Course Details
This class introduces the handler and dog team to key agility foundations, including body awareness, commitment, jumping skills, contact foundations, and handling techniques.
Many of these skills are first taught without agility equipment. Training away from equipment has many advantages: it helps make it easy and accessible—you don’t need a full agility ring to build strong foundations—it helps prevent the chance of a negative association accidentally happening during the foundation-and it reduces impact. It also allows us to easily make adjustments to our training approaches before layering in equipment. When the time comes to transition, the process is faster and smoother because the dog is simply generalizing known skills to new equipment, rather than learning both skill and equipment all at the same time. The result is a more confident and comfortable dog!
The skills transfer so well that I continue to use variations of many of these exercises throughout the course of my dog’a careers. It allows me to keep those skills sharp because I can work tons of generalizations due to the ease of set up. This comes in particularly handy in the winter months when my dogs don’t see the big contact equipment. I also love bringing these back out for my senior dogs so they still have a job and dedicated training time.
We will use short training loops that incorporate stationing, transports, and varied reward strategies to build both sport-specific and supporting skills. By including stationing and transports from the start, we strengthen essential “out-of-the-ring” behaviours. While these may seem less exciting than running courses, they are what make the in between running fun and easy. It give you a dog with skills you can be proud of in and out of the ring. So much of agility involves waiting and moving—waiting for a turn, waiting while we set up or reset, resting between repetitions, walking to and from the car, crate, ring, or start line. In fact, we spend more time waiting and walking than we do running! It is so much easier to build these behaviours before the dog’s develop their agility addictions. That’s why it’s so valuable to weave these everyday skills into our fun foundation training from the very beginning.
Each week we will learn and grow more skills. At the end of the specific skill lessons for the week there will be bonus options of growing those skills even more by creating small sequences and/or using other layers of generalization. If you don’t feel like you are ready to tackle the bonus work that’s a okay, they are a great resource for you to continue to work on and grow these behaviours and skills when our class time has come to an end!
Teaching approach:
Lectures will be released at the start of the week. Lectures are a written with video demos.
Feedback will be written with the use of still shots for clarity. In some cases voice over video may be used, I find in some situations it is helpful to explain in real time with the ability to slow down, rewind or stop video to help you see and understand a concept.
