Scoop and I trained serps and threadles this morning, and I convinced Jim he had 10 minutes to film me before his classes started. While I am no moviemaker yet, I do think my little efforts are getting better, and if I keep filming myself  this often, my handling may eventually improve too:)

I hope you are taking the time to videotape some of your practice sessions with your pup, I think it is one of the most valuable learning tools that we have.

NJG

Scoop and I are rusty on our handling exercises. I haven’t been able to run drills with him for the past couple months because of my foot injury and travel schedule.The injury followed 10 days of no training while I was in Germany which followed a  month of foot discomfort before the trip where I did again little running and lots of weave training. I have been doing long lead-outs after walking to my position and then adding a few more obstacles which I could send Scoop to while walking. And I did a fair amount of sending to jumps and tunnels to get into position for contact training.

So, now I want to move a bit and Scoop is driving a bit too well into the corners, and thinks it lots of fun to bounce the diagonal lines on my box work. I like that he bounces unless I don’t want the diagonal line. This week I was a bit frustrated thinking he has forgotten how to follow me around the corners on shoulder turns. Along with no running agility, there has been no fast paced circle work, just heelwork circles on both sides at a walk. I was wondering if all would be fine when I could really run my ground work drills again. In the meantime I decided to see what would happen with no bars on the jumps in my box work. I placed all the bars on the ground and just ran him through the jump standards. He followed me through all the patterns wonderfully. Front cross, rear cross, pulls through the box on shoulder turns, 270’s, threadles, it was all there.  So I put the jumps to 12 inches, that worked well too after the ground bar exercises. I was able to move him back up to 26 inches over the course of 48 hours and he looked so much better. I think we just need to train the jumping at speed again, he hasn’t really forgotten his skills, we just haven’t used them for a while.

The teeter training is coming along. I am only a few inches from regulation height most of the time, and I have done a few teeters at full height which you’ll see here on the video. A frame training is not perfect but pretty good. Scoop does the best when I throw his toy as he is coming over the top of the frame. He digs in and pushes off from the contact zone. I made a little movie of some of his training the other day. Not the most professional edit job, or the camera work but hope you enjoy nonetheless:)

Scoop and I have lots of fun every day, usually doing at least 2 or 3 short training sessions. In a few days I leave for the East Coast to teach and will be gone 9 days. I am going to miss Scoop and the rest of my pooches and my training, which once again has just started to gain momentum before it will come to another complete halt. SIGH:(

Hope you are in full swing with your training and that nothing gets in the way of your success.

NJG