When The Mood Is Good!
- Jul 31, 2025
- 5 min read
Back To Life
When the war was finally declared over, I felt like I could breath again and trainings finally started to look happier again.
In our first training I started with 2 easy repetitions of follow up without food before I grabbed some food and used full luring and on-time rewarding. my main goal is working her concentration and quick returns from breaks.
I try to keep the session interesting and dynamic and use movement after every time I ask her for something that requires more self control or static skills, and it seems it works well because she looks happy and excited to work together.
From Time to time I challenge her with some sequencing moves or different types of transitions from the ones she already knows nicely and every time, I remind myself to also go back a bit to make things easier so that she won’t feel as if the difficulty only goes higher.
When I see she is not 100% sure about something I try to encourage her and let her know that I believe she can do it!
I NEED her to know, that I think she is the best dog in the world so that she would think so as well 😊
After the “long” food session I changed to toy to celebrate her great session but I also have the “improving mental stamina” agenda behind it…
At the end I challenged her with a nose touch and she was finally able to do it with the toy even thought it was super hard for her so we celebrated that too.
It was an amazing session in my opinion and I felt very proud of her.
The next day it was time to have some fun!
I love working with frisbees. Mostly because it’s toy that can bring all the prey drive skills into use, but when I work well with it, I can also teach the dog a lot about self control in high drive.
I like to make sure that my dogs can work with the frisbee like any other toy and perform all the tricks they know with it.
With the disc I am also able to work on the eye-mouth connection to improve the mouth accuracy.
So this whole session was about making her think with the frisbee and boy did she do good or what?! 😍
After two days we had our next serious session, I am sorry about the sound, but for some reason the microphone was not recording well.
First part of this session was about spins on platform - but not with full luring.
I am trying to get her to think about her steps so that she won’t put too much pressure on her shoulders during the spins. It was a bit hard for her at first, but she adjusted quickly and then it was no problem at all.
The next part of the session was down stay on a platform.
Super hard for her, but we will slowly get there.
For now, I still need to be quick and not too move too far or too much, but we are learning our boundaries together, and that super cool, but honestly, there are moments that I think to myself “she is way too jumpy to stay still”.
After a few repetitions of staying in down position, I got her off the platform and did some dynamic moves to reward her with movement after the staying.
There is a point about that too; I want her to build a certain amount of tension and waiting before moving so that she will bring out all her energy in the movement or (in the future) in the dancing part.
The next day e worked with the toy on self control and some changes with my body language in tricks and I also incorporated some sequences and different ways of rewarding; catch from my hand, close throw, chase…
I even tried some new stuff like the under the arms slaloms which she really succeeded in in singles but as sequence it was a bit harder and it even got her a bit frustrated, but not too much that she couldn’t work anymore after 😊
At the end of the session I did some ZEN with the ball, and she did well, except for one time where I asked for too much and had to mark the mistake with a physical hold back and to my surprise not only she recuperated quite fast from it, but it even increased her drive in the reward when she came back with the ball… and of course, to finish, I start using the dog catch which I want her to really like.
In the next session the mic didn’t work again (I really need to do something about it) so the next few videos are soundless unfortunately.
I started from ping pong and followed by arrival to a front position and I feel she is really starting to understand this position which is good because that means that soon enough we will be able to start working with the position on the sideways as well, but I am not in a rush of course.
Next was the front legs pivot. I didn’t do it too much with her when she was younger because I felt I have to work on other things first, but by now I think she can handle it better and we can start using this to prepare her body for heelwork, backward movements and body awareness too.
I can see it is not her favourite activity but I think it’s a matter of time because she is super talented physically so there is no reason why she wouldn’t like this once she understands what she needs to do.
I wanted to try the rear legs target afterwards but this went really bad. She is not confident enough to do it on a small surface yet while walking back, so I dropped the idea fast and changed to something that would be more fun for her because I didn’t want to harm her energy and concentration at this point.
I went without platforms to change the ambiance from the previous exercise and started working on the bow. I love teaching dogs this trick because it is super good for the core but also it forces us handlers to be fast and clear to the dog about what we want the dog to do.
She was AMAZING!!!!!!
I think she is going to love performing the bow in the future!
For the grand finale I did some small nose touch (still not her most favourite yet) and then some dog catch positioning while sitting down to help her with the confidence and rewarding in my arms.
On the last day of the month we celebrated 700K followers on IG and I got dressed up to film a nice training with her and we had a wonderful time together during the sunset.
I chose the puller for a toy and started the training from tugging and chasing and my main goal was to help make her retrieval more attentional and tried to show different positions of my body here she can retrieve the toy to, but I was in such a good mood that she was too excited from my energy at times.
Unfortunately some of my throw as rewards were not so accurate so the phone fell a few times.
We had lots of fun and finished with a small sequence and it was a super good feeling after.
I feel we are slowly starting to understand each other better.
and yes, there are good days and other days that are not as good but in generally, I couldn't be happier about how this pup is growing and becoming a true partner to me ❤️