What's Important When It Comes To Footwork When Heeling?
I decided to experiment with ideas that could help most handlers in obedience. Can you handle your dog without footwork? Do dogs really need handlers to stop or start on a certain foot. Do handlers need to place their feet in a certain way to cue the perfect a turn? Because of my experience in agility and other sports, my instinct was answering, "Yes. No. No" to those questions.
Because of that, I created a unique way to look at obedience handling without any emphasis on footwork. This process shifts the emphasis away from footwork and lower body movement into upper body cues. When you depend on footwork, you must translate each maneuver into foot placement immediately after the judge gives you the cue. That translation can take time and that delay causes all kinds of problems for the handler. No need to translate when you work with my system of handling, because you won't focus ont foot placement.
An Alternative Approach: Cuing With The Upper Body Instead
In agility, your dog gets information from upper and lower body motion, where you are looking, and where your feet are pointing. Obedience is no different than agility. Dogs get information the same way. For instance, let's look at about turns. Most people spend months working on footwork for about turns. It is so much simpler to focus on your upper body and spatial awareness. Here is a chalk talk that goes through the about turn mechanics within this system.
Photo credit: Alexa Goulet
Nancy Gagliardi Little has been training dogs since the early 1980's when she put an OTCH on her Novice A dog, a Labrador Retriever. Since then she has put many advanced obedience titles on her dogs, including 4 AKC OTCH titles, 6 UD titles, 3 UDX titles, and multiple championships in herding and agility.
Nancy is a retired obedience judge, having judged all obedience classes from 1986-2008. She enjoyed judging around the country and had the honor of judging 3 National obedience tournaments in Florida, Kentucky, and North Carolina. She retired from judging to spend more time training her own dogs and competing in obedience, herding, and agility.
Nancy draws from her experience training and competing in multiple sports, which has given her insight into innovative and creative ways of training and handling dogs. She finds that most trainers have no issues training the "big picture," but they tend to lose sight of some of the little details that are the building blocks to the communication and the relationship between them and their dogs. She loves working with very different challenges and trying to help people find a way to improve their communication with their partners.
Over the years, she has moved from a more traditional obedience training background towards reward based/positive methods in training dogs in all areas. As a result she understands the challenges faced by "crossover" trainers and dogs, and can help handlers find their way to newer and more positive training techniques.
Nancy's website is http://www.endzonedogsports.com.
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