initially need to be on the same level as the dog. If you have a dog who is prone to sinking, cup your hand under the dog’s belly, as shown in Figure 3. That hand can keep your dog from moving forward and from either sitting or lying down. With your left hand supporting the dog, again use gentle pressure on the leash with your right hand to try to pull the dog forward from the stand stay. Because of the increased difficulty of holding a stay while in a stand, you may need to give significant support to your dog initially. As with the other positions, though, he will soon learn to lean back away from the pressure of the leash to securely hold his position. You should gently pull to the sides as well, and you can pull downward more strongly. In all cases, you should support the dog’s stay until he shows that he understands how to hold it himself. Once a dog understands he needs to hold the stay in whatever position you’ve placed him, you can stand up and apply the leash pressure at a greater distance. When I’m practicing stays with one of my dogs, for example, I’ll put her at the end of the leash and pull at a variety of angles, and each time she holds it correctly I’ll say “good stay” before moving on to another direction. I also do that when prepping the dog to do stays in the ring. With the moving stand, which is used in both rally and utility obedience, I walk with my dog in heel position, say “stay,” and keep moving while applying pressure to the leash to remind her that she is to stay at the location where I said the word. It’s a great way to get a dog to lock into position quickly. For the novice obedience stand and the rally stand in which you have to walk back around your dog to heel position, many dogs tend to
position, apply tension to the leash, and have the “judge” (your training partner) walk up to the dog. Keep tension on the leash as the “judge” does the examination, and the dog will know he’s to remain in position despite the person infringing on his personal space. To apply opposition reflex to the utility go-out, you need a dog who will work comfortably on a Flexi lead. Acclimating your dog to a Flexi is a whole other topic, but it’s worth doing to have it in your tool bag of training possibilities. For the
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You want him to fight to hold that position. Learning to put up that fight is what resistance training is all about. Resistance training can also be used for moving exercises like heeling and go-outs.
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dog who stops short in the ring but not in training, you can use the Flexi to cause the dog to stop short in training so you can then correct him. The Flexi itself provides some resistance to the dog’s movement forward, so he has to work harder to go toward the stanchion than he would without the Flexi, but you can also literally stop the dog with the Flexi as he’s going out. That
Figure 3 want to turn around to watch their handlers walk behind them. If the dog has been resistance trained, you can apply that to this problem. As you approach the dog, hold its leash taut and straight upward so he can’t move his head to follow your progress; this will remind him that he is to hold his position. Keep the leash straight above his head until you are back in heel position and end the exercise. You can also apply this to when the dog is being examined by the judge. Set the dog up in heel
ring at shows, so we hadn’t been able to correct it in practice. A friend suggested to me that I try resistance heeling with her and explained the concept to me; I took the idea back to my trainer and we implemented it into our training regimen. The difference it made in my dog’s heeling was astounding; she quickly went from lagging to staying in heel position, enabling her to earn OTCH points at all-breed trials. Here is how we did it: I had my dog on one collar and leash, and my trainer had her on another collar and leash. My collar and leash were situated higher on her neck than the trainer’s were (see Figure 4). We would start to heel, and the trainer would walk behind us; after we’d gone a little way, the trainer would start to gently put some pressure on her leash, trying to pull my dog out of heel position. Initially, my dog would fall back with the trainer’s pressure, so I was able to give her a leash correction. It took just a few corrections for her to figure out that she should pull forward when the trainer’s leash tried to pull her backward out of position, and she became a little sled dog, dragging the trainer forward with all of her might. We also worked her from other angles—from the side, from the front to try to get her to forge, and from angles around the Figure 8 exercise. It all clarified exactly what was expected from her, and she was not going to be “tricked” into making a mistake after that; the harder the trainer tried to pull her out of position, the more determined she was to stay where she was supposed to be. I would caution that this method was so effective with my first dog because she was a colossally stubborn and self-confident dog; we tried it later with my next dog, who is quite
Figure 4 gives you the chance to let the dog know that he made a mistake (even though you caused it) and that he needs to try harder to go all the way out next time. If your dog is not comfortable with a Flexi, you could accomplish the same thing with a long line. One of the most valuable applications I’ve found for resistance training was also the first one I learned: resistance heeling. I had a lagging problem with my Novice A dog when she got to upper-level classes; she would only do it in the Dachshund Club of America
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soft and biddable, and she always let the trainer pull her out of position without putting up a fight, even though she knew I’d correct her for it. No method is perfect for all dogs. That second dog learned her stationary skills from opposition reflex, though, and her stays have always been sublime. There are many applications of opposition reflex for training your dog; start with the basics and see how many other ways you can find to use it.!