Helia & Joker, Border Terrier, 2.5years, South Africa

Welcome! 🙂

Joker is not going to give us anything for free. 🙂 Is one of your other dogs tolerant enough for this experiment…? If Joker is not up for it, you can run to get another one and focus entirely on that one, running along with him and praising that other dog as if he/she just won a big trial. If Joker at any point wants to get involved, you can reward him with a treat throw but at first just casually, without giving him too much attention. Only if he starts to actively beg for it.
Otherwise I would maybe try with hungry Joker and a food pocket toy or a combination of food throw in one direction and food pocket chase in another… see if that makes him turn on faster. Did you keep the routine since LP ended?

Cool! I am sure not all trainings are this hard. Glad to see he is improving so much overall 🙂 Curious to see how he reacts to having some competition on the field.

Cool! That is better yes! Maybe the turn off were the balls – simply because he is not as used to them as he is to the food pocket and thrown food?
Generally well played, I just think you can push him some more by not waiting for him and adjusting to his speed, both on the start and when you reward. Let’s look at starts: 2.25 – don’t wait for him. As soon as you are reasonably sure he is close to the treat, run away, make him feel some hurry. 3.45 was the same situation – you helped him find the treat, but than you don’t have to wait for him while he takes his time eating it. Turn around and run!

Same when you are rewarding him 2.46 – run away with a greater speed, so he needs to put some effort immediately and “wakes up”. Mostly in a straight line, so he knows the catch is a sure deal if he speeds up. 3.55 the same – you upgraded the game somwhere in the middle, but you can start faster so when he is out of tunnel he already sees the need to accelerate to catch up.

“I look at the small victories for now!”
Yes, that is the attitude! Small victories add up until eventually everything falls in its place. 🙂 It is absolutely good to try things out and if being restrained from you helped, by all means keep using it! I can see that he is a bit unsure about the environment and shutting down is probably his coping mechanism, so I would still be doing some playing and “warm up” sessions in between your runs. Short and fun. The more such experiences he gets, the more he will be able to forget about what is going on around him and focus on the job. You can include restrains in those sessions too. Make some warm up with him first, than have someone restrain him while you run away with the food pocket and the person eventually releases him into the chase.
If you can, I would also run the next competitions with food pocket in your hand, so you make it easier for him to transition from warm up area to the run. While at home with less distractions I would be working on a full routine – including the part where you leave the toy somwhere. To start with I would maybe do a warm up, stay, short sequence, reward with food throws and than run to the food pocket for jackpot. So he is not exclusively “obsessed” with the food pocket but knows that the reward can come from you at any point even if he sees nothing on you.

Generally nice. I would maybe try to mix it up with some straight line drills and crazy food throws wraps, so you keep things interesting. He is a pragmatic boy so he needs some sort of stimulation Rather than just boring repetitions.
And making things less predictable/variating the value of the reward falls in the same category, so it is perfectly ok to not give him food every time. It is ok to do all kinds of variations. Less playing, more playing, food/no food, just chasing with no bite opportunity between two wings… all is ok, just watch out for signs of frustration or luck of motivation. It can build up over time so if you see that happening, ease down on him.

Overall he did really good considirenig it was pretty “technical” training and not just fun and games. You kept him engaged through it all and reacted well to his mistakes. So I was happy to see all that. In general I think it would be better for him to just do speed encouraging speedy, easy sequences with him, so he develops a habit of just “letting loose” on the field and running as fast as he can. But you can try and teach him some skills in a totally different environment – preferably indoors with less distractions and as a plain and simple shaping game. Once you get to the point where he is consistently “fired up” on the course it will be easier to add technicalities, especially if he has some idea about them from the shaping games already.
At this point, “in”’s were a bit too tricky, I feel it was more about reading your handling than actually understanding what it is about. So it worked with low speed and not anymore when he viewed it as agility (combining the two jumps together). I also like to use a clear verbal for this, so the dog is reminded that something out of the ordinary is happening so he should pay better attention. So that is just for further refference, but for now I don’t think that those things are important for him at this point. You can do “outs” in sequences if you are there to support them, and I would probably avoid all “in”’s because you are probably fast enough to switch in such situations anyway. We don’t want him to have to think too much… he is a thinker as it is. 🙂