Fenzi Dog Sports Academy - AG175: Jumping Gymnastics

Course Details

Sarah has your jump foundation training, and Dr. Leslie has the conditioning exercises required for jumping in this innovative course that covers jumping from all angles. Each week you'll have a foundation training exercise from Sarah focusing on different types of learning and positive reinforcement for correct jumping efforts with an emphasis on errorless learning procedures, as well as a conditioning exercise from Dr. Leslie focused on one of the five phases of jumping: approach, takeoff, aerial, landing, and departure.

Teaching Approach

This course is taught by TWO instructors who are different. You will get feedback from both throughout, and their separate lectures and videos will have some differences. In general; spacial awareness is required, and ability to convert measurements to metric system (if needed) will be helpful. A combination of lecture, video, and video with voiceover and/or captions is used. Both instructors are helpful and accomodating.

This class will have a Teacher's Assistant (TA) available in the Facebook study group to help the bronze and silver students! Directions for joining that Facebook group will be in the classroom after you register.

Instructor: Sarah Stremming

Sarah (she/her) has been working with dogs in the realms of performance training and behavior solutions for over a decade. She currently operates online through her business, The Cognitive Canine. Her special area of interest has long been helping dog owners address behavioral concerns...(Click here for full bio and to view Sarah's upcoming courses)

Instructor: Leslie Eide, DVM

Leslie Eide (she/her) graduated from Colorado State University’s veterinary school in 2006. She completed a rotating internship in small animal medicine in Albuquerque, NM. She continued her education by becoming certified in canine rehabilitation through the Canine Rehab Institute...(Click here for full bio and to view Leslie's upcoming courses)

Syllabus

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Week One

Five phases of jumping

What IS good jumping?

set point

body awareness: cavalettis and individual paw targets

Week Two

SAID principle

motor learning

motor baseline grids

all four on instability equipment

Week Three

Errorless learning

Advanced motor grids

Strength for each phase

Sit to stand and imitating takeoff

Week Four

Declarative learning

Declarative one jump exercise

power ups and hops

Week Five

Classical conditioning

Declarative testing

Trends in Canine Conditioning Discussed

Landing Exercises

Week Six

fitting grids and exercises into workouts

sample workout

Prerequisites & Supplies

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Dogs must be done growing or close to done, so either considered mature in age or development. Handlers should have a good understanding of shaping and luring.

Equipment requirements: We are flexible! Some kind of platform would be extremetly helpful. Some instability equipment, like two fitbones, two discs, two twindiscs, etc would be great, but we have worked with couch cushions, air mattresses, and hay bales. A peanut or platform that can be elevated is very helpful but we will work around it if handlers don't have one. Either paw pods, or four paw targets of another variety (tupperware lids that don't slide around will work!).

Some jumping exercises require four jumps and 50' of space, others can be done in your living room with one jump. Sarah and Leslie are very good at helping you work around equipment requirements, most exercises can be adjusted to fit available equipment or space. If you think you are going to have equipment questions, we would recommend you take the class at least at Silver level.

Sample Lecture

In these exercises we will progress our dogs' ability to power off their rear over a jump; a vital skill!

Power Ups

The Power Up is the progression of the sit to stand, as your dog gets stronger with the sit to stand and is able to raise the front end on higher equipment, you can progress to the power up. The Power Up both imitates the jumping motion of the take-off phase, as well as doing that motion backwards. This exercise strengthens the hind end muscles needed for jumping in both a concentric and eccentric manner.

The dog sits with all limbs on the ground and then explodes up to a high front paw target. Ideally, the dog does not rest at the top, and only hits the side of the equipment to avoid resting and weight bearing with the front limbs. Then the dog goes back into a sit, by lowering the back end first and then the front end (there should not be a stand before the sit).

Hops

The hop is a jump, but slowed down and put on instability equipment. The instability equipment is important for neuromuscular training of the very distinct possibility that a leg might slip out from under the dog when taking off for a jump or landing. Start low to the ground like with two discs and progress to larger/higher equipment. The dog may not recognize it as a jump at first, just continue to work on getting the hop by changing the distance or adding a jump bar/cavaletti pole to help the dog understand. You can also imitate a the jump action by asking them to jump onto something higher as Stig does when using the donut and peanut or using the platform and peanut.

The Hop broken down into foundation movements when using equipment of almost equal size is: Sit, Stand, Tuck Sit, Kickback Stand, Rock Back Sit.

When using equipment of two different sizes (like Stig is doing with the platform and Peanut), I do not ask for the backward movement.

Testimonials & Reviews

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A sampling of what prior students have said about this course ...

Took this class at bronze level, so this is my first chance to give feedback to the instructors, but just wanted to say that I learned SO MUCH from this course! For once, I was good about following the gold threads and it was so educational to watch the student videos and read Sarah and Leslie's feedback. It was also very inspirational to see the progress that the different gold students and their dogs made.

I have a young dog who is just learning to jump and I feel reasonably confident that I can come up with a plan to teach him jumping skills and work on his conditioning. If there's one thing I take away from this course it's the importance of the strength and conditioning exercises: you could definitely see the gold dogs get stronger and become more confident and skilled at jumping. Such a far cry from what I did with my first agility dog: just let her figure things out on her own!

In the years I have taken agility with my dogs, very little time has been spent on the correct way for dogs to do the jumps in agility. Yet jumps are probably the biggest single part of agility. So to me it is a critical part of agility. I will definitely be using this with my other agility dogs and am really sorry I didn't take the class 6-7 years ago. Great class and think highly of it. Worth it to anyone who is working on better jumping skills in agility for their dogs.

Sarah and Leslie were amazing. I took the course at bronze but I got so much out of the lectures and following the gold threads. As the gold students worked through problems with grid spacing and training the exercises, it gave me an idea of how to change/alter things for my dog when he struggled a bit. My 2 yo dog (will likely compete at 24") had never jumped more than 10-12" before this class. Now he is comfortably up to 20" for declarative jumping and 16" for the grids. Huge improvement in a short amount of time! Thanks!

Really enjoyed this course. Impressed to see how much the course dogs improved. Pleased to see the improvement in my dogs as well.

Learning jumping skills and exercises to support them in one class was too good an opportunity to pass up. The feedback was excellent with suggestions on how to modify the exercises and jump work for your dog. In reading the other gold threads it was obvious that a cookie cutter approach was not used. Suggestions were very specific to each dog. Concern for the dog's safety was evident in modifications suggested to jump height, exercise equipment used, etc. Feedback was given very regularly, sometimes twice a day which was appreciated. I did the exercises with my other dogs as well. One of them went swimming this week (week 6 of the class) and the therapist commented that he was swimming much better with his rear legs extended rather than in the usual frog dog. The course has had an obvious benefit for him. Overall a fabulous course. I wish there was a followup to it. Thank you Sarah and Leslie.

Registration

There are no scheduled sessions for this class at this time. We update our schedule frequently, so please subscribe to our mailing list for notifications.

Registration opens at 9:30am Pacific Time.

AG175 Subscriptions

	Gold	Silver	Bronze
Tuition	$ 260.00	$ 130.00	$ 65.00
Enrollment Limits	12	25	Unlimited
Access all course lectures and materials	✔	✔	✔
Access to discussion and homework forums	✔	✔	✔
Read all posted questions and answers	✔	✔	✔
Watch all posted videos	✔	✔	✔
Post general questions to Discussion forum	✔	✔	✖
Submit written assignments	✔	✖	✖
Post dog specific questions	✔	With video only	✖
Post videos	✔	Up to 2	✖
Receive instructor feedback on	Questions All videos	Questions All videos	✖

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AG175: Jumping Gymnastics

Course Details

Teaching Approach

Gold

Silver

Bronze