When dog trainers discuss training foundation skills for their particular dog sport, it usually involves developing flatwork or basic movement skills specifically for that sport. In addition, it involves introducing the dog to behaviors, equipment, obstacles, or experiences associated with that sport. While these things are critical for the preparation of any dog to compete in a dog sport, are there other skills that we can introduce to enhance communication, clarity and simplify future training?
Each sport has a framework of foundation skills that build reliable performance for the specific dog sport. But what about the glue that holds that sport-specific framework in place?
This presentation lays out the glue skills that your dog needs to build a better framework for teaching the skills needed for any dog sport. The good news is that glue skills can benefit all dog training, whether specific to training for performance or basic life skills.
Performance trainers dramatically overlook these skills because the specific sports training feels like it’s more fun for the dog. But is it? Or is this more how the trainer feels about these skills? However, these feelings go away during the glue skills training as the trainers witness how much the dogs love them.
Glue skills provide performance dogs with abilities that provide productive learning opportunities in classes, seminars and ultimately allow them to function at an optimal arousal level at the trials. Additionally, the glue will give your future performance star the resources and strengths to help create the necessary focus in the unique environment surrounding most dog sports. Without glue skills, dogs can develop unwanted habits which interfere with their learning. Furthermore, once habits are established, they can be more challenging to change.
The other benefit of glue skills is they will create more straightforward and defined training sessions. And, ultimately the training and the handling of performance skills go much faster when you have glue skills in place. Once you have had a chance to train glue skills, you will never return to performance training without them in your future dogs!
