Weave Pole Help

Need some help figuring ideas to proof weave poles in a trial setting. Kiba can weave at home, she can weave in class. We can do sequences with same side/off side weaves and she does them. Then we get to a trial and we suck it. If I can back her up and reattempt them, she can get them. I'm not sure if I'm just not giving her enough information, as she gets frustrated and that costs us more time.

While it's something we could "get away with" in CPE, it's not something that will fly in AKC/USDAA that's upcoming in the next few months. We NQ all weekend in games that required weaves due to being overtime, something that we haven't dealt with in a long time (though now Level 4 has them in EVERYTHING! lol). Also Tsuki is coming up the ranks, and I want to have rock solid weaves starting out as well.

Do you own your own weaves? If so, start taking them random places and weaving. I took Psyche to a park, and trained at several different places to work on her weaves.

If you don't have weaves, you could make a PVC set for a decent price.

Do you have an instructor or someone who sees your weaves both in practice and trials? I notice a lot of people try to "baby sit" poles more in trials and wind up crowding the dog.

Trainer hasn't seen us trial in awhile, but will see us trial at the USDAA one next month. He's having fun runs at his place Wednesday so I will bring it up.

Nope, don't baby sit. And she actually weaves better if I hang back and let her do her thing (little snot).

Weave proofing:

Throw food/toys down while the dog weaves.
Run laterally away
Slam on the breaks.
Run the other way after they start to weave.
Weave while another dog is sitting beside the poles, progress to other dog running/tugging etc.
Put pressure on them in training by being to close or a close rear cross at the entry.
Run past them while weaving.
Put a tunnel parallel to the weaves with the tunnel entrance at the half way point of the weaves, tunnel can be as close as 3 ft away.
Same with contact equipment, esp if contacts are the dogs fav etc.

Great post! We've been working on these with Sloan. Today my instructor put a stuffed over sized "Bolt" dog besides the weaves and it took 3 times and babysitting to get her through them. She was so overwhelmed by that stinkin big head stuffed animal. LOL

I've been doing a lot of the body movements like slamming, running, lateral movement, I'll have to try turning my back and lining a tunnel next to the weaves too.

Thanks It is a big test to put a tunnel that close to the weaves, as we all know doing a tunnel is a lot easier than weaving and often hoovers the dogs in

Another fav exercise of mine is to fan out a bunch of a dogs fav obstacles beside and arching close around the weaves. We see it all the time at trials..........dog gets part way through the weaves and sees a fav obstacle beyond it and pops out. If you watch closely you can see the moment a dog takes it's focus off weaving and switches to that obstacle

Just thought of another one, (granted getting harder to do at my age lol) handler falls down.

Want to see your dog give you a look? Sit or stand on a chair and ask them weave or a independant contact

Biggest one I see when dogs won't hit entrances at trials is because they are more hyped up in that setting and are generally moving faster. You have to give the information early and very clearly otherwise some dogs will blow past them. One other thing to add to Ado's already awesome proofing list is to race your dog to the entrances, moving as quickly as possible.

Yeah, we do a LOT of practice really revving our dogs up with a "READY, READY, READY!?!?!" cue and then letting them tear off like a bat outta heck and try to find their entrances.

We'll also set up x-pens down the middle between two sets of weaves and have the dogs weave side by side.