Old Habits...

After having such a great first class, and our instructor being out of town this week, I decided to set up some small jump sequences in the back yard to work on handling skills. I didn't have a goal other than to navigate which ever course we were running and choose the best handling strategy for the dogs. I also use those small courses to find weaknesses in our training. 

Well... we found our weaknesses but I fell into my old habit of just repeating the exercise instead of quitting and thinking of a way to work on strengthening that particular skill with my dog. Shawty and I struggle with rear crosses and that weakness revealed itself in the same spot every time on the course we ran. Monster and I were actually pretty in sync until we had to bypass one entrance of the tunnel for the other. All the dogs were sucked in lol. It could partly be that I suck at recreating courses from maps and there's handler error mixed in. 

But what I realized was it is crucial for me to video tape our training. I know, I know. Experienced handlers have probably done this for years. I'm sure some good handlers have enough self awareness to judge where they've gone wrong handling a course but NOT me. I get frustrated because I think I've changed my handling when I repeat the exercise but I haven't. 

Enter: Coach's Eye. It's an app for sports videos that is available on iPad, iPhone and I believe some Droids. You can import videos that were not recorded using Coach's Eye as well. What's great about it is that it gives you the ability to break your activity down and even put it in slow motion. There are lots of tools for writing and drawing on frames of the video to point out where you were late with a cross or a cue so that you can actually go back and correct your performance when you repeat the exercise. I tend to get frustrated when I can't get something right handling in agility and it makes my dogs shut down and stop having fun. It makes training become unpleasant for all of us. I don't want to continue with my old habits so I am going to start video recording our training. 

The next issue is that I don't have a videographer and the app is on my iPad and my iPhone. I have a tripod but needed an attachment to hold my iPhone. I could import the video like I mentioned earlier but that takes time that I don't want to spend. So, I have ordered an attachment that will hold my iPhone and allow me to put it on my tripod so that I can film our training. 

I am excited about this next adventure and I hope that it improves the way I train my dogs so that we can both have more fun training!