Flyball training

I really enjoyed the flyball training today with Sizzle. The Team is doing so well and we have more than 20 dogs in the beginners class! The class was supposed to last for an hour but for the last four weeks we never finish on time, and the next class has 50 minutes wait! So they've got a new idea this week ... to split all of us into 4 different groups to learn four different things.

Every group has approximately 15 minutes to learn a thing, then we got to swap around. It was great fun but I find it a little tiring for me as we were in the smallest group, so this means we are running all the time!

The first task for us is the BOX WORK, this is to teach the dog to do a swimmer's turn. First of all, we need to find out which way the dog turns. I know Sizzle is a right handed like Sing. Luckily Sizzle is perfect going AROUND an object, so I just handled him gently over the box (from left to right) and asked him to go round and he did the box work nicely. On the second go, he was so excited that he went on top of the box and somehow trigger it and the box pop, so the third time he became a coward! I'd like to take him back for another go, unfortunatley the time ran out but I am sure we will manage that next week.

Our second task was to teach the dog how to STRIDE. I think this is easy for a bigger dog. The longer the legs, the easier to do one stride. They put 8 jumps up instead of 4, I guess the reason is to get the dog to stride in momentum. The other three dogs in our group has no problem striding but Sizzle still have a messy stride, double, double, double, single ... or double, single, single, double ...

We then moved on to STATIC RETRIEVE. Since all the dogs that come to join the flyball team, they must have at least like a ball, so retrieving a ball is not a problem but it is good to make sure they all can retrieve a static ball.

The last one was RECALL/RUN BACK. We have been doing this since day 1 so there is not a problem at all but today we are learning to get the dog to chase us and to reward the dog at the end.

Here is our training video:

Sing has a good practise session for tomorrow's indoor tournament. More news tomorrow.