OB290: Give Props to Props: Getting Clean Competition Behaviors
Course Details
Are you struggling with crooked fronts or finishes? Is your dog creeping on the position changes? Is your dog still not backing up on cue? Learn how props can help fix all these problems and prevent these and many more! How would it feel to explain exactly what you want to your dog, without a ton of body cues and prompts? With so many behaviors to teach our competition dogs, I am all for building good habits early on and making training easier!
If you agree, join me in this class and learn why and how I use props to teach many obedience and rally behaviors. We will cover shaping and luring and how both can be effective in teaching props. We’ll discuss sit platforms, full body platforms, pivot bowls, gates, PVC chutes, and foot targets. You’ll learn how to teach your dog what is expected of each prop (no buddy, we don’t pivot on the front foot target!) and how to use those props to get lovely rear end awareness, fabulous left turns, fantastic fronts and finishes, and stunning position changes at a distance. In addition, we’ll teach pocket hand, sustained nose touches, and chin rests that you can use in a variety of situations! Finally, we will discuss methods for fading the props. With the information you learn in this class, you can teach or improve heeling, fronts, finishes, position changes, retrieves, backing up, and more! Watch your scores go up with the understanding your dog will gain!
Do you have a young dog or puppy that hasn’t had a lot of formal rally or obedience training? Maybe you're starting to get interested in the TEAM program? Or maybe an older dog with whom you’re trying to clean up those fronts and finishes or posititon changes? Do you want to take your training to the next step? If so, this class is a perfect fit for you! From puppies to older dogs, every dog will love this class!
Check out the trailer!
Teaching Approach
Lectures will be released weekly on the first day of each week. Each lecture contains written information with short videos to demonstrate. Videos do not include captions or voiceovers. This class would work best with students that prefer written out instructions with video examples of each step and prefer a systematic approach to training. I will provide written feedback with video examples if necessary.
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 will be in the classroom after you register.
Nicole Wiebusch CPDT-KA (she/her) has been competing in dog sports for over 25 years. Starting in 4-H, Nicole quickly became addicted to the sport of obedience and has been showing in obedience, rally, and agility ever since. (Click here for full bio and to view Nicole's upcoming courses)
There are no pre-requisites for this class. Everyone is welcome from puppies on up.
Equipment: You will need properly sized props for your dog. I will put up a pre-lecture on either how you can make props yourself or where you can buy them.
OB290 Give Props to Props: Clarity for Obedience and Rally
Teaching Fronts with a Sit Platform
Now that your dog is comfortable on a sit platform, let’s start talking about using the platform to teach fronts! A front for obedience is a very precise position, and although there is a bit more flexibility in rally, the dog still needs to be in a particular position in relation to your body.
In my opinion, it’s easier to fade a prop than it is to fade extraneous body movements and cues. Trying to show your dog where “front” is with treats and your hands isn’t easy! Here is a video of me luring Excel into the front position. It’s difficult for me to get him perfectly straight and notice all that body language that I’m having to give him. Further, I’m doing the work for him by luring him into position with the treat and my hands, so he’s not really thinking about what he’s doing. He’s focused on my hands and not my face, where he should be focusing. Do you see how I’m not able to do a good job communicating with him what I want?
Compare that to this next video, in which I use a sit platform to show my dog exactly what I’m looking for. The sit platform has already been trained and he is very comfortable on it. This video was taken the same day (just minutes apart) as the last one.
In this video, look at how still I am able to be, with my hands at my sides. Excel’s attention is focused upward on my face. He knows exactly what his job is. Now I can go right to practicing correct repetitions of this behavior and putting a lot of reward history on the correct behavior.
Eye Contact in Front
I teach my dogs to seek out my face very early, rewarding for eye contact often. When I get to more formal training, my dogs know to ignore my hands (even with treats in them) and give me eye contact. Before you start front training, your dog will need to understand that your face will be the focal point in front. Here’s a short example of me working with Excel on eye contact:
If you haven’t taught your dog this skill yet, it’s a great time to start! First, I set up my training session so that the environment is not distracting. I usually start with treats in my hands behind my back. I don’t care about what position my dog is in. When my dog makes eye contact, I mark and reward. It’s extremely important in this training that you mark without any body movement, THEN move your hand to reward your dog. If you start moving your hand as you are marking, the dog will look toward your hand in anticipation of the treat and you will end up marking the dog looking away from you.
In the beginning of training I will mark any eye contact, no matter how fleeting, but very quickly I would like the dog to really look at me, not just glance. If I’m struggling with getting duration, I will ignore the first quick glance, but mark the second one. Then I move onto marking the third quick glance. At this point the dog will usually start looking at you longer. Within a session or two I am waiting for 1-2 seconds of steady eye contact before I mark.
When the dog really understands eye contact with my hands behind my back, I will start putting them at my sides. I keep my hands low so I can really tell if my dog is looking at me or my hands. I continue to mark and reward eye contact. As the dog improves, I will start to put my hands in different positions, such as straight out from my body.
Here’s an example of me working with Excel, showing you how I’d progress. Excel went through these steps really fast since he knows the game, so make sure you don’t progress to the next step until your dog is solid.
If my dog looks at one of my hands, I try to reward from the opposite hand. I didn’t always remember to do that, but I try. :-) I always have treats in both hands.
Teaching Front with a Sit Platform
Once your dog has been introduced to the sit platform and understands duration, you can start working on the front behavior. The first step in teaching a front with a sit platform is to get the dog very comfortable with getting on the platform. Your dog should be able to sit square on the platform from multiple angles. I start this game by standing a foot or two from the platform and tossing treats in different places, and marking when the dog gets on and sits. I don’t move on until my dog is showing confidence with getting on the platform from all angles.
Many dogs struggle with the pressure of our bodies standing right by the sit platform. This is the reason that I stand a foot or two away for the initial training. Once my dog is comfortable getting on the platform, I will start to move closer. At first I’ll mark when the dog sits, then step into reward. I slowly work toward me standing right in front of the platform as the dog comes up and sits.
Side note: there are other tools I use to help the dog come close in front, and we will discuss those later in the class.
This video shows Strive early in her front training. You can see how she struggles with sitting close to me and how I work through it.
Placement of Reward
Being smart about your placement of reward makes a big difference in training fronts. If you are always rewarding from the same pocket or the same hand, your dog will start to sit crooked in order to look at your pocket or hand. Be sure that you store treats in both pockets, reward from both hands, and deliver the treat in the center of your body.
Here’s a video of Excel as a puppy, working on fronts. You can see that I haven’t taught him a good focal point in front. He’s very distracted by the treats in my hands. He also is a little uncomfortable with me standing really close to the platform. I am trying to use placement of reward to help him, and I’m marking any eye contact that I get, but you can see how difficult and inconsistent it was. After this session, I went back and worked on eye contact and it made a huge difference.
Throwing a treat through my legs is another way that I reward fronts. Since dogs want to go to where the treat is, this reward placement will often cause the dog to want to be closer to your legs.
As this class continues on, you’ll learn other tools for teaching your dog front. If you have these beginning steps done as outlined in this lecture, you will be well on your way to your dog having a fabulous front!
A sampling of what prior students have said about this course...
This class was great, I love the option to keep building skills from previous weeks plus getting new material every week to learn something new as well.
Give Props to Nicole for her Give Props to Props class! The class material was well organized and easy to follow which was critical because this fast-paced class covers A TON of material. Nicole's lectures are super chock-full of videos showing and also explaining exactly what she discusses in her lecture notes. So whatever your preferred learning style, Nicole's got you covered. And in the case where a Gold student needed additional visual information, Nicole replied super fast with a custom-made personalized video showing the student specifically how to address their issue!
So there was no getting stuck on anything because Nicole had everyone's back, ensuring that progress was made by each team and she kept it fun in the process. This was my first Gold and I am amazed at how Nicole's keen eye caught any errors, knew what to do to fix them, and ensured that we were successful. I have taken many classes at Bronze and I do think this class would be a super value at Bronze. However, if you can go for the Gold, do it; you won't be disappointed! Without a doubt, I will be taking more of Nicole's classes, and hopefully at Gold.
We haven't done all the work yet, but I hope to because the lectures are clear and make a LOT of sense. I am looking forward to doing this work with my dogs. Thank you!
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Instructor: Nicole Wiebusch 
