ep 88 front crosses
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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 and 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.
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Hey there. This is episode 88, and today I want to talk to you about front crosses. You either love them or you hate them. I don't think that there is any in between.
Admittedly, as a front cross queen, I absolutely love them. Front crosses are so versatile and can provide so much clear information for our [00:01:00] dogs, whether they're preparing to jump, or go into a tunnel, or exit a contact. It really is the technique that can be applied in almost any situation. But I do have four key things that can help you improve your front crosses, and maybe help move the needle a little more in the I love them direction.
The first one is footwork. Th- the footwork is definitely something that a lot of students that I work with get caught up on. And while I do suggest practicing your footwork, and practicing the footwork a lot, I really encourage students to practice the footwork without their dog. I break all of this down in my handler mechanics lessons, especially when we get to learning the front cross.[00:02:00]
But once we add the dog to the equation, I actually want you to stop thinking about the footwork. I want you to, in that moment, be thinking more about timing and connection, and let your body do the rest. And that's really only possible if you have spent an adequate amount of time practicing the footwork and getting it more into automation without the dog.
Because once we have the dog, now connection, where we're looking on course, matters most I also talk about connection in my handler mechanics classes and teach students where to hold their head so that not only do they know where they're going, the handler can see where they're headed next, they can see the next obstacles, they don't have to turn a- away to look where you're going next.[00:03:00]
Having really consistent connection allows the dog to be able to see the correct side of your face at all times. Where I believe students get confused is that we think we should be able to see the dog the whole time throughout a front cross, and this just isn't going to be the case necessarily, especially in more complex lines when we're using front crosses.
We may lose sight of them. The dog may temporarily be behind us because our front cross has enabled us to cut across the path and take a shorter route than the dog has to take when they're jumping or when they're in a tunnel. So connection in a front cross is about the dog being able to see your face, not about you seeing your dog.
I recommend putting a line on the ground for your eyes to follow [00:04:00] throughout the front cross so that you can maintain connection throughout, without necessarily watching your dog. When we get caught watching our dog through the entire front cross, you might be encouraged to take a lot of extra backward steps, and then you are late getting forward to the next obstacle.
Or you might be encouraged to stop and wait for your dog to come back into visibility and again, if you stop moving, you've probably lost the advantage to being ahead and using a front cross in the first place. So putting the line on the ground and watching the line, so watching the line you want your dog to land and get back to, allows you to continue moving forward with confidence that the dog will appear on that line once again.
Thing number three is timing. I think we all know that [00:05:00] we should get the front cross done before the dog lifts for the jump, but what does that mean? I want you to think about this in two different pieces. Turn around first and get out of the way second. Turning around first gives you the time to show the rotation to the dog before they lift for the jump.
Your dog needs to know that the turn is happening before they leave for the jump, but they don't need to know exactly where they're going next until they land that jump. This is why we get out of the way second. If we turn around, if we complete our rotation of our front cross before they take off, and now our bodies are moving forward and we're staying connected to the line, we have the time that it takes for the dog to get to the takeoff point, jump the jump, land, and complete their correction stride to get out of the way.
And a lot of [00:06:00] times, if your timing is close enough and your connection is great, you can still be a tiny bit in their way and things are going to work out. But separating these two pieces, turn around first, get out of the way second, actually gives you more time while still providing all of the vital information to your dog
this last one is my advice for when you're learning front crosses or you're trying to get better at them. There are a lot of different types of front crosses. Because the front cross can be applied to so many different lines, I, I would never suggest you to just go out and do a bunch of front crosses because it means so many different things.
I try to teach them in an order that makes more sense to the human learner, and makes applying everything that I just talked about [00:07:00] easier to do successfully, right? So the first one that I teach to handlers is the backside send to a front cross, and if your dog doesn't have a backside send, they probably have a wing wrap, and those are essentially the same thing.
I encourage students to start with the backside send to front cross or the wing wrap front cross because when you send around the wing, your body is already prepared to rotate in the correct direction Two, you have more time to get turned around and out of the way because the dog has to still travel around the wing and then jump, or around the wing and then return to you.
So you have a lot more flexibility with the timing. It's also really easy to use a pre-placed [00:08:00] reward in this context to help with the commitment and again, give you even more time. If the dog is collecting the reward while you finish rotating and moving out of the way, this is very easy to set both team members up for success.
The second, once you've mastered the backside send to front cross, is the landing side front cross or a recall front cross. This is really similar to the backside send front cross, but the dog will be coming in with a bit more extension and need more timely turning cues. With the backside send, the dog is naturally collecting h- to get to the backside.
With this more recall front cross, the dog's coming in with a bit more extension. So the setup is kind of sending them out on a line, maybe a pinwheel line, or sending them out to a tunnel, and then as the dog is coming back in your direction, you're [00:09:00] cueing a front cross to turn their line in a new direction.
Again, because the dog is coming towards you, your body is already half rotated into the front cross. So we're... essentially, with these first two, we're eliminating the hard part of the front cross, which is preparing to turn. This way we can focus primarily on good connection and good timing, and splitting the good footwork in half.
It's a lot easier to turn around and get going in the new direction if you only have to do half of the turn. So when we're recalling the dog into this front cross, we're already halfway turned, we just have to finish the turn, maintain good connection, and get out of the way. The third one is front side wrapping lines.
So now we are adding in the goal of [00:10:00] starting our rotation when the dog is landing the previous obstacle and needing to get a full rotation done before they've lifted for the jump. However, with a wrapping line, you don't have very far to get out of the way. Usually, it's one or two steps. So because we've increased the difficulty on the first half of the front cross, we've decreased the difficulty on the back half, again making this easier for humans to practice and learn and build on success Connection is also quite a bit easier to maintain in these wrapping lines because the dog isn't that far from us, and we are likely to be able to see some part of the dog throughout the entire wrapping line.
Then the last type of front cross that I encourage students to try are ones where we have to [00:11:00] move laterally out of the dog's way or front crosses where we may start our rotation on the takeoff side of the jump and move across the line to the landing side in order to get out of their way. These are the most difficult.
These are the ones where we might lose sight of our dog, and if our dog is a tiny bit more handler-focused, we may have to build up a little bit more commitment for our dog to tolerate the amount of pressure turning that early will put on the dog. So it does require quite a bit more confidence, quite a bit more fluency, and if we went through the first three versions of the front cross, you will have built up that reinforcement history for good footwork, good connection, good timing, and maintaining commitment from the dog
So those are [00:12:00] my top pieces of advice for improving your front crosses. Which one stood out to you? I'd love to know. Come on over to the free Fans of FX Agility community, and let's talk about it
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