Clean Run - December 2017 - 35

Balance in Training:
Test Your Skills
By Stacy Winkler
© DIANNE McCORMICK

In order to train behaviors comprehensively you must have balance
your training. A basic example of
balance in training is that your dog
must be equally comfortable working
off your left side and your right side.
Pretty straightforward, right? But balance can come in many forms and
you want to check to make sure that
you cover your bases in as many
ways as possible. And, most importantly, you want maintain balance
right from the beginning!
For instance, when we begin our
weave pole training, we want to
teach the dog to weave equally well
on the on-side or off-side of the
weaves so that when we're running
a course we don't have the added
challenge of needing to manipulate
the dog to one side of the weaves or
the other because the dog doesn't
weave well on a particular side. This
not only applies to straightforward
weave entries but to front or rear
crossing in front of the weaves, difficult approach angles, and so forth.
I remember long ago when folks began talking about making sure your
dog could nail entries by training
around the poles an arc configuration
December 17 | Clean Run

(around the clock). Many handlers
began training much harder weave
entries than they had in the past,
which is good; however, they focused
on these hard entries and neglected
to work on the simple entries. So
you would see dogs that could nail
extremely difficult weave challenges,
but ask them to do a straight entry at
speed... not so much. It's all about
the balance.
Balance can refer to making sure
that you teach strong distance and
acceleration skills and balance that
with deceleration training and tight
turn skills. I once overheard a competitor exclaim at a trial, "My dog is
great at working away, but I can't
get him to turn tight. I am not going
to teach my next dog to work at a
distance!" And another, "I have done
way too much tight work and focus
work, my dog won't take his eyes off
me and I get can't him to work away.
I am not going do all that focus work
with my next dog. Obviously I have
made this dog too sticky."
All I can say is, "Yikes! Wrong!"
Doing great distance work has no
bearing on tight turns. And too much
focus work has nothing to do with the

fact that your dog won't work away. It
is simply a matter of training balance
in your skills.
If my dog won't give me a tight turn
it's because I didn't teach him to
decel and turn well. If my dog won't
take his eyes off of me and won't
drive on or away from me over
jumps, it is because I haven't taught
him to work at a distance.
One of my favorite sayings is, "There
is no such thing as a 'Velcro dog,'
there is only a dog that hasn't been
taught to work at a distance." Any
dog can be taught to work at a distance, it is simply a matter of knowing how to teach it. I have written a
number of articles for Clean Run
addressing that very thing.
In regards to agility obstacles my
expectation of balance is that all
obstacles are of equal value. This
means that a jump has the same
value of the weave poles, which is
the same value as the tunnel or contacts. If all my obstacles are of equal
value than when I signal the tunnel
when it's next to the dog walk, my
dog will drive right into the tunnel,
not cut in front of me to get onto "the
cookie machine". This is important
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Clean Run - December 2017