Podcasts about paw pods

Summary: Julie Daniels has worked with dogs her whole life. In fact, she learned to walk by holding on to a German Shepherd. Today she is one of the foremost names in the sport of dog agility in the United States. She was one of the early champions of the sport and helped many clubs throughout the country get up and running. She owns and operates both Kool Kids Agility in Deerfield, NH, and White Mountain Agility in North Sandwich, NH. Julie is well known as a premier teacher at all levels of play. She has competed, titled and won with all sorts of dogs throughout the years, including two Rottweilers, a Springer Spaniel, a Cairn Terrier, two Corgis, and four Border Collies. She is the only person to make USDAA National Grand Prix finals with a Rottie or a Springer, and she did it two times each. She is also a two-time national champion and a two-time international champion. Next Episode:  To be released 9/14/2018. TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we’ll be talking to Julie Daniels. Julie has worked with dogs her whole life. In fact, she learned to walk by holding on to a German Shepherd. Today she is one of the foremost names in the sport of dog agility in the United States. She was one of the early champions of the sport and helped many clubs throughout the country get up and running. She owns and operates both Kool Kids Agility in Deerfield, NH, and White Mountain Agility in North Sandwich, NH. Julie is well known as a premier teacher at all levels of play. She has competed, titled and won with all sorts of dogs throughout the years, including two Rottweilers, a Springer Spaniel, a Cairn Terrier, two Corgis, and four Border Collies. She is the only person to make USDAA National Grand Prix finals with a Rottie or a Springer, and she did it two times each. She is also a two-time national champion and a two-time international champion. Hey Julie! Welcome to the podcast. Julie Daniels: Hi Melissa. So glad to be back with you! Melissa Breau: I’m glad to have you! To start us out, can you just share a little bit of information about the dogs in your life right now and what you’re working on with them? Julie Daniels: Oh yeah, everybody’s favorite question. My current pack is just three Border Collies. I have one who’ll be 13 very, very soon, and she does whatever she wants, completely spoiled, it’s just wonderful to see. She’s doing great. And my competition dog is now 10 years old, which seems impossible to believe. I’ve just moved him down from Championship to Performance and Preferred level so that he can jump a lower jump height. But he’s doing great and we’re having a ball. And I have a youngster named Koolaid, whom anybody who takes my classes has been following now since the last couple of years. She’s just turned 3, and she’s dynamite and so challenging and fun to train. Always has been, always will be. She keeps me young, keeps me getting smarter, keeps my chops honed every single day. So those are my three Border Collies. Melissa Breau: I wanted to talk today about canine confidence. Can you define what confidence is when it comes to our dogs? Julie Daniels: Oh boy. Confidence can be so elusive, and I also find confidence in dogs and people both to be very elastic. It sort of comes and goes, and they look great, and then all of a sudden we’re shrinking because something makes us feel insecure, and sometimes it’s not environmental, it’s mental. So confidence is tough to define, but let’s consider confidence to be a sense of personal well-being felt by the dog. How does that sound? Melissa Breau: That certainly makes sense to me. Julie Daniels: In other words, an optimism that all will be well. Melissa Breau: If that’s our definition, what are the differences between a confident dog and a not confident dog? Why is that confidence so important for dog sports and stuff we want to be doing with our dogs? Julie Daniels: I think it’s so important, because the world throws us curve balls on a regular basis and life does not go as expected. When that happens to the confident dog, as it will every single day pretty much, the confidence of some dogs carries through a sense of wellbeing and optimism that all will be all right when the world surprises them. A dog who is not confident doesn’t feel that way. I think what happens is a dog who has an internal or higher level of confidence tends to say, “Oh boy, what is that?” when he sees something unexpected, and that’s of course what we’re trying to develop. The dog who is not confident, whether it be in the moment or whether it be an overall set point, that dog tends to say, “Oh no, what is that?” So there are the two extremes: “Oh boy, something new!” “Oh no, I’ve never seen that before!” Those are the two extremes between the dog who has the wellbeing, the optimism, afforded by internal confidence versus the dog who has a much lower confidence set point. Melissa Breau: How much of that is just innate — who the dog is — versus something you can train or teach? Julie Daniels: Tough question, but not as tough a question as it used to be, because we know that quite a bit is innate, and we also know … actually, if I can borrow from research done on humans, we know for a fact that human beings can reset their confidence set point, their happiness set point, their optimism set point. We can rewire and reframe in humans. And certainly it’s the same in dogs. You can see overall changes in the confidence set point and the happiness set point as you work with these problems, so it’s not a life sentence. If the innate set point is low in terms of confidence, happiness, optimism, all these things which we want for our dogs in their lives, there is so, so much we can do. Thanks to research on humans via, let’s say, SPECT analysis and many other brain work, we can measure the activity centers and the levels of involvement in different areas of the brain, and we can know for a fact that it’s quite possible to reset and rewire even, neurologically, the happiness and confidence and joy centers in the brain. So we can change, for our dogs as well as for ourselves, we can change the hand that we were dealt with. It is quantifiable and measurable, at least in humans, that many, many people have successfully done so. So it’s not something that is fated, if your dog happens to have been born less confident than you would like. Melissa Breau: That’s really interesting. I hadn’t realized there was research that’s been done on that in people. That’s neat. Julie Daniels: Let me make mention of my personal favorite book, which is definitely a layperson’s book. It’s by Daniel Amen, M.D. Dr. Amen is one of the leading experts in the world on SPECT analysis of the brain in humans, and his book is quite amazing. Change Your Brain, Change Your Life. Melissa Breau: Interesting. Julie Daniels: Well worth looking up. Melissa Breau: For those who are starting out with a dog that’s a little on the less confident side, where do you start? What does that type of training look like? How do you help them reset their brain? Julie Daniels: Well, it goes without saying, but it should be mentioned: there are no mistakes. We don’t call out mistakes on a dog who already is harder on himself than any of us would ever be. I think that’s probably the best start point is there are no mistakes. Anything that the dog offers is going to be well received and reinforced. It’s not simple, and yet it is that simple. We want to build the dog’s feelings of wellbeing first, so no mistakes. By that I mean anything that the dog offers is by definition correct and reinforceable. That’s where to start. And this is in daily life. This is not a measure of “I told you to do this,” or “I told you to do that.” I’m not talking about training. I’m talking about anything the dog offers in daily life. Melissa Breau: What does that look like? Can you walk me through an example? Julie Daniels: I would want to help any dog of any age who feels insecure. I would want to help that dog become attracted to life. To, let’s say, novelty. So one of the things that I advise people to do all the time, and I’m just saying this over and over and over, it’s so easy to do, and it’s amazing that days go by and we don’t think to do it. When your dog lacks confidence, you should make a habit of taking beloved familiar items around your house and putting them in unfamiliar places. That is the first step toward developing attraction for novelty. That’s what we want. Remember when I said earlier we’re trying to develop the dog’s ability to say, “Oh boy, what is that?” and we currently have a dog that says, “Oh no, what is that?” So by taking beloved items … they can’t be just neutral items. They really should be things that the dog already enjoys, for example, his food bowl. There’s a good one. Put it on your head. Just put it upside-down on your head after you’ve washed it. There you are, standing in the kitchen, washing the dog food bowls, and your dog’s probably going to be interested in that because it’s a beloved item, a familiar and well-trusted item, and there you go, you just put it upside-down on your head. Perfect. Do something like that every single day. Pretty soon, when you make yourself do it every day, pretty soon you’re doing it ten times a day because it’s just fun. Melissa Breau: Makes you laugh. Julie Daniels: But you forget, if you don’t make it a conscious effort initially, and sometimes you’ll think at the end of the day, Well, what did I show this dog that was different in a positive way, that was unexpected and novel in a positive way? Because obviously if you’ve scared him, you haven’t done any good. So it’s got to be a beloved item, and it’s got to be put in a novel place but a familiar place. We’re not talking about taking it on the road, because you said, “Where do you start?” You start at home. You start in a comfortable, happy place. Melissa Breau: If you put that food bowl on your head, are you then going to get lower so that the dog can sniff you and sniff the bowl? Julie Daniels: That’s a great idea! See? You’re good at this already! Yeah, that’s a great idea. But play that by ear, Melissa, because if your dog said, “Oh no, what is that?” then that’s a mistake. But if your dog said, “Hey, that’s my food bowl,” now it’s perfect, and I think what you said is just great: scootch right down. You don’t need to say anything. This is one thing that I think is difficult to do. We want to talk our dogs into something: “Come and check it out.” And that really is not what you should do. You should allow the dog to show you whether he’s interested or curious enough to come and see it. Anything that he offers you is reinforceable, even if he decides to leave the room. And the best reinforcement if he backs away would be what? What would the absolute best reinforcement you could give him if he backs away, because that’s not really what you intended to do, because you realize that unexpectedly you’re on the wrong side of confidence. So what it’s very important for you to do, if he shows you that he’s actually concerned, is take it off immediately. I would say take the food bowl off your head, put it right side up, put it on the floor between you, and say nothing. Allow your dog to make a decision to be attracted to his beloved food bowl in this new context of it being on the floor “where it belongs.” Now you can have your reinforceable event and you’re not going to cause a problem. I think very often, it happens so very often, either with young puppies or generally with dogs who lack confidence, I think so often we mean well, but we scare them. Melissa Breau: Because they’re already not sure about things, and we’re throwing novel things at them, and that can be intimidating. Julie Daniels: Yes. Melissa Breau: I know a lot of people who wouldn’t appreciate being put in front of a full room to give a presentation, because that’s one of the things that makes them feel not confident. Julie Daniels: Yeah, I think so. Melissa Breau: Would you mind sharing maybe one of the other exercises that you use to help build confidence, or a little bit more on how you work on that with them? Julie Daniels: Attraction to novelty, I think, is fundamentally first. That really is where to start. But let’s look at once we’ve made a few inroads, and now, in addition to being able to put the food bowl on your head and your dog thinks that’s funny, now you switch to a colander and you’ve got other things on your head. So I think once you’ve got an inroad made with your dog, I think the next thing for me is substrates. Now you want to put things under foot and allow your dog to feel them. It’s not just about “Oh my gosh, plastic is so hard,” and “Tarps make a lot of noise,” and “Bubble wrap — oh no.” It’s not just about that. It’s about things that might feel different neurologically. For example, when I started working with a teacher in canine fitness, my little Koolaid didn’t like the nubby Paw Pods. Anybody who’s done any fitness work knows about those little nubbies on the various pieces of equipment. They almost always have them, and she just didn’t like that at all. This is in general quite a confident, self-assured puppy, but those things, boy, she just didn’t like the nubbies, and so of course being the mom I am, I thought, Well, why don’t I just teach her the skills on smooth surfaces first, and then we’ll transfer to nubbies, which would sound like a logical progression, but I was advised against it for a very important reason, which I have internalized and embraced. And that is those little nubbies are actually very important stimulators neurologically, and so we want the feet to be on the nubbies. I really took that to heart and went with it, and I am so glad that I did. Just so you know the end of the story, Koolaid loves the nubbies and can pound onto four Pods, pretty much stick the landing, and is very happy beyond the nubbies. But it was a process getting her used to it. But that sort of fits the good advice that I was given from very good teachers who have the eye and have the chops to guide me in my canine fitness classes. That sort of thinking fits perfectly with how I feel about substrate training to build confidence. You want obviously to start with things that are relatively non-threatening to that particular dog. Some dogs need to start with smooth surfaces. Plastic, for example, meaning hard, molded plastic. It just feels different and is smooth underfoot. Other dogs would do better to start with crinkled-up paper inside a box or shredded paper. Some dogs are a long ways away from being able to step on empty water bottles, and other dogs just jump into the kiddie pools full of empty water bottles. So it’s a continuum as to who likes what. Remember you said earlier about it’s so a dog can be confident about one thing but not another thing. Well, look at little Koolaid who didn’t like the nubbies, but boy, she loves empty water bottles. And normal, everyday grinding sounds that many dogs are offended by, she was actually attracted to going in. So you never know. We all have different feelings about substrates, and I think one of the best things you can do as a second step after novelty would be to introduce and to find out the hierarchy of what feels good to your dog under foot and what feels a little bit concerning to your dog under foot, and try to build … not just tolerance, I don’t work with tolerance, but try to work for attraction to these things that might be concerning to your dog initially. So substrates come after novelty. Melissa Breau: I want to talk about that just a little bit more. Some dogs definitely seem confident in a lot of situations, like you mentioned Koolaid, but they’re terribly unconfident in other situations, or in a particular setup, or something. I was curious how common that is, and how someone can work to break apart one of those more complex cases to figure out what it is that they’re actually seeing, what it is that the dog is maybe not so sure about. Julie Daniels: It’s very common, and what is more, it’s very normal. I think probably most of us have little things that are harder for us than they are for other people, and little things that other people find difficult which we find easy. So I don’t think it’s the least bit strange. I think it’s to be expected. I do find that if you have a dog who’s in general a little bit more reserved, it’s tempting to assume he’s reserved about everything, and that’s not necessarily the case either. So it could be that you just need to explore and experiment with what kinds of things do bother this dog, and what kinds of things is this dog a little bit more self-assured about. By that I mean he has an optimistic sense when he goes toward it that this might be a good thing. When you see that in your dog, I think you want to make note of it, that your dog is not afraid of everything. Many people who think their dogs are afraid of everything are just plain wrong about that. And if you don’t give the dog a chance at this early level that you and I are talking about, then you really won’t know where your dog’s strengths do lie, and almost every dog has some. Melissa Breau: So, I’m going to take the next step here. I know we’re planning a rerun of your webinar on all of this stuff on building canine confidence. That’s what inspired me to bring up the topic to do a podcast about it. Can you share a little bit on what you cover in that webinar? Maybe who might want to take it? Julie Daniels: I hope everybody will take it! First of all, it makes me so proud and happy that I work for a person who values the quality of the webinar, the quality of the recording of the webinar, so much that she is going to give this webinar to the people who bought it the first time for free, because the audio — my fault, not your fault, Melissa — was absolutely terrible, and it was not what it should have been. So you and I have been practicing, you’ve coached me on where to be, and you and I have been playing with the microphone to make sure. I bought a better microphone, I have a better setup, and I know that the audio will not fail this next round. But it just makes me so happy that I get another crack at this, Melissa. That I’m going to get a chance to present the material in a way that everybody can hear it the way I intended it to be heard. And the fact that my boss is somebody who wants everybody who bought it the first time to have the benefit of this improved recording production values makes me so happy. So I hope everybody will tune in, of course. We will be talking about the various things that we can do to help dogs who feel insecure, and we’ll be talking about what’s that look like, what does it mean. We’ll pretty much take off running with the kinds of questions that you’re asking me here today. We’ll be talking about creating attraction to novelty, and we’ll be talking about building of course a positive conditioned emotional response. The all-important CER that everybody talks about these days has so much to do with whether the dog is able to work on confidence in the first place. So this initial attraction, this initial feeling of wellbeing becomes a baseline of optimism so that the dog can feel happy about coming into training situations expecting to do well. It means a lot to me. The next step is really that we want to build initiative. The subject of this webinar, building canine confidence, is way too broad. But we’re zeroing in on two factors: initiative and self-reliance. After we’ve talked a little bit about the baselines that you and I are talking about, we’re going to talk about building initiative as a major force in helping dogs become more confident and rewiring their brains to change their confidence set point and their happiness set point even, if you will. So building initiative, obviously in small steps, and the first steps will vary from dog to dog, as we’ve already talked about. But all first steps should come from a feeling that all will be well. That’s what we’re after, that positive CER, and maintaining that positive conditioned emotional response as we go forward and ask the dog to experiment in the world with more and more novel stimuli. I think I also will be talking a little bit about how it’s OK if the confidence of the team, the dog-person team, originates with the handler. I know many, many successful dogs in sports, and I’ve had several myself, who would not be able to run with anyone else, for example. And I know obviously many dogs who don’t much care who they run with. They just want to run, and if they get good information from their handlers, so much the better, but the game is so much fun and it has value of its own. But it doesn’t have to be that way in order for a dog to be successful, no matter what the sport is. Obviously my sport is agility, but I don’t think it matters. I’ve seen many, many, many teams where the dog gets that initial charge of confidence from the handler, the leader if you will, and then from there it just energizes and snaps, and you can see that teamwork, that confidence, being passed back and forth from the dog to the handler. And they reinforce each other as they go, whatever the sport may be. So I want to build that for people and their dogs, and it’s so very doable for us to be able to help dogs in that way and build a team using these kinds of exercises to build confidence. So I have several fun things to do along the way that make that much easier, including we raise the dog’s energy level, very important, motion builds confidence. I have people feeding in motion rather than, “Oh, we’re done. Now let’s stop and eat.” I don’t do it that way. I feed in motion because movement gets the brain working, movement helps optimism, movement builds confidence, believe it or not. It’s very important. I also work hard to put the dog, if you will, in his prefrontal cortex, since we were talking about the brain earlier. But if you consider it a continuum from the unconscious reactions to the conscious reactions, the dog who has a low confidence set point is, generally speaking, operating from the limbic system, is operating where fear resides, operating where the “Oh no” resides. What we want to do is bring him forward into his rational brain so he can be engaged with his brain, he can use his brain to solve problems in a constructive way. So here’s where we absolutely need the dog to welcome novelty rather than shrink from novelty, so that the dog can predict fun and predict happiness as he comes forward into a novel task, a novel presentation in the world, whatever it be. And then we talk in the webinar a good deal about choice and control, how important those things are, how important it is to let the dog make decisions, to give the dog choices all along the way. Not just with the end goal behavior, but all along the training continuum the dog should be able to make small choices and find that every single choice is reinforceable. The whole bit about breaking things down into small pieces, as you said, part of the beauty of being able to break things down into small pieces is that the dog gets to make all these tiny choices and every single choice is reinforceable. It’s a wonderful thing for the dog to learn how successful he can really be. So yeah, we might have an end goal behavior, and we’re breaking it down for that reason, but we really should be vested in the process rather than the outcome, and we should be thinking of this as, “He’s going to get to make twenty little choices, twenty correct choices, in the next two minutes, and that is plenty for this one session, and then we’ll come back and do it some more.” Melissa Breau: That’s awesome, and I think that explains to people both what your approach is for this, and gives them a little bit of insight into what they can expect to learn even more about if they join for the webinar. I also wanted to ask you about the other thing you have coming up, which is your new Magic Mat class. Can you share a little on what the class will cover and what kinds of problems those skills help with? Julie Daniels: Oh boy, yeah, let’s change the subject. This is a new class, which I’ve just been designing over the summer. It’s called Magic Mat: Where to be, when to go, and what to do. But it really is more broad than that. Magic Mat is a good, catchy name, and everybody knows me for my dedication to matwork, and certainly mats will be covered. But it’s really about what I call placement props – stations and platforms. So yes, we will cover some targeting and perch work and matwork, for sure, but we’re also doing platforms and stations and boundary training and that kind of thing, all by dog’s choice. So all kinds of methods and problem-solving techniques based on where to be. I put up a picture in the course description today. I put in my front yard, in my door yard, driveway, I literally hauled out a whole bunch of stations and platforms and targets and various things, a perch or two, that I use around the house on a regular basis. I put them in my front yard and took a picture, honestly, because I want people to understand that (a) you need a variety and (b) you’ve got this stuff around your house. Everybody’s got something. You don’t have to buy an expensive item, a Klimb table. One of my favorite raised stations is a wooden pallet that I got for free, and I put a yoga mat on it. It’s very common in my class for people to use a chair, a sling chair, a canvas chair because we take those to the shows all the time, so it’s very handy to have your dog trained to hang out on your chair. Not that you would leave them there, that’s not really what I mean, while you go have a Pepsi. But it’s a hangout place with you so that the dog can hang out with you in a comfortable and confident way without disconnecting. It’s a place to relax, a place to be, and a place to, for example, wait your turn or wait for something exciting to happen or be polite during dinner. That’s a good one. We use stations here for that. It’s not taught by “You have to go to your station, now stay.” That’s the opposite of anything I would do. It’s taught around … here, I’ll just give you an example of how on earth would you train your dog to go wait in a certain place while you’re having dinner and just hang out there, and do it all the time.   My now 13-year-old was instrumental in choosing her own place to wait during dinner, and she chose this very cushy armchair in the other room, the living room, being right next to the dining room. All of a sudden the other dogs were a little bit closer, and I noticed that she was over there in the living room, on this chair, with her adorable little chin coming over the top of the chair, “Hello, anyone, anyone?” So I decided, OK, she’s getting some macaroni. So I just got up from the table, walked over, and gave her a piece of macaroni. That’s awesome for her to decide. My friend from Virginia used to say, “Go long. Teach them to go long.” Instead of being the dog who’s bugging the people, be the dog who’s out in the backfield, and good stuff will be thrown to you. So that’s how I treated her, and that’s how she taught herself to station on a chair in the other room when we were eating. Isn’t that clever? So dog’s choice is a big component. For example, where I live now, in quarters that are a lot smaller, I have set up a couple of stations which I think will work fine during dinner, and I’ll let the dogs tell me whether I’m right nor not right. They will hang out, they’ll tend to go to the station and usually sit. One of my dogs would always choose down over sit. That’s fine. A default sit is what I’m developing in Koolaid, and so she would be more apt to sit on the station. But they can do whatever they want. This is a place where they are allowed to show patience in hopefulness of being rewarded. I will admit out loud, here and now, that I am a person who would toss a piece of macaroni to the dog on the station. Perhaps you wouldn’t do that, so that’s fine. You’ll develop your own reinforcement delivery systems. But we’ll talk about things like variable interval reinforcement, and some of the things about how to develop duration by dog’s choice, because it’s not always that easy when good things are going on. So in this class we’ll do things like take turns. We will use stations so that one dog is a waiting dog and one dog is a working dog, and then we switch back and forth. I’ll talk about things like, How do you do that by dog’s choice? Does waiting need to pay more than working? I can use my own example of two brilliant agility dogs, Sport and Colt, who were very good at taking turns in this way. All of a sudden one day, I noticed a funny thing in Sport. I went to trade dogs and it was going to be Colt’s turn to wait on the station and Sport’s turn to work. As I made the switch, I saw in Sport’s face, as I said his name, I saw him say with his face, “Oh, OK, I wanted to be the waiting dog.” Of course he came out and looked pretty happy to have a turn. However, why did he want to be the waiting dog? Dogs don’t lie. Why was it a disappointment for him to hear that it was his turn? You’ve got to look at those things, and in my family it was very clear: Sport had to be paid more for working and less for waiting, and Colt had to be paid more for waiting and less for working. It was much harder for Colt to wait. But in Sport’s case, once he learned what a great deal, a better deal, I had made waiting than working, guess what: “Actually, I’d rather be the waiting dog, if you don’t mind. If it’s all the same to you, just throw 17 cookies over here by the station, and Colt can have another turn.” So you’ve got to go dog by dog, and you’ve got to be prepared to switch it up, as I had to do. Over time, the dog is a member of that thinking, working team, and the dog is going to have opinions, and the dog’s feelings are going to develop as the game goes along and the dog becomes an expert in the game. So be prepared. It’s a two-way feedback system. All training should be a two-way feedback system. Learn from your dog as the game goes on, and listen to what he’s saying about how it’s going to play. Such fun, it is so much fun to use placement props. And of course if you’re interested in the TEAM Foundations training, I’m terribly interested in that, I absolutely love it. I don’t know that I’ll ever go for TEAM titles, although I guess why not? But I don’t think they’re necessary in order to get the utmost out of the program. Denise did a podcast at one point, maybe you remember it, about TEAM, and one of the things that she mentioned still resonates with me. I still advise my students to do it. She said, “If you’re having trouble in obedience,” she of course was talking about obedience, but I’m not, I’m talking about agility, the exact same thing applies. She said, “If you’re having trouble with some of the advanced exercises in obedience, just take …” I think she said a week, maybe she said two weeks, but “take that time off from all that advanced training and just do the exercises from TEAM 1, Level 1, and then go back to your advanced work and see if you don’t notice improvement.” Well, I heard that and decided I’m going to do that with my agility people, and it was such a resounding success for the exact same reason. TEAM Foundations is for all sports. It’s not just for obedience. I don’t think it’s sport-specific at all. And much of TEAM training benefits from good station work, good platform work, good targeting skills, perch work, all kinds of really fun challenges that use what I’m calling placement platforms. Yeah, where to be, when to go, and what to do is the whole concept of this Magic Mat class, and we’ll use lots of fun things. Please, anybody who’s interested, go to the course description and click on the … I think it’s called Prerequisites and Supplies. Click on that tab to see the picture of all the cool stuff that I dragged out into my front yard, which is a subset of all the many different training props and placement platforms that I use around my own house in my everyday training. So you don’t need anything fancy. I will want you to develop a station before class so you come to class ready with a target and with a perch and with a station and with a platform. It’s not hard. We’ll be talking about that before the class actually begins on October 1. So between the week and a half or two weeks between registration and the beginning of class you’ll have lots of chance to talk about what you’d like to build or make or find, or what’s the best dimension and size for your size dog. We gear the platforms, we gear the stations, to the size of each dog, so there are some good rules of thumb to go by, and we’ll be talking about those before the class gets going. So it’ll be busy. All my classes are busy. I like them like that. There’s lots to talk about and lots of fun along the way as we see what the dog has to say about each game that we play. It’s a very, very fun process. Melissa Breau: For folks who have already taken some of your other classes, which I know you do some matwork in some of those, can you talk about the difference between what they learn in that class and what the new material in this class will dive into and what you’re planning to cover? Julie Daniels: I will cover matwork in Magic Mat. With a name like Magic Mat, I think you have to. But I’m best known for my matwork. In Week 1 of the Magic Mat class, we will do both Step 1 and Step 2 of my four-step Magic Mat protocol, so we’ll go through it a little bit more quickly. The class I’m doing now, Cookie Jar Games, dives deeply into matwork, and likewise in Baby Genius I actually go through the different steps at length. But in this Magic Mat class we will do all four steps of matwork, but we don’t dive into it quite as deeply because we have so many other kinds of placement props to use. But matwork is one of my dearest loves and really is a foundation behavior for any dog that I raise. And any dog that comes here for board and train learns matwork as well. I think it’s that powerful a motivator for the dogs. Melissa Breau: If somebody’s listening to this and trying to decide if it’s the right class for them, do you have anything on who should take the class, what kind of guidance you can give for that? Julie Daniels: Sure. I guess you could call it a concept class, because it’s a patience class. Some dogs lose confidence when they’re forced to wait, and some dogs just fry their brains over how difficult it is to wait. So it’s very compatible with people who have problems with impulse control in their dogs. For example, the dinner example that I gave is a good one. If your dog can’t hang out politely, if you have to lock your dogs away whenever you want to eat something, this is a very good class for you. It wouldn’t hurt the over-eager door greeter, either, to do a little station work. It’s very helpful for them. In my limited experience with reactive dogs, station training is very, very helpful in giving them a secure place to be where nobody will bother them. So I think it could be useful for that, but I’m not an expert in that and will not be diving into that specifically. But in terms of impulse control, I think it’s a great class for dogs who need impulse control. I think it’s a great class for confidence building and for training that is all about hurry up and wait: “We’re not going to go yet, and now you have to wait, and now we’re going to go now, and I need you at full energy now.” A lot of dogs who once you institute a pause, a major pause, in the action, inertia wins and now the dog has a great deal of trouble getting back up to full energy. This class is very good for that as well, because the “when to go” builds anticipation along with patience, and raises the value of the exercise that’s going to come after the station work is completed rep by rep. It actually builds the dog’s enthusiasm for the work at hand as well. So I think it does a lot of good for dogs who tend to get bored with training, and I think it has a lot to offer dogs who need impulse control in their training. Melissa Breau: Gotcha. Awesome. I’ve got one last question for you, Julie. It’s the question I’m asking all of my guests at the end lately. What’s something you’ve learned or been reminded of recently when it comes to dog training? Julie Daniels: Oh gosh, that’s way too easy. It just hit me over the head this past weekend. I don’t get to show all that often in agility anymore, and my competition dog, Sport, who is now 10, is a pro. Thankfully, he’s still going strong, and we’re having a lot of fun whenever we do get to get out to an agility trial. I got to trial this past weekend, not every day of the weekend, but two days out of three, and all of a sudden it became glaringly apparent that I had no start line. Here I am doing start line work on a regular basis in all my classes, in person and online. OK, I guess I haven’t trained that lately, but the dog is such a pro it would never have crossed my mind that my start line would break. But everything breaks. Everything breaks. Behavior doesn’t stay the same when you don’t work on it. So that’s the lesson. We don’t stay in the same place when we stop training. We go backwards. That’s the way it is. And here’s me leading out on the outside of a curve because I have such a good start line, and my dog passed me going 90 miles an hour. I was able to save that run by having him wait in his contact, which drew uproarious barking from him. He thought that was about the stupidest assignment he’d ever heard. But he did wait, and I got around the corner and was able to complete the opening. Not pretty. But that’s the lesson, boy, it just hit me like a ton of bricks over the weekend, like, Hmm, better do a little start line work with your pro dog, because nothing stays fixed if you don’t work on it. You have to constantly maintain all these foundation behaviors that you think you have control of. Anyway, so that was my lesson, and boy, nobody had more fun with that than all my students who were at the show. Melissa Breau: I’m sure you shared your lesson, and I’m sure they’ll take it to heart, right? Julie Daniels: I hope so. I can only hope so, yes. Melissa Breau: Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast Julie! It was great to chat again. Julie Daniels: Likewise, Melissa. Thanks for having me. Such fun to talk to you. Melissa Breau: And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in! We’ll be back next week with Sarah Stremming and Leslie Eide to talk about raising a performance puppy. If you haven’t already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. CREDITS: Today’s show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

SUMMARY: Lori Stevens is an animal behavior consultant, a professional dog trainer, a canine fitness trainer, an animal massage practitioner, and a senior Tellington TTouch® Training practitioner. She continually studies how animal behavior, movement, learning, fitness, and health all interact. She uses intimidation-free, scientific, and innovative methods, in an educational environment, to improve the health, behavior, performance, and fitness of animals. Lori gives workshops worldwide and has a private practice in Seattle, WA. She is also the creator of the Balance Harness. Lori's most recent of three DVDs by Tawser Dog Videos is co-presented with Kathy Sdao and called The Gift of a Gray Muzzle: Active Care for Senior Dogs. It focuses on improving the life of senior dogs. She teaches the popular FDSA course Helping Dogs Thrive: Aging Dogs, and will be introducing a new course this session called Helping Dogs Thrive: Fitness in Five. Links www.seattlettouch.com Next Episode:  To be released 1/26/2018, and I'll be talking to Chrissi Schranz about building reinforcers and recall training, so stay tuned! TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we'll be talking to Lori Stevens. Lori is an animal behavior consultant, a professional dog trainer, a canine fitness trainer, an animal massage practitioner, and a senior Tellington TTouch® Training practitioner. She continually studies how animal behavior, movement, learning, fitness, and health all interact. She uses intimidation-free, scientific, and innovative methods, in an educational environment, to improve the health, behavior, performance, and fitness of animals. Lori gives workshops worldwide and has a private practice in Seattle, WA. She is also the creator of the Balance Harness. Lori's most recent of three DVDs by Tawser Dog Videos is co-presented with Kathy Sdao and called The Gift of a Gray Muzzle: Active Care for Senior Dogs. It focuses on improving the life of senior dogs. She teaches the popular FDSA course Helping Dogs Thrive: Aging Dogs, and will be introducing a new course this session called Helping Dogs Thrive: Fitness in Five. Hi Lori, welcome back to the podcast. Lori Stevens: Hello Melissa. Thanks for having me back. Melissa Breau: I am very excited to talk to you again today. To start us out and remind listeners who you are, do you want to recap who the animals are that you share your life with? Lori Stevens: Sure. Since you made that plural, I'll add in my husband because humans are animals. Melissa Breau: Fair enough! Lori Stevens: Anyway, I live with my husband, Lee, and I live with my 12-and-a-half-year-old Aussie girl, Cassie. You know, I used to teach about aging dogs without actually having one, and now I have one. So after several years of teaching basically senior dogs how to have a better life, now I have one and I'm putting it to work. So it's nice to have a 12-and-a-half-year-old who's excited about doing fitness, and going to the park, and the beach, and trail outings, and all sorts of good things. Melissa Breau: You shared pictures. She's clearly in great shape. She looks awesome. Lori Stevens: Yeah, she's doing well. Melissa Breau: Good. I know from last time we talked that you're an advocate for canine fitness — probably not surprising based on what you do. But can you share a little about why it's important, especially for sports dogs? Lori Stevens: I'll start with sports. I have personal experience with seeing athletes go to the next level, and I think it's the cross-training, because they'll come in and basically say something like, “My dog keeps hitting bars. I think we need to improve something.” When we start doing some cross-training, or strengthening the core, or strengthening the legs that are involved in a jump, all those things, we see improvement in performance —surprise, surprise. I think a lot of time in sports the training is going to classes, practicing the sports, but sometimes you need to do one more level of fitness to get that extra little bit. There are so many benefits in canine fitness, things like strengthens muscles is obvious, but it really strengthens and helps the dog know when and how to engage their core muscles. That would happen automatically. It's not like they think, OK, it's time to engage my core muscles, but we do exercises where we start engaging them a lot and then it becomes more natural. You build better joint support through stronger muscles, improving flexibility, improve alignment and posture, balance and stability improve. And with that, what you get is fewer injuries, you get more confidence, you get more body awareness. And so dogs, when they're faced with a quick decision or a quick body move, they're more prepared and more confident to make that move, and stronger in that movement than they might be if they were just doing the regular training as a sport. It improves gait, movement, I just think it's fantastic. But another part of it, which I think we often leave out, is that it's a behavior changer. I have worked with fearful dogs that that was the way that I broke through to them. That confidence they get with suddenly doing things with their body that they've never done before, like hind leg targeting, I think that's a huge, huge exercise for dogs' awareness of where their back end is, their confidence. It seems to be a game changer, really, in terms of behavior, I have found. It's all the stuff you would naturally think of with fitness, but it also does a lot in terms of confidence, body awareness, and building trust even. I mean really being able to build trust, or doing something joyful that doesn't have the pressure of competition in it. Melissa Breau: I think that, for a lot of people, when they talk about fitness, they think about their own experiences. I don't know about you, but for me at least, the gym is not my favorite place to be. How does that compare to how dogs generally feel about fitness and what's the difference there? Lori Stevens: I hate the gym. Can I just say that? Really hate the gym. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. Lori Stevens: I have a personal trainer now. I love my trainer. And so maybe that's more like working with your dog. What pops to mind when I think of going to the gym is a sweaty place that doesn't smell great and has a lot of grunting. Canine fitness, what pops to mind when I think about it, is joy, joy, joy. That's what my canine gym is, my canine gym room. Doing fitness together is just a blast. I have to say that every dog I've ever worked with loves it, and that's why it's my sport. It's my sport, I'm calling it my sport because I don't have another sport, but to me, it really is. It's truly a fun activity and it's all about the joy. So they aren't really comparable, those two things. Melissa Breau: Fair enough, and I guess if someone was sitting there feeding us cookies for everything we did at the gym, we might enjoy it a little more too. Lori Stevens: Yeah, true. Melissa Breau: I think the other place that our concepts about our own fitness struggles sometimes hold us back is with the expectations around how much time we have to put into it. Most people probably think about spending an hour — or more, maybe — at the gym each time they go. Based on the upcoming course name, I'm going to guess that canine fitness differs there too. So how much time should people really be spending on canine fitness? Lori Stevens: You know that five is five hours. No, I'm just kidding. It's five minutes. You know, that goes for people too. When you're out walking your dog, and you're out in the woods, or on a trail, or in the park, it's OK if it takes an hour. But when you're in your house with your dog and you want to do some focused exercises, you want to stop and do a little training, so you might as well do a little fitness, five minutes is plenty. I do believe in warming up and cooling down, and the five minutes is the strengthening part, but if you wanted to turn that into two minutes of strengthening and a couple of minutes of warm-up, and a short cool down, that's fine too. I actually think, with people, they don't need to do an hour workout either. If I stop and do five to ten minutes of working out, that's better than if I don't do any at all, so the time thing, I think, often gets in the way. I also think we can over-train our dogs. I have a 12-and-a-half-year-old, and I set a timer. I set it for five minutes of training. If she's cold, like if she's been sleeping for a few hours, then I wake her up, I set my timer for five minutes, and we do five minutes of warm-up. Then I set it again, we do five minutes of strengthening, and then we do a few minutes of cool down, usually another five on the cool down. So I just set my timer. I think I got that idea of five, five, and five from Leslie Eide, a rehabilitation vet in our area. She also teaches fitness work. I think she's done some for Fenzi. I think the thing is that it's important to warm up a bit and cool down a bit, but you really don't have to spend that much time doing it. So all of the workouts that people are going to develop in my class are going to be five-minute workouts. We don't have to overthink this, you know. We can be creative. We just don't want to work the same muscles every day to fatigue. So we just want to be careful on that side of things. Melissa Breau: How much do fitness behaviors — maybe including or maybe not including warm-up and cool down stuff; I'll leave that up to you — but how much do those skills or those behaviors differ from other skills and behaviors that we teach our dog for sport or just for daily life? Lori Stevens: It's all behavior. How does it differ? I think the way it differs is that we need to be safe. So we need to pay attention to alignment, we need to start on the ground, and what I mean by that is we really need to build a foundation, just like with any sport. You're not going to get past the foundation stuff. You don't put your dog directly on a peanut and start doing things. One of my goals in teaching fitness is to really teach people how to be wonderful, incredibly sharp-eyed observers, and teach them what to look for when they're doing fitness, and how to start on the ground and build up. All these exercises that we do as foundation exercises, they're all going to get harder because we're going to be doing them on the ground first, on a stable platform, then an unstable platform, unstable equipment. Training fitness is not training for a competitive sport, so the pressure isn't the same, but you still have to have a good foundation for it. Just like with agility, you don't go in and start running courses. You teach the dog how to get on the equipment, how to exit the equipment, how to use the equipment safely. This is all a good thing, in my view, and that's why I can call it my sport, because there are a bunch of nuances. But it's also a very joyful thing to do. Not to say that sports isn't joyful. Most people do it because it's a blast. But precision is important in fitness training, just like it's important in competitive sports. It's just different in the sense that it's something you can do year-round. You might change your focus based on what you see in your dog, and all of it is about teaching behaviors, so the better you are at training and timing, the better your fitness work will look. Melissa Breau: You mentioned in there the idea of equipment. Do people need special equipment to do canine fitness? Lori Stevens: I think people like an excuse to buy equipment. Melissa Breau: Fair enough. Lori Stevens: I really do. I think it's funny, I do think they like that. But let's just say they can't afford it or they don't like it. There's a lot of things you can build. You can use things around the house. Do you have to have fancy cones? No, you can use potted plants. Do you have to have a fancy Cavalletti set with cones with poles through it? No, you can use your mops and brooms and put them on cans and use painter's tape. Do you have to buy fancy platforms or an aerobic platform? No, you can use books and bind them with duct tape and put anti-slip material around them. You can use air mattresses and pillows for unstable equipment. I'm betting most people will want to buy a piece of equipment or two, but you don't have to. Let me just add that the outdoors, when you go for a walk in the park, it is full of exercise equipment. I'm going to give you yesterday's example. We haven't gone for our walk today yet. Yesterday's example was we went to the park and Cassie wanted to jump on every park bench. She sees the bench and she starts targeting for the bench, and she wants to go on every single bench. She can put her front legs up to work her hind legs, or she can push up all the way to do a little jump. Then we do uphill sprints because I'm in Seattle, so there's a lot of hills. We do uphill recalls and she sprints up the hill. We hind leg target curbs on our way to the park, and we were walking across a bridge, and I noticed there was this little shelf, a little curb-like thing that you could step up on. So we did ipsilateral work — I'd better say what that is — we did targeting with same-side legs on the little raised part of the bridge, and we turned around, did the other side, and I took a photo of it. We do that in the class, ipsilateral work. We ended with nosework in the park, followed by walking up a very steep hill. And I did a workout with her that day, too. But this was a really good workout just utilizing, there's often a big rock she likes to jump up on, and there's all sorts of logs that are a little slippery right now because it rains here nonstop for ages. There's exercise equipment everywhere. Maybe I should do a class someday on just outdoor equipment. Melissa Breau: That would certainly be cool. It would be interesting. Lori Stevens: Yeah. Melissa Breau: For those people who are interested in buying a couple of pieces of equipment, are there specific pieces you usually recommend for getting started, or good places to get their feet wet? Lori Stevens: First a caveat: You're talking to someone who has a ridiculous amount of equipment, so maybe I shouldn't really be allowed to answer this question. Older dogs do really well with a balance pad, and you don't have to buy it. You can get a balance pad on Amazon for people and it's not very expensive. You can do a lot of things with a balance pad. I like for people to have a Fitbone or two, or a couple of 14-inch discs. Those pieces of equipment, either one, a Fitbone or a 14-inch disc, or two Fitbones or two 14-inch discs, you can do a lot with those. Platforms are super-useful. Where do you buy a platform, right? A lot of people have been making platforms recently, so there's a lot of how-to's on that. But you asked me about buying. An aerobic step bench is actually a useful platform. Michelle Pouliot has a place that she links to that builds platforms according to her specifications, so I've got a couple of those. And then Paw Pods. They're inexpensive and they're a blast. You just have to make sure you get the ones that are nice and soft, so I get the FitPAWS ones. They're really fun, because then you can target one paw at a time, target all four, do turns, and do side steps onto them and all sorts of things. Back onto them, back onto all four, there's a million things you can do with the Paw Pods. OK, I'll stop. Was that just a couple of pieces? Melissa Breau: No, that's excellent. Paw Pods are fascinating. I've never taught a dog to use them, but just in general I've seen some stuff done with them and they're pretty cool. They require a real awareness of where all four of your feet are. Lori Stevens: Exactly, and it is just fun. It's fun to teach and fun to do them. Melissa Breau: I know you have, and you mentioned this earlier too, this idea of fitness foundation behaviors. I know that's part of what's on your syllabus, so I wanted to ask you what you mean by that, and what are some examples of something that counts as a fitness foundation behavior. Lori Stevens: One isn't even a fitness behavior, but having a good nose-to-hand touch where your dog can … so targeting is a big one, so first a nose-to-hand touch, and that's super-useful for positioning. Having an easy go-to default behavior they can do when you just ask them to do something and they don't do it, you can just say, “Touch.” So when you practice that in all sorts of ways, and moving them into position with your nose-to-hand targeting, then you've got something that you can use during fitness training that gets them to a certain place, gets them on something, gets them off of something. Getting off of equipment sometimes can be challenging for some people. So just to continue with the targeting, being able to target with one paw, target something, your hand, with each of your four paws — not your four paws, your dog's four paws — targeting with one paw, two paws up, four paws up, is a useful foundation skill. Hind leg targeting is, in my opinion, hind leg targeting is a useful skill for all dogs, period. Being able to hind leg target something is really important, but then, of course, it's a foundation behavior when you're just teaching a dog to hind leg target a mat. But it becomes more skillful and more of a fitness behavior when you're targeting something unstable and higher up and asking to hold that position and maybe do shoulder exercises with their hind end up. So these things that start on the ground that don't seem like that big a deal, they build and become more difficult and more challenging fitness exercises or strengthening exercises. Backing up, side stepping — both of those are foundation exercises, but side stepping on unstable equipment is a different thing than side stepping with all four feet on the ground. I call them foundations because you're giving the dog the idea of what is side stepping and what is backing up, or asking them to do it on something difficult. Melissa Breau: What are some of the basic exercises that you teach most often? What do those look like, and what are the benefits of doing some of them? Lori Stevens: Let me just start with the simplest concept, and that is, when you put two front feet up on something, your dog is usually, not always, but you can help them shift their weight to their back legs, so the further they're standing up, the less likely that they'll have the weight on their front legs. The benefit of putting two paws up on something and holding is that the hind legs are being used more. If the hind legs are up, then the weight is more down on the front legs, so you're building front leg muscles. Things like tuck sits and sphinx downs require more core work. There's something that is often said in physical therapy, and that is, you stabilize, you strengthen the proximal, which is the core, which is the trunk, to get better distal mobility from a strengthen position. So it's important to be able to have the strength of that stability in your trunk and in your core, your stabilization muscles, your multifidi, your transverse abdominus muscles. It's important to be able to automatically engage those, your serratus, in order to do some of these other exercises. So the benefits of the core work is to be able to do more difficult things safely. The benefits of some of the other exercises we work on, like, let's just say crawling. Crawling, you're down in a sphinx down position and then you're moving forward on the ground. So you're working the back muscles. You're utilizing all four limbs, and those limbs, especially the back legs, really have to work the rotation of the hip. The benefits of these exercises are pretty amazing. Another example would be with the dog standing on all four legs. If you lift the left front leg, you're going to put more weight on the right back leg, so if you've got a dog that's in a habit of standing to the side because maybe they hurt their right knee two years ago, so they got in a habit of unloading that leg, well, lifting the front left paw loads that leg, and in their body they start getting the muscle memory back of, Oh yeah, I can use that leg like I used it before. It doesn't hurt at all. Let me just add that I still think it's important that everybody who does fitness is checked out by a veterinarian, and if they've had any sort of problems that they're cleared for the exercises first. But there's a lot of benefits that come from doing this work that sometimes people don't even see until they start doing it. It's pretty cool. And then there's the behavior benefits, like I said earlier. The body awareness, the bonding that occurs, the trust and joy. And do you know that some of the agility dogs I work with have never slowed down, and they're like, “Ha ha ha, my dog will never slow down,” and they walk over those Cavaletti poles. But slowing down helps dogs go faster, because in slowing down they really get to know their bodies better, and they get to know where they're not just pushing through. Being the little masters of muscle compensation that they are, when you're moving slowly, it all stands out. You have to know what muscles you're using, you have to know where your feet are in a different sort of way, and so the slow work doesn't slow your dog down on the course. It helps your dog because they're even more confident and more aware, I think. Melissa Breau: I wanted to ask if there are differences in the behaviors you'd recommend for daily fitness versus those you use to warm up and cool down, or whether the behaviors are multifunctional. Maybe you could just talk to all that a little bit. Lori Stevens: The exercises are multifunctional, or at least some of them are. In my warm-up I might do a few tuck sits and a few tuck sits to stand. I might do some short recalls. I might do some targeting, some spins, some bows, some Cavalletti work. But I'm not going to do ten tuck sits to stands, three sets, with feet upon a Fitbone, as my warm-up. So the concept of the exercise is the exercise might be the same, but I'll just do two or three of them in a warm-up versus ten of them, really hard, three sets. I want the dogs, as they're warming up, to go through the different movements. I want them to back up and side step, and all that's on the ground during a warm-up, really. I often just come in from a walk, like, I walk Cassie for however long, usually we walk at least 30 minutes, and we walk in the house and she's pretty warmed up, so we just do a few exercises right after that. But it's spins and turns to get the … or spins in each direction, sorry. It's good lateral flexion for the spine, so it warms up the spine muscles. Cavalletti work is a nice warm-up exercise when you're trotting across them, but I'm not going to raise them real high and have a dog do high steps, or side stepping, or backing up over Cavelletti poles as a warm-up, because that's taking it a little bit further. So they're multifunctional, but they're done in the simplest way during warm-ups and cool downs. I probably made that into something longer than it needed to be. In cool downs I'm even going to go lighter and do less in a cool down than I would in a warm-up. Melissa Breau: You mentioned this earlier, and you talk about it a little bit in your syllabus, this concept of alignment. I wanted to ask what you mean by that, and if you can talk a little bit about why it's important. Lori Stevens: It's super-important, and why it's important has to do with the muscles that are engaging. I'm an alignment geek, I admit. If a dog sits with a leg shooting out to the side, or just a super-sloppy sit to the side, the first thing I want to know is why that's happening and let's change it. If a back is roached up or humped up, I want to know is something wrong. Hunched up, back roached, I don't know how you'd say roaching, but hopefully people know what that is. Sometimes what I see is a dog can stand with their feet under them perfectly fine, but as soon as they step up on a platform, their back feet go really wide, or their front feet go really wide. Have you ever seen people that are standing with their legs really wide? They're not using their core. They're just creating this super-broad base that they don't have to use any muscles. I mean, you have to use muscles to stand, but it's a rather lazy, non-core way of standing. Sorry if you're thinking, I do that all the time! So what I'm looking for is that dogs are using the muscles I expect, they have nice, long spines, neutral necks, their tail is not tucked. If the dog's tail is tucked — some dogs tuck their tails a lot — but if the dog's tail is really tucked and their legs are wide, then I think either, They're not comfortable standing like this. Maybe we're standing on something a little bit too high. Maybe for one reason or another they might or might not be hurting. It's really hard to tell because you can't ask. So I want to see if we can change their position in a way that puts them in better alignment and if they're comfortable doing that. Now if the dog regularly really goes wide in the back, I know how to encourage them to have their legs under them, but if I all of a sudden start doing the exercise with their legs in, they might be using muscles they have never used before. So I have to really be careful with not just bringing their legs in and then doing a million exercises, because the dog needs to get used to using those new muscles. So anyway, alignment is a really, really big deal. It's just safe. It's safer. There's no reason to do things with improper alignment. It's the same thing in human training as well. Melissa Breau: I'll let you talk a little more about the class specifically. I know it's called Helping Dogs Thrive: Fitness In Five, and it's in February, so lots of f's. What does it entail, what is it going to look like? Do you want to just talk us through a little bit? Lori Stevens: It's going to be fun, it's going to be educational, it will benefit your dog and help him in sports. At the end of, so every week, I think this time I'm going to release everything the first day of the week. You'll have lectures that will tell you a bit about why I want things to go a certain way, or things to keep in mind, or learning about fitness. So I'll have lectures. Then I'll have exercises, and I'll say how to get the behaviors, what they're good for. I'll say the setup, what you need in your environment, the instructions, the number of repetitions and sets, I'll have video of the exercise. So we'll do that. And then, at the end of every week, I'm going to have something called The Five-Minute Workout, it's just called Five-Minute Workout. I'm not going to create the five-minute workout. However, I'm going to give everybody the tools to create their own five-minute workout. So you can imagine what the homework will be. The homework will be showing the exercises, or for sure showing videos of the exercises that you're having trouble teaching. But also I'm going to want to see parts of the five-minute workout. The first week, you're learning how to do a five-minute workout. You're not all of a sudden, “Here's my five-minute workout.” It's going to build across the weeks, and every week your five-minute workout can incorporate, like, let's just say we're in Week 3. Your five-minute workout can include the exercises from Week 3, 2, and 1, so we can get creative and more mixing and matching. Anyway, that's basically how the class is laid out. I'm going to have lectures on things like raising criteria. I'll talk about the benefits, the kinds of movements, the anatomical terminology, like what is cranial and what's caudal, what's lateral and what's medial. I'll talk about exercise frequency, repetitions, durations, and sets. I'll talk about physiological issues, muscle actions. So there's things I'll just talk about, but then there's the exercises, so people will have both. They'll learn about fitness and they will learn the exercises. Melissa Breau: They'll learn both the whys and the hows. Lori Stevens: Yeah. Melissa Breau: I think you hit on the things that people are most likely to have questions about. I feel like anytime people talk about this stuff, it's like, “OK, but how much do I do? How long do I do it?” and all those pieces. Lori Stevens: Yeah, right. Exactly. And it's really different from the Aging Dogs class. In the Aging Dogs class, depending on the age of the dog, for sure, I'm not always this picky about everything. I'm likely to be a little bit more picky about alignment and how we're doing the exercise than I am in the Aging Dogs class. It all depends on the dog, but when you're working with a 16-year-old dog, teaching him fitness exercises, you're going to go really slowly, give that dog the time to learn them, and you're not going to be super-picky about, you're going to be as picky as you can be about alignment, but it's different. Melissa Breau: You hit on something there, and I didn't tell you I was going to ask you this, but you brought it up and I think it makes sense to maybe talk about it for just a quick second. Is there a type of dog that is a good fit for the class, or maybe isn't as good a fit for the class? Lori Stevens: I would say if it's a dog that … OK, first of all, if it's a puppy and the growth plates aren't closed yet, then puppies probably should not take the class, because everything about repetitions and sets aren't going to apply to the puppy. Somebody could take it if they have a puppy. I recommend they audit it. Then, when their dog's growth plates close, then they can start applying it, or they can take it again later. It's a lot of material. You could audit it, then take it later, and still go, “Oh, I don't remember doing this.” If your dog's coming off a pretty serious injury and you've got contraindications, things you really shouldn't be doing, maybe don't take it at Gold. Maybe just audit it. Check with your vet. It's different if you're coming here and you've been released from the rehab vet to come to me to do exercises. But if you are taking this as a fitness class, I'm going to assume your dog is pretty healthy. Other than that, pretty much all dogs can take it. For sure the dogs that are pretty mobile that have been in my Aging Dogs class, they can take it. They may not be able to do everything, but the ones that are pretty mobile, there's some I have in mind that could definitely take it. But if you've got a dog that can hardly move, this will be challenging, is my guess. But there's always something, you know? I have to do some harder exercises for the dogs that are more performance dogs. They're strong and they're used to doing things. And then you can always just stick with the basics and build really, really gradually until you're ready to go up a level. So it really depends. Melissa Breau: If people have questions, they can message you, right? Lori Stevens: Whatever people have, yeah. I think it's going to be a well-attended class, based on the interest I've seen so far, so I hope. It should be really fun. It should be a very positive experience for the dogs and people. Melissa Breau: Well, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Lori. This is fun to learn a little more about this stuff, and I feel like every time we talk about it, I'm like, Hmm, I really should be doing that. So thank you for coming back on and talking through this with me. And thank you to all of our wonderful listeners out there for tuning in. We'll be back next week, this time with Chrissi Schranz to talk about building reinforcers and recall training. If you haven't already, I hope you'll subscribe to our podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice so our next episode will automatically download to your phone as soon as it becomes available. CREDITS: Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

Health and Lifestyle Contributor Monica Leighton shares ways on how to help your pets who have the "pooch scooch". | ‎ Dr. Robin Ganzert, CEO of American Humane tells us about their Hurricane Harvey pet recovery, disaster preparation for pets, and about the new Chicken Soup for the Soul books that benefit ‎American Humane. | Special ‎ways to remember your beloved pets on National Pet Memorial Day on September 10 with One Fur All from Robert Eichner, founder of Pet House Candles, and with Paw Pods by founder Ben Riggins.

Health and Lifestyle Contributor Monica Leighton shares ways on how to help your pets who have the "pooch scooch". | ‎ Dr. Robin Ganzert, CEO of American Humane tells us about their Hurricane Harvey pet recovery, disaster preparation for pets, and about the new Chicken Soup for the Soul books that benefit ‎American Humane. | Special ‎ways to remember your beloved pets on National Pet Memorial Day on September 10 with One Fur All from Robert Eichner, founder of Pet House Candles, and with Paw Pods by founder Ben Riggins.

Seafurrers: True Tales of the Ships' Cats blog; Amy Sutherland (Rescuing Penny Jane) on rewards of volunteering at shelter, Paw Pods pet caskets

Support the show (https://www.animalcaretrustusa.org/donate.html)

Michelle Fern welcomes Mark Hughes, founder, and national sales and marketing manager for Swheat Scoop. Swheat Scoop is a natural cat litter made from ground wheat, scoopable, clumping, flushable in sewer and septics, guaranteed odor free. Unlike ordinary clumping litters that can overburden public landfills because they never decompose, Swheat Scoop is 100% biodegradable and made from renewable, sustainable resources right here in the USA. In the second segment Michelle talks to Justin Duneskiss, co-founder of Paw Pods. Paw Pods is a dignified, loving and eco-friendly way to preserve the memory of your beloved pet. The urn was developed after consultation with veterinarians, pet companies and engineers. The result is a unique urn constructed from 100 percent biodegradable and recycled materials that is accompanied with a seeded sympathy card that can be planted in a backyard or garden - producing beautiful flowers year-round that will serves as a living memorial of your family member. Questions or Comments? Send them to: michelle@petliferadio.com. More details on this episode MP3 Podcast - Swheat Scoop and Paw Pods with Michelle Fern