Train Only Good Habits For Skills That Sticks....
At Powerpups Agility, we help students solve specific skills and improve team performance from the very beginning. We also help students who had developed bad habits into good skills.
If you are constantly faced with dog dropping bars, weave poles issues, poor distance handling, unreliable contacts, no start line, slow pause table performance or simply poor timing in competitions, stop doing what you are doing with your dog and begin to seek help.
The Rule of 300/3000 applies to all motion related sports and in our daily lives. In simple terms, the Rule of 300/3000 states:
a. If you want to be good at performing a skill, you need to practice doing it over and over again.
b. It takes 300 repetitions to develop bodily memory of a skill and 3000 repetitions to fully embody it.
Alan did not invent this Rule of 300/3000. Please read excellent book "Leadership Dojo" by Richard Strozzi-Heckler for more information on the Rule of 300/3000.
How does the Rule of 300/3000 applies to agility performances?
For each bad habit taught to your dog or yourself, you need to perform 300 good repetitions to change a bad habit into a good habit. Then you need to repeat this new habit 3000 times to fully embody into a good skill.
To reach a higher order of agility skill, a handler has to perform well coordinated bodily movement effortlessly without having to think about it.
The Rule of 300/3000 is complex for agility team performances because our bodily movement influence and impact the dog's movement. Dogs are highly visual and very reactive to motions. Therefore when a handler keeps repeating a bad move, the dog learn a bad skill. A bad skill that is not corrected in a timely manner is 'assumed' a correct behavior by the dog. Our dog does not know what is a good and a bad move. They simply perform a move at our command - our physical motions and verbal commands.
Many handlers are not aware of bad moves in training unless the moves are pointed out visually to them after an exercise routine. No matter how visual a handler is, there is no better tool or methods than seeing oneself in video for visual feedback.
Take jumping skill as an example: All dogs can jump. Everyone can induce a dog to jump over a bar. However not every dog knows HOW to jump properly while running at great speed over a series of obstacle sequences.
No matter how natural your dog is with jumping, they need to be taught what muscles to use to turn tight on a dime and to be efficient in recovery upon landing. Without proper training, a dog cannot produce a desirable and predictable jumping style.
A picture paints a million words. Any imperfection in movement is immediately corrected before it become a bad habit with the help of videos feedback.
Click on images below to launch the videos to understand how the visual helps in training.
| Above: Interactive Mediabook with Key Positions and Comments on training skills |
Click here for simple training tips to help you excel with your dog in agility.
