Friday, February 18, 2011

Finally a perfect dogwalk session

I'm away at a class all weekend (unrelated to agility) so no time yet for a write-up of the seminar but the weather finally cooperated for a dogwalk training session out at the practice field.  Finally a perfect session, 6/6.  I kept the reps low because I wanted to work on other things and Strum starts getting hot and slowing down/changing stride with too many reps.  I started out with the treat gizmo 15' off the end of the dogwalk then replaced it with a jump and put it 15' after the jump.  I meant to pan the video to show the whole set-up before each set of reps but forgot.  I'm going to try to remember to do this in future sessions because I've learned that it's important to keep track of the training set-up.  Wish I'd been better about it at the start.

Apparently now if you want to watch this at a higher resolution you have to click on the 'YouTube' button and go there to pick the resolution.  Don't know why they took that option away from the embedded player.  Or maybe it was never there and I dreamed it.  Anyway, this looks much better in HD on the YouTube site.



The plan is to continue to add obstacles straight ahead and fade the gizmo.  Then I'll come back to turns probably first with the gizmo then I'll fade it again.  I'll try some sessions with a thrown toy instead of the gizmo as well.  I didn't want to start with that today though because it's much harder for him and our success rate has been so low lately.  I don't have another trial until April (have to miss my March trial due to the wedding) so I have plenty of time to work this stuff out as long as the weather holds out.

I also tried working on some rear crosses and that video is like watching paint dry so I won't post it.  I started out with an ill conceived exercise so that I was still rotating out of a front cross as Strum came out of a tunnel then tried to cue a rear and that was a big hot mess.  I finally fixed things so I could be done with the front in enough time to cue the rear but I didn't have a good idea of what was going wrong until I got home and reviewed the video.  Glad I bothered to tape it but I'm not torturing you folks with it.  Wish I could figure this stuff out in the field but I suppose I'll get there eventually.

1 comment:

  1. Woohoo :) I'm glad you guys found your solution, at least for this stage of training.

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