I woke up early this morning and actually have time to write a quick post!
We've got snow now, which I love but which makes traditional agility a little harder. We're still spending lots of time outside, but I'm doing most of our training indoors.
I have two main projects at the moment: pedestal work and cik & cap turns.
For pedestal work, I have a box about 6" x 9" and about 4" off the ground. Both dogs are doing well. They can pivot around the box with their front two feet on the box and their back two feet on the ground. Then they can do the opposite: back feet on the box and front on the floor. They also can rotate with all four feet on the box, and then they do a variety of tricks while on the box. The training process went well. Nika had a little more trouble 'getting' the 2o2o position since I haven't done too much of that with her, but she has more speed in pivoting around. I do think it's helping her body awareness. Next I'm curious to see if I could do one paw on the box or two left paws/two right paws.
Our other project has been cik and cap turns, Silvia Trkman style. I watched the video and now we're in the training process. In the first shaping session, they both quickly understood to go around the far side of the cone, but they didn't want to make a complete circle: they always wanted to have the cone between me and them. So, it took a few sessions before they would happily do 'multi wraps' where they just keep turning in the circle. Jonah's harder direction was clockwise (not surprising--this is his harder lead). Nika's harder direction was counter clockwise. She doesn't seem to be a particularly one-sided dog now that she's figured it out, though. Now we've graduated to working on wrapping trees out in the yard. They generalized to the trees very quickly and can get some distance. I work on rear crossing, front crossing, lead outs and sends. All that is going well. Jonah still needs work to keep his wraps tight. When he gets excited, he just runs wider. Nika shows a lot of promise. We'll keep working this and hopefully I'll get some video soon.
We've got snow now, which I love but which makes traditional agility a little harder. We're still spending lots of time outside, but I'm doing most of our training indoors.
I have two main projects at the moment: pedestal work and cik & cap turns.
For pedestal work, I have a box about 6" x 9" and about 4" off the ground. Both dogs are doing well. They can pivot around the box with their front two feet on the box and their back two feet on the ground. Then they can do the opposite: back feet on the box and front on the floor. They also can rotate with all four feet on the box, and then they do a variety of tricks while on the box. The training process went well. Nika had a little more trouble 'getting' the 2o2o position since I haven't done too much of that with her, but she has more speed in pivoting around. I do think it's helping her body awareness. Next I'm curious to see if I could do one paw on the box or two left paws/two right paws.
Our other project has been cik and cap turns, Silvia Trkman style. I watched the video and now we're in the training process. In the first shaping session, they both quickly understood to go around the far side of the cone, but they didn't want to make a complete circle: they always wanted to have the cone between me and them. So, it took a few sessions before they would happily do 'multi wraps' where they just keep turning in the circle. Jonah's harder direction was clockwise (not surprising--this is his harder lead). Nika's harder direction was counter clockwise. She doesn't seem to be a particularly one-sided dog now that she's figured it out, though. Now we've graduated to working on wrapping trees out in the yard. They generalized to the trees very quickly and can get some distance. I work on rear crossing, front crossing, lead outs and sends. All that is going well. Jonah still needs work to keep his wraps tight. When he gets excited, he just runs wider. Nika shows a lot of promise. We'll keep working this and hopefully I'll get some video soon.
