 Does your dog struggle with over arousal?
Is your dog easily excitable? Are your training sessions an exercise in patience? If you answered yes to any of those questions, you are not alone! Over the past year, many of you have seen Miss Keeper on my various social media platforms learning and perfectly her canine conditioning foundation skills. What you haven’t seen is some of my struggles to manger her over arousal and keenness for everything in life. She is eager, full of life, intense and insanely drivey - all the things I want in my up and comer agility dog. Learning to harness this arousal when asking for prevision work in Keeper's canine conditioning ventures has taken some time to figure out and has led to some frustration times/sessions along the way. In dog sports, you’ll often hear people talk about high drive as a coveted feature of top canine athletes but high drive dogs can be a LOT to handle! Learning to live and work with a high drive dog was something completely new to me and at times overwhelming! Over the past year, with the help of experienced trainers and friends, I have learned a variety of tools to help manage my excitable 10 lbs puppy!! With their advice I was able to change my entire mentality at how to approach everyday life and training (i.e. sport specific training/conditioning work) with Keeper to maximizes our success and limit both our frustrations! With new tools in my toolbox, I was armed and prepared for “most” situations!! As a result, my frustrations drastically lowered and we became a better team in life, sport training and conditioning. So how can we have a high drive dog and still find success in canine conditioning? In this week’s blog I review some simple strategies that I have learned to help manage my dog’s arousal level in both the canine gym and life!
0 Comments
 Keeper and Carolyn Have you ever gotten SUPER frustrated when training?
Have you ever found yourself saying, "We'll never get this!" Have you ever felt that you're seeing no progress towards success? Our mindset has a big impact on our ability to be successful and what we choose to do in our life. It can either increase our sense of confidence and push us to achieve our goals or it can really undermine us. In this week’s blog I take a look at the other end of the leash explore how we can make our failures WORK for us!  Ptarmigan owned by Lori Schlosser If your new to canine conditioning, chances are, you may not have realized yet just how much training is involved! I was recently talking with a friend who had joined my Do More From Home circuit class. When I asked her how she liked the program she took a long pause and said, “Carolyn, I didn’t realize how much dog training is involved in conditioning!" My friend Jess went into the course with the focus on conditioning and she soon learnt that this was not possible without first addressing some of the foundation skills of learning proper foot positioning and how to hold/maintain position.
Now, Jess is a very skilled dog trainer so it didn't take long for her to layer back the exercises, focus on the 'training' side of things and re-visit exercise criteria with the goal of improved form and positioning. This was her ticket to success in finishing up the circuit course with her original goal of conditioning and overload. This is actually a more common occurrence than you may think! In this week’s blog I take a look at some of the common mistakes students make in their conditioning sessions and how a return to foundation training is the answer to fixing these problems! |
AuthorCarolyn McIntyre Archives
April 2021
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed