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[00:00:00] Hey, everyone. Welcome to fostering excellence in agility the podcast. I'm your host competitor, coach and mentor Megan Foster. I help agility enthusiasts focus on the small details of training and behavior while still having a clear understanding of their big picture. Join me as I take you through key elements of dog agility training, competing, and teaching, and how you can take action today to start improving your skills within the sport.
Let's get started. Hi everyone. You're listening to episode three, loopy agility training. Today. We're going to talk about how cleaning up your loops can help you solve problems that you are experiencing in your agility behaviors and get to the bottom of solving those. More quickly and how to avoid those problems in the future.
Let's start by defining what a training loop is and why this even matters [00:01:00] to us. Draining loop is naturally occurring in your training because you have a starting position. You have a way to start the behavior. You have a way to cue the dog to engage in the behavior that you are trying to see. You typically have a specific behavior that you were looking for when you are training, whether that's an obstacle scale or a sequence of some sort.
And of course you have a way to reinforce the dog for the correct behavior, or you have a way to respond to the dog when you see the unexpected response. So the behavior you didn't want to see, and then you have to get the dog back to that starting position. So. That's what a training loop is that starting position to the behavior, to the reward, back to the starting position.
And that loop is happening, whether you're paying attention to the details surrounding it or not. So it [00:02:00] means a lot when we do pay attention to those details and it means that. When we do pay attention to those details, we have a lot more of the training situation under our control, which means it's going to be easier for us to solve problems maybe even before they happen.
It's also going to be easier for us to identify which variable to increase or decrease our criteria for. And it's going to make our training a lot more efficient. This is really important to me because most of the time, when a client comes to me for the first time, whether it's in a group class or one-to-one coaching, or even in a seminar and they're experiencing a specific problem, the first thing that I kind of telescope out and look at is their entire.
Training loop. I look at what's happening just before the behavior happens [00:03:00] and just after the behavior happens. And I'm also observing what's happening in between the repetitions, because these are generally times where we aren't paying as close attention and problematic behaviors can creep into those surrounding pieces.
And then they leak in to the. Behavior and the behavior part is the piece that we're typically hyper-focused on. We're, we're set out to train that we fall entry or train that running dog walk or train front crosses or train German turns. We sat out hyper-focused on the details of the behavior that we're trying to train and we get off track or.
Hit a wall. When those problematic behaviors start to leak into the behavior, we were set out to train. That's why I first want to encourage everyone to look [00:04:00] outside of that very specific behavior and look at the details of your loop, because like I said, they are there, whether you are aware of them or not, and we can solve a lot of problems.
So we want this for all of those reasons. I just said, and also produces clarity for you and your dog, right? So when you have these details planned out and you know where you're starting, you know what behavior you're looking for, you know how you're going to reinforce, you know, how you're going to get the dog back to the starting position.
Your training plan goes very smooth and very efficiently. Probably twice as many reps done in the same amount of time, because it's like a well-oiled machine. You don't have to think about things. You just know what's coming next, the dog slips into this pattern, they know what's going next. They know what to expect.
And they. Always have a better time when they [00:05:00] know what to expect and what's happening next. This also gives us the ability to give the dog more choice and training. So again, by putting them into that pattern, we're going to start here. I'm going to give you a cue to start. I'm going to reinforce this behavior in this way, and then I'm going to transport you back to the beginning so we can do it again at each step of the way I can.
I give my dog the ability to say yes or no. So if I've just finished the repetition and my dog eats their cookie, and then they snap back to focusing on me and they walk with me together, back to the starting position. I can interpret that as, yes. I'd like to do another rep please. Whereas if my dog eats that cookie and then looks around at their environment, or maybe even start sniffing.
The ground or [00:06:00] leaves to go say hi to a friend, anything like that? Anything other than, yes, please. I want to do another wrap. I'm coming with you. That might be something to pay attention to. And if you're having that problem, that the dog I'm going to use air quotes here, randomly checks out during training.
I'm going to first look at that piece of. Do I expect my dog to eat their treat and snap back into focus before I bring them to the starting point again, or does it take a lot of effort and a lot of additional work. I have to go get the dog out of the grass and get the dog away from their friend. All of those things.
Am I already experiencing problem behaviors? And can I clean up my mechanics to avoid those problem behaviors for leaking in. Okay, same thing. When I put my dog into their starting position and say, I lead out to the first jump, are they looking at me? Are [00:07:00] they looking at the job? Like what, whatever they're trained to do their default is, or are they looking around by planning for all these details and having this pattern that you slip into, you will notice if your dog is engaging in the pattern.
Or is not really engaging in the pattern. So you can bring in dog choice and consent into your training by having all of these details mapped out ahead of time. And of course, we're going to spot problems before they happen, because if I give my dog a treat and their normal response is to eat that treat and then snap back into.
If that's normal and I do a repetition and my dog eats that treat, and then they do look around or they do kind of start sniffing, or maybe they take a step or two towards someone watching [00:08:00] that is information for me that they're getting near the end of their training session or that their training sessions should be over that they are running out of good choices.
Whereas if I'm not paying attention, To what's happening at every stage of the loop. I might choose to just call the dog back, Hey, and you know, get them back, do something that's not normal for the two of us. Get them back, do another rep. And then what may happen is they may not eat the tree when I try to offer it to them, or they might make a mistake in the behavior that I was attempting to train the small mistake of.
Not snapping back into focus. After eating the treat was the warning sign for me that a problem could be occurring. And that is the cue for me to make some adjustments so that I don't have those behaviors [00:09:00] leaking backwards into my agenda that I was about to train. So that was a lot of why. And now. How, how are we going to do this?
So we're going to plan these details and we're going to plan them backwards. When you set out to train that running dog walk, that's really in the forefront of my mind, uh, at this point in sprints agility training. So let's just use that as an example. When I set out to train that running dog walk, I have to first decide, how am I going to reinforce this before?
And when I'm thinking about the reinforcement that I want to use, I need to be thinking about what behavior do I want the dog to be doing when they're finishing the behavior that I cued. So if we're thinking about running dog walks, the criteria is to [00:10:00] run as fast as she can hit the target with her feet and then continue straight to her reinforcement.
So I need a reinforcer that produces that continuing to run forward since we're working on straight exits. So that eliminates rewarding from my hand, because then I'm likely to be behind her when she's running as fast as she can, unless I cheat. Right. So I can make it possible that rewarding from my hand produces a straight exit, but it's not as likely as say a pre placed reward.
All right, so I can pre place food or I can pre place a toy. And now I have to consider the Headspace that both of those reinforcers put her in. Do I want her in the highest, most intense state that she will be in and use a toy or do I want to use a little bit more, uh, of a, a calmer reward? [00:11:00] Something that she really enjoys, but she's not.
As intense for, and at this point in her training, because I still feel like I'm truly acquiring the skill of hit the target, no matter what I'm choosing to kind of function in that lower arousal state and use food. So I'm going to use pre placed re uh, pre placed bowl with, let's say chicken in it.
That's kind of her go-to right now. So I'm going to reward. Chicken and a bowl, and I'm going to reward contact with the target with her mark cue dish. Excellent. If she doesn't hit the target, I'm not going to cue dish and she should turn off the dish before she gets to it. And also I'm not going to worry about it.
If she does take the food off, uh, off cue, I'm not gonna worry about. Not at this point. So then we go, what [00:12:00] is the agenda behavior? Well, in this case, the agenda behavior will be to move from her sit position on the queue, through run down the plank, hit her target with any of her feet and then continue to the dish when she hears the cue dish.
Okay. I will be looking for contact with the mat to mark that before. Her starting point. Well, at this point, she's going to start at the top of the down ramp, innocent stay. So, and then how am I going to get her there? Right. So I need to walk her up the plank, turn her around, have her sit. And now I have to decide, am I going to reward that set or not?
At this point I am. I'm rewarding that sit because her climbing up and turning around. Difficult behavior for her and sitting is pretty taxing. So if, [00:13:00] especially, if I'm going to do 10 reps in a session that's 10 sits and 10 sit stays. I'm going to go ahead and reward those six. So I am going to let her hop onto the dog walk.
She's going to. Go up the ramp, turn around. She's going to sit. I'm going to feed that set. I'm going to position myself where I would like to start. I'm going to give her the cue. She's going to start moving. I'm going to start moving. She meets criteria. She gets her marker cue. She gets reinforced while I'm reloading the bowl.
Putting her on a cookie LER in my hand, and I'm getting her back to that starting position. So every single detail of that training session is mapped out ahead of time so that if something goes off track, I can be aware of it because I have a very clear picture [00:14:00] of how the training session should go. So yeah.
If she breaks a CIT or the starting position that I chose is not helping her. And I need to change it. I can just fidget with that small detail, instead of wondering if it was the reinforcer that was wrong or the positioning of the mat is the dog walk too bouncy. I can pretty much locate. Whatever detail that needs adjusting on the fly, because I have a very clear picture of what I want it to look like.
Okay. So all of that happens in my office with my notebook. I take these little notes down. I watch whatever relevant videos that I need to watch, depending on what I'm going to train. And we go from there. Little bit of planning goes a very long way for making those training sessions. Clean and efficient.
And I can [00:15:00] say that like those 10 reps takes less than five minutes to actually train once you're on the field, because all of those details are already worked out and the loops are clean and tight. And from one ending point to the starting point, Nothing else happening. Okay. We're neither one of us are getting distracted by anything when we're training.
Hey, so some common troubleshooting with loopy training. Some of the things that I encounter when clients come to me for the first time and we're kind of assessing what needs to happen. And I always start with the reinforcement strategy because I find that these are often. Fluent behavior cues for the dog.
And what I mean is that if I have a piece of food in my hand and a toy in my hand, eating [00:16:00] food and biting a toy are two different behaviors from the dog's perspective. So those two different behaviors are on two different cues in my dogs is lives. So if I have both of those things in my hand, and I.
Look at sprint and say, yep, she should move forward towards the hand that has food. And she should eat that food. Even if the toy is there. If I say strike, she should ignore the food and bite her toy. So I start there. Does the dog understand what they should do to access the reinforcement that you are providing for them?
Right. Basically is that fluent? Do they know how to eat out of a bowl? Do they know how to strike a toy from your hand? Do they know the difference between the toy in your hand versus you throwing it versus it already being on the ground to the, understand how to get the reward? Because if there's any confusion about how to access their reward, [00:17:00] they're likely to experience that frustration.
During the behavior piece, or they're not gaining the reinforcer that you're expecting them to. It's not having that effect if they're not sure about how to get it. So you definitely don't want confusion leaking into your agility training because all sorts of problematic behaviors can crop up when you're dealing with confusion and frustrate.
Then we have to ask, is it appropriate? So like, my example was if I'm behind sprint on the dog walk, but I want her to continue forward after hitting her target is rewarding from my hand appropriate. So you have to kind of look at, does the dog. Respond well to the queue. So is the dog when you say yep.
Let's just say you are rewarding [00:18:00] from your hand and you say, yep. That's Mike. And the dog is immediately popping into. Yep. I got it. Go to the hand and eat that tells me that that cue is fluent. But if I'm seeing that, the behavior that I was after is not getting better, then I would lean towards, that's not an appropriate reinforcer for that behavior today.
Whereas if I do see. That confusion I say, yep. And the dog looks at me or looks around on the ground for their toy or does not immediately come to my hand for food. I would say that the reinforcement strategy isn't fluent. And again, when you have all the other details worked out and you have a clear picture of what it should look like, you are able to identify the differences when it doesn't, when it doesn't quite add up.
So always start with is the reinforcement strategy fluent. And is it appropriate [00:19:00] next? If I'm still kind of experiencing some problematic behaviors in my training session, I'm going to look at, am I giving the correct cue for this? So especially in handling. Or in something like contacts or refills where our position can influence the dog in different ways.
And we can be sometimes blind to how our position is impacting the dog's behavior. We just want to kind of check in with ourselves that am I standing in the right place? Am I doing the right thing? Am I blocking this? We full entry? Cause that's really common. Um, am I. Queuing this front cross, the way that it should be queued, you want to make sure that, that the issue isn't a mechanical one in yourself before we do all of these other crazy fanatical things, uh, changing things to create [00:20:00] the behavior that we want when our cue isn't correct.
Okay. And then we also need to look at the environment and what that might be queuing. So. Particularly lazy with my setups. I try really hard to just go to the field and go, all right, I need to work on these three things and I want to do it with moving as little equipment as possible. So for instance, I was working on Sprint's throttle wrap queue, so she needed to turn away from me to take the jump.
And of course, turning away from the handler is not natural for the day. So I I'm aware of that. I know that this is not new information for me, but so I set her up to turn left. And when she was turning left to get to the jump, there was nothing on her right side that she could see. So it [00:21:00] was very easy.
And I progressed through my rewards, uh, progressions very easily. I was like, oh my gosh, she's a genius. This is fantastic. And then I just turned around to do the mirror image and have her turning to the. And she could not do it. Y'all it was, it was a little bit heartbreaking in that moment. And it took me a couple of repetitions before I realized, oh my gosh, in this setup, there's a ton of.
On your left side and that's more natural for you to do so there was an unintentional distractor in the environment, cuing her to do something different and it would have been super obvious had she just gone in the tunnel, but she didn't. She went towards the tunnel and turn towards me and the tunnel and looked at me like, I don't know what you're saying.
I've never heard that word before in my life. And if. [00:22:00] Hadn't been successful. On the other side, I had already proven to myself that the loop was correct, and then I flipped it around and she says, no, I have no idea what you're talking about. And she had been strong on this side, in the previous session. So it wasn't, it was a big surprise to me that she wasn't doing it.
So then I go, okay. My reinforcement strategy is the same. I know it's appropriate and I know it's flowing now. I need to look at my queue. Am I too close? Is my position weird? Am I not close enough? Am I? And so I watch my video. I'm like, no, this is pretty much the same. But then when I really start looking at it, I go, oh my gosh, the tunnel that's totally different.
And so I went to a different jump where there wasn't anything else. Distracting her and she could get it. No problem. And when I did it a couple of days later in a completely different environment, absolutely no problems. She was turning in both directions flawlessly. [00:23:00] So that, that's just an example of. It could be a queue within your own mechanics and your own physical cues or verbal cues or something that you're doing, but it can also be something in the environment that's queuing them that we're not aware of.
And in this case, the tunnel was kind of obvious, but sometimes it can be just a person has now appeared in the parking lot or a dog that wasn't on the field before now is so sometimes we can't even perceive the changes in the. That are queuing the dogs to do things differently. We just have to really trust them, especially when this is a practice habit of being in clean loops and listening to the dog and honoring the dog's choice to opt into the loop.
We get to a point where we can really, really, really rely on the information that they are giving back to us. And then. [00:24:00] All right. So you checked your reinforcement strategy. You checked your queue, you've taken a look at the environment. You are still stumped. This is not going the way you expected it to go.
Well, Behaviors not happening today. If you are in the acquisition skill of this behavior, and you're not seeing what you want to be seeing, it's probably not being split finely enough into small enough pieces, given the rest of the context. And we can have an entire episode on splitting. Don't you worry?
I'm going to write that down so that I don't forget it. And even if you are sequencing known behaviors and the behaviors that you are really sure that you're diagnosed are not happening today, it's probably something you can't perceive. It's probably something in the environment that you can't know about.[00:25:00]
It's a sound or a smell or. They're not feeling well, so maybe they're taking reinforcement, but it's kind of making their tummy not feel great. So it's not having a great effect on behavior who knows. All that we know is that we want to build this paradigm. We want to build this training loop. So precisely that we can rely on that information so that when my dog's behavior isn't getting better, I can go, you know what?
You must just be having a day. And I'm really sorry. You can't just tell me in words that you're having kind of a bad day, but we're just going to take a break. And I can believe that information when my dog tells me that, because we practice this, this loopy training all of time. And my, one of my very favorite Sarah streaming quotes [00:26:00] is how do you know they can't do it?
They aren't doing it. She said that on a podcast one time. And I pulled over off the side of the road and I texted her that I was just like squealing with delight at that quote, because it sounds sassy when we say it, but that's exactly what we mean. If the dog isn't doing it, they can't. And they're telling us loud and clear that they can't.
And we just have to take that moment to go, you know what? You're right. You're you can't do this. We'll just try again tomorrow and it's going to be okay. So how does this help us as a trainer if I haven't convinced you already, but number one, when you are training your own dogs, you're going to be able to spot and avoid problems before they have.
And you're going to be able to clean up really common problems and agility like the [00:27:00] dog disengaging, the dogs, lack of focus. Maybe the dog is barking and spinning up and maybe the dog is getting over aroused and high via frustration and things like that. You're going to be able to solve a lot of common problems just by cleaning up your training loops as a competitor, when issues come up in competition.
You will be able to more easily pinpoint what the actual problem is. You will be able to be confident knowing. Is the problem and what isn't a problem. And by that, I mean, is this a Wi-Fi problem or is this an environmental problem? When you have clean training loops to rely on and look back on as data you can go?
You know what, I really don't think that my dog's ability to find this we have will entry is the problem. I think maybe the ring crew at Jason to the wave poles is the problem. I can look back at my data and go, you know, we haven't done any of that. [00:28:00] In training. And so I can add that to my, my training plans.
So it helps you kind of funnel out which details of the dog's performance are actually suffering. Even if they're not the ones getting you faults on paper. Hey, and as a mentor, as a coach, as an instructor, as someone who is helping other people to learn agility, And that could be that you are someone modeling this in your training class, to your friends or your training groups, or just being this competitor, talking about these things.
When you are modeling good loopy training habits, you're able to track down the actual issue much easily. And you're able to explain their dog's behavior to them in a way that's easy for them to understand and then way that they're able to learn [00:29:00] compassion for the dog, which can be so difficult when you're in a vulnerable place.
Like being a student, trying to learn a new sport. Right. We S when we work with clients, we see a lot of frustration because it's vulnerable to be the learning. And so by taking a look at their loop and kind of tracking down where to make those changes, and sometimes you don't even have to tell them why you just say, Hey, when your dog finishes eating that treat, I want you to put another treat on their nose and I want you to lure them back to that starting position.
And then suddenly the dog has 95% more focused in the entire training session, just by cleaning up that one. And now we went from a frustrated handler with a dog that was leaving work to a very happy handler and a very engaged dog. So that's where it's really powerful as someone who is teaching individuals is we [00:30:00] can see that they're doing all the right things when it comes to the behavior, but we can tweak some things about what happens just before and just after.
And that some, a lot of times that's where the magic happens. And I want you to all have that magic wand. When you are training your own dogs and your clients docs, that's it for today's episode. I hope this was really helpful and gave you some good ideas about how to clean up your own training and what to look for.
And. I would love to hear about your success stories with Luby training and see some of your loopy training as well. So come on over to the synergy dog sports free community on Facebook and share all of your loopy training.
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