Lorrie [00:00:08]:
Welcome to the Maximum Fun Agility podcast. I'm Lorrie Reynolds, owner of Maximum Fun Dog Sports. We help your agility team build your relationship, communication, confidence, and fun in training so that you can joyfully succeed on any course. In this episode, we'll talk about the benefits of lowering criteria when you are teaching new skills and how it can help your dog learn faster. One of the students who attended a seminar was telling me about her efforts to train more distance. She said that she'd been having some problems, they'd worked really hard on building confidence, and then when her dog finally, finally nailed the sequence of jumps 25 feet away, he knocked a bar, so she couldn't reward. For the record, I believe in rewarding effort, so I definitely would have rewarded the attempt even with a bar down. But I understand that some people would view that as rewarding the dog for knocking a bar.
Lorrie [00:01:04]:
As we talked, I asked her one simple question. Have you ever thought about setting the bars lower while you are focusing on distance? It took her a few seconds to process. Well, no, she said, and then she laughed. It's such a simple solution to a frustrating problem, but most people never think about it. We are accustomed to training like we trial, so we set our exercises just like the courses we compete on. In all of my agility seminars, we use hoops, set the bars to the lowest height, or we use jumps with no bars at all. My seminars aren't about teaching dogs how to jump, weave, or hit their contacts. They are about teaching the team to communicate and the dog to respond to cues so that they can achieve the distance they want.
Lorrie [00:01:54]:
Doing things like using 6 weaves instead of 12 and eliminating the chance of knocking a bar lets the team focus on what we are actually trying to accomplish. People can focus on handling and building confidence in their dogs, rewarding at a high rate, and clarifying their cues. If you want your dogs to have a better chance at succeeding in an exercise, want them to learn faster, and want to reduce the frustration that comes with almost getting it right when you're focusing on teaching your dog a new skill, lower the criteria for things that the dog already knows. For example, if you are focusing on distance training, lower the jump bars and make the sequences easier or remove any off course temptations. If you are working discriminations, lower the contact obstacle if possible to make hitting the contact easier. If you are working weave entries, use 4 or 6 poles so there is less chance of your dog popping out and missing out on an opportunity to be rewarded. Lowering criteria that isn't relevant to the skill you are teaching gives you a higher chance of being able to reward the new skill. This means your dog has a higher rate of reward, is less likely to get frustrated, and you can teach the new skill faster.
Lorrie [00:03:18]:
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Maximum Fun Agility podcast. If you want to host a seminar where your group can learn all about handling your dogs at a distance, contact us at [email protected] to talk about available seminar dates. See you next time.
