Calm, Cool & Collected
Session in progress (auditors can join at anytime. Next session will open for registration December 10th at 9am MST and begin January 2nd, 2025!
This class with give you the tools to turn your over aroused, over the top agility dog into a calm, cool and collected teammate who can better respond to cues and control their impulses in the most exciting environments. So many dogs have great skills at home but the arousal of a competition environment can easily put them over threshold where they have a harder time remaining in a healthy state of arousal. Situations such as off course obstacles, not collecting, knocking bars, breaking start lines…these things often all relate to a dog who might understand their job but they do not have the tools to control their emotions and feelings when excitement levels escalate. This class will give you an array of tools and exercises as well as some simple training habits that will help you to create a more thoughtful dog on the agility field as well as some games and tools to manage arousal in higher environments. These are necessary training games that I do with my own high level dogs before big events or after coming back from an agility break. We all know training at home is one thing, but being able to have the same level of responsiveness in different environments can be a challenge. This class is geared towards dogs already doing agility with the expectation that they have worked through the Shape Up foundation and already have a number of skills that we will utilize but not be covered in detail such as: crate games, retrieve, perch work, hand target & multiple wraps. The basics of those referred to behaviours are covered in ‘Shape Up Pup’ and this class will be designed to take control to a whole new level, push the skills further, then transition them onto the agility field. The course is run on a private facebook page where both auditors and workers will be able to view all questions, videos and discussions at any time. This course is 10 weeks with 5 lesson plans. Auditors can take part in everything except posting their own videos. For working spots 1 dog per drill and maximum 5 min of video per week.
