Yay 2 x 2 weave experiment

I have been doing agility for nearly 17 years and I finally got around to trying  to teach weaves using the 2 x 2 method. You can't say I rush into things!

It was fun trying this method with Yay. I  decided to give it a try it because the weather had been so awful and I didn't want to take her into the wet training paddock to do a lot of running.  I decided that I could just set up some stick in the ground poles right outside my backdoor and step out for  few minutes each day.  The first few  days were very frustrating; when I went from 2 poles to 4 poles I thought she would never get the idea and I was frankly about to give up. So we took a 2 day break and when I brought her back the next time it just seemed to click and the progression from 2 sets of 2 poles to 6 straight up went really quickly.

After about a week of training with the stick in the ground poles, I was lucky to have been able to borrow a set of three 2 x 2 poles. This helped progress her even more smoothly as those poles were easier to slightly tweak if necessary. When it came time to adding more than 6 poles I had to go back to adding my stick in the ground poles but she seems to cope fine.

This video was taken when she was at 8 poles. Not so easy videoing and trying to get your 10 month old pup to weave. HA! So  the video quality isn't professional and my  rewarding could be better but you get the idea.



I have been amazed at how quickly she learned to weave straight up poles and she has some wicked  entries learned already.  I am not sure I love her foot work through the poles or her little jump at the last pole but that could be the result of my rewarding incorrectly. We started her with a thrown toy while the poles were open but went to thrown food as we progressed.

Yay can now do 12 poles straight  up and I will honestly say the amount of time spent on the weaves has been 1/3 of the time I would normally need to teach poles. She has not done many repetitions and I know she will need more work on things like cross behinds and my running past as most of the repetitions have been done with my standing still.  I will go back and review the 2 x 2 DVD and see where I might have skipped steps and start adding a  jump before the weaves as my next step.

I am so happy that Yay loves the game of agility already; she is great fun. I  think we are both ready  to begin the next stage of training: Running Contacts!  Fondly known as "self-imposed manic depression" and I can't wait to start!