Improvising Your Home Dog Sport Training

Practice makes perfect, and if you're involved in a dog sport, you could really use it on a regular basis. However, in sports such as Agility and Rally Obedience, the sport's necessary equipment isn't always available for home usage. A lot of canine sporting equipment is incredibly expensive if you want a good quality piece, and not everyone has enough room at home for storage. So, if you're unable to have your own home equipment for your sport, what can you do?

Ethel

We're personally fortunate enough to be able to purchase and store some of our own Agility equipment at home for home usage and training. This comes in handy on a regular basis, especially if our usual training classes are cancelled and the conditions are fit for practice. However, we do not own any of our own contact equipment due to the size of the piece, lack of appropriate room for storage and lack of open space to set them up and use them effectively.

At the moment, Ethel requires more training on contact equipment than anything else on the Agility course. Due to her still being quite a young dog, training on contact equipment is something that we haven't been able to do until not long ago, therefore she hasn't had a huge deal of practice. For her to be able to safely and successfully compete in Agility classes at competitions (I'm currently restricting her to Jumping classes due a lack of experience on her young part and possible safety issues at this point), she needs to be able to complete the contact equipment safely and in a controlled manner. Not only could she injure herself if she was to jump off a high point due to lack of experience, but this could dent her impressively shining confidence levels for the future.

So what do we do? We don't have any contact equipment of our own at home; it seems we have an impossible situation on our paws...

... Unless we improvise! Training for dog sports at home is an important part of being successful, especially if you compete. Training sessions aren't always consistent, and unless you're having a one-to-one with your trainer, you don't always get to train what you personally feel you need to improve on; it's a group session, after all.

It's simply a case of being creative and using what you already have in your home and in your garden for training purposes. For example, Ethel and I regularly use the step we have in our back garden to practice her two-on-two-off contacts. Because of the similar slant it has to real contact equipment, it makes a good improvisation that we can easily access whenever we wish, for no amount of cash!

Your home and garden often have more hidden features that you could use for training your dog than you'd initially imagine! All it requires is a creative mind and a will for training. Have fun!

Do you train your dog in a dog sport at home?

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