you hold it together for less than 30 seconds on an agility field when you've got the most exciting noises and sounds and all angles and so much pressure happening. So that is how they are connected.

Melissa Breau: Gotcha. So we're talking a little bit about precision in there. We've finished it kind of a couple of times. But when we're thinking about precision and conditioning, what does that look like in terms of movement and balance and mental focus when you kind of break it down into those little parts?

Ashley Escobar: I look at precision for a few things. The dog has some mental responsibility to again, be able to, let's say follow.

We're going to talk about just the turn, right? Can the dog mentally follow through with the turn? Are they changing leads on me in that turn because they got mentally flustered or mentally excited because the chicken came out kind of a thing? Do they completely lose their physical posture? Are we now having a soft like for us, it would be like slump shoulders, right? Are they slumping? Are they not reaching and driving?

Are they reaching with their front and not driving with their rear? Right. Putting too much torque and strain on their knees? Like, what's happening? Are they being crisp and sharp in their movements or are we seeing sloppy movements? And usually what it looks like in dogs for this is, you'll see a dog that looks very frantic. And those are usually the dogs like, man, my dog is so fast, they cannot think when they take this turn.

And they always pull down the bar and take down the wing and it's like, is it because your dog is so fast or is it because your dog is frantic because they mentally cannot keep their head screwed on tight enough to even move their body in a 270 degree around a jump wing kind of a thing?

Melissa Breau: Okay, so thinking about the early training phases, how do you balance for maybe a younger dog or a dog that's kind of new to this type of work, that stillness and control while still maybe keeping things fun, keeping things engaging.

You want to keep the dog motivated. You don't want the work to feel boring. So how do you kind of balance those two pieces?

Ashley Escobar: I also do not like to sit still and I do not like you and me both just being still still. And I think it's dumb and I think it's boring. I'm a very hands on, active participant in everything I do. So I get it from the dog's perspective, like it's dumb to get on a piece of equipment and just be still.

So I am very intentional with my sessions. So I'm very intentional with sessions. And I don't ever let a session go so long that my dog is raising their hand and asking for a break, right? I'm gonna keep it fun and light hearted and I'm going to do what I call micro stillness and micro moments of success, especially for the young dogs and the young working dogs and the sportbred dogs and these driving dogs that also think that being still is dumb.

I'm gonna capitalize and mark behaviors when I get them. And we're going to grow them as the dog's maturity allows us to do that. And some dogs mature slower than others. Teal so you have to really just embrace the dog that you have in front of you and be prepared to adjust your agenda and your training, as that goes. And what that looks like for me is a lot of food games.

My puppies and my dogs in training, they very rarely eat from a bowl because they'll get it in training sessions. They'll get their food and stuff. So I do a lot of cookie tosses. I do a lot of pattern movement games with the puppies because you can tell when something is just tired of standing still. Like, I see it. Like, I'm like, yep, you've had enough. We're going to move.

We might move and go all the way outside. We might just move to a couple of cookie tosses in that moment and then come back. Because the other big piece to impulse control is can you have some movement and then control the energy to have no movement and then go back and have some movement, right? Like, you have to have that back and forth. And I really don't look at stillness as a lack of energy, right.

And I like when I say I feel this, like, I feel it. I even as a kid, like, I hated traditional schooling where you just had to sit and be still. Like, it's really hard for me. And I really feel like stillness is controlled energy, not a lack of energy. And so I think that looking at it from that perspective for the dogs too, like, it's not a lack of energy, it's how much can you control your energy to not move anything right at this moment and how long, you know, can we grow that moment?

Can we grow the value for that controlled energy? Because if I can, if I can grow the value for controlled energy in a fitness situation with some fitness equipment and working on proprioception and injury prevention and body awareness, then I can totally grow that controlled energy for a very precise dog on an agility course running tight lines and not having frantic movements and feet out of place and bars coming down and falling off of contacts and stuff.

And I say that just to say that anything could happen, right. We all trip. Like it's not a fail proof type of training. Right. They're not robots. Like anything could happen. But it definitely gives you the upper hand to have that sort of spatial awareness and body awareness in motion and if you can build it from the ground up. So thinking about that and kind of the difference between that and maybe the idea of like repetition and rhythm, which I know are kind of like also things you sometimes talk about, right.

Rather than just, you know, random drills or rather than just like kind of just breaking things out. Not, not for lack of a term, willy nilly, right. Like how do you, how does repetition and rhythm fit in here? How does that maybe help build the foundation for self control and mental regulation? I find that a lot of these dogs that just innately, you know, some dogs just come, I feel like pre programmed with impulse control.

They're like, cool, you want me to watch this 28 dogs in front of me do agility that I love so much? Yeah, I'll just sit right here and chill. And then they go to the line and they just tear it up. It's not all of them, it's not a lot of them. So I think that building in some patterns for dogs not only helps their understanding, but I think, I think it helps with clarity of what it is that we're wanting.

Because if I can add in some patterns for dogs that maybe don't have just an exuberant amount of confidence, and I do think that there's a connection there between dogs that can easily spiral up and become very frantic and become very sloppy in their movements. They tend to not have as much confidence as my dogs that are just like not that easily excited over even the things that they love the most.

And so I have found a very strong correlation between that and pattern games with dogs with regards to movement because then they, they understand what's coming next. And so now you've taken out this whole element of surprise for them. Like you're not going to pull them out of the kennel, take them for a potty break and then just put them in the ring and run a course they've never run before.

Right. Like now you can add in very specific routine things into what happens the moment they come out of the crate. Right. Like the thing before the thing. And the dog's like, yeah, I know exactly what's going to happen now. I have this fancy leash on where I'm going to go potty and then she's going to make me, you know, we're going to do these circles over here and they, they're really, they start to know it and sometimes people are like, but now my dog is just like, they're, they're starting the routine and they know how many reps I'm going to do.

Not a bad thing. Especially if you have a dog that does not have a ton of confidence because they, they know it's very predictable for them. And now they, they feel safe. And now you've got a clear headed dog going into something that six months ago would just blow their mind and their mind would just be left on the start line as their body just ran around frantically which no one wants.

Melissa Breau: Right, Right. So thinking about a couple of these pieces, right. So body awareness and impulse control and I know we talked a bit of arousal in there, we talked a little bit about self control. We talked, you know, there's a couple pieces in there, but when we're thinking about like stress and distraction and you know, some of those pieces, how does having better body awareness and having better impulse control I feel is a little more intuitive, but maybe especially the body awareness piece, how does that factor in to being able to manage stress and being able to avoid, ignore, deal with distractions and kind of those things that come about in both sports and life?

Ashley Escobar: Yeah. So I like to look at it in this manner. If you've learned how to swim, right. You know how to swim. So if something were to happen and you just got pushed in the pool just out of the blue, had no idea it was coming, the initial response that happens neurologically to you is like, oh, like I'm, I'm underwater, right. Like you, not you just, you don't even have to think about it.

You're not going to take a big deep breath in under the water. Your body is not, you naturally will start to move your arms. You don't even have to think about it. You have such, we have such good spots, spatial awareness of our bodies in a moment where that kind of stress and pressure has happened that we naturally can get ourselves out of it. Right. And I feel like the dogs, when they fully understand how to move their bodies and how to, they've got this pattern going into it, right.

But they, but they know how to move their bodies. They know how to collect with their rear. They know when to load, which lead and how to offload and how to turn their neck. So now that no longer is clouding up their brain, they don't have to think about it. Right. It's like being pushed in the pool. They just now have a new neurologically programmed skill set.

Muscular wise, like neurologically muscular speaking, right. Their muscular structure can kind of just takeover second nature in those moments of high stress and pressure. And their bodies just know how to move through it. It's not an accident that it happens, right? I think that it happens through all of the tiny little pieces that we do at home with the training and the proprioception and the conditioning and the patterning, but being able to give them that ability to not have to think about it.

Because I think part of the picture and obviously I'm not a dog, but part of the issue is there's so much happening in their brain. It's all. And you've, if you've ever watched agility or dock diving, it's clear you can, you're. It's like that dog does not know where their front end is, where their rear end is in that moment. Like the dog is under so much pressure and stress and it's like a combination of things, right?

Like it's not just one thing. It's not because the sky is blue and there's a dog to the left barking like it's all of the things that are happening in that moment. It's like being pushed in the water. So when they don't have good spatial awareness and proprioception and understanding of their self as to how to move their bodies, when all those pressures start coming in and they start feeling it, then you get the frantic dog, you get the dog that moves.

You're like, why is that dog on the right lead when they should definitely be on the left lead? And they don't do it on purpose. They just, they just honestly, they don't know how to move their body. All they want to do is get from point A to point B and they have lost sense of spatial awareness of their, of their body and their, their muscles. I mean it's, it's insane.

And I think about the pushing in the pool, that's always been my like go to example of this. Because if you didn't know how to swim, the one thing for sure that you would not do is just take, just inhale a big breath of air underwater. Like your brain would take over. Because there's just some things that we neurologically have pre programmed in us and the dogs, they don't quit breathing, right?

So similar type analogy there, but they really, they just forget how to move their bodies. Yeah, super interesting to think about that and think about how we respond to stress at the same time. You know, just kind of like, thinking through those pieces.

Melissa Breau: All right, so part of the reason we're talking about all this stuff is because you've got a new class, Patients in the details. Impulse control, body awareness, and precision through conditioning. That is taking place this December. So do you want to share a little more about the class, maybe, who might want to sign up?

Ashley Escobar: Yes. So the class original, again, all of the things that I do originate from my own firsthand experience with my lovely dogs who teach me so much. And the class is all about laying the fundamental foundational base for building a dog that is thoughtful in those high stress, in those pressure situations, no matter what your sport might be, and building it through a series of games that start with impulse control and then move to spatial awareness with their bodies.

I think one of the best things that we can do for our sports dogs coming from rehab is teaching them how to move their bodies in the sport that we have chosen for them, right? Like, they didn't come to us with the little sign saying, hey, this is what I want to do. I want to do your sport, right? So the best thing we can do for them is to at least teach them how to swim if they get pushed in the pool, right?

Like, we want them to be able to at least maneuver their body in a safe manner and be comfortable and confident in moving their bodies. So this class is all about teaching just that. We're gonna go back to the basics. We're going to go, not relearn, but I guess if it's your dog's first time learning, like food choice games like impulse control and stuff, we're going to go back and teach it from the ground up.

And then we are also going to be immediately incorporating the most fundamental basis of conditioning and how you can incorporate conditioning into your routine to help build a thoughtful dog when we introduce the drive component to their sport. I even set up a gold thread because I have a new border collie puppy. And so she's going to be going, right, this is what I do with my puppies, right?

So you'll be able to see a puppy learning all of these components to this class as well in the class and all of the games, different games that we play and kind of how she responds to it and. And how I respond to her, because obviously she's not going to have these behaviors down. It's going to be like first time she's seeing them and learning them too. So I always think that's cool to see, like, how the trainers train.

I think you can get a lot from that too. And if you have a puppy or a young dog, it's like, great, because then you can kind of see another one go through all the process versus my dogs that have kind of been playing this. Although I have some older videos and stuff. Stuff lined up for this class, because again, this is all thanks to good old teal.

So is it. Is it just kind of foundation gusts for puppies, or is it also, like, really appropriate for dogs who maybe have been down this path for two or three or four years and need to go back and learn the skills it is. There is no age limit. I feel like you can teach, you know, you can teach an old dog new tricks. I really think impulse control, it's.

It is collectively, and I work with a lot of folks from all over, it is the most overlooked concept across the board. I don't care what sports you're doing. It is the one thing that I would say 95% of the people are like, yep, I did that in the very beginning. And then I don't know where it goes, right? We just, we. It seems. It seems dumb or it seems silly or it seems so easy that we just move on and we never revisit it.

And so it definitely is not a step back in training. It's just part of training. Right. Like, I don't ever view it as moving backwards. Like, I've progressed to, like, not needing it anymore. It's kind of like my seat belt, right. I'm never gonna not put it on. Like, I'm always gonna need it. I feel like certain foundation training skills are. Are just that. They're like a seatbelt.

Like, it's not something that you're ever not gonna need. It's just a matter of when do you pull it out and remind the dog about this and when do you reintroduce it into new concepts? And this class really gives, I think, a good perspective of how to appropriately build pressure on your dog to and. And maintain and meet criteria that you have for your dog. Right. If I am able to play some food choice games in the house, that's great.

Am I able to play it in the front yard? 100%. Can I take it outside the agility ring with no one working perfect? Can I take it right next to a jump or a tunnel or a set of weave poles? Might have some issues there, right? Like, how close can you get to the exciting thing and still have criteria being checked off all the boxes before your dog says, you know what?

I forgot how to play this game because that's all you need, right? It's just, you're just gathering information. Like at what moment is the distraction, is the pressure too much? And then that's where you get to have this amazing experience with your dog. Because now, you see, this is where my dog says, I need help, I need more direction, I need more guidance. And I love tying in the fitness to that because it, it's, it's crazy.

And when you experience it with your dog, it's like you get to see a whole other side of your dog, right? Because before you see your dog get so worked up and get so frantic and they're unable to make a weave entry or keep a bar up or make the long jump that you know, that they can make on the dock, and then you build in some fitness into their routine and their pattern.

And you get to see this dog, like, it's almost like they get a pair of glasses for their sport, right? Like they have a different perspective and they're able to work so clear minded that you lose the frantic movement. And now you have this very precise, moving dog who's super accurate. And it's just, it'll just blow you away when you get to see that dog actually kind of unfold from all of this work. So it's really pretty cool.

Melissa Breau: Very neat. It sounds very interesting. Any final thoughts or maybe key points that you kind of want to leave folks with on that?

Ashley Escobar: Definitely that it's not a young dog situation. Right. Like, this is not something that's only suitable for puppies that have never been introduced to impulse control. Or they, you know, they've never learned how to maneuver their body. Like you can do it for adult dogs.

You can certainly teach adult dogs how to maneuver their bodies and every dog's journey, regardless if they're a puppy or an adult. Right. It's a little bit different. Some take longer than others and just embrace that because it's the only. They only get one go.

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

Ashley Escobar: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Melissa Breau: Absolutely. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in.

We'll be back next week, this time with Erin Lybes to talk about building confidence in our canine companions. 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 Benson.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!