• 01Mar

  How to Walk Fast and Efficiently

  Interesting and Funny 1 Comment

  Many people have knee, foot or other physical limitations which keep them from running in order to improve cardiovascular fitness. Even if you don’t enjoy exercise or going to a gym, walking is a terrific way to move your body in a way it was meant to while doing something positive for your life and your dogs. I know you thought this article might help you to walk an agility course. It very well may! Whether a participant in a walking race event, agility competitor, or just the average Joe, it’s always good know how to walk quickly and efficiently with good form.

  Fast walking begins with proper technique, then speed. Using proper technique and good body alignment, energy radiates from the ground up while arms and legs work together to transmit speed and power into each step. When learning body awareness and new walking form, slow down at first. Soreness will work itself out with practice. Walking with the right technique, adding a brief warm up and cool down with some light stretching, will also help to prevent injury. These techniques may be used walking on the sidewalk, grass, or treadmill (gripping the handrails as little as possible).

  Head and Torso: Good posture while walking will help you breath better and avoid back pain.

  • Think of being tall and straight (back not arched)
  • Eyes looking forward about 20 feet (not looking down)
  • Lean slightly or 5 degrees forward if walking very fast
  • Chin up, parallel to ground, nose pointed forward
  • Shoulders down (shrug up and down a few times to make sure)
  • Head remains level (all motion is from the shoulders down)
  • Pull in on your belly button/abdominal muscles
  • Tuck rear end in slightly to keep from arching back
  • Hips will rotate slightly side to side but excessive moment is wasteful

  Arm motion:

  • Arms bent at 90 degrees
  • Hands in a loosely closed curl (fists not clenched)
  • Elbows close to body (no bird wings)
  • With each step straight back the opposite arm moves back (hand toward the hip)
  • With each forward step the opposite arm comes straight forward (not diagonally)
  • Avoid swinging arms across the center of the body
  • Hands lower than chest (avoid upward pumping)

  Foot motion:

  • Heel strikes the ground first with ankle flexed
  • Think about showing the underside of your shoe to oncoming walkers
  • Roll through the step: heel to toe
  • Push off the toe (a good push off the rear leg will add power and speed to your step and stretch your hips)
  • Bring the back leg forward again to strike with the heel.

  [note: shins or ankles may hurt at first until they get stronger.]

  Leg motion:

  • Keep a natural stride length rather than over-striding
  • Rear-push-off leg stride will be longer than leg in front of body
  • Think of keeping the rear leg on the ground as long as possible then push through the toes
  • Think of driving forward with leg, rather than knees upward, while presenting heel to the ground
  • Increase strides: quicker smaller strides enable more steps per second and better use of the back leg.
  • Feet should not slap the ground noisily. This will improve as strength improves
  • Hips naturally rotate front to back with each stride but not side to side.Putting this into practice:

  If recovering from an injury, deconditioned, or just learning, start out with short 5-15 minute walks 5-6 days per week. Each week add about 5 minutes per day to the walk while monitoring form and gradually adding speed. After about a month, or once able to accomplish a brisk walk (let’s say about 4 MPH) for 30 minutes, you can also add jogging intervals (provided you have healthy knees, feet, ankles, and hips). If looking to improve endurance for agility runs, the intervals would consist of walking 3-5 minutes, then jogging 30 seconds to 1 minute, and repeating until completing about 8 cycles (roughly 45 minutes total). For more advanced walkers, sprint intervals can be joined with light jogging intervals in the same way: light jog 3-5 minutes, sprint 30 seconds-1 minute. Incorporate our interval training every other road work session to allow for recovery time.

  The best part about getting reconditioned this way? You can easily take along one of your dogs, friends, or family members for motivation and condition them too. Everyone can find a few minutes a day to start consciously walking. Just do it!

  How can this help you walk an agility course? Once you know your body has better endurance, muscular efficiency, and good walking form and mechanics imprinted on our nervous system, we can walk a course confidently thinking about our handling maneuvers and positions, while more accurately considering where our body will be in relationship to our dog.

  Kimber Chase, CFT, AFT has been certified fitness and aquatic trainer for 15 years. She lives in South Florida and has been competing in agility for 9 years with two border collies. She can be reached at kimfit@bellsouth.net or through her website at http://www.completephysique.com/.

  Tags: agility safety, Inspirational

• 04Feb

  Love Me Hate Me Contest

  Monthly Contests 49 Comments

  We all have our ‘druthers’ in Agility- and our dogs definitely do!  But there are some things we love about it.  Is there anything we hate about it?  Comment with your love and hate for agility below! Any aspect of agility- training, trials, obstacles, or tricks!  Name one thing you love, and one thing you hate. There are no wrong answers, and lots of fun to be had!  The prize is a three sets of red E-Z sacks (Value approx. $45) to show the love you have for your agility course by not letting it blow around!

  The winner will be selected by a random number generator, and notified via email (providing you are a registered user here).   Deadline is  Feb. 15th.  Good luck and have fun! 

  This contest is now closed- stay tuned for the winner, and thanks for the great participation!!!

  ________________________________________________________________________________
  

  How to enter this contest:

  1. If you have never done so before, you must first register your email address on this blog. We will then notify you if you are a winner of this contest. You only need to do this once, and you will be good for all future monthly contests (and get priority notification of when they occur)!
  2. Scroll to the bottom of this page and enter your comment/answer. Or, if there is no box, click on the “comments” in the upper right corner.

  Tags: Affordable Agility News, Events & News, Inspirational

• 31Dec

  New Years Resolutions

  Interesting and Funny 2 Comments

  Are you a resolution maker?  Consider some of these resolutions for 2010 - and remember to keep the end in view when starting!  Don’t bite off more than you can chew, just work patiently for your goal.

  1. Get those contacts down!  And by down, we mean get reliable results every time.
  2. Get myself and my dog more fit for the Spring season.  Go for a long walk with my dog at least once a week.
  3.  Work on positive training.  The word ”No” shouldn’t be in my agility vocabulary (except for dangerous disobedient acts).
  4. Find more time for me and my dog- even if its’ not one on one, the dog can be sitting on my feet as I cook!
  5. Remember that my love is all the reward my dog will ever need.
  6. Perfect start-line behavior!
  7. Get your dog to work a little farther away from you than he currently works.
  8. Challenge my dog more in agility and in our other activities as well. 

  Remember, perfect is only in paintings.  Aim for great, and achieve it.  When you keep knocking yourself over the head for not being ‘perfect’, you’re short changing yourself, AND your dog.  Usually your dog knows you’re not happy, and isn’t quite sure why.  In many ways, they are simply a reflection of your own moods.

  Tags: Inspirational

• 29Dec

  Have a Focus Plan

  Inspirational No Comments

  The period of time between Christmas and New Year’s is naturally a reflective time of year.  Priorities begin to jostle for dominance as we begin to let go of the past and begin the process of looking forward to what the new year will hold.  Don’t get too hung up on analyzing the past.  There’s a certain point where it no longer does any good, and you have to grab hold of the positive things the future holds. 

  Goals are for Things That Take Time

  You’ve heard the importance of setting goals before.  But think about this.  We set goals for things that take time.  Otherwise, why bother?  Not setting goals because they take too long is like a man who says, “I should plant a tree, but it will be so little and take so long to grow”.  So he doesn’t do it.  Every year he says the same thing, until 10 years later he realizes that if he had just planted a tree when he first thought of it, he’d be sitting under it and enjoying the shade today! 

  Begin With End in Mind

  Assuming that you already have gotten in touch with your goals (which is another whole subject in itself which we’ll leave for another time), how can we make sure that we actually keep them?  This is the hard part of course.  There are so many resources available on goal setting, and I’ve read and failed at so many.  But there is one tip that I’d like to share with you that I have found to be highly inspirational in the difficult process of writing down (and sticking to) goals.  And that is, begin with the end in mind.  You can also call it the “Top-Down” Approach.  Meaning, by committing yourself to the end first, through some creative (and even costly ways), you “lock down” your goals and root them into your future, even before you work out the process to get there!   Let me explain.

  Let’s say that one of your goals is to see your dog flawlessly run 12 poles for the first springtime competition that rolls around.  Well, you can just keep the goal in your head, and “hope” that you achieve success.  But here’s how to really be a winner.  Send in your registration for the event NOW!  Not a minute later.  Then plan all the details of the event, including emailing a babysitter, telling your husband, or inviting a friend to go with you!  Bringing others into the goal (for accountability) will lock in the success of your goal BIG time.  Everyone is different though.  Choose those things that is hightly motivating to you.  You may want to choose an out-of-town trial you’ve always wanted to go to and make it really special by reserving a hotel nearby (if that floats your boat. I personally love overnight trips).  The good thing about hotel reservations is you can cancel up to 24 hours in advance without penalty (which you should only do if you get sick of course, not because you forgot about your goal!).

  There are so many similar ideas you can use to “set” your goal into the future.  Here are a few more:

  • Schedule a party to celebrate an agility title you intend to achieve. Make it a dog party or a people party: whatever you would enjoy most.  Buy invitations and fill them out ahead.
  • Write a newspaper announcement or invitation, and send it in. Don’t forget your pre-payment too! Even if it is weeks in advance, they’ll hold it for your scheduled date.
  • Plan a night out Or a day off.  Let your employer know what you are going to do.  Make it all about a celebration for you, doing whatever it is that you would find highly enjoyable, and plan every detail with anticipation.  Make sure it relates to your goal.  It has to be connected somehow.
  • Ask your agility trainer to call you or email you for updates on your progress in a certain area.  Tell him or her that you want to perfect your contact training, for example, and ask if they would review your reliability in a proofing-test on a certain date.
  • If you find it hard to schedule the completion of your goal for some reason, try the exercise of writing your goal in the past tense, as if it has already been accomplished.   Write about how good you feel, and how much better your dog is doing, and the types of things you look foward to doing next.  Write about the pitfalls that occured along the way and the strategies you used to overcome them and accomplish your goal.  Doing this exercise may also help in thinking of other ways you can “lock down” your goal.

  It may seem like it’s too early or risky to commit to a deadline or celebration event, but the more prep work you do ahead, the higher the chance is that you will stick to the goal!  It’s quite scary, I know.  I liken the motivation of this top-down method to a wedding.  While I haven’t yet experienced it, I can’t imagine that I would set a date and invite my guests and not be ready for it when the time came!  I would be ready in a thousand ways, not only because I would be looking forward to it, but also because it would be a date that many people would know about and I would have imagined every detail in advance for my happiness, and the happiness of everyone who would be rejoicing with me.

  Next Steps

  After you have deeply committed to your goal, you can then break it down into smaller, more easily obtainable goals. For example, if you want to learn 12 weaves by a certain date, make the smaller goal to learn 6, and plan your strategies to do this. Maybe something you need to do is get Susan Garrett’s DVD “12 poles in 12 days, or get a VersaWeave training set (that will turn into a competition set when you reach your goal..bonus!).   You can even apply the same “top-down” principle (setting a date/event) to your smaller goals as well if needed. 

  I hope some of these ideas spark some ideas for you!  Goal setting is hard work, but if you can actually see them in your future and work from the top down, then the hardest work is already done!  Actually doing what you set out to do becomes a lot easier when you are really committed to something.

  ~By Pamela Spock

  Also read:  Discover Your Purpose:  Get in touch with the deeper meaning of agility and harness it for your success!

  Tags: Affordable Agility News, agility training, Inspirational

• 28Dec

  Discover Your Purpose

  Inspirational 5 Comments

  A friend of mine confessed to me she dropped out of dog agility, and I asked her why.  She replied, to my amusement, “Because I found out that I have to run on the course too.”!  Well, duh, yeah!  

  But the fact is, my friend expressed a common misconception about agility that affects many people.  While not as bad as the customer that called and told me that she looks out her window into her obstacle-filled yard and is disappointed that her dogs aren’t out there running around using the equipment on their own (yes, I’m serious), there IS a mentality that we have to come to grips with, and that is agility is more than something that entertains us and works our dogs.  I’m afraid most people catch the ‘agility fever’ without counting the cost of what it means to them, not the dog.  The speed, the glory, the good feeling of seeing dogs flying over jumps and whipping through poles is something that affects anyone who sees it the first time, and does more for enlisting new recruits into the sport than anything else.  But as much as we might want to admit otherwise, the purpose for agility goes deeper than our dogs.  It’s also about our own character and personality.  There is something we all seek for in doing agility with our dogs, and it’s often a “vision” that lies in a seed form in our heart.  This applies not just for agility, but for anything we get involved in. Getting in touch with this vision and clarifying the reason why we do something is one of the keys to “sticking it out” when the weather gets nasty, distractions come, or when difficult challenges arise.

  “Agility is like life…you have to take it one obstacle at a time”.

  I have to admit, when I first started Affordable Agility about a decade ago, it rather ’snow-balled’ into what it is now, rather than starting off as well-planned company of vision.  Not to say that it didn’t have any.  Vision was conceived in frustration, particularly over trying to make backyard equipment for the “agility fever” that I had caught.  As a single gal who still holds a hammer up close near the head (the hammer’s head, that is), and who is about as confident walking through the aisles of a Home Depot as I would be walking the streets of India, trying to design a teeter-totter base for my dog was more than I could emotionally handle!  I remember my pitiful attempt at building an a-frame.  Would you believe I used a small hinged garage sale sign and nailed carpeting on it?  My Springer Spaniel would either fly over it, or knock it flat. She was so patient with me back then.

  It didn’t take long for me to feel that my dog was enjoying agility more than I was.  What happened?  Why did it sometimes feel like a chore to train?  Why did I get involved in agility to begin with?  What did I believe it to be? What was the vision of Affordable Agility going to be?  Over time I got more in touch with the vision for all these things, and it helped me immensely.

  I discovered, for one thing, that agility is more than just a fun thing to do with our dogs.  If that was the sum and whole you would get bored of it, because while your dog appears to be in his glory, you yourself are doing soul-searching.  Soul-searching, you ask?  In agility?  Well, if you’ve been involved in agility training for any length of time you have surely experienced the subtle affect that body language, tone of voice, and attitude has on your unusually sensitive dog.  Anyone who has competed in agility knows, for example, what happens to their dog’s confidence when you feel nervous in the ring.  Or if you feel insecure, how easily you can miss giving a necessary cue in time.  Or if you are discouraged, how your dog runs slower.   It’s like your dog is seeing right through you and reflecting everything you feel.  Suddenly a sport that started off being fun (and still is) is also becoming a way of seeing yourself for who you really are! For some of us, this revelation can be a pivotal experience.  How committed we become to the training process, and how we decide to work at it, is directly related to how much we want to use the method of dog agility to train ourselves and succeed in overcoming certain negative aspects of our character.

  You see, in a fundamental way agility represents and contains the essence of what dogs were meant to do and what we were meant to do from the beginning of creation.  Dogs are creatures of nature, and nature was created for man.  Both are happiest when in a harmony of submission, dogs to their masters, and man to his Maker.  Agility is a form of teamwork that exemplifies this harmony.  Training dogs is fulfilling and rewarding, both for the dog who was created to work, and the human who was created to work the dog.  This goes for any other act of ruling over nature, whether in tending to a garden or mowing grass, teaching students how to do read and write, or organizing unruly data into neat columns.  Everything we do, done to the glory of our Creator, is honoring our created purpose.

  So next time you go out to ask your dog to run through a tunnel, or leap over a jump, maybe you’ll get that exhilarating sense, as I do, that even the simplest things of life have profound opportunities to fulfill Divine purposes.  I hope you will embrace the moment for all it’s wonderment, and learn all that you can from everything you do.

  ~By Pamela Spock

  Also read: Get a Focus Plan: A gutsy top-down approach to setting agility training goals!

  Tags: Affordable Agility News, Inspirational

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