Green dogs and weaves

We were at class last night and Split had some problems with the weaves. He was very excited to be doing agility and would not slow down enough to hit his entrances. A site -- his head would hit the second weave pole, his butt would go up in the air, then he would pop out. Not ideal.

Split's first trial is coming up this weekend! OK, his weave style probably isn't ideal for trialing. My son and I were brainstorming on how to 1) manage weaves in the trial 2) how to train him to collect so that we can overcome this problem.

So, first thing this morning I put an email out to many of my great agility pals. What would they do? Interesting, all the advise was great, but different:

• Tell the dog 'EASY' several times before he entered the weaves. This person uses EASY as a collection cue.
• Decelerate before you get to the weaves as a cue to decelerate.
• Go back and teach entrances with two weave poles. This is nice since you only have to worry about the entrance and not the rest of the poles. Focus on what he needs to learn.

We experimented with several things today. The most successful was to declerate before the weaves. We learned that we could also reinforce that by pointing at the first pole. This seemed to help the collection as well.

We are still debating on whether to teach a collection word or not.