[00:00:00] Hey there. If you're an agility nerd, you're in the right place. You're listening to fostering excellence in agility. I'm Megan, your resident agility competitor, coach, and mentor. And this podcast is where I break down all things agility and guide you on your path to excellence. Are you ready? Let's go.
Today. I want to talk about reducing reinforcement. When I am training for agility or any sport. There are two main ways that I go about this. The first way is to move reinforcement from my body to being stashed outside of the training space. And the second way is to grow the duration of my behaviors and [00:01:00] behavior chains. So that the dog is working for longer periods of time without needing access to food or toy reinforcers. First let's talk about moving reinforcement. We often train our skills or even our coursework with the food and toys readily available. We may even wear our treat bags or training vests or training belts. And that's a pretty big queue. Where and how reinforcement is going to be collected. But in a competition that reinforcement is outside of the ring. Or at the very least at the end of the run left with your leash. So I want to be careful to build routines around my stash reinforcement outside of the training space. So that my dog understands. That. Reinforcement can be [00:02:00] collected elsewhere and that reinforcement will not always follow us into a working space. I especially want to build confidence and a clear understanding about leaving reinforcement behind and how the dog can gain access to that reinforcement again. So from a very early age, once I know what my dog likes, what types of food, what types of toys, what types of play that they like. I will. Introduce the concept of. Leaving that reinforcement behind, even just walking away from it. Offering some eye contact just to walk right back over to it. and access that reinforcement through me. Now let's talk about growing. Behaviors or chains of behaviors. The first way that I do this is to increase how much the dog can do without reinforcement. [00:03:00] So this can be as simple as how many steps away from reinforcement can they do. Before needing to return to reinforcement. How long of a downstate can they do before needing access to food or toy reinforcers? How many easy, simple behaviors or tricks can they do without accessing reinforcement? Their behavior will tell us. Because if we are pushing the duration too far, we'll start to see latency or errors, or even the dog starting to become distracted. Looking for where reinforcement is stashed. So once I get one or two behaviors that the dog is really fluent at, I do like to show them the contingency of leaving reinforcement behind. Performing those one or two simple behaviors and then returning to reinforcement, just so that they. Understand from a very early, very early. Point in their [00:04:00] education that that might happen to them. I want to avoid training all of my skills. With reinforcement on me and then surprising them one day when the reinforcement is no longer on me, I want to layer this into my training. Just like any other distraction that I'm layering into the process. The second way that I want to. Reduce reinforcement.
And this one is primarily to build motivation. For doing the things that I want them to do. And it is to back chain. My end of run routine and exiting to reinforcement. Into the coursework. So I will start my dog at obstacle 18, 19. And finish the course, put their leash on and exit to my reinforcement. And over time throughout a session, I will increase by two obstacles. Maybe I'll make a bigger leap early on in the training increased by [00:05:00] four obstacles. But just a. Good staple of my training is to not continuously make it harder during a training session.
So I will bounce around with a number of obstacles. That I'm asking them to do. Before. Leashing up exiting the ring and collecting reinforcement. I do this back shaming process. On a pretty easy course because I do expect the dog to learn the pattern. So I don't want to over-complicate this and. Have, uh, and use a course that sort of relies on very precise handling to keep them on course, because I just want them to build the desire for doing the things and have it fairly easy to access reinforcement in the long run. And over time. The number of obstacles that you do can increase. And also the complexity of the course can increase. The third way I like to do this is to generalize [00:06:00] each of my behaviors. With a high rate of reinforcement. Both on my body and off of my body. So, especially for more, for the obstacles that are more taxing for your dog. Generally, this is we've poles for a lot of teams. I will. Put a lot of money in the bank for we've poles. But I will also put a lot of money in the bank for we've posed. When the reinforcement is stashed.
And so that might not include. My ring routines, it might just include stashing the reward, moving away from their reward, doing your Wi-Fi polls, and then moving back to the reward. This is going to build. Um, higher level of value for each obstacle. I believe. Because they have to really want to weave in order to weave correctly and gain access to that reinforcement.
That's not in front of them anymore. And once I have [00:07:00] built that kind of value into the obstacles that the obstacles themselves are worth. Moving away from reinforcement to go do. Then I can more easily expect. That that particular obstacle can reinforce another obstacle. And that's what we need to see happening in our sequencing and coursework. Jumped number two needs to be valuable enough to reinforce dot number one. Because they need to maintain that motivation throughout the course. So we definitely want to back chain. Courses. To show them that reinforcement is accessible through. Maintaining speed throughout the course, but also building value for our individual behaviors. So that kind of coming at it from both ends that the dog's motivation stays with them on course.
And they're not conflicted. And thinking about the [00:08:00] rewards stashed away somewhere else. It will always depend on the individual dog and the team and their learning history. But in general. If I'm trying to build more motivation for maintaining speed and enthusiasm throughout the course, I'm usually going to do more back chaining to stashed reinforcement. And if I want to maintain more precision in my behaviors. Then I'm going to focus more of my training on generalizing.
Each of those behaviors. To a high level of accuracy. When the reinforcement is not available. And obviously we want to balance that appropriately for each team that we see. Okay. So that's all for today's episode on reducing reinforcement.
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, there are several ways you can leave me positive reinforcement. [00:09:00] One, leave me a five star review to share with your fellow agility nerds, or three, share your thoughts with me on social media. Be sure to follow at F X agility on Facebook or Instagram.
