Episode 302: Does Your Agility Training Feel Like Whac-A-Mole?

(uplifting music) - Welcome to "Bad Dog Agility," (dog barks) a podcast helping you reach all of your dog agility goals. Whether it's competing under the bright lights of the televised finals at Westminster or successfully navigating a homemade course in your own backyard, we'll bring you training tips, interviews, and news about the great sport of dog agility. Are you ready? - I'm ready. - I'm ready. - I'm ready.

- The show starts with your hosts, Jennifer, Esteban, and Sarah. (uplifting music) - I'm Jennifer. - I'm Esteban. - And I'm Sarah, and this is episode 302. Today's podcast is brought to you by hititboard.com and the new Teeter TeachIt, an easy-to-use tool that controls the amount of tip on your teeter so you can introduce motion to your dog in a gradual way. Go to hititboard.com for the new

Teeter TeachIt and other training tools and toys. Use discount code BDA10 to get 10% off your order. That's hititboard.com. Today, we're gonna talk about how training works in the real world, and by that, I mean the progression of adding new skills, fine tuning existing skills, teaching obstacles, teaching handling, and how we can take a dog who has never done agility before and turn them into that dog that

we're gonna be competing with for the next several years. And the idea for this podcast came from a question that was asked by one of our VIP members, and they were talking about having a novice dog, and they had really concentrated on contacts and they'd been working it. They'd been doing, you know, FEO and proofing the contacts and everything was going really well. And so, then they went

back and did some weave pole training and their weave poles had kinda fallen apart, and they were like, how do you manage adding new skills, maintaining existing skills? And somebody in the comments mentioned, Whac-A-Mole. I've heard lots of people use that phrase to mean there's always an new problem popping up that you have to address with your agility dog. So you go and you trial and one day

it's a contact and then you work on contacts and then the next weekend, it's weaves. And then the next weekend, it's jumping. And you always feel like you're playing a game of catch-up with your dog's skills and trying to get them to what I might call this mythical, wonderful euphoric state that we like to call maintenance (laughs) where your dog knows everything and you're just maintaining skills. And

so, I wanted to talk about this because I think that everybody can relate to this idea of I constantly feel like there's something that I need to be working on at all times. And as soon as it's one thing is fixed, it's something else that's broken. - Yeah, first I wanna talk about Whac-A-Mole. What if Whac-A-Mole is a distinctly American phenomenon? What if like every Canadian who's listening--

- Is like, what? - What is Whac-A-Mole? - Do we need to explain? - You whack, that's in hit, a mole, M-O-L-E the animal. - Yes, this is like an old video game. Not even video. - No, it's not. - Like an arcade game, right, where you have these holes and you have a padded hammer. - No, it looks like a pinball machine. - Kind of. - But

there's holes. - Right, there's holes and this little head of the little mole pops up and you have to hit it before it goes back down, and it's constantly popping up in a different spot. And the more of 'em you hit, the higher your score. - And more tickets you get... - And the more tickets you get, and then you can spend a hundred dollars at the arcade

and then get-- - To buy that $6 AM transistor radio. - Exactly. Okay, (laughs) so that is Whac-A-Mole for anybody who is not familiar with that term. But yeah, the idea of just constantly having to switch focus all the time and when one thing is fixed, something else is broken. So Jennifer, what do you think? - So from an instructing standpoint, I'm actually dealing with this with a

couple students currently, but have dealt with it a lot in the past, and I'm gonna lay out this scenario. And a lotta people will go, "Yes, that's me now." Or "That was me at one point," but, you know, they have their seasoned dog, they get a young dog, and they go, "Okay, I'm gonna take my hour private lesson "and I'm gonna spend 15 or 20 minutes of it

"with the young dog." And the young dog comes along nicely, and they're now eight and nine and 10 months, and you're getting to the point where there's like a lot to do. And that 20 minutes just isn't enough, right? So in that 20 minutes, you have to work on your contact training, and then you're gonna start wrapping around barrels. And let's introduce a tunnel and let's not forget

our impulse control and our start line stays. And it gets incredibly overwhelming because you're trying to cram all this stuff in, in this 20 minutes. And next thing you know, the young dog's working 45 minutes and you're out of time for the advanced dogs. And so, currently what I'm doing with a couple of the students that are in this situation is we're alternating what we work on every

other week. So we have more dog training on one week. So that's gonna be our impulse control and our contacts, you know, whether it be mat work or box work for the running A-frame or two on, two off work. And then on the alternating weeks, we're doing more with the running and the handling skills, sending around barrels, running straight lines with go, go, go, working on tunnel sends.

And I tell 'em, I said, we're not gonna try to do everything every week. We're gonna alternate it. And it's helping to keep them not feeling so overwhelmed, but also it gives them time to do homework because people who have a class or a lesson every week, it can be really hard to try to get your homework done on a bunch of different things if you know you

only have a week to do it, but if we only do contacts, for example, every other week, not only does it keep our sessions more focused within that session of working the dog, but then it gives 'em two weeks to do their homework. So I think what I've really liked is this idea of being very specific about alternating topics to keep the handlers not from feeling overwhelmed and

also to give you more time to do the homework. So as soon as this message came through, I'm glad we're doing this podcast because I was gonna mention exactly that scenario of what I'm doing with some of my private lesson students who have those young dogs and feel like there's just so much to do right now. - Right, exactly. I think there's a couple of different kind of

avenues for discussion here and I think one is, you know, part of the question was, how do you structure your training? And I think what you just said speaks to that exactly. I think we also had a long discussion, and I will link to the podcast about parallel versus sequential training, meaning do you train a lot of things at the same time, or do you train one thing

'til it's done and then move on to another? And I think that in the beginning with dogs, we tend to do a little bit more sequential training. So, you know, when we're focused, or we'll pick one to two things to work on, and this is especially true in my mind with weave poles and contacts, where I want the dog to get a lot of exposure, consistent exposure. If

there's too much time between sessions, then they tend to stagnate a little bit in their training and not make progress. And so, you kind of, you know, need to do it every day or every other day for several weeks 'til you get the skill. But then once they have that skill, then I'll keep working, progressing that skill in parallel with some other things kind of like how you

were talking about it. And so, I think that that structure of parallel versus sequential is important to recognize. And I think then you want to pair up things that make sense. So even when I'm working weave poles, for example, I can't work the dog to exhaustion on weave poles only. So even if that is my primary focus and the first session of every day is going to be

weave poles, then I might pair that with something that isn't quite so mentally intensive, you know? Maybe some recalls or maybe some start line work like you were saying, but you kind of wanna balance the physical with the mental, the drive with the thinking. And so, you can kinda pair things up in that way so that your dog has some breadth of training experience. So I think that's

like how you structure your training, but now let's take a step back. And there's another idea in here that I wanted to talk about. And I was talking with Jen about this before the podcast, and that's the idea of, well, what should we read into the fact that a skill is falling apart in the first place, right? So ideally, you know, when we have taught something, even if

we go away for a little bit of time, when we come back, it shouldn't be too far from where we left it. It might take a session or two to kinda remind them. You might take one backward step, but it shouldn't have, quote, fallen apart, right? So, Jennifer, what do you think about that aspect of coming back to something that you had worked on in the past and

feeling like it fell apart? - I remember years ago, I attended a seminar with Susan Garrett, and she was telling a story how kinda the idea was if you've trained something really well in the first place, that if you have a long break, it should not cause a deterioration in performance. And she was using an example that somebody had left their dog in their home country and had

to travel for six weeks to go do something. And I actually don't remember who the person was, so I do apologize. Left, was gone on for six weeks, not with their dog, came back home and within a week or two had to go to some big world competition, national competition, and then just smoked it, right? Did awesome, won all the things, you know? Basically the idea was they

weren't actively training the dog, but the skills were so solid that even after that kind of break, they came back and the dog was just like, "I got it." And the example that she used is riding a bike. I know for me, I can't tell you the last time I rode a bike. It's not been in the last 12 months, I don't think, but if you put one

in front of me, I could do it. And the reason I could do it is because I know how to ride a bike. Okay, so the idea here is kind of in terms of skills, if the dog had a really solid understanding and a really solid performance to begin with, a bit of a break shouldn't put you on that much of a setback. And I think, you know,

weave poles and contacts are a good example of that, that people are, you know, doing a bunch of weave poles and then they take a break and then say, when they went back, oh, they fell apart and the dog forgot the injuries and didn't know what to do. It does make me question if the quality and the understanding was there to begin with. All right, and same thing

with contacts. So there is this idea that, well, if every time you take a break from something and you go back to it, things aren't quite right. Maybe it's in something that you're doing training-wise. Maybe there needs to be a shift or a change in how you are training it so that the understanding and the clarity sticks. - Right, and I think actually, as you were describing that,

I kind of had like a light bulb moment for myself. And I was like, aha, this is exactly why I do the sequential training that we were talking about in the last like section where we were talking about finishing the weaves. It's because when you're in the middle of teaching the weaves, most methods for teaching the weaves are somewhat shaping based, which means that you aren't at the

final behavior in the middle parts, right? If you're doing channels, you're gradually closing the channels. If you're doing two by twos, you're gradually bringing them together and making them more straight. If you're doing weave-o-matics, you're gradually pulling the weaves up. None of those are the final behavior. And so, if you take a break in the middle, you haven't gotten to the final understood thing. You're in a learning

process, and that's harder for the dog to hold onto than a finished behavior that has a name and has a very specific way of executing. And so, when I think, when people say, you know, something fell apart, my inclination is you to say, they probably left it in a not-quite-finished stage. And that's gonna be much harder for the dog to understand because they are in a point of

their training that is designed for them to move through, not stay at, right? So they don't have a ton of experience doing it the way they're doing it. They were doing it a little bit easier yesterday. The plan was to do it a little bit harder tomorrow, but you kind of stopped in this transitory phase. So yeah, I think that's exactly what's happening. - Mm, so yeah, this

is triggering a lot of thoughts for me. So I think all of this, we're saying it's in the context of kinda young dogs or new upcoming dogs. Yeah, okay, I think that makes sense because they don't have the benefit of experience. So we're saying that's different from, say, you have weave problems with a dog and then suddenly they start flying off their Teeter and now you gotta go

fix that. Is that right? - Yeah, I mean, I think it's similar, but yes, I think there is a very distinct difference in how we approach dogs who are just starting to learn versus an experienced dog where something new is popping up. And yeah, now that you put that example out, I would say if it was young dog, I would say that as things pop up, it's because

they didn't have understanding. And if it was a more experienced dog, I would probably lean towards, in the absence of other information, saying it's more of a consistency of criteria, consistency of rewarding impulse control. - So a Whac-A-Mole, but you're creating the moles? - Yes, yes. - Yeah, yeah, as opposed to a failure of, I guess, designing a suboptimal regimen, a daily training schedule or a six-week plan

- Yeah, that's a great point. - for whatever. - It is often a problem that the handler has created by not maintaining criteria. - Gotcha, gotcha. - Right. - Okay. Yeah, I thought that Susan Garrett's story was pretty interesting. I think I've heard or I think most people know somebody kinda in that boat and mostly you're gonna get those stories from old timers because I think agility is

a little more complex now. It's not quite so easy to pick up and compete at that kind of a level, but even the international courses, I mean, 10 years ago were like nothing. I mean, yeah, not to be rude. Just agility is much more complex in recent years. And I know with the pandemic, right, I went several months, I think, at one point without driving a car. I

never had to drive, and Sarah was driving, and I was driving to school or whatever, but wasn't driving anywhere. And then I got in a car; it was weird. - I did feel a little weird. - It did feel weird, right? And I'm like, if some dog had run into the street in front of me, I'm not sure my reaction time would have been as good as back

in the day when I was driving every single day. - Right. - To and from work, - But.. - taking the kids and that sorta thing. - Counterpoint, how many days of driving did it take before? It felt pretty normal again. For me, the first time I was like, "Whoa, this is weird. "Everything seems to be going really fast." - Yeah, yeah, yeah, not much at all. So

I think it'll come back. But I think there probably is some practice. - Right. - People love to tell those kinda stories, but it's not like the dog is meeting you at the competition. And then you're getting 'em out of crate, and you haven't done a single obstacle in six months and all stuff. I think for me, the big thought here is the one you were alluding to

with, because it's happened with our puppies, right, running contacts, specifically, because it takes a long time. In my mind, aside from weave poles, running contacts is the hardest thing to train because a lot of people never get it done with certain dogs, right? So the failure rate is quite high, just like the failure rate for weave poles can be quite high. You can eventually get a dog weaving

some amount of the time in trials, right? But for a lotta people and a lotta dogs and not necessarily because the human is a poor trainer that you're not gonna ever get to that 100% level on weave poles, right? Everybody knows dogs that never miss. Everybody knows dogs that get double Q's every single weekend and get 20 double Q's in a row, and they're Mach 25. Okay, we

all know people like that, but we also know that there are dogs who really struggle with those things. And so, what we found was we had a forced layoff and I think the most common force layoffs that people run into are weather, right? So winter comes and now you have to put your dog walk away or it's covered in snow, and you don't have the space to do

that kinda running contact work. And then when spring comes, you kinda gotta start over. You know, and that's where I think, like you were saying, I want to condense it all and be like, okay, these three months gonna be mostly contact work or these three weeks or one month or whatever, I'm basically gonna teach the bulk of weaving during this timeframe, you know? And then you can continue

to work on it. You can continue to come back to it, but you've done most of the work. So I like for very complex behaviors, making sure that you're getting it in a shorter, more compact amount of time, whereas like handling, you know, that's a with quotes, air quotes, that's a big, broad topic. It covers many different maneuvers. I think that's the kinda thing that can be spread

out over time. You know, maybe your blind crosses aren't great now, they'll be better in a year, even better in two years, even better with your next dog. You know, you kinda spread that out. And I think it's a little bit different from teaching these very solid, very specific independent-obstacle performance type behaviors to our dogs. - Right. I think the kinda the final key point that we want

to talk about here is more about expectation setting, and about realizing that no matter who you are, and no matter what level you are training at, agility is not a sport where you're ever done. And so to some extent, every single one of us is playing our own version of Whac-A-Mole in our training. The sport is too complex for you to work on every aspect of the sport,

every week, or even maybe even every month. And so, we all have to pick what we're gonna work on, pick what we're not gonna work on. And so, then how do you do that? And I think that, you know, Whac-A-Mole, often it's used as in a derogatory way, but actually I think it's a good thing that when you run into a problem in competition, for instance, you take

that problem and you go back and you work on it because you have uncovered a weakness, a weakness that got you, a weakness that caused an NQ run. And so, you take that back and you work on it. And so, it's a little bit of, I know someone likes the phrase problem based. So it's like a problem based approach. You run into a problem, you go and you

fix it. The other thing that I like to do is on-the-job training, which is basically I'm working on something and I have an idea of what I wanna be working on, but my dog makes a mistake in something else. So maybe I came out to work on my backside commitment, but my dog decides to break the start. And so, now suddenly my training turns into start lane training

instead of backside training. And so, it's like in the moment, and so, one approach that we can take once we have gotten through that beginning level of I'm teaching my dog things for the first time, and now you're in, now what do I do? Well, we can set up sequencing. We can go out and we can run partial courses. We can run in competition and everywhere we run

into a problem, that is the next thing that we work on. So Jennifer, how does that fit into your strategy? And I think it also goes into how you approach preparing for events. - Well, I was thinking, as you were talking there about this idea that, you know, we're never really done with our training, right? You can have a six- or seven- or eight-year-old dog and you're constantly

working something. And even if it's not based on a problem that came up, right, even if it's not that, the evolution of course design, right, it might be the course design that's forcing you into this state of training something new or training something different. And I remember when backsides were sort of more new to the scene. You know, the standard was okay, you need to be able to

do a backside from 10 feet away. And then courses just got harder and backsides got more demanding. And now the standard is, you know, for a lot of teams, much further back. I find myself telling my students, "Nope, I wanna 15 foot backside." So you could sit there and say, you know, checklist, checklist, I've got it all. My skills are perfect. I'm exactly where I wanna be. I

am, quote unquote, done with my training, but then as soon as a new skill is presented, a new challenge, a judge comes up with something unique or courses get harder on the backside. The course is gonna force you to be constantly training and evolving your skills, whether it be now, the backsides need to be done from further away or you know, I remember when the forced layer came

around. - Yeah. - You know, and the forced layer came out and we were all like, "Ooh, that's new." We see it a lot. We better train, and we practiced that. Or there would be more layering with tunnels under a dog walk, you know? That's been relatively popular. So you might be sitting there going, "I feel pretty good with my six-year-old dog "or my seven year old dog."

We've whacked all the moles. The moles are dead. And then some judge is gonna go, but wait, and now you're gonna have something new to tackle out there. So I guess it kinda goes along the lines of problem-based because then when you see it, it's a problem and you work it. But I guess it's this idea that we're never really done. You know, training is ongoing. You're never

really gonna feel like there's not something that you need to balance out there. But I think the point that Esteban brought up about the idea of this balancing the training for a young dog who's learning skills is a little bit different than balancing a more seasoned dog when you're just trying to determine what to go out and train. And I know that's a podcast we've talked about in

the past before, you know? It's different when I have my four-year-old dog and I'm trying to decide what to train and balance out my training time. A little bit different than the scenario we're talking about here, where it's like, how do I balance out teaching this and teaching that and not losing that. So you're always gonna feel overwhelmed. That's my takeaway from this is like, don't worry, guys,

if you're feeling like there's a lot and you don't know how to balance your time, join the club 'cause I'm in it as well. - Yeah, and I'll say one other thing. I think we have to tailor this for the dog and handler team. Obviously, there are people I know of people, we went to our first trial this past weekend for the first time in years, I think,

right? First one in the pandemic and yeah, there are people out there running Mach 20. They don't even go to class anymore, right, with the veteran. You got some dog, whether or not they're running in preferred at this point, 8, 9, 10, 11 years old. And they're just automatic. They're just out there getting double Q's, especially if you're not doing classes like Premier, you know, what do you

really need to be doing? Or if you're not going to national events where the complexity is maybe a little bit harder than when you see a local trials. So you can definitely reach a point. I remember with our less competitive golden way back when, our very first golden, right? I think she reached a maintenance stage where we even stopped taking her to class. You're only taking the young

dog to class. And then you're like, ah, the old veteran, she's fine. You take her to all the shows. Certainly you might work her every once in a while in your own yard. But I remember we reached a point where we weren't taking her to class, certainly, right? And so, I think that was maybe more prevalent back then, but there's no reason you can't make that your standard

now. Now as it relates to young dogs, I will say this, there is one thing that you can do to really minimize the moles. And we reached a point, so we have two dogs, two puppies going on right now. And they both have some fear, anxiety, sensitivity kinda stuff they're working through. And the golden is much better about it than the poodle. Right, the poodle is gonna take

some time. There's gonna be more work put in there. The golden, we felt like we were ready to go ahead and come out, so I don't think, have we talked about this on the podcast at all? Her doing FBO and all that? - Nope. - No, so basically we took her out to her first AKC show and she did FEO time, to beat it fast, just to get

re-experienced, get her in there with a toy. Instead of jumping her at 20, we dropped it four inches, make it a little bit easier, 16. And you know, she showed improvement from one to the second run, right? So I feel like, overall, it was very successful, but we were on this path where like, okay, I'm treating her a little bit like my last dog who I ran, which

was like Gitchy or we had the old border collies, right? And you got all these international skills. Back in the day, we call them international skills. Today, I would just call it agility, but backsides, threadles, and certain scenarios and bigger spacing, but also being able to rear across and getting through boxes and things like that. There are things that you are not going to need until you hit

your first national level competition, or until you're running in masters at, say, UKI or an organization or Premier or any of those things, you can kinda set all that aside. Set it aside for three, six months, a year even, right? And so, finally, I turn to Sarah, I said, "Hey, what do we really need to get out there?" She needs to be able to do a couple crosses.

She doesn't even need to know the rear cross necessarily, right? You can do all fronts or blinds or whatever you're gonna do. And you don't even need 12 poles, you can do six poles. Let's get her out there. Let's get her some experience. And so, in my view, for people who are feeling very overwhelmed and you haven't gotten your dog out there, right? And for our dog, in

eight days, she is turning three. Now there's a pandemic situation here where, you know, obviously that delayed us bringing her out and all this stuff, availability of trials, things like that. But it's a situation where you can get that dog out and kinda defer, defer all the moles, right? I'm gonna deal with that later. So the super interesting threadle, that I see and everybody's practicing based on something

cool they saw in the finals of the European Open, that's not right for my almost-three-year-old Yolan who has yet to show in novice, right? So let's stay very focused. I know a lot of us, especially if this is your 4th, 5th dog, if this is the border collie or Sheltie that you have, that's got your best possible shot at making one of the international teams or winning a

national title and you're very excited about it and you wanna teach them all the things and you want them to be able to do everything before they even go out in novice. I think it's okay to defer. Remember how we used to do it back in the early 2000s, right? You just took your dog and you got out there. And then as challenges came up, you just went

and you taught your dog, right? The excitement was in getting your dog out. And then whatever pops up, you're going to teach them. You're going to work through it. There was no trying to reach some magical, I'm ready and now let's do it. I think that kinda comes almost from the old obedience thinking, right? Where like you can train a dog all the way through Open or utility

and then go and show them at novice. - Right. - As opposed to like, I'm just gonna show 'em whatever they need at novice. And then when I get there, now I'll start doing the Open exercises. Now I'll take out my dumbbell, now I'll do whatever. - And to be clear, we're not saying that it's bad to be prepared for everything, but I think this is for the

subset of handlers who are feeling either overwhelmed or stuck, or yeah, I mean, you just get to this point where you're juggling too many things and making progress with nothing. We need to narrow down the things that you're trying to make progress on, and like you said, a really good way is to focus on what you need. - 'Cause there's an element of overwhelm, right? - Yes. -

To the Whac-A-Mole. So Jen, you run a lot of dogs. At any given time in your life, right, you probably have multiple dogs. Do they all basically have the same training program? Probably, but when you tweak and adjust, aren't there big differences? Talk a little bit about that. I think that'll be pretty helpful. - Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is gonna be based on so many

factors like age - Exactly. - What they're prepping for and what event they have coming up. - Exactly. - You know, just natural strengths and weaknesses, right? I mean, Surprise - Yeah. - and High Five are not that different in age, but naturally, High Five has more of a struggle on weave poles and Surprise gets 'em a little bit better. So I'm gonna spend more time doing weave

polls with High Five than I do with Surprise. But then the opposite is true on jumping. Naturally, Surprise needs more work on jumping than High Five does. So, you know, two dogs, same breed, very similar in age, less than a year apart age. And I'm very much tweaking what I'm doing. Now a lot of my structure might be the same. As you mentioned, and I've talked about this

before, like balancing days and sessions that are skill-based versus days and sessions that are handling, right? Some days it's, I'm going out there, I'm working, running sequences, nothing but jumps and tunnels, less on them, more on timing. Other days I'm going out there and I'm working skills, it's a contacts and weaves day or working on jumping. So overall format from dog to dog really doesn't change. It's very

much a balance of the two for me of handling and training. But then within each dog, if I'm gonna go do a training day, I might be training weaves with High Five or I'm training jumping with Surprise. And I will say that as the dogs get older, it's a little bit less of the training and the skill and more of the handling and the timing. - Right, right.

- Because naturally as they get older, I'm starting to run harder courses. So I'm gonna do more handling stuff as the challenges get more difficult, and it's me. It's me learning, can I make it down that 70 foot line to that backside? And you're not gonna know that until you get out there and do it. So certainly with the quantity of dogs that I'm actively training and/or showing,

it's a lotta similarities yet very, very different from dog to dog. - Yeah, yeah, I think just keep that in mind. You know, it was very hardening to me to go and watch the show and watch other people's dogs. And they're also not perfect or they're also noticing the bar setters and the judge and going to visiting and stuff. And then I thought, "Hey, you know what, "my

dog's not doing so bad." - (laughs) That's right. - Yeah. - All right, well, I think that that answers the question. I think we gave everybody a lot of good things to think about, but mainly just assuring everybody that this is part of the normal progression of a young dog. It's part of the normal progression as you gain experience. And we all feel that overwhelm and that feeling

of it's not done. And that's something that we have to learn to live with because it is very rare to get a dog to the point where you don't feel like you have a weakness that needs to be worked on, but it can be what we all aspire to, that feeling of everything coming together. And that's it for this week's podcast. We'd like to thank our sponsor, hititboard.com.

Happy training. (uplifting music) - Thank you for listening to "Bad Dog Agility." We hope you enjoyed today's episode. For more information, updates, and links to all our socials, just check out our website, www.baddogagility.com. If you haven't already signed up for our email subscription, we would love to have you join the BDA community. Until next time, take care. (uplifting music)