Before we start teaching our learners complicated behaviors and advanced concepts, we need to teach them how to learn. This course focuses on building one of the most important skills our dogs need in training; focus. We cant’t teach them anything if they are not with us during training session. In this course we will cover:

• how to start the training session
• how to end the training session
• wait for cue behavior
• building easy to more complex training scenarios
• training loops
• backward chaining
• antecedent arrangement
• trainer’s mechanics
• multiple exercises for building focus AKA precurrent behavior

This course is a prerequisite for Let Me Want It.
One of our previous student if this course and before and after:

Dogs olfactory abilities amaze us and what they manage to do with their noses is truly astounding.
Nosework is a sport that uses most natural, amazing dog’s abilities and develops them into perfection.

Nosework is one of the greatest dog sports, making its way to the top most popular canine activities. Inspired by working detection dogs searching for narcotics, explosives, nosework makes it available for everyone. Dogs are searching for essential oils hidden in vehicles, interiors, water, exteriors and containers and they love it!

“No limitations”
This sport is for everyone! It is a perfect activity for old, retired, or disabled dogs who want to stay in shape but can’t be physically challenged. Aggressive dogs are welcome too!
Pure breed, cross breed, old, young, slow, fast – it doesn’t matter what type your dog is!

During the course we focus on:

• what is nosework; rules reading
• classically conditioning odors
• building solid alert behavior using clicker training
• introducing discrimination between hot and cold objects
• introducing various odor holders
• introducing cardboard boxes
• generalization

There are 3 more nosework course stages.

When was the last time you practiced your handling skills? How much time do you spend working on your timing, mechanics and control in relation to the time spent on your dog’s skills? Do you know that your dog’s skills are reflection of your own? Very often we forget how important it is to focus on our own preparation before even working with dogs. Being able to mark in time, properly delivery reinforcement is not a something extra, it’s our obligation as a trainer! Very often we expect from our dogs much more than from ourselves.

Trainer’s toolbox is a foundation course focusing on scientific approach to dog training. We will cover ABA (applied behavior analysis) principles and how they resonate with what we do with dogs, we will cover mechanics and techniques of teaching behaviors!

• clicker training mechanics
• skills for trainer
• chaining
• adding stimulus control to behaviors and
• luring
• shaping
• structure of training session
• concept of fluency
• frustration and errors
• raising criteria
• moulding
• concept of loopy training

This course is must have for anyone interested into diving into depths of scientific dog training. If you want to be the handler your dog deserves – join me for 6 weeks of great learning.

Obedience; distance control exercise, position changes with front anchored.

Position changes are one of my favorite exercises from the obedience ring. Starting in class 1 all the way to Elite class (class 3) there is always something we can focus on when doing position changes. This exercise is a perfect combination of precision and speed which equals fluency! Distance control is also perfect exercise for behavior/precision nerd like myself! There is a lot of focus on those micro movements, tiny weight shifts that change the whole process of learning.

The course will cover:

✔️ front anchored positions

– sit from stand

– sit from down

– stand from down

– stand from sit

– down from sit

– down from stand

✔️ building precision in each movement

✔️ adding distance

✔️ adding cues

✔️ adding duration

✔️ trial variations

Rear anchored positions will be covered in different course.

Prerequisites:

– clicker training foundations.

Self-study course! Auditors only! (No premium spots in this course)

Positive reinforcement training is about setting up for success and making sure desired behaviors are followed by reinforcers, which strengthen the behavior in the future. In this course you get to join the Swedish duo Eva and Emelie as they zoom in on the small but important details that make up a training session, from one reward to the next. What happens right after each reward? What happens within your reward procedure? And why does it matter?

In “Seamlessness – from one reward to the next” you will learn learn how to work deliberately with small but significant details, paying attention to all the parts of the training loop and using them to create seamless training sessions. The material in this course will help you develop your own training sessions further.  Your planning will get better, your training will become smoother, and both you and your learner will enjoy the process even more than before!

This course will cover

• The underpinnings – goals, core values and basic principles
• Efficient training using positive reinforcement, what does that look like?
• Overview of training from one reward to the next
• Decision making in all parts of the training loop
• Training session fundamentals
• Reward ends – then what?
• Cues, prompts and lures – what part do they play?
• Criteria and avoiding “garbage” behavior
• Reward procedures
• What to do when mistakes happen
• Putting behavior together
• Creating a great training session, from one reward to the next!

This is a 6 week self-study course. New lessons will be presented each week  (a total of 15 lessons) and you will have continued access to the material after the course finishes.

We have so much material we wish to share with you on this topic – in this course, we put it together in a comprehensive yet extensive form. Our goal is to provide you with a lot of information and ideas from which you can extrapolate the aspects you currently wish to work with in your own training.

The course is auditors only,  allowing you to digest the material at your own pace and consider how it relates to your own training.  There will be follow-up courses with practical training and feedback from us, we just wish to have everyone on the same page first…   There are so many aspects to consider – it literally takes us six weeks to get from one reward to the next!

Do you work at a Dog Rescue? Are you volunteer at a Dog Rescue? Do you Love, Care, or Work with Rescued Dogs? Would you like to learn more about their Training? Would you like to know how to Help them more? Would you like to know how to work with them Successfully?

If you answer to any or all of these questions is Yes, then this course is for YOU!

“Working Successfully with Rescued Dogs – The Blueprint, Part 1” will cover several topics to get you started on the path of Training and Educating Rescued Dogs!

In this course, you will learn about:

• How Environment affects Dogs’ Behaviour
• What is Stress; How to recognize it in Dogs; And how to reduce it
• The power of Trust
• Dogs’ Needs and their Well-being
• How Dogs Learn
• Dog Training Equipment: What to use and what not to
• The Basics of Dog’ Body Language
• How to Approach Rescued Dogs Successfully
• Clicker Training
• How to Train Rescued Dogs: Practical Exercises

These are the main topics that will be covered in detail throughout the course.

Make sure to sign up for Premium if you would like to get my full support throughout the course.

Building up on skills we covered in stage one, we will continue our preparation to exams. ORTs and first trials. Our primary focus will always be precise and clear training loop, and clarity in search criteria.

We will start where we left with stage 1 and focus on:

• start line routine
• introducing search patterns
• duration of search behavior
• handling
• building clarity in cues during search pattern
• generalization of locations
• task analysis of searches
• basics of scent theory
• increasing complexity of puzzles
• planning your own training

Preparation for frisbee is a series of four courses  that are meant to turn newbie dog frisbee adept into a team with good foundations that allow them to have fun with flying plastic safely. 

What is a Foundation? 

It’s a group of skills and behaviors. Whenever we think about where to start we should consider where do we want to end up. What our dog will be doing few years from now? 

In most general terms dogfrisbee is a game where dogs chase, jump and catch. So our plan should contain:

1. Physical preparation- conditioning muscles, joints, ligaments and tendons for all those taxing, flashy behaviors.
2. Skills- dog will need to keep track of what it’s body while traveling with high speed. Be able to follow flying discs and adjust it’s behavior accordingly, showcase tremendous coordination of entire body
3. Behaviors- there is simply a lot of stuff that our dog needs to do. We can throw him into deep water and hope that it will be fine… Disclaimer usually it ends with” my dog is bad a frisbee”. Or we can teach what to do instead. Your choice. 

Do we doing part one? 

In short we “teach rewards”. It’s a collection of tug based games that teach a dog all those minor things that we don’t appreciate when they are there but we can get very frustrated when they aren’t. 

Exercises with a dog:

1. Quality tug- how to do is right? How to make a great reinforcer and strength exercise out of it. 
2. Catch the rat- introduction to chasing. Teaches a dog how to execute effective catch on moving target. How to control its body and judging the distance between him/her and a toy. 
3. Drop – if you teach your dog to drop by grabbing its color you are doing it wrong. You will learn four different dropping games. Your dog will think “how can I make this human monkey to ask me to drop”
4. Exchange- swiftly changing from playing with one toy to another. Imagine cool looking freestyle routine. Would it be equally cool if a dog had no idea when to refocus from one frisbee to another. It’s also often used reinforcement procedure.
5. Follow me- base for fetch is a dog that wants to come back and share a toy with you. That’s what we are teaching here.
6. Tossing toys- it’s combined catch a rat with following. 

You will receive one exercise per week. On top of that additional lectures covering more specific aspects and topics. 

In order to to take maximal benefit out of this course you and your dog should be able to tug “happily” for around 30 seconds. If you struggle with it you should check out my course “Iron Jaws” before signing up for preparation for frisbee.

This course is very sentimental for me. My dog didn’t tug at all. He didn’t like to take things into his mouth but I really wanted to play Frisbee so we started learning how to tug. At that time I knew very little and our journey was full of frustration. That wasn’t a fun experience for any of us.

We were working hard (I’m pretty stubborn so I kept trying) and after a year we managed to bring tugging to the level where I can call that a reinforcement. Was it hard? Definitely… Would it be easier to do if I had known as much as I know now? It would!

So what is “Iron Jaws”? It’s a compendium of knowledge which I hope I have known when I started. I know that I am not the only one who struggled with this behavior. It’s harder than most people think and that’s why I wrote this course.

The goal is to teach you to tug and give you a clear view on what to do BUT “what” is not enough for me. With a little help of science I will show you why does it work. Tugging is not magic. It’s a behavior like a sit or lie down and shares the same principles of learning. It’s also one of the best ways for creating strong and happy relationship with your dog AND it’s so fun to do!

Lessons you can expect can be divided into three major categories:

1. Basics of learning- We will introduce simple concepts like ABC’s, primary and secondary reinforcer, motivation and operationalising behaviors we want to teach. It will be our scientific core for understanding why we teach the way we do.
2. Myths- common knowledge and misunderstandings about tugging. We will dig deep into why things happen and we will question what we know.
3. Tugging- Pure practice and mechanics of the game. How to do it right. Meaning what to do to be safe and have a blast together.

If your dog doesn’t “like” to tug this course is for you!

This course is designed to create the necessary building blocks for effective communication between you and your dog.  It will teach you how to train your dog a repertoire of core behaviours, as well as the skills in how to then effectively apply and progress them.  On completion you will have strong, solid base to progress your training from.

Essential Foundation Behaviours is suitable for dogs of any age, stage and can be an important refresher to assist overcoming any training glitches you may encounter.

We will cover:

• Training Mechanics
• Attention
• Touch
• Mat/Bed/Crate
• Down
• Settle
• Follow me
• Recall
• Drop
• Feed retreat