Dec
12
Front crosses across the box, and serpentines
This weekend I worked on couple of variations of the Double Box exercises. One is a drill to practice front crosses while running the diagonal through the box, the other is a serpentine drill.
I’m really not a fan of this front cross drill. They aren’t my favorite front crosses anyway, and I’m just not fast enough/confident enough in Ticket to be able to do these crosses on time. We’ll get there, but it’s hard. This is the sequence:
So, you front cross between 3 and 4, 5 and 6, 9 and 10, and 11 and 12. The front crosses should be done along the diagonal line that runs from the near wing that the dog is coming from, to the far wing that the dog is going towards. The cross should be done such that you finish at that far wing of the next jump. Obviously, the real trick of this exercise, is getting there, and then managing to get there for the next one. But it’s good practice.
The second drill is work on serpentines.
I love serpentines, but with Ticket I’m still having to wait a split second longer then I’d like at the second jump (#3 and #7). She’s still learning what that arm cue means, and if I don’t wait for her, she’ll bypass the jump at the last instant. In the middle of this session, she was doing that (not on video), so I went back to rewarding for it, and built up again. By the last try at the sequence, I was able to leave the middle jump a bit earlier, allowing me to be ahead for the final jump of the serpentine and truly indicate where she should be going.
I also threw in a couple of threadles at the end, just to remind her the difference in the cues. My threadle cues are still awkward and late, but I’m working through it. Hopefully with repetition I’ll get it. 🙂
At the end of this video is some work on weave poles entrances. So far so good 🙂
