10 treat training

Confession Time!

I think that I have heard this since I started agility, "get 10 treats, go out and train, and when the treats are gone, you are done". Well for various reasons I never felt that it was important to adhere to that. Probably mostly since I have a border collie personality and until I am dead I will keep working :)

Well, since Split's news I have been thinking a lot about this statement. It might really be the perfect amount of training for him. A couple of really great reasons, it limits how much strenuous physical activity I will give him, makes me focus my training with him since I have to be so very limited, and it seems very possible now that I don't have to drive 45 minutes to train for 3 minutes (I just go out back).

So, this afternoon I did 10 treat training with Split! (I actually had a little more than 10 treats just because if I want to super reward I have the ammo.)

Our theme was "drive forward".

He did three magnificent tunnel to dog walks for me (better than I have seen in a long time), a couple of straight three jump sequences, and two tables.

We ended the session, he was still happy, confident and not limping!

P.S. I have begun to think lately that dogs have a finite number of runs in their life, we can choose to use those up in 3 years or pace ourselves so that our dogs run with us their whole lives.

Running contact week

Tangle was BRILLIANT today!

I will get video posted I promise, but the move has been keeping things busy.

Here is the video finally

I decided that Tangle was had a very good hit rate this week and I wanted to start working on speed. Mostly show him that he can run fast on the dog walk. So, I set up a small little course built for speed. I acknowledged to myself ahead of time that this could bring his hit rate dramatically down and might be too exciting for him. But ya never know until you try right?

I set up a tunnel at both ends of the lowered dog walk. I would send Tangle in one tunnel, tell him walk-it, then tunnel, if he showed any hesitation I would give him a 'go' (which is really just encouragement that he was doing the right thing).

I will modify this post once I know what the stats are, but it seemed that he did really well. He is always better when he is on my right. On my left he leaped the first couple of times, but quickly figured out what was expected.

So, speed is what I had after 10 or so reps. Not his adult speed for sure, but greatly increased. I don't plan to do this too often because I don't want to encourage the tunnel sucking, but I will use this as a tool.