 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!
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 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!  When I first started out in canine conditioning, I made a lot of mistakes! I made even more when I started circuit training! I had a bunch of questions – how many reps should I be doing in a session, what’s the best equipment to use, how do I structure the circuit, how do I know when my dog is tired and more!! When first starting out with a new exercise it’s not uncommon to have uncertainty and questions. Making mistakes are to be expected as we learn. Remember that a mistake is only a failure if we refuse to learn from it!
I recently launched a new edition to my popular Do More From Home circuit series so I thought I would take some time this week to review some of the most common circuit mistakes I made when first starting out. |
AuthorCarolyn McIntyre Archives
March 2026
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