Another agility lesson back home :)

Jemma:
We did quite a lot of work on her a-frame and addressed two problems, one: her driving to the bottom - with the target in she was great so we just started phasing it out and making her touch the ground sometimes instead of the target, it seemed to work well and has given me something else to work on on the stairs :), two: her not being 100% confident on going when i say go, she seems to hang around and look confused and be all like "does mum really mean it" so i did lots of throwing her toy/treats to really build up her confidence on this. It seemed to work but I still need to do more of it. On the dog walk she was driving up & along it but then really slowing down on the way down so we did some work on just the down plank and getting her all excited so she really drove to the bottom. This now needs more work and then we just need to back track it a bit :) She seems to also have a hang up about going in tunnels these days, I used to be able to drive her to one from quite a long way away but now she seems quite reluctant to go in them!! I need to go back to rewarding her after she has done the tunnel so it becomes fun again. We then did a lot of work on the flick flack handling and I think by the end of the session she was really understanding it, I just need to keep up the practice so she doesn't forget it again, sadly something easier said than done!! Think that was it for today, we had no time to do weaves, we shall just see how they go at the weekend!!

Elliot:
We did some more shadow handling work - getting him to go in front of me and me to cross behind him, he kept doing silly twizzles though so it is definately something I need to work on!! My main aim with him at the moment is still change of arm=change direction. So we did quite a lot of front cross work with two rows of three // jumps and he did this really well (apart from when he smelt a treat and went wondering off for ages, naughty boy!!) We then did some flik flack work but as my trainer said, and i agree he is too young really to be worrying about these, but it is just nice to have something else to use to reinforce the change of arms, he did well but just struggled a little when he was turning into my left side and kept running behind me, but we worked on it with the tuggy and he got it by the end :) Something I need to work on with both dogs is focus forwards at a jump when they are sat at and angle to it and not dead straight!!We also spent a lot of time today going over how I would sort out problems that arise during training Elliot (and Jemma), such as when he went off sniffing, not to shout at him but to go back and rebuild the reward/drive for the jump because he obviously found sniffing something more rewarding than doing the jump, and with the flick flack he kept going between the jumps (despite my body language being correct) so instead of trying to change what I was doing I should move the jumps closer together so there is no gap and then gradually move them further apart until he gets the hang of it!!