O3000 Fit to Heel: Fitness for Obedience Dogs

We will look in detail at the physical skills that your dog needs in their obedience training and competition, and build specific exercises to ensure correct and strong performance of these skills. We will also examine aspects of cross training for general fitness, warm up, and any other topics relevant to gold students.

The course will have a different focus across each week, with Week 1 focussing on movements, Week 2 Positions, and then Week 3 advancing exercises to cover a number of fitness aspects.

This course is best suited to handlers who have started some fitness work, however that absolutely does not mean that beginners cannot join! There will be lots of content and exercises, so selecting a focus for your dog, and specific exercises to work on over the class period is important.

This class will focus on skills and positions important in a number of obedience, and obedience related sports that will include heelwork, positions and rotation between positions, retrieves. This means that people training and competing in sports such as obedience, IPO and mondioring, Rally-O, Working Trials, Gun dog competitors, and Heelwork to music will find this class useful.

Teaching Approach:

Lectures will be composed of extensive written detail, and accompanied by photographs and videos that both verbally explain concepts, and demonstrate exercises. The majority of details and concepts will be covered in both written, and video form. There are often multiple videos showing different stages, or dogs, performing exercises. This means that the concepts are accessible to those who like to learn through text, or verbal explanation, or visual explanation.

This class is relatively intensive, giving you not just the ‘how too’, but also the ‘why’. There is LOTS of information, so it is important to work at your own pace and focus on the needs for you and your dog. If this is difficult for you I suggest working at Silver or Gold so you can ask questions.

Lectures will be released weekly, and are grouped under similar concepts. They will be released sequentially from theory and foundation fitness concepts, through teaching individual exercises, to putting these into workouts.

Feedback is given in detail in relation to the goal of a particular task or exercise. In particular the focus of feedback will be improving a dog's form, understanding of exercises, and meeting your specific goals.

Feedback can be given in written, OR video voice over form (Loom). Generally the form of feedback will be selected to best meet your specific post, but there are times where voice recording may be difficult so I may have to write feedback. Please be sure to discuss with Kelly if there’s a specific form of feedback that is most useful to you.