Dog dancing - finally we entered a competition. This has been a dream for a while. Pixie has done lots of tricks for her whole life. Finally I had time to train and take part in dog dancing. We really started training for this routine about three months ago and made it to its final from 1 month before the trial. We had also heat during this time so we couldn't train our routine in arena or with music. So I did lots of work by training the routine by myself and Pixie did little part on our living room mat.
Last Saturday we finally hit the ring. I had never been to a dog dancing competition so all was new to me. Competition started with 10 minute time to get to know to ring. You were aloud to bring your dog with you. So we did some distraction clicker training for few minutes and then I took my headphones and walked the through the routine without my dog. After this it was waiting for your turn. To my surprise it took some time to write the commentary after each performance. So you had a lot of time between each performance. We did few tricks as warm up routine and then we went to wait our turn to waiting area. It was really scary to walk in the ring for the first time. I just knew, I had to just start doing our routine see how it goes. We did few mistakes but in the end our team work looked good and total performance was fluent. End result 177/ 200 point and winning of the beginner class!!! This was more than amazing start in this new sport. Now we just need to work on new routines and head for the next class.
Here is the video of our routine in the competition:
It had been a long time since last training session Jaakko. Pixie had had a 3 week brake from agility do to Freya’s kennel cough. We had course with 36 obstacles. First round we did a competition run. We did pretty well. At one point we had few dropped bars from my bad handling. Next we did some talking about when to choose front cross or blind cross. This lead to interesting conversation about the dogs’ line. Do I see the realistic line or the perfect fantasy line? This was a very good note. I often think too much about “fantasy line” and get frustrated when we don’t achieve it. This really gave a good aspect to think when I train and plan my actions in a competition. There are just few things dogs really can do and some things you have accept. Some turns are tight and some will have longer curve to it. You just need see beforehand to make right handling maneuver.
Pixie 2011
Other matter we had was rhythm. I had few spots that I started to run way too early and made Pixie work in inefficient mode. When go too far it makes Pixie a little bit unsure and this shows in the speed. It very small change but it could be difference between winning and losing. It is my job to give my dog support as much as it need even though Pixie can do many things on her own. This is something I need to remember before I just start running fast away from her and have to wait her on another spot without any movement. We need to learn to keep the flow in our motion.
Here are some nice runs from 3 weeks ago. Pixie did two clean runs:
What to train? How much to train? When to start? How balance training? These are few questions that have been on my mind these days. I have been constructing a base line to a puppy class. Since Freya have had some issues in everyday life I have changed my thoughts what is important to learn during puppies first year. Last few dogs I have built pretty fast to competition form and I haven’t done so much everyday skill training. Freya made me really change my mind. With her I have had to train a lot of everyday skills like passing other dogs relaxed and control her re-activity. This has given her more tools to cope with scary and unexpected situations. Of course there are dogs that can cope with lots of things without any problems but shouldn’t we make “the good headed” dog ever better?
Many of buy a puppy to a certain sport in mind like agility or obedience. Most of thing about starting to train the task that will come in these sports. But how much we train the social and environmental aspects of the sport? Do train relaxation by the training field? Do we train relaxations after high drive play? Do trained to dog to be ok walking in the crowds and noisy places? These are scenarios that the dog need to cope to even do sport without extra stress. Many of train the dog to do agility and hope it will just fine in competition situations and don’t burn itself down the situation where there is lots of new dogs and people. Training for competition situation can take a lot time and effort when you have for example a sensitive or reactive dog. It can be done but how many are ready to do the work for the dog to get used to more to competition environment?
What about starting to compete? As soon as the rules lets you? Or do you wait your dog to be more mature and ready to handle all the distraction and your excitement in competitions? I started competing agility with Freya as soon as I could but later on I realized should have waited to let her grow to her role better and work more on her skills on the competition site. In obedience I have kept my mind and made her pretty ready to each level. I have really given more thought about letting your dog to grow up and enjoy teaching it new things and building up strong resistance towards different distractions. It is our benefit build a dog with strong confidence when it enter its first competition.
Bodywork out for performance dog and nutrition
More have done dogs ports more I have learned how important is to keep your dog in super condition. As wrote before we do a lot of balance work with my dogs. I usually use our evening or morning meals to train these exercises so that the dogs don't get too much extra energy. This time we got another delivery from SLN Imports. Freya and Pixie got Wild Boar Treats, which are freeze dried meat treats. These are so good that my girl get little wild. These are easy keep in you pocket because they are dry. Other bag was from Acana single series, where you can have on option with only one meat. This is good choice is your dog have any sensitivities. We got to taste Pork and Butternut Squash. This food has 50 % of pork and 50 % fruits and vegetables. I like to use grain free food for my dogs to keep them in shape. Grains can make muscles to build up fluid and make more easy stiff. I have been super happy with Acanas and Orijens grain free products.
Here are some balancing work from our girls we try to do about 2-3 times a week depending on our other training session. I also your different object in the forest walks to do similar exercises. So I can do this training during our walks. Now less words and let the videos do the talking:
I hope these little works outs will give some tips how to built up your to more stronger and balanced.
I have read
a lot about how to build up your training season. You need to have training,
competition and rest period during your year program. In sports training people
spend lots of time to build up their training year so that they could be at
their best in the most important competitions. This is also something we need
think with dogs. Especially in agility dog to high performance work that ask a
lot from their whole body. As dog trainers we should also build up training and
rest routine for our dogs. Did you know that you could roughly say that 1 year
old dog needs at least one day to recover and 5 year old dog 5 days to recover
from hard competition day? To me this was a little surprise how fast the
recovery time rises. This would actually mean I could safely push Pixies limits
only once a week and other times keep the training and competition work to
minimal. With her it is pretty easy because she knows her stuff.
For whole
year I make rough plan how I keep my training and rest periods. My plans evolve
with how my dogs are doing and how I my own training is going. I usually keep a
longer brake during Christmas time. At least 3 weeks without training. This is
a recovery time for all of us. Other bigger brake is kept after tryout season.
Then we usually keep at least 2-3 week brake enjoy the summer. I think, it’s
important watch your dogs’ behavior and condition to make fast changes to your
plan if needed. I have only seen improvement after our brakes. Learning goes
forward and movement also becomes better.
During
training season we work with three different areas. Body balance, muscle work
and of course specific sport training. I think it is important to build up your
dogs’ body as good as possible. Going to walks and run is part of it but one
important piece is core work. More stable the body less injuries you get. We do
core work three times a week with balance pillow, different platform and trick.
At the same practice I also do stretching exercises. This helps to keep the
body working smoothly. Usually training session last about 5-10 min. I have
also thought my dogs to stretch with cue and I always praise long stretching.
Muscle work includes hill work and also lactic acid training during walks just
build up my dogs’ durance. I do lactic acid training only if I’m not doing hard
agility training because agility is always anaerobic training because its high
speed. Little things can sometimes make difference. Listen to your dog. Help it
become balanced in body and in mind.
For
everyday work
In everyday
training it important to remember warm up work and cooling walks. Warm up are
as important to us as it is to dog. You can try to run full speed 100 m run or
do 20-40 tendon jumps without warming up. Next day you can feel how the dog
feels if you do agility training without warming up. Cooling down is as
important because it help body recover from anaerobic training with causes
lactic acid to build up in muscles. Lactic acid is one the reasons our muscles
get stiff and painful. I do usually warming up walks that last about 30 minutes
and rise speed and stamina all the way of the warming up routine. Cooling down
routine I do in two steps. 20-30 minute walk right after agility run
/competition and second round two hours after when I do trot run about 45-60
minutes. With these routines I hope give my dogs the best treatment to keep
them in good shape. Of course these routines make my body recover too.
Freya had now her second competition in A3. I had a goal to just get her some experience and take notes what we need to train. Our first run was pretty chaotic but we had some good bits. On the second run everything clicked and she did super clean run. Freya also win the competition and got her first Cert for Agility Champion title. We had really a moment when we worked together as we do in training. On the last two runs we had few hard parts and some problems with jumping. So lots of homework to do with Freya. On total I was very pleased with her work and how she did the contacts etc. We will have nice base work to build on her skills to higher level.
Here is her winning run from TSAU:
Jumping skills has been something I have always been interested. Freya has had some problems with jumping every now and then. Especially going over diagonal jump has been her problem area. I have already made some work with the 8 figure training. This has helped her to learn the right take off position. We have still problems when you have more than one diagonal jump in a row. In this she has sometimes problems to make the right lead change in her canter. This problem I have work with a tight slalom training I learned from Linda Mecklenburg. Freya has become better and in fast lead changes and she has done the exercise in 40 cm height. I started with very low bars just to make her used to the exercise and give time to find the right settings from her body. She improved a lot but she has still some side differences so I will continue this work. I bought a book of Susan Salo from the Clicker Expo. It has a lot of good exercises and my goal in 2016 is to keep one jumping skills training each week to improve Pixie and Freya’s jumping. We will see what kind of results we will get.
PIXIE
Oh boy we have had a hard year. First we started with training our start line stays then we worked half year with contacts. Our National Team tryout went down with one jumped A-frame contact again. European Open we had the first reserve place and I got to know that we got spot too late. I had already had to cancel our hotel room and car. So no EO for us. It had been totally shitty year with lots of training in competition and not really enjoying competing at all. Finally our work has starting to pay of and we did two clear rounds in our last competition. It felt like doing agility with Pixie. This feeling had been lost almost for half year. It has been one the hardest year in agility. I hope our work will pay off and we will have super year 2016.
Here is video from our last competition:
Merry Christmas and Happy New year 2016 for everyone!!!!!
I have watched for years beautiful dog dancing videos from YouTube. As a hobby I have trained some of tricks I have seen with Pixie and Freya. After Clicker Expo I got my last kick to start training for it. Michele Pouliot lecture had the coolest videos of dog dancing and I got million ideas of different tricks to train. Now I had a goal to really use my passion to train dogs’ new things because in freestyle everything is possible. I wanted learn more about the sport and I entered myself to Michele Pouliot online class on Freestyle. I also drove to Ylöjärvi to learn more about rules of dog dancing in Finland. At this point my basic knowledge is growing more and more. Still lot to learn to even enter a first competition but I’m at a right path.
On our Independence Day I traveled to Helsinki Winner Show to see Nordic Championships in dog dancing. I wanted to what kind routines people had built and get new ideas for our routines. I saw absolutely amazing performances. Pair work really good together and their routines were nicely built. I also had a little wakening the heal work to music could be fun too. This is all thanks to Nordic Champion pair Sidsel Rychter Lauridsen and German Panda. Their performance just hit me to my heart and hard. It was fast and it had a good story. After this performance I told my friend this could be Freyas’ sport because she love to do heal work and she has super attitude doing it. Freestyle winner Smedberg Jonna and bordercollie Lizzroys Zoyaalso had wonderful and sporty performance which I really liked and had a vision that our might someday look like that with Pixie. Totally it was wonderful day and I almost cried because the performances touched me so much. I think I found something that really have waken big motion inside me.
Dog dancing work with Pixie
I have started built up our routine around song Bum bum bum by Jari Sillanpää. I had the feeling it had a nice beat and it had a love story in it. I had right away some ideas what could be filled in the routine. Now I have done work with separated tricks and also some back chaining them together. It has been so much and I have taught lots of new trick to Pixie and I have started few hard ones for the future. I have done lots of work also to clean my training to get more and more accurate performances to cues. I have started make more clear to Pixie what I want her to do on each cue. When I have trained tricks as hobby thing I haven’t been totally specific what I want her to do. Our work has payed of and Pixies’ performance has improved a lot. Working with these dog dancing tricks has been super cool!!! We will see how our first performance will go but I’m really looking forward to it.
Here are some trick we will using to our routine:
Still lot to do and new ideas to work on. Half of trick are not video yet. I hope to film them soon to everybody to see.
Lots of things has happened since last time. Freya finally rise to A3 and will be competing with Pixie next weekend in the highest class in agility. We have lots of little things to work on with Freya. She has had some problems with jumping again and by this I mean she jumps with a crazy big space of air between her and the bar. But we have lots of time make her work better with that. With her running contact we have worked on turns. We getting close to our target.
With Pixie we have done lots of work with contacts. She has finally started to make as trained in competitions. Our old problem of dropping of one bar in each course has come back to hunt. At this moment it feels like Pixie is a standard 5 fault dog. So yet again we have work to do. This has been really hard on me. We have been used to be one of the top pairs...... Patience, I need lots of it.
Here are our work from last few week:
Obedience
I have almost forgot. Freya got her first prize in open class obedience (OB1). We had a nice trial. Only thing she didn't do was going down from my side. This has never been a problem in training but I guess she was little too tense to listen properly. Otherwise she did super. Her healing is just so good. I need work on our full turn it didn't look nice when I saw it from the video. Little things to work on but we on our way higher classes. Here is our work from the trial:
At this point we have started to do all the new tasks coming in the winner class. So far so good. Especially our directed retrieve is super cool!!!! Freya was born to do it!!! Sit-down-stand has been super also. I have worked on her head position to make her look forward. This has also worked also super good. Our only challenge right now has been scent discrimination. Freya has had way too much speed and she brings usually the next one from the right one. Too much speed and not enough concentration. So I have started train it again from the start. So that's a little bit of our ob work. Here is video of distance control from today:
Next time full text about dog dancing! Pixie and I have started Michele Pouliots dog dancing online course. I have been so excited about our new sport! Next week I will go check Nordic Champs in Helsinki to get new ideas.
