walks
Walking for Fitness - its all about the equipment. Take a look at the video and see how this leash choice influences the way my dog walks. Can you see how having the wrong piece of equipment if not helping my dog have a productive walk, through the lens of this walk being for fitness?
Want to learn more about some of a basic things you can do at home that will help improve your dog's fitness, like just going for walks. I'm hosting a live FREE webinar on Tuesday December 10th at 9pm EST to talk about position change, fitness walks and more
Register for that webinar here to get a link
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUqc-CgpjIuHNO734AgriYlcpt122n4LxeZ
Position changes are a huge, huge part of canine fitness. Training things like these 3 downs is part of why I love canine fitness, the combination of dog training plus teaching your dog to move their body on their own without force or lures creates this really great bond between handler and dog
Besides the different downs here, we have different ways to sit and stand.
In the spirit of Thanksgiving and being grateful for all our followers, I’m thinking about putting together a FREE webinar on position changes and some tips on how to train them
Throw this post a like/love if you’d want to see that
As much as I share fitness here I also spend a lot of time trick training because really fitness is just a targeted, specific use of tricks
High performance athletes utilize sport specific training to do from just in shape to in shape for sportWe should be adding sport specific canine conditioning as well which is geared toward helping the dog be conditioned for sport like movements Following up from yesterday you can see in these clips how much angle the dog has when coming out of these turns or preparing for them. This is what makes the Amplify Your Agility program so unique! I have studied the movements the dogs have during agility and created exercises for some of the unique ways our agility dogs use their body. Sport specific exercises for our sport dogs, to help make them better athletes and be physically prepared to compete!K9Nut.com/agilityfitness
Teaching our dogs balance on contacts goes beyond just teaching a dog to be comfortable on narrow surfaces and being able to keep their feet on them. It is a great start but we can do SO much more to educate our dogs for body awareness in space and also to truly understand how to find balance and control their body in motion. This is why I have created the Amplify Your Agility canine fitness program!! 6 lessons to take you beyond the basics and really help to educate you dog on how to move and gain strength and control with their entire bodyLearn more and sign up here https://k9nut.com/agilityfitness/
If this was your workout, we would call this just a workout for general fitness, and if you had to do this every single day you would not only get bored you wouldn’t be getting better at any specific activity for sport. So it’s great you are moving and getting in fitness but it doesn’t serve any longer term goals…..so let’s apply this same thought process to our canine fitness routines #fitness #caninefitness #generalfitness #sportspecificfitness #k9fitness
Part 1
Power of Sport Specific Exercises
Cavalettis are a commonly used piece of canine fitness equipment, I use them often and for many different reasons. They are so adaptable and their use translate perfectly into dog agility as our agility dogs often understand what to do when they see the picture of a bar with two uprights.
Here is Part 1 or 3 of an exercise I use to not only help my dog gain core strength, balance and flexibility I’m taking a basic curved cavalettis setup and adding some twists to it to it to work on the concept and body control for collection, not just to a jump but to weaves or any where our dogs go from running in extension to shortening their stride for collection.
**If you are new to curved cavalettis setup, the basic setup here is 4 cones and 4 poles, I have the cones bunched up in a way that I can space my poles out in a way that the center of the poles is at my dog’s extension cavaletti spacing. If you don’t have that distance, we typically start at a distance equal to your dog’s shoulder height (unless you know your dog is very straight in the front then you might want to do 1in less). The height of the pole is low, I have it angled down using the lowest hole on my cones, this does not need to increase with taller dogs, low for all dogs is important**
If you want me to share Part 2 share this post and help get at least 50 likes to this video and I will release the next steps of this exercise
Jumping
Accidents like this happen but with concentrated effort of fitness to help our dogs with this kind of jump we are staking the desk in our favor that they won’t happen. Check out the Canine Fitness of Jumping Webinar Series to learn some exercises to help strengthen your dog for these exact type of scenarios
Details at K9Nut.com/webinars
(Note this was 2022 and we thankfully haven’t had any incidents like this while following a protocol that helps to keep him stronger)
Summer Cavalettis
One way I like to acclamate my dogs to heat is using our cavalettis
It’s a fairly low stress exercise and it easily to stop when time is up and get dogs cooled down. If I know I’m going to be spending a lot of time in the heat during a season I make sure to build up our time working outside so the dogs can build up a greater tolerance for the heat.
And then making sure we don’t push it, know your dogs signs of being hot and spot before they get over heated
Movement pattern
It’s the last day of Canine Fitness Month, hope you enjoyed some of the equipment combination workouts.
At the end of the day you can get a lot of bang for your buck without combining pieces or combining by just a few, it doesn’t need to be fancy, as long as you are getting in some fitness workouts you’ll dog will benefit
My last video is sharing my favorite way to combine equipment and that’s in a movement pattern, dish-to-dish style, especially for young dogs but I do this will all my dogs because it’s a basic pattern and just fun for them! And it’s a fun way to use a lot of pieces all at once :)
Squats
Another commonly used piece of canine fitness equipment is the Klimb, and you can pair the Klimb with so many other pieces
In this combination we have Klimbs paired with a sitting platform. Having a surface that is the proper sitting with for you dog is important for a lot of exercises so we can help control how a dog moves through an exercise. Make sure what ever you use it has a nice, non-slip surface on it!
So this exercise is a squat to stand using he sitting platform to control the rear end and the Klimbs for a front limb target
Pops
Here is an equipment combination and exercise for you to play with over the weekend.
Using a balance pad (can use another stable block here too), a single cavaletti and two balance discs, he have the dog pop up and pivot in one motion
I left a few errors in the video so you can see how the dogs want to just step back and forth, which that is a good exercises on it’s own, but the advanced version would be to get the nice pops I show.
Only a few more days in April and of this series of exercises with equipment combinations, so if there is a combination of products you’d like me to feature put them in the comments
