This week's private lesson with Debbie went pretty well. We spent a lot of time walking Gus around the equipment and rewarding him for looking at something and then coming back to me. The goal was to get him to calm down around the toys and check in with me. He was definitely making improvements in this and started to catch on to the game. We also worked on his weaves around other pieces of equipment. He is weaving so much better and so we started to add other pieces of equipment into the mix. Gussie was definitely having issues with adding the speed into the mix and still weaving. We lower the criteria down so he just needed to get the entrance and then one pole. Debbie definitely saw some handling mistakes that I was making so we worked on those:
1. Spinning him into the first obstacle (in this case a tunnel) was getting him too excited. I am to stop doing this and we need to work on a finish command to get Gus to line up with me before a sequence rather than the spin move we have been doing. I practiced with a telephone book and a target stick.
2. I was pushing him out too far with my motion and he was going wide around a jump so Debbie had me stay still and just signal the jump with an outstretched arm. This made a dramatic improvement for Gus.
3. I also needed to signal the weaves before he took off for the jump ahead of it because he was landing and unable to collect to make the entry and the 2nd pole if I didn't.
In addition to this work we looked at the progression on the paint stick targeting that we are working on for his contact performance.
The weave exercise that we did is pictured here. It was a natural flow from the tunnel over the two jumps to the weaves.
No comments:
Post a Comment