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Megan: [00:00:00] Hey, everyone. Welcome to fostering excellence. in agility the podcast. I'm your host competitor, coach and mentor Megan Foster. I help agility enthusiasts focus on the small details of training and behavior while still having a clear understanding of their big picture goals. Join me as I take you through key elements of dog agility training, competing, and teaching, and how you can take action today to start improving your skills within the sport.
Let's get started.
Hey everyone. Welcome to episode 18. And today I want to talk to y'all about concept training for improving your ability to homeschool your dogs. A lot of us are functioning solely from online classes. Or even if , you [00:01:00] are going to a group class, you are having to find ways to practice your skills outside of that weekly class.
And as the sport grows and as more facilities get busier and busier, maybe with classes or trials on the weekends, renting those facilities to practice is getting more and more difficult. So a big part of my training program is being able to break skills down in ways that we can practice them without access to the actual equipment and also providing the tools to continue to enhance those foundation skills or those basic behaviors.
so that you don't actually need access to the equipment to continue to improve. When we all look at our foundation [00:02:00] programs or the foundation skills that we are teaching, there's a lot in those foundation programs that does not require access to equipment. We use different props like singular posts or cones or a wing or a trash can, or maybe.
we're using a mat or some platforms. We're not actually teaching our dogs the skills on the equipment. Right. What if I told you that didn't really have to change? My goal is that. I can always return to those basic skills, those foundation behaviors that I was able to train on non obstacle props. I wanna be able to go back to those and still increase the challenge enough to suit the needs of my three year old dog or my five year old dog or my eight year old.
[00:03:00] and that does come back to having really good reinforcer skills so that I can put a loaded bowl of food. in front of a platform and expect my dog to still stop on the platform with bowl of food, six inches from the platform or 10 feet from the platform, whichever is more difficult for the dog. I also want to be able to work on cue discrimination that my dog understands the difference between run to your mat versus run to your toy.
Being able to practice those skills. Not only increases my confidence and their abilities. It also means that I can practice those tricky discrimination behaviors without dragging out the dog, walk in the tunnel in the middle of winter or renting a facility. access to equipment is a great privilege that not [00:04:00] all students are going to have.
And so as instructors, we need to be helping our students find ways to get creative and continue practicing their skills, even if they haven't gone out and bought an entire set of equipment or. Moved home and property to house said equipment. Not all of our students are going to catch the agility bug in the same way that we did.
when we started. And also it's not going to be on the table for all of our students. So we need to continue to. Make the sport as accessible as possible via creativity and adding in more and more layers to our basic foundation skills that do not require equipment as a competitor, you are going to feel more confident knowing that you can.
Miss a weekly class or not have access to a weekly [00:05:00] class and only have access to an equipment rental a couple of times a month and still make progress. You're going to be able to break down the things that you're struggling with at a trial. And at least you will have the opportunity to add money in the bank for the concepts, even if you aren't able to practice and rehearse the exact same behaviors.
As a trainer, you will benefit so much by learning to think outside of the box and piecing different things together and not relying on a course map and all of the obstacles to tell you what to train. So let's look at some examples. Of taking a basic foundation skill and progressing it to a very advanced level that might help even if your dog is three or [00:06:00] five or eight and you don't have access to the equipment or it's winter and your equipment is locked away.
I mentioned cue discrimination. This comes up all of the time on the agility course, it can be contact tunnel discrimination. It can be tunnel weave discrimination. It can be the front side versus the backside discrimination. cue discrimination happens everywhere on the agility course and more and more it's becoming verbal cue discrimination.
And that is not an easy skill. And it is a skill that does require more repetitions than learning physical cues. So the more I can do cue discrimination, training in my living room without the equipment, the faster that's going to progress. So some cue discrimination things could be discriminating between two [00:07:00] props.
So in my living room right now, I know I have. A platform, a Cato platform that my dogs understand that the cue place means go put four feet on that. Platform. And I also have the Cato tip plank and it, when it is set up as something that moves, that cue is spot and that is also a four on behavior. But if that Cato tip plank is in the locked.
Slanted position and it's not moving and I cue walk it. My dogs will go in and perform a two on two off on that. So I can very easily put together some cue discrimination exercises with just the platforms that I have hanging out in my living room. Then I also have a cone in my living room. For obedience practice.
So I [00:08:00] can add the cone to that cue discrimination. I also have my reinforcers, so I can put a toy on the ground near either of those props or a bowl with food in it, near those props. And I can continue to build my cue discrimination skills without ever stepping a foot outside the home. I can easily add in my motion as a distraction.
I can move my arms and legs in place. I can walk in place, jog in place. I can actually move back and forth across the room while the dog is having to perform the cue discrimination tasks. and then I can take all of those props with me anywhere pretty easily. So I may have a list of locations that I either go frequently or I drive past frequently when I'm out running errands and [00:09:00] I can list them in order of difficulty for the.
that I'm working with and I can put together a cue discrimination training session for say a level three environment. And the difficulty of the environment may be based on distractions. It may be based on activity. So it increases the dog's arousal when they're there. It may be based on their previous feelings of what that is.
Right. So the, um, The public park near my house is pretty low intensity for sprint. She gets outta the car. It's usually we do sniffy walks here. It's very low key. Versus if I take her to the Trailhead where history tells her that's running through the woods as fast as possible, those are two different arousal levels that I'll be working with.
So I have to make my choices and [00:10:00] training based on, on that information. So these cue discrimination exercises can be very creative, very dynamic, and you can take them anywhere and it will help your cue discrimination on the agility course. Even if you are listening to this and finding it a bit skeptical, building fluency around that concept will only make.
Practicing that concept in the real picture, on the real obstacles, so much easier for the dog to progress in those, in those contexts. Another example, um, in this one is specifically for stopped contacts is moving position changes. So a skill that I teach my dogs is how to down sit and stand. Out of motion.
So when [00:11:00] we can both be running across the field and I can cue down or sit or stand, and I expect them to stop in that position and stay put in that position until they are cued to do something else. That is exactly what a stopped contact is, is running as fast as you can, until you are cued to stop.
And then you have to stay put. And then you are released to go. So being able to, again, layer in all of those distractions that I described in the previous example of reinforcers in front of them, other props in front of them, all of those things are only going to make your stopped contacts. much more fluent because if I'm running, say at a Cato board, but six feet before the Cato board, I cue a down.
That is a serious. Cue discrimination task [00:12:00] at speed that I'm expecting my dog to do right down. Instead of go to the Cato board and down, I have to feel pretty confident that my dog understands the difference between down and place and that they have a pretty good understanding of down in order to ignore the place board, the platform that's in front of them.
And that is going to look exactly like what it looks like when you have a tunnel and at the end of the dog walk. So again, you have to continue to think outside of the box to progress your skills and think, okay, I went to class this week and my dog really was self releasing into the tunnel. They were not maintaining their criteria on their stopped contacts.
How can I set that up when I don't have equipment. And when you look back, you can set these things up with a little [00:13:00] bit of creativity and thinking about those skills that you did when your dog was a puppy, but you haven't visited in a while. I want you always thinking about applying your foundation behaviors and your foundation skills to your advanced.
Tasks and advanced questions that you're asking the dog. One more example that I have for y'all today is about handling skills. When we're talking about following the handling and. Accelerating and decelerating and extending and collecting. Most of these things are going to be primarily physical cues and we can practice those without equipment all of the time I can use no equipment so that I can.
Just ask my dog to follow my handling on the flat. I can include some of the [00:14:00] props that we've already discussed so far, like a cone or a trash can or a platform or anything like that. So I can practice collecting onto a small platform and then. Bursting forward again with speed, I can practice front crosses and rear crosses and blind crosses on the flat and all sorts of turns to, and from the props that I already have.
And again, I can take that on the road and I can increase arousal via the location that I'm at and I can increase the distractions based on where i am taking this session. And in the end, if I have the dog in my car anyways, and I'm running errands and I've got a couple of props in my car and [00:15:00] I drive by a park and it's mostly empty or there's, you know, light distractions, distractions.
I know the dog can handle, I can pop out and I can do a three minute training session. Put the dog back in the car and continue running my errands. That's way less time consuming than driving to a rental that you have to rent probably at least half an hour. So now you have to plan for a half an hour or have multiple dogs or, you know, meet your friends, right.
It, it takes up a lot more time than is really necessary. And I'm not saying don't go rent those places. I'm saying that if renting places is sometimes difficult, you don't need it all of the time, we do need to practice these skills on the equipment on full size courses. And we do need that experience, but we don't [00:16:00] only need that experience.
And we don't need the lack of that availability to hold us back. Really really well trained dogs have handlers that continue to focus on the basics and find more and more creative ways to advance those skills. And so that is my challenge for all of you today is to think about a foundation behavior or skill that you have not visited in quite some.
but you may be struggling with right now on the full agility course. And I want you to take your training back to that foundation skill and see if you can create a training session that is more dynamic. Doesn't include the actual obstacles and see if you can repair that behavior. [00:17:00] From the foundation level, rather than the full coursework "advanced" level.
I think you'll find that you'll be able to set up a training session that's more successful and you may find exactly where the behavior is breaking down. So you'll also get some key insight for helping your dog be successful when you do practice that behavior on the real agility. That's all for today.
If you're listening to this at the time that it airs September 8th, I hope you will join me for my webinar. Being hosted by Fenzi dog sports academy on essential skills for stopped contacts. I go through a lot of these foundation skills that we can really, really power up and use to a very, very high, advanced level that will.
Be [00:18:00] very puppy friendly, very retrain, friendly, and very seasoned dog friendly for maintaining those stopped contact behaviors. It really goes deep into how we can use different foundation skills and add more and more layers to them. So that stop contact training is very, very easy for our dogs at any time during their career.
And so that again is going to be hosted on fenzi dog sports academy.com. And I hope to see y'all there.
Thanks for listening, please subscribe and leave me a review. If you'd like to support this podcast, head over to synergy dog sports.com/community to access bonus content and to get your questions answered via podcast episodes and other social media content. [00:19:00] If you'd like to know more about what I'm up to and what's coming up, make sure to bookmark my website, www . Synergy dog sports.com. .
