Hey all, here's another quick post from the Ring Confidence Facebook group:

Something I hear a lot from handlers prepping for a trial: "I've been doing a lot of run-throughs to get us ready."

And I get it. It feels like the right thing to do. You want the dog to know what the full thing feels like. You want to know if it holds together.

But when you run through your exercises in sequence without rewards, you're testing. You're not really training.

Testing has its place. I do mini run-throughs when I'm specifically prepping for an event, usually not the full sequence and sometimes not even full distances. I want to see how pieces flow together and find out if anything is harder in combination than it was on its own. That's useful information.

But if you're doing full run-throughs regularly, you're not strengthening your dog's understanding of the skills. You're not finding ways to challenge them or build their fluency. You're just asking them to repeat things they already know, with very little payoff along the way.

And that combination of long stretches of work, not much reward,
and not much variety is exactly what makes dogs start to find the work either too hard or too boring.

What I do instead is spend most of my training time on the pieces: the setups, the transitions, and the individual skills broken down enough that I can actually reward well and push the boundaries of what the dog knows.

I want each exercise understood on its own, including how to handle it if things get "weird." If something isn't perfect in a trial, I want my dog confident that they still know how to win! This can be stuff like purposefully throwing the dumbbell off to the side and under a chair, or doing a mini "directed jumping" style send over the broad jump and then cuing a drop on recall when they land. These "skill building" sessions have a high rate of reinforcement!

The formality of chaining it all together comes in naturally as the individual parts get easier.

And when I do chain exercises together, I'm not doing them in ring order, not even all from the same level. It is not A, B, C, D, E. But I might do B, Z, K with transitions in between and broken down to easier distances.

The focus of these mini chain sessions become less about the exercises and more about how they handle formality of long pauses as we wait for the judge (real or imaginary!), moving from exercise to exercise with connection (and no cookies!), and inserting other trial prep details like delays in the ring, and fixing setups (actually crooked or just pretend!).

But testing the whole sequence for little to no rewards, especially when this can easily be over 5min in the obedience ring? I don't think this is building up the dog. And when we test we tend to only provide the dog feedback when they are wrong!

Your dog doesn't need more testing, they need more practice with the individual pieces. Both the actual "skills" being tested in the ring, AND those "trial prep" pieces of everything that happens before going in the ring and between exercises!

This was an obedience post, but I really hope that you can extract meaning for other sports! The longer you are in the ring for the "test," the more it matters. But even in 30 seconds of agility I don't think it is beneficial to continuously only run full courses in practice!
Are you doing runthroughs regularly right now? What are you actually looking for when you do them?

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Upcoming Classes

Registration is open for TEAM 2, starts November 1st! We still have 3 working spots left!

Teach a retrieve from step 1. Have fancy fronts and heeling through pivoting. Teach the foundations for marking a line, and more! Obedience is fun!

TEAM 2 Obedience

Obedience can be intense, it can be fast, it can be creative, and most importantly it can be joyful for both you and the dog! In this class we will look at using a few simple games that you can build into a variety of training exercises to bring more engagement, creativity, and joy into your training.

Up Your Game! (3wk class)

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