Is your dog’s dog walk performance less than perfect? And you have no idea about why that is or how to fix it?
Could it be that your dog is scared of heights, leaving him uncomfortable on the dog walk and not performing at her best?
In today’s blog post I talk about the fear of heights, why this happens, how it affects your dog’s performance and how to recognize it in your own dog.
Leave a comment“Hang on! So you are saying I can fix my dog’s dog walk performance with body awareness and balance exercises? But I’m already doing canine fitness training with my dog! And he’s still struggling on the dog walk!”
As you already know, doing fitness training with your dog builds a perfect foundation for sports!
But here’s the secret: most canine fitness routines are missing the key elements that would help to improve your dog’s performance on the dog walk… and many other real life challenges!
These 3 elements are absolutely essential for transfering skills from your dog’s “gym workouts” to actual sports exercises. Like running on the dog walk without misplacing paws, losing balance or falling off.
And if you are missing any of these elements in your training routines, then you can do as much fitness training as you want, you simply won’t see improvement in your dog’s dog walk performance.
Find out what these 3 missing elements are in the newest The Moving Canine blop post!
Leave a commentYour dog needs coordination skills in every activity he’s engaged in. Yet it’s one of the most overlooked areas of dog sports training. We often see the word “coordination” in a fitness program or puppy school program. But the reality is often just a couple of exercises for body awareness. It’s because coordination can be a bit tricky to train, especially when we don’t know it’s even a thing! Time to change that. Coordination training has some HUGE benefits. Find out what they are in this blog post.
Leave a commentIn 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 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 responsesIn 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!
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