Book Megan

Essential Skills 
Handling Skills 
Obstacle Skills
Ring Prep Skills

These are the four pillars of dog agility training.  Traditional seminars hyper-focus on the Handling Skills, leaving the other three areas of training under-developed in most teams. Megan strives to balance the scales and bring a more balanced approach to agility training to her seminars. 
Read below about the sub-topics these pillars can be broken into. 

Essential Skills

These are the skills needed to maximize clarity, efficiency, and success in training.

How Training Works  

Steps to structuring your training for clean loops and clear communication with your dog. Students will learn how to begin and end training sessions that promote focus and engagement from start to finish, as well as how to transition between exercises and take breaks during training sessions without ending the training time.

Reinforcer Skills 

 Clarity surrounding how and when to collect reinforcement is the #1 problem solver in dog agility. Having multiple reinforcement strategies in your tool box gives you the ability to leave rewards pre-placed out on course, hand your rewards over to your instructor while you train, or run with rewards in your hand without fear of your dog jumping up to grab your arm.

Handler Mechanics: Key Movements  

These 16 exercises are the building blocks of all agility handling techniques. Building fluency in these movements makes learning handling much easier later on in your training.

Leash Skills  

The majority of your time spent at agility events is on leash. There are a few key skills regarding the leash that make training and trialing so much easier. Learn about those skills here.

Stationing   

This valuable skill is the gateway to so many concepts our agility dogs need to thrive in the sport like: calm crating, waiting your turn, startlines, stopped contacts, and any behavior that requires patience and sustained focus from our dogs.

Handling Skills

Handling skills cover not only the techniques and movements we use on course but also the way we see the course from the dog’s perspective and plan our handling strategy based on that information.

Technique Training 

In technique training seminars students work through the step-by-step process for teaching new techniques to themselves and their dogs. These seminars typically cover 4 new techniques per day and students will work on handler mechanics, basic training, short seqeuncing, and application of those new techniques.

Concepts 

Handling concepts are the skills we need in order to accurately apply the handling techniques that we know on course. These concepts include: understanding your dog’s path on course, recognize and accounting for lead changes on course, choosing your optimal positions on course, and walking the course effectively.

Obstacle Skills 

There is no shortage of obstacle training to be done in dog agility: tunnels, jumps, teeters, weaves, aframes, & dogwalks! 

Each obstacle is broken down into the skills needed to teach a high level of fluency to the dog. Then, sequencing is introduced to reduce reinforcement for the individual obstacles.

Ring Prep Skills 

The holy grail of dog training is getting the exact same performance in a competition as you do in training. This process begins during training and should be layered in throughout. 

In Ring Prep, we cover:
– delayed reinforcement
– beginning and end of run routines 
– clear round training 
– event preparation 
– how to handle errors in competition 
– FEO/FixNGo
– analyzing your runs 

What to offer

Obviously, we can’t smoosh all of these amazing topics into one weekend, so deciding what to offer can be hard! Once a date in confirmed, Megan will work with seminar hosts to determine the best line-up to offer based on the individual groups’ needs.