Alex Robinson Performance Dog Training

Part of getting competition ready is building your dogs ability to perform under duress. Now that Sushi has a base layer of heelwork fitness. I am going to start pushing her ability to exert herself under some controlled fatigue. At the end of an intense sprint based session, I set Sushi up to offer one straight of heelwork. I am just after a moment where she pushes through and gives me a bit more. I never ask for much in these sessions, just one single exertion of effort in the context of heelwork. This will build the belief that she can push and try. In the video, I accidentally ask for a little too much… she lowers her lift a little. This is where I trust my training that she can pick herself up and try unprompted… Sure enough a stride later, she lifts in intensity. Sushi can be inclined to raise her left front higher than her right. To counter this, I try and time most my rewards with the left leg in the air. The one caveat is that you can build too much dog and they bleed drive when everything is picture perfect (most dogs don’t need to worry about this though!!).

First Wednesday of one on one lessons completed! Big thank you to everyone for being so teachable and willing to learn! We have our start points… let’s smash some goals!

I think most seminar presenters or trainers can agree that the most common question we get asked is what do we do when our dog loses attention/gets distracted/gets it wrong? I truly believe if you’re asking the above you’re looking in the wrong place for the magic you’re after. You need to shift your focus to the other opposite end. You should be looking at what trainers do when the dog gets things right. This is where the magic happens. This is where trainers build the right emotion into the work. This is where trainers transfer the feelings and value of reward into the work. This is where confidence and self esteem is built. Mistakes shouldn’t be made from lack of effort or attention, rather they should be spectacular and spontaneous explosions of drive and power. You’ll find the best trainers have levels to their praise, levels to their rewards, and most importantly levels to their emotions. They know how to build emotions into the rewards they use so that they can inspire and motivate the biggest of efforts in their dogs. If your rewards don’t have levels to them. You have no room to be adaptive and dynamic in your reward strategies and therefore able to explain to your dog that maximum effort is worth their while and not just doing the bare minimum. This goes back to one of my mantras what you put in, is what you get out. If you can only give your dog bare minimum, if you’re not blessed with a Lassie or Rin Tin Tin, you therefore have no capacity to inspire maximum effort from your dog. To contradict my whole essay above, we’re going to look at what I do when it goes wrong. This is a moment that actually occurs and I can walk you through my thought process. I am bringing Sushi back into work, I am building up her heelwork fitness, that’s my primary training goal. I work other important bits and pieces along the way - though they’re not as important. In this video is a Sushi gets distracted and looks away. What’s in the front of

Heelwork truly is the sum of the reinforcement history. Not just how you reward or what you reward with. It’s which parts you reward and how you reward them. It’s also about your dogs inherent feelings around teamwork, and if they value working with you on an intrinsic level. Heelwork is built up of many concepts. Two that I really focus on are movement and position. I’ve always likened the relationship between movement and position as an arms race, because as you work on each thing, you’re constantly trying to catch up and or get ahead. But it didn’t allow for the finished product where both exist in perfect harmony. Truthfully with each dog you may only experience perfection fleetingly - but that pursuit is what makes it addictive. Perhaps now I consider the relationship between movement and position to be like two masses on a balance scale. Picture it in your minds eye. A balance scale with two plates - one is movement and one is position. Your job is to balance the two by training each concept. Each time you reward your dog for a concept you add a mass to the balance scale. Initially each session may have a profound impact on the harmony and completely throw the balance off. The plot twist is every dog has a different start weight on each of the plates representing movement and position. To explain it literally, if you build too much value and therefore drive to movement, your position will weaken and your dog will float wherever momentum takes them. If you build too much value and drive for position, your movement will weaken, your dog will get sticky in their action. To throw a spanner in the works, if you build too much value for the “up” component in movement, you can lose your movement! As you train and develop your dog you’ll learn how to balance the two in your quest for perfection. Sushi, as extravagant and big moving as she is, wasn’t always easy or naturally fluid. It’s been a true labour of love. Her movement is super import

Can anyone tell me what I am marking and rewarding - and why? Hint - I’m a fraction of a second late marking…

If heelwork is trained right your dog should build in strength through the pattern. Here’s a few pointers: Don’t rely on momentum to generate drive! Instead teach your dog that they can make you move by bringing effort! It’s their job to make you move and make you be fun! They will learn that their energy and commitment is what will make you move, become the life of the party and deliver reinforcement. This means STOP giving your dog big games and your energy in the warm up when all they have done is flop out the crate half awake! Instead give them easy achievable tasks with rewards that reflect the task difficulty. As your dog builds in intensity, begin to ask for more and then you BETTER pay up! Teach your dogs that MORE = MORE. In this video, pay attention to the pace I walk as it correlates to the first point. It’s not fast and there is no energy in my step. Sushi has to make me move by bringing the energy into her gait. I am bringing Sushi back to heelwork fitness post maternity and injury leave. I am refreshing her that it’s her job to bring energy when I drop in energy - this is why I stop and this is why my turns are slow. A key point here, is notice how Sushi gaits DESPITE my slower than normal walking pace and with the frequent disruptions… a big competition ring/training area, and a flowing heel work pattern is helpful BUT if you are reliant on those in order to show off your dogs rhythm, you are relying on momentum to generate drive. This video doesn’t show how to create what I’ve described in the first part, rather it showcases what’s further in to my dogs education.

Building perfection piece by piece 💖✨

Miso’s first offered down to sit! Pretty stoked, from limited predictable lured reps, she cottoned on to what I was after and offered a pretty snazzy version of the behaviour!

Did anyone notice the cheeky little rename? 🐶💕 rebranding to come…

Handler Activation

I thought I’d upload this video for two reasons: 1) look how cute Miso is, and 2) do you notice how attentive and how resolute she is in her quest to get my attention before I’ve even started training? The second point is something that I’ve begun to take for granted because it happens so effortlessly. It is something I will spend time rewarding now I’ve had the reminder. What I love is that Miso has offered this attentiveness all because my body language and my intent is that we’re about to do something together. When you’re purposeful and consistent, your body language will become the biggest cue for your dog for what’s coming next. So, how can you get this with your dog? Spend time rewarding them when they interact with you (without you cuing the attention/interaction) in every day life - this teaches them that they can start the conversation, or it teaches them that they can make you reward them with the simple act of giving you attention, this is what we call handler activation! Another thing you can do, is get up and move with the intention that you’re going to go play or train your dog, if they come and give you attention, reward your dog! Have a party! Have fun! Your dog will then start to pay attention to your intention and use that as a cue! Supplementary point - do you see how in my video, the first things I reward when I start the training session is attention? Your competition behaviours are only as good as your foundation allows them to be! Never neglect those foundation skills!!!

Girl, you walk like a bitch 💅🏻💅🏻💅🏻

Reward based training

I haven’t posted on here in a while and I figured I would share something that I’m now able to articulate. I’m not reinventing the wheel or necessarily sharing something new here. I want to talk about one element of training your dog. We all utilise rewards, in my opinion this is how rewards work and here are some points to consider so that you can maximise the yield of your training! The dogs execution of the behaviour is the sum of their reinforcement history. The aforementioned statement goes beyond click treat; it includes the dogs inherent feelings natural or manipulated by you, environmental factors and experiences while performing the behaviour, presence of intrinsic drives etc. At its most basic level positive reinforcement training relies on the transfer of the value of the reward to the behaviour. This means after consistently rewarding your dog for doing the behaviour, they will begin to associate the behaviour with the reward. The caveat here is consistently reward - the dog will not form the association between reward and behaviour if there is not significant reward history. Now if we know the dog associates the reward with the behaviour we have to look at how the dog feels about the reward. What I mean by this is how bad do they want the reward, what energy and mental state the presence of the reward triggers. Because what they give you in the presence of the reward, what they will do to get the reward (chase/lunge/leap around etc) is the maximum energy and the mindset that will transfer into the behaviour after consistent reward. The next point isn’t groundbreaking or anything new, we all do it, but perhaps with varying degrees of intention and purpose. Before you go about training behaviours you have to know how your dogs feel about rewards. What I want to talk about is we have the power to influence performance based on our dogs feelings/energy/mindset that rewards can trigger. Therefore to get the most out of rewards in trainin