Jump Handling Practice

Today I set up a basic little exercise, but we learned a lot from it.

Here's the setup:

           |

__          __          __

The possibilities were actually quite large.  We did regular serpentines, where I practiced front and rear crosses at each point, and worked on lead outs of various lengths and some distance.  Having the jump out of line was quite telling.  A few times Jonah would take the jump to the side instead of doing the inside line of the serpentine.  

I also worked on threadles, where he would jump the jumps of the serpentine but he would jump each one going the same direction.  I tried the two handling methods that have videos on Agilitynerd.com

The first one, the push pull, simply wasn't a strong enough cue for him.  He's conditioned to do the serpentine, so he ended up just doing that.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=echohlMf4vw&feature=player_embedded

Then I tried the front cross technique.  On the video I'd thought this looked a little bit silly, but the bigger motions seemed to make more sense to Jonah.  He wasn't going full speed, but we got it done without much trouble.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpDBO6toWkQ&feature=player_embedded

So, fifteen minutes outside with four jumps and we got a lot of good practice out of it.  I'm glad we have class tomorrow.  Hopefully we can find some new, challenging things to work on!