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Welcome!! 18 months already… time flies!!!
I’m excited that you got to a real live class – sounds like Keiko was fabulous, like usual 🙂
Looking forward to seeing her in action here!
TracyHello and welcome!!! I am excited to see you and your girls 🙂 I think there will games for Maple to join in.
Have fun!
TracyHi and welcome!!! Glad to see you here. How is Select doing? Hopefully he can join in later in the summer. And it will be fun to watch Taken!@
T
Hello and welcome back!! I’m excited to hear all about your boys. And extra special hello to Ace <3
Have fun!!
TracyHello and welcome! I’m excited to see you all here and especially get to know Fusion!!!
And I think all 3 dogs will have stuff to play with. Have fun!Howdy! I’m excited that you and the Aussies are here 🙂 we can get creative to make it all fit your space. Fun times ahead!
Hi!
>>OK, I hadn’t noticed that, but I’ll try another surface soon…which may mean that I need to finally get/build my own wings. Do you have plans or resources for building agility equipment? The wings just seem like they would be easy enough to build and pre-made ones seems so expensive for what they are.>>
Pre-made wings are ridiculously expensive!!! Here is a link to a popular way to make your own:
>> The tandem turn to get her to come in would be more on a parallel line to the wing, facing the center of the tunnel, with your outside arm drawing her in as if you had a cookie, then turning her back out.>>
Uh…what? I’m sure it’s perfectly clear, but I can’t picture things in my mind, so not really sure what this is saying. 🤣>>
You can see the visual here:
https://agility-u.com/lesson/handling-game-rocking-horse-turn-aways-2/The Advanced Level has the tandem turns to give you the visual 🙂
>>Overall, it seems like a lot of the issues that I’ve had during this class have been from handling mistakes>>
That is basically the life-long challenge of agility, from beginning to masters level 🙂 Handling is the hardest part 🙂
>> and things that are probably easy to correct in the moment by a third-party observer who knows what they’re doing. I’m thinking that some in-person agility lessons would be helpful for me, just so I don’t get into bad habits myself. Do you offer any of those or know of someone in Alexandriva, VA/DC area that does?>>
I think the closest to you will be at A Click Above in Leesburg:
https://www.aclickabovellc.com/
And a lot of the NoVa/DC folks also go down to Level Up – a bit further but they have seminars so you can have a longer experience to make the drive worthwhile:
https://www.levelupdogsports.com/
Live, in-person training is a huge part of agility, so hopefully you can find classes that fit your schedule. There are a couple of other facilities on the MD side of things too!
Have fun! Great job here!
TracyGood morning!
Nice work here!! A couple of things that I see:
on the 12 poles, he only has a couple of reps before the striding goes from rhythmic to wonky. It could have been a bit of fatigue, or it might be that he strides better when you are ahead (like the first couple of reps) and when you stay parallel, he slows down to match your speed so he ends up crossing over in the striding. With that in mind, you can add more speed and move faster to stay ahead. And mix in driving ahead to a reward target so he doesn’t rely on you being ahead.On the 2x2s – he was definitely more consistent here. He was somewhere between the bounce and the swim – not quite one or the other but definitely rhythmic!!! So keep moving forward with speed on these and maybe tighten up one more inch and see how he does. Then it can be 4 then 4 to see if he can hit and hold the rhythm, eventually bringing them closer together.
The zig zags are correct! You can move the wings a little closer together so he learns to make the changes quickly – the ideal eventual distance is 4 feet (then add a 3rd wing in the line :))
Great job here and thanks for all of your work and feedback!!!! I will see you in CAMP 🙂
TracyHi!
yes, I think that is a great progression! Now that the weather is good, it won’t take long 🙂
See you soon!
TracyHi!
On the accordion grid – your setup is good with the distances and your placement with the toy giving her plenty of room to land (and be sure you aren’t facing her, be facing away but still watching her – it was hard to see what your position was here :)) Her stays look great!
About the bars coming down… I believe it is about the footing. The rubber matting is slippery so she is unable to get her hind end organized for takeoff, which changes her jumping form. If you watch it in slow motion, you can see her slipping a bit as she is trying to take off. So on the first rep – she slips on takeoff. On the 2nd rep, she starts from the stand and she can’t sort it out, so she runs around the jumps. On the 3rd rep – she can’t organize her hind, she jumps short trying to use only her front end and lands on bar 2. On the 4th rep from a down – she is trying super hard but can’t get the grip on the footing. On the 5th rep, same thing happens as on the 3rd rep – a little bit of slipping so she lands short. On the 6th rep – her start position was a little too far back from 1 at 2:53 so she ends up short on jump 3. On the 7th rep she worked really hard and pulled it off, but it is hard to find the balance on the mats. Because she is fast and making split second jumping decisions in the learning process, the next jumping sessions should be all on grass or dirt or turf – no more mats 🙂 They are just too slippery for a fast dog and while she is doing her best to figure it out, I don’t want her to have to work that hard – I want her to find the natural feel of using her hind end to power off for the jump. Even a small patch of grass or dirt is great, she can work the jumping skill on 1 or 2 jumps if you don’t have a lot of space for all 3.The lateral lead outs are definitely going better! When you got into the groove (especially when you were on the far side of the wing) she was really finding the jump! Yay! Throwing the toy really helped her focus on the line – but the bars down at 1:26, 1:45 and 2:23 were because of the toy throws (that was causing her to drop her feet a bit and hit the bar). That improved too later in the session – it is possible that a big cookie reward (like a visible piece of cheese) will be better because it will still reward the line but will be a little less stimulating, so she can still keep the jump bar up.
On the starfish video – the setup was also good here! It looks like you were able to fit it all in and still have to do a good amount of running 🙂 And nice work adding the verbals – right now they still need body support, but it is great to use them because she will get better and better at recognizing them without physical cues.
>>Also, despite having 5-10 minutes between repetitions, did I overdo this for a single day?>>
I think it is not so much about length of session (this looked to be 2 sessions of about 5 minutes each) but it is more about keeping track of the dog’s rate of success. This is particularly important when the dog keeps making the same error while insisting that something else is correct. I have found that when this happens, the dog is always correct LOL!!! That is why I have the 2 failure rule (and by that, I mean 2 failures for the entire session, not just 2 in a row) – if the dog fails once, a little red flag goes up in my brain and I try to clarify the info. If the dog fails twice, especially on on the same cue and even more especially twice in a row – I stop asking for the skill, ask for something else, then take a break to figure out why the dog has the massive question.
>>I had a really difficult time getting her to wrap clockwise around the first wing.>>
That is where the 2 failure rule will definitely help: you were cuing something and she was insisting it meant something else… she was correct. The line up and cue for that very first wing was the question: I think you were trying to get her to wrap away from you on the inside pf the wing, turning to her right and clockwise away from you – but the cue when starting her on your right side really was presenting the counterclockwise turn – it looks like a send to the far side of the wing to get a left turn. To get her to come inside, the cue would look really different – A tandem turn with the outside arm would be needed to give a clearer indication of the come-in-to-you-then-turn-away.
There were a lot of failures there which really dropped the overall rate of success, so you saw frustration behaviors such as the hard mouth on your hand and grabbing the tunnel (she was offering something else because she didn’t know what you wanted on the wing).You can see it more clearly when you changed the camera angle at approximately 4:08, the physical cue was to the counterclockwise side – there was a step and motion towards it. The tandem turn to get her to come in would be more on a parallel line to the wing, facing the center of the tunnel, with your outside arm drawing her in as if you had a cookie, then turning her back out.
That is a more elaborate physical cue for sure – but if she doesn’t read it twice, you can break it down or change your position – generally it is easier to start the dogs for a clockwise turn by sending from our left sides (rather than having them turn away from us).
If something is going wrong and my dogs are insisting that what I am asking for means something else – I invoke the 2 failure rule and either change something or skip it and come back to it later 🙂
Once you got rolling, the sequence went well! The race tracks and tunnel commitments are looking really good. That left turn around the wing after the tunnel was also going nicely – keep giving her the connection to get her to the wing past the tunnel. When you connected after the tandem turn, she nailed it, When you didn’t connect to her eyes, she ended up back in the tunnel.
>>An additional trouble spot was the last wing to the tunnel threadle (?)>>
She did best on those when you turned your shoulder away from her earlier and more dramatically – when you kept your shoulder open to her, it looked like you were cuing the end of the tunnel in front of her, so that is where she went. That earlier rotation totally helped her be able to change her line!
Nice work here! Let me know what you think!
TracyHi!
She is doing really well here! On the plank, I think there is definitely a solid understanding developing here and that is great! At this stage, add in waiting one heartbeat longer now to be sure she is fully stopped and fully in position, and then mark and reward. You can still be moving while this is happening – either moving the whole time, or stopped the whole time, as long as you don’t stop when she stops 🙂 I liked how you were praising in there with a lot of quiet “good girl!” before the reward – those were the reps where you could really assess her position. She had one error at :40 and on at 1:37 where I think she was anticipating the quick reinforcement. And there were a couple of reps where she was not really in position and got rewarded – because she is quick on her feet, adding in the extra time to see if she has truly ‘stuck her landing’ in the 2o2o will work in your favor.I totally agree that the plank session was strong and the bang game was the right next-step. It also went well, and not surprisingly – she had an easy time transferring the position to the teeter. Super!!!! On the teeter here, you can add challenge: line her right up at the end corner of the board so she leaps right into position with no steps down through the yellow. It is harder for balance and simulates what she will be doing when she is driving across the board. And as you cue the position and move, keep moving the whole time until you see that she has stopped, you praise, then mark and reward. The quickness of reinforcement makes it harder to see if she has fully stopped, and she is anticipating a bit 🙂
Overall, she was SUPER successful so you can keep moving forward on this. We want her to keep her head low on all of these, so keep trying to get the reward on the target. When you were tossing to her mouth, she was looking up high at you and that will change the weight shift on the board – so the low tosses will help maintain that weight shift. Losing the treat in the grass can slow things down a bit for sure, so you can play with different types of highly visible treat (I use chunks of white string cheese and others use those orange crunchy cheese ball things 🙂 I practice that – throw a treat in the grass and when the pup finds the treat in the grass quickly and returns her attention to me, I give her a toy or another treat – the dogs get REALLY quick about finding the treat in the grass haha!!!
Planning ahead now: The bang game is going really well so you can also add the 2o2o into the downhills to the ground, and into the elevator game. And when that goes well for a couple of sessions, onwards to the crazy elevator games and then the full teeter! She had basically worked through most of that before the position change, so I think it will be a straightforward progression to get to the full teeter. Yay!
Great job here! Let me know what you think!
Tracy
