In order to move well, the nervous system needs to have very high quality information about the body.
Knowing where different body parts are and how they move depends on body maps. Body maps are areas of the brain representing different body parts. In order to grow and create connections in the body maps, the brain needs information from movement.
Slow movement exercises allow the nervous system to sense even the smallest differences in muscle effort or if the correct muscles are working and firing at the right times. During slow movements the nervous system is able to work on any inefficiencies in the movement pattern and is able to correct the movement so that it becomes more efficient and better coordinated.
Leave a commentIf you’d like your dog to become better and faster learner who is motivated and engaged during training sessions, then improving handler mechanics is one of the key things to work on. You don’t have to spend more time training your dog in order to get rid of stressing high or low behaviors like sniffing, walking away from the training session, barking, frantic movements. Having clear mechanics and reinforcement delivery will almost always result in a better training experience to you and your dog.
Leave a commentAs soon as my dogs start looking at me because of my faulty mechanics, they find it very difficult to focus on the exercises. They may miss one of the cones when looking at me. They struggle figuring out the foot pattern. And they may even trip and lose their balance during the exercises. They are no longer in The Flow mindset for coordination work, they are no longer mindful about their own movement but rather multitask, trying to keep an eye on me + do the exercise.
4 responsesWhen we look at the arousal states from coordination and movement point of view, which arousal state looks like the good place to be? It’s actually written in the descriptions of the arousal states, where The Flow is linked to controlled and deliberate movements with high accuracy and low latency. And The Red is linked to frantic movements with low accuracy and high latency.
2 responsesThe turns were uncomfortable enough for Bo to cause uncertainty and confusion during the turns. And this uncertainty transferred into the agility exercises. Every time I asked Bo to do an exercise that included a turn, I could see that he was a bit doubtful before doing that exercise. The cues were getting poisoned due to the lack of physical skills.
Leave a commentIn order to link our dog’s fitness program to real life situations, we need to have movement exercises in there. Exercises where our dogs develop movement skills that carry over to sports and work. And that teach our dogs to really use the power and strength they have. We need coordination exercises for our dogs!
Leave a commentIt may happen that when teaching new behaviors to our dogs, we would like all the repetitions to become as similar as possible. Especially when training something for competitive sports.
Let’s look at this from the movement perspective. What does good movement skill tell us? Does good movement skill mean there is no variation in the specific movement over the repetitions? Or is it the opposite – in order for the movement to be skillful, it needs to have variation in it?
Leave a commentWhen teaching new behaviors to our dogs, focusing on the visible behavior components, then what we are really doing is asking our dogs to multitask and figure out the technical side of the exercise while at the same time develop their physical skills. Isn’t it a bit like… lumping?
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