Adrenaline Training

Last night in private lessons we started adrenaline training. We worked on trying to get Clover as excited as possible and then running her. We may not have exactly reproduced trial conditions, but we got her so excited, she behaved exactly like she did in trial.

We tried a couple of things to get her excited. Because clover is so ball motivated, we first tried playing ball with another dog as Clover watched. That got her a little excited, but not as much as we had hoped. We then worked on just playing ball with her and trying get her riled. It seemed to work. Once we had her all excited, we quickly went into the ring and ran her.

We worked on weave poles first. The course was tunnel-weaves-tunnel-weaves-tunnel-weaves. She was truly acting like "Trial Clover" she actually wanted to leave a start line stay and the first time through she had to be restarted multiple times at each weave. We ran through the tunnel weave course three times and by the 3rd time. She was nearly flawless.

We then did contacts, and she did them very well but I think she was calmed down by then.
It was a very good lesson. It was only 20 minutes because we ran clover so hard but we sure did learn a lot. I am now going to try to get Clover that excited before working on contacts and weaves.