On the adventures and training of Cinnamon Snapdragon, a papillon destined for greatness.

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Agility Foundations, week 2-2 recap

We had a new instructor today, Wendy. We spent the hour doing jumping and contacts review and then a short jumps-and-tunnel sequence so that she could assess where each team was with their handling and training. Her emphasis was on getting the dogs more reved up before their work, and on going back to reward stays frequently. The reminder about reving up was good for me. I tend to get too focused on the "how" and "why" of an exercise and forget to add that extra enthusiasm for Dragon. His performance is of course much better when I am able to get him more excited!

At home, we've done a couple of sessions of plank work on stairs, and it is building his confidence nicely. Here, too, it greatly helps if I jump around, run him in a circle, wrestle with him, and send him straight to the board instead of doing a lead out. In the meantime I think that I will not put him on the dog walk at all in class, not even to backchain it.

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