The Mental Game Blog Today I will approach the topic of motivation. This can come in many formats. I will only touch on a few. Each individual has to find what works for them. Here are some examples of things that can be used as motivation; words, proverbs and, phrases, music, stories, people and results. …
This time I kept the weaves at the same stage as last time. I wanted to play a bit with his understanding. He did have some impulse moments that led to mistakes. He did not get his reward (toy and tug) if this mistake happened. If it happened 2 times in a row I assessed …
Have you ever run a course and felt like your timing was off? What about if something went wrong during the course, were you able to recover? How about if you are at an event and you have a bad run, are you able to leave it behind to take on the next challenge? This …
This post is a follow up to mentally preparing yourself for the course you are about to run. If you attend a larger event you may find yourself with some time to watch dog and handler teams compete. This sometimes can lead to self-doubt. This happens because while watching you see people do something on …
This session I made no changes to the physical dynamic of the poles. Reminder that we are at a point where I have them closed and 4 wires removed from one side. Also a reminder that we managed to skip a few steps and ideally removing wires one at a time is ideal. When I …
The picture in this post is my Border Collie Echo. She has been gone for awhile now but she was one incredible teammate! That is the point of this post. Agility is a team sport. We teach our dogs to work and play this game with us. Some of us are fortunate to have dogs …
Nationals is around the corner. I was reminded this week that one of the main challenges that face competitors is the that we sometimes mentally put ourselves behind the eight ball. How often have you looked at a course on paper or walked the course and said, “this is hard”? Or that part is really …
Today I admit I was a bad trainer! When you train, your attitude needs to be positive. Not fake positive. Faking positive doesn’t count. You need to be able to have your mind available to the situation. This means having the ability to focus only on the moment with your dog. But also, the ability …
In my last post I said I was ready to put a command to the weaves. I held off doing that and I am glad I did because this time there was a bit of regression! This happens. What I did was close them a bit more. There is about an inch and …
This session the poles were set about 2.5 inches apart. My goal over the next couple training sessions will be to get the channel closed as soon as possible. The reason for this is that the channel can interfere with the stride pattern. The dog feels uncomfortable stepping on the track. If the dog is …