Michelle & Luna, Sheltie, 1+ year, UK

Welcome back! Looking forward to see more of Luna in action! 🙂

Nice! It was a good start! If you see she is a bit hesitant going from one repetition to another, like for example at 1.53 you can switch to a simple engagement game for a while and throw in the tunnel when her spirits are very high again. Not that you didn’t “solve” that situation well – getting her in the mood with a couple of fun tricks – that was a good move. But overall you can make a more graduate blend between games and “training”.
And always try to start a “round” with a little food throw in the opposite direction. You can do that as a reward for the last trick – throw the treat in the opposite direction of the tunnel and run away asap. Your movement and distance between you and her works in your favour when it comes to developing speed.
Reduced/improvised setup is ok too of course. What are the dimensions? Not sure which length of tunnel you are using so I am not quite sure how big the place really is.

Slowing down a bit towards the end is perfectly normal. What is more important to pay attention to is what kind of energy she brings into the session. If you can see that after some time she is getting more and more excited when she realises it is agility time, you are on the right track. If she alwayus needs a lot of encouragement to start with, than we will have to think about it some more.
But overall things looked good to me on this video! When she was still fresh she was always accelerating really well in the second line. She is not the biggest fan of the tunnel so you can do some brief sessions of just crazy food throws with just the tunnel. Send her in on one end, run and throw. Than turn around, run towards the tunnel, send her in from the other end, throw,… For the U sequence you can try throw over the first jump immediately after release, than throw in the opposite direction (back to where she started) than run and throw over the second jump, run and throw back to where she started and than finally the whole sequence. This gives more unpredictability and fun to the beginning of the sequence and might help her develop speed sooner. 🙂

“ We did some of the turns exercises. I know she doesn’t really like these. After the rounds the turn, she does speed up coming out of it, but she goes into the turn much more slowly. Not sure if I should worry about that so much considering if we do a sequence, presumably there’d be some speed already to help going into the wrap (compared to just wrapping a standalone wing from a sit).”

No worries. You are right, in crazy balls drill her speed was nice – the faster she was returning, the faster she wen’t into the turn. And yes, I generally give cues when I am doing this exercise, but if I plan to do a “longer” sequence I will plan it in advance and “course-walk” it beforehand. But it is not even all that important if it is otherwise clear from your body language.

Shaping – it is normal for most dogs not to produce great speed in shaping – dogs that throw themselves into everything with everything they’ve got are generally not that good at figuring stuff out because they are too quick for themselves. We will not focus on getting her dive into the turn with max speed, but we can try to up the frequency. To get her to offer it repetitively and a bit more enthusiastically, add some more fun to the game if you add some action into your rewarding process. Even just running away/moving further from the wing is good if you than still reward from the hand/bowl. But you can also include some food throws as a reward and give more than just one to keep her moving fast before next repetition. If she at one point sits and is very passive for a while when you are waiting for her to offer it, you can just call her off and walk away from the jump and back to “reset” her.