Hi Megumi,

You and Rod look great in the video you posted. He is indeed very responsive to your direction. And your direction is very good!

If I remember correctly, Rod is rather tall, right? Could you please remind me how tall exactly he grew up to be. For a bigger dog, weave poles are harder to do.

And though Rod is weaving quite fine and has a good skill and understanding of how to enter and stay in the poles, what I see he is lacking is DRIVING towards the poles and DRIVING through the poles. So, we will work on that.

It is a team effort to create drive towards and through the obstacle: both dog and handler need to be intent on the task to get to the poles quickly. Once in the poles, the dog's job is much harder and takes a lot more time and effort to do then the handler's job, since the dog is weaving and the handler is just "hanging around", ;-)..

I want you to do two things at the moment.

1 - Please study weave poles performances of your virtual classmates in the video lesson 19. That's the lesson you have been working on, right? You will find that dogs are always encouraged to drive to the poles and get there first, except for the instances where the handler performs a front cross at the entry of the poles.. After the dog enters the poles, the handler does not get ahead of the dog but supports the dog's effort through the poles and promptly directs the dogs to the next obstacle upon exit. Again, the exeption would be if a front cross is needed after the poles.. You may also watch videos of me running my dogs on Agility Video Service and you'll see what I mean.

2 - I want you to make a point not to go ahead of Rod when practicing weave poles and stay close to him and try to feel his effort and help. The dog has to trust you not to run away and then he will feel secure to put all his attention into the job of weaving. If he sees that you are fully supporting his effort, he will weave better..

Olga.