Dan has now had two formal agility lessons one was in early June and the other was two weeks ago. He loves it and I think he’s gonna be great fun to play agility with.
During his first lesson Justin and I introduced him to a “jump”. Since he was such a young puppy, we had the bars set very low and kept the session short to prevent any injury, but our goal was to teach him the concept of going between the jump standards and over the bar. We first had one jump, with no bar and called him through that. We added a second jump with no bar, just a straight line, and called him through that. Then we added the low bars and did one jump then two. We added the third jump with the bar. Each step probably had 2-3 repetitions and the whole session was only about 20 minutes.
Here is the video of the final product from that day. We were looking for him to complete all three jumps and drive forward to get his toy. The goal was to keep it upbeat, fun, and easy.
You can already see him getting excited about the game and driving to the toy. I goofed on spacing the jumps and the distance between the second and third jump was slightly shorter than the distance between the first and second, but this didn’t stop Dan! You can see him taking one less stride before this jump.
Two weeks ago was the second lesson. We worked on front crosses at a low jump height and tried a couple of jumps at 16″ to work on the concept of “go over not under!”
We’ve been practicing at my in-law’s house because they have so much more space than us. They are working on their roof so excuse the piles of scrap wood in the background but here are some of the photos from that day. My father-in-law took the video and I forgot to get it from him before we left so I’ll have to add that later.
