From the Agility Obstacle Task Pack - A-frame!

The agility grab bag gods knew exactly what we need last Friday morning, right before our last agility trial for July. Ocean's a-frame contact behavior goes between 2 on and 2 off at home and at class to running at shows. Sometimes that running ends up being striding just above that much needed yellow zone. So I sat with this card for a couple of hours and thought about what my plan of attack would be.

I ended up opting for this little course out of Clean Run's Exercise Sourcebook Volume 1. I swapped out the tunnel for my a-frame and kept the teeter as bonus contact training. I ran the black circles for our session. Since we would be showing for two days right after this session, I also swapped out the jumps for my hoops and jumps with no bars. For two trials in a row, I had jumped Ocean for three days straight...I wanted to give him and his body a little bit of a break from that. I really like working handling at home with those hoops because it's essentially working flat work with an obstacle.

 

This video is of our entire training session and it's nine minutes long. But, at least you can see how the hoops work and I wanted a visual for anyone who might want to use the impulse control exercise I worked with O at the bottom of the a-frame.  In class last Wednesday, we worked on getting O to hold his 2 on, 2 off and not self-release to something very high value (a tug toy.) For him, running agility is very self rewarding and his "running contact" is him quickly self-releasing from the a-frame. I used this same exercise here at home...and will continue to when we have an A-frame in practice. The exercise itself is pretty simple. I place the tug toy on the ground about 4 to 5 feet away from the bottom of the a-frame. If you're training with a friend, you can have them place the high value reward for you. The high value reward can be anything your dog loves...it could be really yummy food/treats or their favorite toy. Tugs and balls are much more valuable to Ocean than food is. When Ocean runs to the bottom of the a-frame and holds his 2 on, 2 off....I release him to the toy and we play as his reward. The first attempt he does self-release and grabs the tug which is what he shouldn't do. But he figured it out the next and following attempts. Another thing I like to do which you will see closer to the end of the video is to play tug with Ocean while he is in the correct position on the a-frame. I'm more or less rewarding for position like how you would feed your dog a treat in the correct a-frame criteria position. This idea would work for any pieces of the contact equipment and the table. If the dog moves out of position off the equipment....the play stops. If the dog moves back into position...play more. If your dog is very tug play motivated, they will really enjoy this sort of game and reward.