Devon and Erie, 3 year old BC from USA

“took this video a few days ago and thought man she hasn’t said anything yet. Turns out I never submitted it. So this was some of the u shaped sequence working in turns.”
It happens to me a lot. 🙂 Sorry it indeed took a long time – I was competing this weekend and it turned out more exhausting than anticipated and couldn’t manage to get anything done.

Again nice training! Interesting how much he loves running around wings. 🙂 And he doesn’t get sloppy. So that makes me think that you can put some individual wings to the side of the U tunnel and in the beginning of each straight line (on the same U setup) to give you some more options and I think he will like it. So you can make little sequences mixing normal obstacles and individual wings. Just make sure you always do a little “course walk” at least mentaly, so you handle precisely. I would also start with some static toy/lure out of the wing drills in your training sessions. I couldn’t really see because of how far the camera was, but I think he is not super tight when actually jumping full height – at least not after some repetitions. I don’t consider turns a priority for him right now, but I wouldn’t want him to become too slopy.

Starts really nice this time – I could see that after a while he wasn’t starting as enthusiastically as before anymore though, even if he was happy to sit and keept great focus. Probably he was just tired and accelerating from 0 requires some more energy. But given that the starts were his problem, you can sometimes release and throw almost immediately, so he is rewarded after the first obstacle already.

Really nice training! Yes, starts better for sure. Make sure you randomly surprise him with a quick release after a ball at every training. Not every time of course, but let him know it is always an option.
Luring out of a turn really nice. When the sequence allows you to be there and get ready, you can randomly do it out of a sequence as well.
Static toy – nothing really wrong, even my dogs have the tendency to do that now and than. When it starts to happen I get rid of the second toy and just make a big party with the one they pick up instead. Erie looks like he loves to run with it, so you can first chase him some and than invite him for some more tugging or an extra throw before starting again.

He seems to have it all figured out already! Yes, please film what you’ve got, I don’t want to fix what is not broken. 🙂 Or bore you with stuff he already knows. From what I can tell from this video, he has all the right understanding so you can easily try those little sequences in all possible variations. 🙂

I think overall he has very good understanding of things. That mistake was probably just cause he wasn’t really focused and he just assumed it is going to be left based on his starting position. He was paying more attention next time. What I see as something to keep an eye for is that his turns were not tight once you added speed at 2.07 and onwards. I think it was mostly due to distance – he had no time to process and had to take off almost immediately. But if that happens with bigger distances as well, I would maybe consider starting with a stic toy in place and gradually traisition from that. Or maybe a static toy + barrier even. Would you say he had problems staying tight on speedy courses?
In – yes if I had to guess I would say it was your body language. Frontal position and leaning into him + staying relatively straight in the beginning. He was recognising it much better when you were moving along and keeping your torso straight. So next time I would do reverse – start with those moving ones and than gradually try to stay more behind for it – but with straight torso, not leaning into him.

Overall I didn’t think it was so bad… He did most of the repetitions correctly. Or woud you say he had better percentage before? If that is the case, is your handling completely the same as it was? Were you ever doing with static toy laying there? It could also be a distraction.
The way I saw it he didn’t really make many mistakes, but he didn’t react to them very well. As soon as things weren’t going right for him he had a little melt down and didn’t quite know how to organise himself. But that is ok, that just means he is mindfull about what he is doing.
So the way I see it, I would just do one of the two things – if you can pinpoint what distracted him, you can just switch to something else and not correct it immediately, but only after he is no longer afected by making a mistake.
If everything seemed right but he still made a mistake, you can take food and make a short step back – make things easier for him so he is successful again and gradually upgrade from there.