Handling and Dogwalk practice

Today was weave pole/tunnel day.  Strum did awesome with his weave entries, I was stunned.  The only one he missed was coming out of a tunnel and the tunnel was very close to the weaves so he had to collect hard and early.  It took him 4 tries even though I cued the weaves verbally while he was still in the tunnel.  But he finally got it, what an awesome boy.


Practice 3-10-2011 from colliebrains on Vimeo.

The exercises where from a Clean Run Backyard Dogs, I don't know which one, so I can't print them here but they were short and obvious enough you can see what's going on in the video.  We added in the A-frame, what they hey, wanted to get some contact practice in.  Strum missed the first one but I called it and had him redo it and he was perfect for the other reps.

Overall I could have gotten more collection in some places but I think we did a nice job and I remembered to keep my eye on him.  Had a nice lateral send at the end of Exercise #3 and was able to get far enough ahead to put in a front cross after a tunnel-whee ha!  I think maybe some of the seminar lessons actually sank in though I did have one botched forward send.

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Running Dogwalk

I finally looked at the video from yesterday's nightmare of a practice and on paper it doesn't sound as bad as I thought:  9/15 (60%).  That's still bad but I thought it was more around 30%.  Unfortunately the misses are on the full dogwalk while the hits are mostly back chaining of the down plank.  I cut the video short, even I don't want to sit through 15 reps.  You get the gist of what's happening.  Set-up was jump-dogwalk-tunnel-treat gizmo.


Today I decided we needed some success so before handling practice I set up the treat gizmo at the end of the dogwalk for a couple reps. then replaced it with a jump for a couple more.  I didn't put a jump in before the dogwalk.  Technically he was 4/4 (100%) but two of the hits were high for my liking and sloppy looking.  But it felt so good to have some success.  I think the new plan will be to continue with the successful set-up for one more practice, start the next practice with the jump then after several good reps. replace the jump with the tunnel and see if he can maintain success.