Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Yay for Contacts

I am training Max and Rylie differently on contacts.  Max has running contacts.  Rylie is learning two on two off contacts (his front feet are on the ground while his hind feet stay on the contact and he touches his nose to the ground until I release him).  We are training this way on the advice of my trainer and it's mostly due to the speed of the dogs.  I need Rylie to stop at the bottom so I have a hope of keeping up to him.  Max will sometimes miss his contact in a trial and I still have to be pretty close to him to make sure he drives all the way down but all in all they were pretty easy to train.

We have been working forever it seems like on Rylie's.  It took him a long time to get decent nose touches and then he had a hard time stopping at the bottom.  Last week he did the entire A frame and managed to stay on it.  This week we added the dogwalk and he did both in sequence.  Yay!  I'm sure this will be a work in progress but I think the next trial he will be ready for an event with contacts.  Which is good because right now he can only do jumpers and he isn't pleased to go to a trial and only get to do one run in.

He had a grand time in class tonight because he got to do all of his favourite things (we were sequencing and I honestly think everything is his favourite )

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