Distances Landing from the Box

There's an equation for Baer's re-training in order to achieve 3 strides FROM the box.

1) There must be 3 strides from the box. Easy enough. (Note the sarcasm).

2) Baer must LAND close enough to the box that she can fit in her 3 strides.

With a leaping dog, the box presents a huge problem, especially when high speeds are added in.

She gets to the box in 2 strides (not even touching that yet). Leaping from about 7 feet away, she does a hard, snappy box turn that launches her.

If you figure that there's 15 feet between the box and the first jump, simple math says no, 3 strides will not be possible, no matter how much striding work I do, if she launches far away off the box.

So now, to fix the turn.

In our last tournament (3 months ago), Baer had the widest turns she's ever had. It was strange, and it has not presented itself since that tournament. Go figure. But we've been doing regular slant board training to ensure turns are tight and snappy- now we have to add an element of landing close to the box/board.

In order to do this, I followed a friend's advice to put a piece of tape on the ground 5 feet out from the box. This marker allows me to ensure that her feet around landing more out than they should be.

Here's the video of what we're getting so far.




By the end of this first session, both front feet were landing before the marker.



Then, reviewing my box training with Flash, I saw that he was landing way out. A part of this, I think, was my determination to get him to hit the box with speed- I had to put a prop very far out in order to encourage him to leap over it and accomplish his box turn. So now, he leaps off, landing far from the box.

This is how we were doing box turns/slant board before:



Now, going back to the slant board, I used the marker and this is what we were able to achieve:



Much closer landing than before. I'm going to take a break from the box with Baer and Flash, and probably only use it once a week. The slant board will be our main tool right now to train this. Especially with Baer- she MUST get this muscle memory, or we risk ruining the 3 stride training.