We got to drive through torrential rain to get to the building today (and back again later). Nothing like trying to maneuver on the Washington Beltway when the weather is bad. Perhaps I was in a bad mood as a result, or perhaps Taz is just annoyed we aren't out herding again. For whatever reason, we didn't have a real great practice. In fact, it was one of the worst we've had in awhile.
Why is it whenever a competition is approaching, that things seem to fall apart? If you're like me, the usual cause is that I start to fret about the "little things" that up to this point have not been a big deal. But now, I want those moves to be better, tighter, perfectly on the beat. And where once we would do the work with an emphasis on fun, just letting him enjoy the routine and not worry if it was sloppy, now there's more insistence that it be done RIGHT. Having watched the routine on tape, I could see how off some things were, how wide he goes in certain areas, and I *really* would like it to be better.
I'm trying not to make too much of this, but it's obvious Taz is starting to pick up on the fact that I am getting a little stressed about it. Even if I don't correct him, but just ask him to do something over again, he's sensitive enough to know that I wasn't happy with the first time. How I wish I had another month to work on things, but I've got to try and make the best of what I've got. I have learned that often a routine looks quite a bit different on tape than it does to a live audience, so I'm hoping it will be the case here as well. And let's face it...most of us ALWAYS think we look worse on tape than we probably do. ;-)
This will possibly be our last freestyle competition for awhile. I had to pay $40 to rent the key to my club's building for a month. After this it goes back, and I may not be a member of the club for much longer. So, no longer will I have a place to train. I have to admit as well, it's tough to want to put a lot into a sport that is not my dog's favorite. Motivating, constantly motivating, is tough! It's so much easier for me to do things like agility and herding that he loves so much that I don't have to constantly try and encourage him. I don't imagine we'll ever get past that in freestyle, no matter how much he likes a routine.
Well, since I wrote yesterday's entry fairly late, don't have much more for today. I can't say it's been easy to sit down everyday and type something up. Generally I don't have too much trouble finding something to write, but finding the time is another matter altogether! Thankfully my hands have not been bothering me, or that would be an issue as well. My day-to-day job does not involve much typing, so it's not something I am real used to doing a lot of.
I've generally not been the type to keep a daily journal. Sure, when I was a kid, I would keep a diary, but I was not good at all about keeping up with it, worse than most kids. Record-keeping has never been one of my strong points. One of the reasons I've been reluctant in the past to charge people for a lot of the things I give away on my website is simply that I don't want the work of keeping track of sales (great businesswoman, huh?!)
So, this journal was one of those things I offered to do in haste and have had moments I regretted afterwards. ;-) But overall, it's been a very useful exercise for me, in really making me think about what I am doing, and being able to look back and remember why I did certain things.
Yesterday was a good example. As I said, we had a bad practice. Now, in the past, I'm just go home and mope about it and just hope the next one was better. This time, however, I had to sit down and write the journal entry. Instead of just blowing it off, I had to come up with the reason it was yucky. This made me really have to think...what was the difference between yesterday, and Friday night when things went much better? What had changed in the meantime?
By articulating the reasons, I could better make sure that I didn't repeat the same mistakes. I could also apply what I'd now learned to working at home. So, I can honestly say these journal entries are a help to me, a very useful exercise to go through.
Specifically, I mentioned how I was starting to get more insistent with Taz that he do moves 100% right, not sloppy or slow. As a result, he was getting stressed, and losing attitude. I should mention that I am not really talking about corrections here (which I see as having little place in freestyle)...just stopping and redoing a move is a good enough signal to Taz that I was not happy with the first attempt and he will often start to lose interest. It's different in agility, where I could stop and redo an exercise 100 times and he'd be just as happy when he finished as when we started. With freestyle, I think he just wants to get to the end as fast as possible, and gets frustrated when we stop. So, we can work on individual elements, and can get improvements there, but trying to put the whole routine together and keeping it clean and smooth is much more difficult.
So, it came to a decision on what I'm going to be able to accomplish in the time I have left. I can do my best, using toys and positive training, to tighten some of these moves in practice at home, and see if I can get them to carry over a little when we work on the complete routine this weekend. Obviously, trying to get anymore than that was causing more problems than it ever will solve. It's difficult for me, perfectionist that I am, to overlook these little flaws in the program, but some things are more important. I'd rather have a slightly flawed program and a happy dog, than one with everything very precise but a dog that looks like he'd rather be anywhere else.
It often strikes me when working on freestyle how many parallels there are with my favorite canine sport of agility. Sure, the roots of freestyle may be in obedience, but I see many more similarities to agility, particularly with the type of routine I am working on now.
I've discussed this on the list in the past to some degree, and my feeling that the degree and nature of the teamwork in agility is very similar to that in freestyle. In both cases, you the handler must have very fine control over the dog's movement in space. Unlike obedience, where the dog's movement is either specifically tied to you (as in heeling or fronts and finishes) or is related to the specific task they are doing, in both agility and freestyle, independent movement of the dog, and the handler's control of it, become extremely important. You may not think this is necessarily the case in agility, that the goal is to just give the obstacle commands to move the dog from task to task....but the higher you go in agility, the more important it is to be able to finely control your dog's movement *before* they know where the next obstacle is. In both cases, the best teams make this look effortless, and you really can't tell the amount of control that is taking place. The smoothness of a perfect agility run on a difficult, twisting course, can only be described as a dance, as the handler's turns and pivots and movement direct the dog where they need to be.
But it occurred to me recently that there is an even bigger parallel between the two sports, and that is in the performance of complete runs versus sequences. Most top agility competitors will tell you that you should spend much more time working on short sequences with your dog rather than running full courses. Yet, it's something that can often be tough to do. When you have limited time to practice, and particularly when you have a big class with lots of students that want to work their dogs, the natural inclination is to just set up a course and run it. Obviously, running courses is what you need to do to earn legs towards your title, so it seems only logical that this is what you should do in practice.
The problem is that it is much more difficult to get a 100% (or close to it) accurate performance on an entire course. Nor can you really focus on a specific problem and work your way through it. And one problem may have thrown the run off enough to create more problems throughout the rest of the run. Yes, still we'll keeping doing course run after course run, expecting to be able to correct the half a dozen problems we had in the first run, by doing the whole thing over again. And of course, it seldom happens that way.
The advantage of sequences is that you can practice just a small number of obstacles, but ones that contain a particular handling challenge. You can do it over and over much quicker, until you and the dog are comfortable enough with just the sequence to be able to handle it as part of a whole course.
I'm sure you can guess the parallels with freestyle here. Once a routine has been completely choreographed, our natural inclination is to practice it through, start to finish. Yet, doing so can often make it near impossible to deal with small problems that might crop up. Just stopping a routine every time there's a problem can result in a dog losing motivation. By breaking your routine into specific sequences, and practicing just those, you can get a much stronger performance in the end.
Sequences in freestyle would not be individual moves. I see a move as similar to one agility obstacle. Learning moves is a basic skill...putting them together into a sequence is what can be more difficult and cause the problems in a full routine. We're basically talking about 2 to 3 moves, and the transitions between them.
This is where my Minidisc recorder comes in handy, in blocking off the sections of music that make up different sequences. Or you can use a cassette player, and create multiple chunks of each section to practice with.
This isn't going to be something that will help me a whole lot at this point. With only one weekend of practice left, we're pretty much forced to focus on the entire routine, other than my little practices at home. But I'll certainly be keeping it in my mind, perhaps on Friday night we can just do some sequence work, and finish up with a single full routine, rather than doing several long ones. And if you're putting a new routine together, and want to know the best way to go about it....avoid doing full routines as much as possible and focus on those sequences.
Okay, so I've mentioned that there were some moves I wanted to tighten up a bit, but was having trouble with Taz getting worried about doing things wrong as a result. Well, a lot of times dog training is like a puzzle. There are many routes to the final product, and our role is to find the best way to get there. And in some cases, the most obvious way is not the right one.
I think it's the constant problem-solving inherent in dog training that makes it such a rewarding hobby for me. I've always been a big fan of brain-teasers...I think it's why I also enjoy computer programming. After all, what is a program other than just a big puzzle, finding out a way to get the computer to do what you want. It can be great fun.
So, here I am, with just over a week left to practice. Some of the problems with these moves are ones I've had for a long time. Shaping and clicker training, a method that I think is great for teaching freestyle moves, has only brought me so far. I needed something else here, and something that might help me get some quick results without losing my dog's attitude.
Some of these weren't too hard. One of the problems we have is with Taz's spins. They have a tendency to get wider and slower, until he seems to just be *walking* in a circle. This plays havoc with the timing of our routine. So, we took a two-pronged approach here. First, I brought out the food, and quickly reminded him what I wanted, by luring him in a quick, tight circle with the food and giving it to him at the end. Once he's really interested in the food, I just gave him the command and treated him for a quick spin. Lots of praise all through this, soon I have him spinning like crazy.
Now, where I start to lose him is when I do the turn opposite to him. That's when he seems to get slower, worrying about where I'm going perhaps, but also taking advantage to sort of gaze about the room. So, now I add a game into it. He knows a command "target" which is when I hide the food in my fist and have him chase it. I use this in agility to get a real fast turn towards me, and to run past obstacles in certain games classes. So, to get him to continue turning really fast and get back to me, as I turn him, and turn away myself, I give the command "target" and if he's not turning fast enough, I don't turn back, but just keep going away so he has to chase me. He caught on quick to this little keep-away game, and was soon jumping and barking at me as he would try to catch me. I'm not sure all this will stick once we're doing the turns back in the full routine, but at least we've got fast turns at home!
The next move was a bit more difficult to deal with. This is one in which I have him jump back and forth over my arm. He does them in fairly quick succession, and I was pleased with it until I got a look at him doing it on tape. From the audience side, it's clear that he goes over my arm well from one direction, but from the other direction, he has a tendency to just sort of hop his front end over, and doesn't get his hind legs off the ground much.
Well, most of my attempts last week just succeeded in making him confused. As long as I blocked the other side of the jump with a chair or wall, he knew to clear my arm nicely. But as soon as there was any open air on the other side, he started this side-swiping bit again. Asking him to do it over again just made him get worried that he was doing it wrong, and I was not having much luck communicating what was wrong to him.
This is a dog that really loves to jump. I know this, and I had to figure out a way to use this to my advantage. Okay, he loves to jump, and even more, he loves to please me. But what I needed to do was find a way to correct the bad jumping without turning him off of jumping completely. So, the idea I came up with was to sort of swipe my arm under him as he jumped and sort of bump it against his hind feet. At the same time, I was going to be VERY enthusiastic with my praise and letting him know how proud I was of his jumping.
This seems to be working. After getting his rear legs banged a few times, he decided it was a LOT better to get them off the ground, but he wasn't worried about me being upset with what he was doing, because I was telling him how good he was the whole time. Instead of *me* correcting him, I found a way for him to decide on his own to jump a different way. He's certainly not perfect, but at least there's some improvement.
I took a similar approach to our last problem. When Taz weaves through my legs, he finished the same way he does in agility...by shooting out and going forward several feet. I've worked on this for what seems like forever, but have had little success in getting him to realize that I want him to change direction and come back to me *immediately* after finishing the weaves.
In this routine, there are two times where he exits my legs, and then we have this BIGGGGG circle as he comes back to me. Even my target command didn't help much here. This week, it occurred to me that I could use the move itself to teach Taz what I wanted. You see, in this particular routine, the times when I really lose him, he is supposed to come right back into weaving...one of his favorite moves. By getting him to anticipate getting to do another group of weaves, perhaps that could encourage him to do a quick, fast circle instead.
So I got out a good toy, something small he could grab and keep running with. As he came around my leg on the last weave, I got the toy right down in his face and let him grab and end of it, and pulled him towards me, just like a good tug of war. Great, soon had him anticipating getting the toy and getting into the game, running to grab a hold of it. Unfortunately, I've tried this before and it doesn't seem to translate into a tight return when he knows I don't have a toy, i.e. in a full routine. So, what I now needed to do was transfer that reward into something he *could* anticipate in the ring, and that was the second set of weaves. So after he grabs the toy, I then send him immediately into the second set of weaves, and after a few repetitions, he was definitely getting in to it, and thinking this was a great bit of fun. With a bit of practice, I think we'll have it down, and he'll basically see it as one move...do one set, circle quickly and go right into the second set. The exit on the second one is not as important, so, problem solved.
Well, these all work great in practice at home. The goal is to be able to go out to the building and work on them there a bit before doing the full routine with them. Hopefully, we can keep the improvements we've gotten so far.
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