Importance of planning

Planning training sessions is essential if you really want to progress with each training session. But with a dog, you can't just run through as planned. You have to be able during a session to analyze dog's behaviour and adjust a plan accordingly. On the go. This isn't easy. Some sessions are just perfect, and you reach clear results. In many cases there is something that influence training. A plan was not realistic, temperature was too high for planned activities, you were tired and could not focus, environment was too distracting, your instructor is not thinking the same way and offered opposite advice to your plans, or training time is limited. Just to mention some...

Without a plan training is likely to be just repeating same old stuff. For the dog this doesn't matter, he is likely to have just as much fun repeating familiar skills and tricks if those are rewarded. But for the handler a target of continuous development requires lots of thinking and planning. Where are we know? What's the next step and criteria? Should I move to the next level now? How can I test this skill? This problem I didn't expect, what to do now?

It has been great to follow how amazingly Kumma is responding to training. How fast he is learning, and how well he is using learned skills in other more distracting environments. He has a lot of potential, and it depends mainly on my skills as a trainer how much he will learn in agility world as well as in everyday life.

Back to this week's training. We had a good jumping training the other day, well planned and well applied. Extremely good results.

Basig grid with doubles, 3 reps. One without handler movement, two with running. Prior to third one I turned on Kumma's engine by whispering "Where is the toy?" and taking take off position myself. Excellent jumping even with high drive!

Landing exercise with a 40cm double jump, 3 reps like with the basic grid. Again excellent jumping with good bouncing.

Set point with a 6ft distance, 4 reps. 45-50-55-40cm. Nice jumps. This was the 2nd time Kumma jumped 55cm, and it looked really good. Could start using higher jumps in handling training, I have used max 45cm so far.