Jumping (Post 312)

Dyl was fantastic in training this week. I’d be dancing if I knew he was going to run like that in competition, because it really was brilliant! Super smooth, super fast, and just smoked everything. We played weaves and jumping, and left the contacts alone for another week. I know I’m going to regret that (we really need to do some dogwalk training especially) but there’s only so much we can focus on in 45mins.

I did some weave games, since he popped those last two poles at the weekend, but I couldn’t get him to break out. He was also nailing his offside entries, even at 90-120, which was pretty awesome to watch. I’ve been quietly niggling at that one for a while, and I love it when the work pays off. By the end of the night I was sending him to 90 angles from around 20ft away, which was fun and meant I could be lazy.

We had some straightforward jumping sequences, and we also had a slice grid set up (which is now my new favourite exercise. It’s so much fun watching the dogs figure it out!). We worked the slice grid first, since I know this is something we have a problem with anyway. Dyl jumped it initially as he tends to in competition; cautious, tucked, collected strides. He got more and more confident every time, until the 5th time around when he blazed through, just as confident as Kim if not quite as smooth. He’s not fully extending over the angle yet but he was clearly figuring out what needed to go where and adjusting to it.

Same story with everything. Lots of lovely extended jumping, twisting into his wraps and actually moving with complete confidence and pace, and the more we did the smoother and more fluent Dyl’s jumping got. I can see a couple of lingering issues even when he’s moving and jumping as well as he is, and I think that’s probably the genuine source of his problems. He misjudges takeoff points occasionally, but because he’s rolling he just throws a massive jump in and stretches to clear it. I am currently theorising that in competition, because he’s not moving as fast, he doesn’t have the momentum to throw those big jumps in and save himself, so he instead he slams on the brakes, throws another stride in and then pops over. That would account for his over-collection on the ground and his compacted appearance when he’s jumping. I like this theory, it feels about right, but I have no idea how to improve it. More work needed, I think …