Violet & Kasper, Cavachon, 2yo, Singapore

Well first about agility – agility trainings can be very different. If you are running a relatively difficult sequence and being under pressure because it is a competition or a seminar, things get automatically more difficult for him and he will opt to shut out more often. Especially if it piles up and he gets a lot of such experience at once. If you want him to have consistently more drive, focus and enthusiasm in agility, you will have to connect agility with a different, care free, playful emotion that you are building through games. I don’t know what your possibilities are – do you go on your own or always with a trainer and how free are you about deciding what and how you want to run it.
If you can go and design special trainings for him, then going to train agility once or twice per week is perfectly fine. But it will look more like playing and goofing around than agility at first. If possible I would use an agility field to play the more dynamic versions of my games, those you can’t do in your apartment. Food throws across the room with you running full speed in the opposite direction. Chasing of food pocket toy or dried goodies directly tied on leash. Crazy balls if he wants to play with them or even some fast chasing and tugging with toy if he is up for it. You come to play, but you can have him overcome single obstacles in between. For example with food throws you have this up and down dynamic when he runs full speed up and down the same line. After a couple of warm up throws you can add a single jump or a straight tunnel into this straight line or eventually a short straight line made up of jumps and a tunnel. No pressure on him to actually take any of the obstacles or nail them in a proper order. He has to RUN and have fun and that way he will associate that place and obstacles with the right energy and you will be able to build more serious agility on top of it through time. So if you can I wouldn’t do serious agility for a while but I would take him to an agility place and build his desire to run and cooperate with you.

Tugging – in general he was having fun and was trying to be active, but you can make the game more fun for him if you change your movement from doing short and hectic “left right, up down” moves and replace them with slower and more fluent movement – so rather than rapidly moving the toy in all directions, slow things down (but keep steadily pulling towards yourself to maintain good tension in the toy!) and make nice long fluent moves instead – slowly from your left side to your right, closer and further away from you. You can see that as soon as you slow down enough for him to “smell the opportunity” he will shake the toy himself and show more activity. Like for example at around 1.30 – when your moves were getting less intense, he got active. And that is what we want. I would time those sessions and keep them short – around a minute or a minute and a half, so you lessen the chance that he gets bored or tired of it. But if it happens, try to include some “hide and seek” or try what happens if you throw the ball. Changing the dynamic and having him move and chase you around sometimes re-activates their desire to tug. But if not, no problem, just put away the toy, it happens. 🙂

“Another question I have is – currently, he loves to be chased, how do we convert this into him loving to do the chasing instead?”
With a lot of “in between”, check it out in topic 2. It works better when you have some space so you can do everything – chase him, run far away from him, hide from him,… Chasing him around in a playful way is important so he discovers that playing with you is more fun than playing on his own – once he finds you to be important in the game, he will have no problem chasing you around for a while because that is the natural dynamic of the game. When you can make me a video of you2 playing in a bigger space and I can guide you through the process more directly. 🙂