Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Teaching 2o/2o (warning , the video is boring)

Ive been doing the contact training with Miley on the board. It felt like a terrible session. I'm not sure why. I felt like she just doesn't get it. And the way I was standing wasn't right. But I was video taping it. When I watched it, I was surprised to see her go into a 2o/2o before I started. To bad I wasn't paying attention. So she didn't even get rewarded. Ugh!!! How did I miss her doing that? Also as I watched, it didn't look that bad to me. She did lots of circling. That has me concerned too. The other thing we practiced was tunnel entrances. I'm not sure why but she seems be to taking the wrong entrance. We will be running and the tunnel opening will be a straight shot, and she goes off course and takes the other entrance. To get her in the right opening, I had to go all the way to the tunnel almost like a block. I'm going to have to work on this and maybe video tape it too. Maybe I'm doing something with my shoulders that causing the off course.

3 comments:

manymuddypaws said...

can I offer some suggestions?

you need to have her stay in that position longer- it looks like she is releasing as soon as you give her the cookie- make sure to start using a release word right off the bat.

Also she needs to come off the board looking down and not at you as having her head up is going to cause problems later on. A head down position will keep her spine straight and prevent some physical damage later.

you also might want to target the
2o2o- if you are always there feeding you are going to have a hard time adding distance and will have to baby your contacts- which defeats the purpose. Make sure to change your position a lot.

you have a good start though- you've built value for the board- but you need to have a clearer picture for her and for yourself of what it should look like.

She should also be stepping off the board on her own- on command instead of being lured- which will come, I know you just started this. If you decide to do targeting it will be easy to get to this step- place the target at the end- restrain her a foot from the edge of the board and get her hyped to go- release her to the target and jackpot when she steps off and nose touches.

Does that make sense?

Anyway, there are lots of methods out there for teaching contacts- that is just the method that we use, lots, and lots, and lots of backchaining.

Johann The Dog said...

Mary Ellen Barry gave me some good tips for 2o2o.

She progressed to having the dog stay in position (until Q'd for release), and she would run around like a crazy person - either side of the DW, take off for another jump, run back and forth, etc. Her dog had to stay in the 2o2o position all that time, and she would throw treats back to the dog as she ran by or back, as long as he stayed.

He was allowed to reach for the treats as long as he didn't move his feet - and that also made his head stay down. That's key.

We did some of that on the teeter the other day with Gracie and she loved the game! I had her go teeter, she would go right to the end and ride it down, hit her two feet on the ground and I ran past and threw a treat near her nose, did 'football' moves in front of her, and ran back and forth while I threw treats at the ground near her nose. It really works!

It got Gracie in an extreme high drive mode, but she stuck her 2o2o on the teeter every time until I said OK.

And the neat thing is it's very energetic exercise for you :) You're exhausted after the routine.

You have a great start there! She is so ready to work and eager to learn.

I just wish I had time to paint my board :)

GeeRome said...

I really need to get a board. So far I have just been using a target and the stairs to the basement. I keep the target on a table near the bottom of the stairs and every time I go down (I live in a basement suite) I tell Romeo to stay at the top of the stairs, run down to the bottom, toss the target on the ground and ask for a touch. At which point he races down the stairs and nose-touches the target. We're working on only rewarding when he has two feet on the bottom step and two on the floor. But sometimes he gets too much momemtum going so ends up all 4 on the floor. In those cases, I'll send him back up the stairs and try again.