Part 2 (iv) Maintaining Forward Focus

Objective

Maintain what we have trained so dog is always looking forward, regardless of obstacle in front (or not)

How?

Consistency. Now that we have trained our 2O2O position, we need to maintain this by using a reward (which is varied, and we will look at that in next post) which is always forward.

Total Time

‘Forever’ !

Discussion – Why is this so important?

One of the primary disadvantages of a stopped contact or 2O2O position, is that it must be ‘forever’ trained and maintained. Once we have taught the dog, there is the temptation, particularly in group sessions to pull the dog off from the side, reward from hand or just not reward at all. Collectively we will call this ‘losing our process and consistency’. Over time this will lead to handler focused dogs, lack of drive to contact position and worse, missed contacts. All of which will mean retraining / reworking our contact position. So what do we do?

In training one will be faced with one of two broad scenarios:

With obstacle in front of contact

This is a desired situation as we use the next obstacle as our focus. From the last article we described transferring the focus. Here is a process for using that obstacle:

1. Place the reward after the next obstacle – allowing for landing distance
2. Only release the dog when they are firmly looking forward at obstacle / reward
3. Give release command and lots of praise

Without obstacle in front of contact

Less desirable but a training fact, we will be faced with courses where there is nothing in front. The temptation here is to demonstrate how good your turns are at training and pull the dog sideways. This is counter training your forward focus. A good example is demonstrated in these images on the link below:

Click here to see example of keeping forward focus during course training

I broke this down into 2 distinct stages, (i) sending to reward (ii) setting up rest of course and starting again.

But what about turns in competition? Well that’s a discussing for future articles, but at this stage I will say for the young dog get the basics right, all the time. Secondly a well taught stop puts the handle in 100% control for alighting the contact.