The Susan Salo “Zig Zag Grid” is a plyometric drill for footwork and balance.  This is an advanced grid so be sure your dog has mastered the basic grids first. The first video is shot from above so its easy to see Tai find a nearly straight line through the grid. The next video is Nick executing the grid and […]

Forced Fronts are another maneuver that require collection and quick change of direction and lead.  A Forced Front is simply the placement of a front cross on the backside of a jump.  In this video, I give a brief overview of how to train this skill.  Before trying this, your dog should have value for the refusal plane of the […]

Once you and your dog are comfortable with wraps, serps and threadles, you can begin to mix all of those handling maneuvers in a single training session.  Here is a setup that worked well for me in a training session with Nick.  It afforded the opportunity to work on all those maneuvers in longer sequences as well as to break […]

In this course, I’ve talked a lot about the dog needing to adjust his stride, weight shift and leads – on the ground – prior to takeoff for a jump.  Susan Salo’s Figure 8 Jump grid gives the dog this practice by incorporating transitions from quick footwork to extended jumping while performing lead changes.  I hope you will take the […]

In Lesson 4, I covered teaching the dog to spin right and spin left on verbal cues only.  In this lesson, I’ll give you some ideas on how to apply this understanding to equipment. My goal is for my verbals to be “in support” of what I’m doing with my motion and position.  If I am momentarily out of position […]

A threadle is a handling maneuver that changes the dog’s line off his obvious path without the handler changing sides.  Here are some examples of threadle patterns. Threadle handling cues: An efficient execution of these types of threadles requires collection from the dog on the first jump, followed by commitment to the “gap”, followed by a turn back toward the […]

Adding speed into handling maneuvers that require collection is both challenging and necessary.  There are two elements to the speed…the dog’s speed and the handler speed. The exercises in this lesson are designed to ask for speed from the dog but allow the handler to get into good position for cueing the collection needed for producing efficient turns. In this […]

Running our dogs in agility is a dynamic process with handler motion, position and verbals providing information to the dog about what is coming next.  Timely cues are those given while the dog is in the physical space between the landing point after a jump and the point where the dog prepares to takes off for the next jump.  It […]

When I’m running a course in agility, I try to give my dog as much information as possible with my motion, position and arm changes.  These days I’m using more verbal cues to direct the dog’s path and support the physical cues that I am giving – very useful if I’ve been caught out of position or far behind!   […]

This Figure 8 exercise on 2 jumps is a logical next step after introducing multi-wraps on  a single jumps.  There are many ways to configure obstacles into a figure 8 pattern.  The setup in this diagram is a good one to start with as the dog doesn’t have much speed and it is easy to put yourself in proper position […]