Had a fun practice session yesterday with some agility friends. We were working on parts of a course from a video from One Mind Dogs which I'd seen a few weeks ago. Exercise 1 on the tape is something my training partner made up and Exercise 2 is from the video. I'd never heard of One Mind until the Rosanne DeMascio Seminar in November which I now realize I never wrote about. Of course I had heard of Jaako via the Jaako Turn but this latest agility sensation had largely flown over my radar. But wow, after seeing the video of them running highly technical courses so easily and smoothly I'm kind of fascinated with their methods. I found a DVD from them on Clean Run that describes some basic handling moves and I ended up watching almost the whole thing at 1/4 speed several times over. I also picked up an old FCI World Championship DVD from a couple years back for only $5 as long as I was paying postage for the other DVD so I'll see if I can pick out the moves on it.
My mistakes are obvious. For Strummer it's all about the shoulders. And he needs motion to support going 'out' to take a jump. You can watch in HD by clicking on HD next to the volume meter at the bottom of the video.
2014-01-02 Handling Practice from colliebrains on Vimeo.
Was surprised to see some things like using the opposite arm to cue a serpentine and running the dog across your feet on a rear cross on the flat. I've worked so hard to get away from doing that. And also the Flip move that went out of fashion. They call it a Lap Turn and to be fair there are more cues involved than simply flipping the dog around with your hand but wow, was funny to see top world competitor championships handlers using that move and making it look so elegant.
I'm going to work on learning some of the moves and I'll put some video up though there's plenty over at YouTube and Janita's YouTube channel. I entered the Masters Challenge courses at a USDAA trial next week, I'll see what I can learn in a week and more importantly if I can figure out where to apply it on course.
On a completely unrelated note I'm on something of a hiatus from Facebook. Such a big noise to signal ratio on Facebook. I'll try to remember to check my messages over there but wow my brain feels so much less cluttered with not having to deal with the tedium of Facebook.
Yea, I joined there website to watch the teaching videos. The front cross one will have to wait, just to much info for me. Another thing I noticed was that arms don't mean as much to the dog as feet and shoulders, it could be part of my problem. I rely way to much on arms ,that sometimes don't support what the rest of my body is doing.
ReplyDeleteThe One Mind folks seem to do a lot with their arms, it got confusing trying to follow when they would cue with the inside or offside arm. But my dog is the same, shoulders mean a lot more than arms/hands and he'll follow shoulders and/or motion over every other cue.
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