Hooray for flyball down season!

Time for training. Repetition. Skill building. Body awareness. Conditioning. Most importantly, getting ready for the next tournament!

So I am pretty happy with how their striding work is coming. One thing is that I switched the positioning of the stride regulators for Baer, because with the regulators @ 5' and 10', she looked awkward and scrunched. I moved them to 4' and 9' and she did great, the movement was fluid, I think we found our niche.


Flash was doing wonderfully @ 5' and 10' and like a dummy, I didn't switch the regulators back to the normal positioning for him. So he ended up looking scrunched. But now I know - Baer, 4' & 9', Flash, 5' & 10'.

We're going to be practicing our striding off the box (with a solid turn) a LOT, with some distraction training for Flash mixed in on Saturdays when I practice with a friend. I can't wait til the spring when we can get back to hiking all the time, and more importantly, POWER STRIDING.

My goal is to do power striding weekly, and hiking 2-3 times a week.

Just when you're done digging your "hole",

Agility class last night was horrific. I think my pups were hungry (class is an hour past dinner time) and thus they were going crazy. Especially my Lab, who blew me off and ran over to another handler and sat at her feet for a treat. Oy.

With Baer's poor striding yesterday, I was ready to dive back into striding work. Today, I switched the third agility jump (my "stride regulator") with a flyball jump, and she was perfectly fine. She looked great. I'm glad she picked it back up so quickly, and we're going to repeating this and many different variations of this in the next few months.

Then we did a new exercise I'm calling "Over and Backs", basically it's the training of a box turn with a "hup" jump. I'm at the point where I'm using just the hup for Flash but with Baer I do the over and back without the box and with the box. The point of this is to train a good landing coming off the box- their heads need to be down when they come back, or I do not reward.

At the tournament Baer was having trouble getting her feet up. Using the "hup", she HAS to get her back feet up (the muscle memory is important). And with Flash, I don't want any foreseeable problems. 

I'm discovering, slowly, that the wall work has not been beneficial for my dog. It has not created a reliable turn for my Labrador. And my Whippet has not seemed to benefit from it much. 

Since my Labrador has been using the wall board, she has a wide turn on a box with no props. She doesn't get her back feet up. It's not a method I want to keep repeating religiously like I have been. Her head is so high when she comes off the box now that she's turning in the direction of her head- which had been adding the third stride, because she was so far from the box. So I'm excited to see how the over & backs will affect her future performance :) 

Sometimes it's best to stop while you're ahead.

Our tournament went pretty well this weekend.

Baer's times were consistent, and in a decent amount of runs, she got the 3 strides. At first, I was excited, then I realized a lot of it stemmed from whether her box turn was wide or not. I didn't think much of it, until we went to do our usual 3 striding work. We haven't done it since before Thanksgiving, and Baer acted as if we had never done it before in her life. 

Not only was she stutter-stepping and skipping jumps today, she did not get a single good stride in, in 15 minutes of trying. I finally had her do one good stride over two jumps, praised her wildly, and stopped there. As baffled as I am, she's unique and I can't expect her to act the way I want her to. She had a lot of practice this tournament getting 3 strides in; then again, she had a lot of practice NOT getting 3 strides in. My fault, bad owner. Honestly, I saw it coming. 

I could feel, during our session today, my patience running thin. I've been going through some emotional shit out of my dog world, and it's been depleting my patience already. I was taking Baer's inability to do the stride work today personally, as if I had failed her. It took a lot of self control to stop, after taking a baby step back and only going over two strides. 

It's hard, when your dog regresses in training, to not feel like you've failed and your dog will never get it right. Yet, starting back at step one is much better than quitting altogether. I have learned a hard lesson - finish your retraining, then enter the dog in a race. Duh, Para.

My dog has reverted to her old leaping behavior and I can tell it's going to take work to get her back to the point we were at. I'm sure it won't take her a long time, like it did before, but you can bet we'll be practicing daily.

What did I learn?

1) STOP WHILE YOU'RE AHEAD.

2) Celebrate every victory. Let your dog know you're celebrating. They're trying so hard to get it right, make it clear to them when they do! 

3) Don't push it. They'll learn in their own time. Make sure you have plenty of patience.

Back to the drawing board, but it's alright since our team isn't going to any tournaments for a while (4-5 months). Even if they choose to, I'm not going until Baer's proven she has gained the skills necessary to succeed. 

Dog training can be frustrating fun shit.

Different feet placement in all shots - but only in the last two, did she get her 3 strides in.

Striding from the Box

Pita - doing two strides with no props, we switched to props, she did three. We took out the first prop, and she still did three strides.




Baer - I kept the props in, and after the first run, she did fine. Happy with her, no stutter stepping.




Flash - Well I have my work cut out for me. Pup-pup wants to do 2 strides. I tried moving the fourth jump out to 16 feet, then 17 feet. Still 2 strides. So I stood at the first jump, and had him just walk to me - once he did two 3-strides in a row, I stopped. Always end training on a positive note.


I hear from a decent amount of people that their dogs are too large to get in 3 strides. Honestly, I don't think it's an issue of a dog being "too large", that they "can't" do 3 strides from the box. I've seen larger dogs do 3 strides. I've seen smaller dogs do 2. It just depends on the personality of the dog, if they have perception issues, etc.

It's more an issue of running versus leaping over the fourth jump back. Leaping throws off their striding, leaping slows them down. Running enables them to gain the most momentum.

Running over the fourth jump (the 3rd stride) allows the dog to gain more momentum and speed. That third stride, I believe, sets them up to have the quickest return to the handler.


Anyways, now I need to enforce all 3 dog's striding, and my plan is to incorporate the box in Baer's training at practice from now on. Her turns are wide. Her head is dragging when she grabs the ball, it almost seems as if her back legs kick off before she's had the chance to straighten out her body.So she lands to the side. It's a new problem, because her turns were pretty nice before, but it's alright. Things are slowly coming together.

Rotations on the Slant Board

Doing rotation work on the Slant board:

Both dogs don't look too bad. I took it easy on them since we have flyball practice with the team tonight.

I bought a new book, waiting for it to arrive. It's titled "Cross training for the canine athlete" and I can not WAIT to get it. I think it'll have a lot of new ideas for me on conditioning & building core strength and balance, which will be very nice to work on in the winter time when hiking and walking slacks off for a while.

I'm especially interested in body awareness- anything to make my Lab a little more graceful.

Full Speed Grid Work with 3 Strides

With a tournament quickly approaching, I'm beginning to feel the pressure of upping our striding training & making it harder. On top of making full rotations in her box training (doing a swimmer's turn and landing close to the box PLUS landing in a straight line to run back), I'm making her RUN the grid. I've done this before, but she had studder-stepping while running so I took some steps back.

Here's from today:



I'm pretty happy. She did knock a few bars but hey, it's my Labrador. I'm not looking for perfection, I'm looking for comprehension.

I definitely need to get her set up with a box and try a few runs in a full lane with props set up. I need to know where we're at, and it'd be good practice anyhow. But for right now, striding & box turning is our main focus.

Always a fun time with my dog's :)