Verbal Push – Distance and Discriminations

Sarah Fernandezlopez says:

I’ll give you two different answers 😉

The different cues for straight on aren’t REALLY for taking the jump straight on, it’s more for what you do AFTER you take the jump straight on. When a dog takes a jump straight, they can wrap left or right, but when a dog goes to the backside of a jump, there is only one way for them to go, over the bar. In other words, straight on the wrap happens after the jump. With a backside, the wrap happens on approach to the jump! And we handle that with other cues (mostly handling on the inside with a physical push to the outside wing.

My second answer is that many handlers are now creating separate backside cues in an effort to be more verbal and depend less on physical cues. These cues often tell the dog whether to expect a slice after the backside or more of a curl. So you CAN consider finer grained verbal cues. But it depends on your goals and whether or not fewer cues is an issue for you. If you’re successfully handling the courses YOU want to run, then you probably don’t need that level of control. But if you frequently run into issues on course that you can’t address with your current handling, then you may need more…

Sarah Fernandezlopez says:

And also – the VERY newly released Shape Up Skills 1 DOES use multiple cues. We’re loading that into the Academy, but here’s the first lesson on backsides:

We will start to build backside wrap behaviours in this course. I am training my backside
wraps differently from my previous dogs where the cue is in relation to the dog instead of
the handler. Just like with the wraps where the dog has learned to wrap to THEIR left or
THEIR right regardless of handler position I am teaching the backside wraps in the same
way. So instead of having a backside wrap cue and a threadle wrap cue I will only have
one cue that allows me to handle the behaviour from either position. In this lesson we are
learning the backside wrap on the left wing (dog circles right). This behaviour will be called
“zoom zoom” and I can handle it as a backside wrap as well as a threadle wrap since they
are learning which wing to wrap independent from which side i am on.
I like to shape the behaviour before I add the cue so you will see on the video using the
shaping game to set the dog up to offer the backside behaviour.
Start by reviewing the shaping game but use a wing instead of a pole. Once you have built
some distance on the back and forth around a wing we will add a bar so they are starting to
see the picture of front side vs backside.
Since they are patterned at this point they should very easily offer a “backside” one
direction and a front side on the other.
Continue to build a bit of distance so they are confident offering the backside to the right
then you can start to only reward from the one bowl so they are offering the backside to the
right over and over.
At this point we can add a second wing so they see the full picture of the jump and they are
confident repeating the backside behaviour.
Once they are consistently offering the backside wrap behaviour we can start to add a
verbal cue, I am using “zoom zoom” for backsides wrapping to the right (left wing) and “loop
loop” for backsides wrapping to the left (right wing). We will focus on backside wraps to the
right in the first 2 lessons then introduce backside wraps to the left in lesson 3 & 4.