Ep 77 Stamina for Agility Dogs
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[00:00:00] If you train, compete, teach, or simply love the sport of dog agility, you're in the right place. Hey there, I'm Megan Foster, creator of Fostering Excellence in Agility. Join me as we explore training, communication, handling, mindset, and all the little details that help build stronger and more confident teams both in and out of the ring.
Whether you're just getting started or working toward big competition goals, this podcast is here to support your journey with your individual teammate. Let's get started.
Hey there. Welcome back to the podcast. This is episode 77, and today I wanna talk about stamina for agility dogs. I recently had this conversation with the members of my coaching program, Train with Excellence, and it was just such a really great conversation that I got to have with all of them. So I wanted to share those thoughts that started that conversation with all of my listeners here on the podcast, [00:01:00] and hopefully we can continue this conversation in my free community, Fans of FX Agility, which I will leave the information to in the show notes.
So I broke this down into two categories: physical stamina and mental stamina
Let's talk about physical stamina first. Any dog that is participating in agility at any level with any amount of ambition from their handler, so any amount of obstacle course racing, should be working with a fitness professional on proper conditioning exercises for sport dogs. This will often mean starting with a good foundation program for fitness so that you become comfortable with understanding correct posture, and correct alignment, and correct placement of [00:02:00] reward in order to properly navigate the exercises that target the muscles that our agility dogs need.
I am not a fitness professional, though I work closely with one for my own dog's fitness, and it has become a crucial part of my coaching process to make sure that the dogs that I'm working with are actually physically capable of completing the task at hand. And a lot of times when we're talking about stamina, this can be one of the main causes, that the dog is just not physically capable of completing the reps that you need to complete your training session.
So if you're starting to see that maybe your dog does not hold up for a lot of reps, doesn't like repetition, kind of peters out quickly throughout a training session, and [00:03:00] you aren't working with a fitness professional on their conditioning, that's the number one thing that I'm going to suggest to you if you are my client When I am looking at my videos or observing my dogs in a training sess- session and I'm thinking about their physical stamina, I'm looking for signs of fatigue, and I'm making note of, you know, how long into the session before I saw these signs of fatigue, how many reps was I able to do?
Am I using food for this training session, or am I using a toy? Because the toy also takes more physical ability than collecting food reward. So the things that I'm looking for as signs of fatigue are small mistakes, mistakes that kind of surprise you, but maybe they don't necessarily lead to, um, a misexecution, right?
Maybe the dog completes the [00:04:00] obstacle correctly or completes the sequence correctly, but they made a small miscalculation within that performance, things like slipping in the weave poles. If you've done... If you're working on entries, or maybe you've done a few sets of weave poles within a sequence, um, session, and, you know, they're digging in, they're fine, and they kind of get hung up in the poles, or they're slipping in the poles, and that's not typical for them, especially on that surface.
Um, one, I wouldn't just say that slipping is typical. That is a problem. But if they were not slipping, and then suddenly they are slipping, that is a small mistake that I'm looking for, and I'm thinking that they're hitting the end of their, um, ability to perform successfully and safely. Um, things like changes in their gait.
Uh, as they're kind of walking around the training space, do you see [00:05:00] their gait change? Do they look kind of too tired to maintain their normal walking gait or trotting gait that they usually kind of walk around in between exercises? Um, are they... You know, maybe they're jumping jumps just with a little bit more, um, flair than they should be.
So for me, this would be something like, um, Sprint does something spectacularly athletic in order to keep a bar up. That usually means that she made some small mistake before leaving the ground that she's having to overcorrect for in the air, and she is an incredible athlete and also really dislikes coming into contact with PVC.
So she will do a lot to avoid knocking the bar, but it's a sign of fatigue when I'm watching her work, and it's something that I try to pay attention to Also, [00:06:00] you just want to observe if there are differences in how they turn from one direction to the other, how they perform something going in one direction versus the other direction, one side of your body versus the other, because there could be some side weakness.
And, you know, if you just do running dog walks with them on your right that session, and you don't see fatigue as early, but then the next day you're doing running dog walks with the dog on your left, and now they are fatiguing a little bit earlier, maybe there's something there that you can look into more
Another aspect that I'm thinking about with physical stamina for my agility dogs is recovery and repair. Am I giving adequate time for their body to cool down after a training session before I put them back in their crate or before they curl up [00:07:00] under my desk to take a nap? Am I allowing their body to fully cool down, fully recover?
And then am I giving enough time in between my training sessions for their body to repair? If I am doing, say, weave pole training every single day for, you know, a month, th- you might start to see your dog fatiguing during training sessions because they haven't had time to repair those muscles, and weaving is a pretty repetitive action.
So I kinda find myself avoiding training the same things on back-to-back days. I try to plan my training so that things are a bit more balanced so that maybe throughout the week they're working on four or five different things and not so much of the same repetitive tasks [00:08:00] over and over. This is, uh, especially true of more difficult jumping tasks.
Um, and a lot of jump training does require quite a bit of repetitive movements, so we just have to be aware of that, and we have to continue to observe how our dogs look and feel before, during, and after the training session. Now let's talk about mental stamina, and mental stamina is also really important for training, but I see it become even more obviously important in longer training days like seminars and definitely competitions.
The number one way that I can help improve my dog's mental stamina is to help reduce the decision fatigue that they are going to experience throughout a seminar day or a trial [00:09:00] day. In simple terms, be a good leader. Help them make decisions so that they are not using up all of their mental bandwidth making these decisions themselves, decisions around dogs and people and when to be focused and when to not be focused.
So if your dog is walking through the trial site with their head up high and they're looking around at everybody and they are excited to go see everyone, and every single time they have to make a decision, "Do I wanna go say hi to them or not?" It's the wrong one, right? Or they go to pull towards someone and you tell them, "Not now," or they're just hopeful about the whole thing even though you're not going to let them say hi.
Or sometimes you let them say hi and sometimes you don't, but there's really no clear way for them to be able [00:10:00] to predict we're gonna go say hi now versus we're not. All of this social kinda interaction will exhaust them. And if you don't believe me, I think you can probably consider your own experience and then start to realize that it is true.
Right? I know it is true for myself that at competitions there is an overwhelming number of social interactions that I have to deal with that I don't have to navigate on a day-to-day basis, and that's probably true of our agility dogs as well. If they are not going to kinda daycare and dog parks most of the time, then just treating agility trials like daycare or dog parks is going to exhaust them.
So having some clear procedures around when they can say hi, when they can't say hi, and when they should just kind of ignore everything [00:11:00] going on around them will help them maintain some of that mental stamina. Also, when to be focused and when to be a dog. If you, again, are wandering around the trial site, if you are, you know, stopping to chat with a friend, what is your dog doing?
Are they sniffing? Are they in a down stay? Are they trying to get your attention and they're being very alert and focused? I want you to think about having really clear cues for them so that they know what to do in these situations. And again, they can save that bandwidth for their run. I know I will sound like a broken record here, but well-trained routines will reduce decision fatigue When you get the dog out of the car and you put their agility leash [00:12:00] on and you warm them up and you approach the gate, if the dog knows what to do in every piece of that routine, they're not having to decide, "Hmm, do I focus here or do I get distracted?
Hmm, do I sniff the ground here or do I do my down stay?" They already know because it is a well-established, well-rehearsed, well-reinforced routine. It's just like your morning routine. You probably do the exact same thing every single morning without a lot of thought. Your beginning and end-of-run routines can function in the same way.
When I'm approaching the gate of an agility course, it's almost automatic. She doesn't even have to think about it. Sprint, slings herself into a down. Sh- her head is up to me. She is alert. She is ready to go. She doesn't have to make a decision about that anymore. [00:13:00] She just does it. And that just allows more of her brain to be available to me throughout the agility course When we're talking about mentis- mental stamina, we also want to talk about cognitive load.
The same way we talk about it in humans, right? We want to kinda minimize how much we're going to have to take on at any given day. So with regards to the decision fatigue, any time I'm going to a competition, pretty much everything I'm going to eat, what I'm going to wear, when I'm going to leave to get there on time, everything is pre-planned so that I don't have to use my bandwidth and add to the cognitive load on the day of the competition
Other ways that we can reduce cognitive load to improve mental stamina is to make sure that your dog is capable of [00:14:00] truly resting throughout the day at a longer training day or a competition. This means kind of noticing if your dog is resting or not, and seeing if we can make adaptations to their, you know, downtime environment to help them rest.
This might mean choosing to crate in your car rather than closer to the rings. It might mean covering them to create a cool dark place. It might mean adding fans and sound machines. It might mean lugging in an ex-pen to put around their crate to protect them from dogs wandering into their space while they're trying to sleep.
Truly being able to turn off and rest in between competition runs or rounds at a training day will dramatically improve your dog's mental stamina. When I hear about dogs just being [00:15:00] absolutely exhausted at the end of a competition day, I pretty much know that this is going to be a mental stamina, um, situation, that they are mentally fatiguing.
Again, we can start to see, um, the same types of mistakes that I talked about in the physical stamina list when they're mentally fatigued. It just... For me, the difference is usually what I'm doing. Competition is usually less agility overall than a typical training session, so unless I have really increased the amount of agility I'm asking for, like multiple days of agility with way more runs than I've ever done, then a competition usually isn't physically taxing them out.
It's mentally taxing them out. So again, we want to focus on lowering that cognitive load for them. Another aspect of this is [00:16:00] decompression We all need to carve out some time throughout the weekend or before and after the weekend for letting the dog be as free as possible in nature, just letting them be dogs and kind of fill up their doggy emotional cup and not have to worry about hitting that weave pole entry, meeting their contact criteria, and falling- following all of our wacky handling.
Okay? Giving them time to truly decompress and kind of get away from the chaos that is dog sports. And best for me is when I can do this before and/or after the competition day. But if I know that that's harder because of the location I'm gonna be at, I'm going to try really hard to kinda overflow their cup before the event, and then also [00:17:00] overflow it after the event, because they will be a little bit at a deficit if they don't get it in between and they just have high-arousal, high-impact agility activities.
I also want to quickly mention just adequate nutrition throughout the day. I am not a nutritionist. I don't even pretend to know enough about it, but I do recognize that different bodies will have different nutrition needs throughout a long day, especially if it is an uptick in kind of the work that you're asking them to do
So you might be wondering, you know, how can we increase the physical and mental stamina over time? And really, this is about looking at what your dog's typical workload looks like and trying to avoid [00:18:00] massive increases in that randomly. And so if you are planning your training schedule or competition schedule, try to start increas- increasing their typical workload, mental and physical, as a way to help prepare for the increase in workload that you're going to ask from them on that training day or at that competition.
The goal is to not do less. The goal is to build capacity over time and avoid those sudden spikes in the amount that you're asking your dog to do. Make sure that you're including enough recovery time before the fatigue accumulates so much that the dog can no longer recover and they're just trying to play catch up from one event to the next.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. So again, please check out the show [00:19:00] notes to come on over to the Fans of FX Agility community. I would love to hear your thoughts
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Remember, excellent agility is built one training session at a time, and every small step forward matters. Until next time, happy training
