Sunday 19 December 2010

Box work breakthrough...?

In previous posts, I showed Fly's boxwork updates. I've been doing what I've watched from the Springloaded DVDs and read on a couple of websites, basically what I did with Jet. Jet's turn wasn't trained like that from the beginning as she started her boxwork with our old club (= zero boxwork), but I tweaked it with that. At uni, one of our lecturers told us a Henry Ford quote "if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got." When I thought about it, as much as Jet has a nice-ish turn, I'd like Fly's to be significantly better; I have her from the beginning, and I'm more experienced than I was then - no excuses.

For a while, I've not been entirely happy with the results I've been getting. She's followed the toy to do a fairly nice turn but I've not been 100% on where her feet are, and overall I think she was a bit too reliant on me. I realised that I need Fly to offer the turn behaviour completely independently and I've set about using a target type method (with a clicker), similar to what I've seen on videos but adapted for Fly.

We have only done one session, but oh my goodness she's made such a huge improvement. She's using her back legs completely differently and offering the turn with no prompting from me whatsoever, I have to say I was really pleased with her.

I have some videos, will maybe post later.