Silvia Trkman is awesome. There ended up being about 7 dogs there doing the workshop, and 3 of them were papillons :) I met two other great agility juniors. One, Selina, had papillons, the other, Hannah, I had actually "met" on youtube. She owns Chance and Bouncer so it was really cool meeting both of them.
First of all, I love how Silvia showed the same amount of respect to everyone working with their dogs. Adults and teenages a like. She let our teamwork show how much we had accomplished before she made any comments.
Silvia trains her weaves using the channel method. I personally have always strongly disliked this method, mostly because I've seen so many people train it incorrectly. They also don't have access to the weaves at home, so it's trained in a painfully slow fashion.
Hearing her explain how she trains them shed new light on them. So much so that I might just give it a shot with my next dog. She starts with an open channel (all 12 poles), at the other end she puts either a toy or a bowl with food in it. Then has the dog run through. Once the dog understands that he's to run through she starts doing something different every time the dog runs through. She'll stay back, rush ahead, run away from the weaves, turn around and run backwards, dance, toss toys, everything she can think of. Then she'll move them closer and continue to do the same.
Depending on the size of the dog, the poles will be 6-10" apart when she starts working every possible entry. At this point the dog isn't totally doing the weaving motion and still has that nice "tunnel" of sight down the middle to help direct them a bit. Still adding in whatever she can think of like jumping jacks so the dog really understands that their job is to weave all the way through no matter what she might be doing.
If done correctly, then in about 20 sessions the dog will have all 12 poles, nice speed, independence, and solid entries.
Very cool, and very different from the channel training I've seen at agility classes.
Anyway... onto what I got from the seminar to use with Knight. Silvia really helped my become more aware of my handling, actually the timing of my handling really.
Front crosses- With Lilly the timing evolved naturally, I'm not really sure how it happened but I started doing it properly, as she was in the air over the jump I'd be doing the cross. With Knight, since I never really knew what I was doing with Lilly, I haven't timed my handling at all. He'd land after then jump and maybe even take a stride or two before I completed the cross. The end result was Knight dedicating to one direction, then swinging back to me.
Once as I got closer and closer to timing the front cross correctly, his line to the next obstical got smoother and smoother. This is possibly one of the most important things I need to work on I think. Simply because Knight's stride is so small, he has to do a lot of running to get around that course. Making sure I show him clear lines will make things much easier for him.
Turn signals- The second thing I really need to work on. Using the other hand to signal wraps and things like that. Knight is more motivated when I keep moving as opposed to me staying static on the turns. So that's something else I need to keep in mind :)
Jump "drills"- One exercise that we did that I really loved consisted of two jumps and two tunnels, kind of laid out in a circle. So the two jumps were next to each other in front of both ends of the tunnels. Then we worked on the 3 different turns a dog will see on the course. First we just did the cirle, kept shoulders straight to cue the dog that it could extend its stride. Then we did a 180 turn, so you'd send your dog in one tunnel, then turn your shoulders as he was about to take the jump so he knew to ignore the tunnel and turn towards the second jump. And Lastly we did wraps, where the dog would come out of the tunnel, you'd cue the turn with the opposite hand so the dog knew the cross was coming and send them right back into the tunnel end they came out of.
I can't wait for the snow to melt so I can try it out with Lilly :)
All in all, it was a great day. I loved Silvia, she was great at watching both the handler and the dog, and knew how to smooth out everyone's runs a bit.
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ReplyDeleteLOVE.