FitPAWS Canine Conditioning Equipment
I just found this today, it looks interesting: http://www.fitpawsusa.com/. Have any of you tried any of their products? What are your thoughts on the equipment (whether you've tried it or not)?
My husband has a large yoga ball with sand in it to sit on and a small ball he has to hold against a wall with his forehead while shaking his head "no" in order to fix an injury to his neck/spine. Some of these remind me of that same concept.
My husband has a large yoga ball with sand in it to sit on and a small ball he has to hold against a wall with his forehead while shaking his head "no" in order to fix an injury to his neck/spine. Some of these remind me of that same concept.
Comments
The things they use to teach stacking are called "Happy Feet", and I don't use them.
I use Fit Paws and similar products for conditioning, agility, targeting and rear end awareness. Here's a thread and some videos I made about it:
http://www.shibainuforum.org/forum/discussion/10101/object-targeting-for-agility-and-teaching-body-awareness-videos-featuring-farrah#Item_16
"I just thought it was kinda neat to share some short videos of Farrah's progression with targeting using the Fit Paws Paw Pods and "It's your choice" training to shape the behaviors into something more useful. I will explain the progression:
Part 1: I don't give her any commands or guidance. She is rewarded for interacting with the object (a piece of paper on the floor) and as she gets the idea, I introduce a verbal marker "yes" because I am not coordinated enough to manage a clicker.
Part 2: She is presented with a more challenging object, a blue disk which is similar sized, but this one wobbles and has a nobby texture. I want her to place her back feet on the object, and the behavior is marked and rewarded in sbroken down steps (touching it with a foot, stepping on it with one foot, so on).
Part 3: She now has a command to "Target" since she understands the concept of interacting with these objects by placing her back feet on them, even if they move. She has learned to "find" the object by fishing for it behind her with her back toes. It looks like she is doing a silly little foot shuffle, but this shifting feet is her "searching" for the different surface with her toes. She gets to try this with a much more challenging object, a very small Paw Pod, and I again reward for any interaction with it at first, but ultimately I want her to stand on it until I release her.
Part 4: Now that she understands targeting for the small object with 1 foot on it, I give her 2 small objects and reward her for both rear feet standing on them. I will gradually introduce the remaining 2 Paw Pods so she will end up standing on all 4 at the same time by her own choice (without me placing her or luring her. The whole point is for her to chose to do the desired action since that gets her the reward, so, this is basically another application of Susan Garretts "It's your choice" game.
The entire purpose of this in the end is to target on Agility contacts without missing the target zone that the dogs MUST touch in order to qualify, such as shown here:
With a final result of this (look at the 40 second mark), Koji did a good contact here:
Anyways, this can be used for other things like balancing on a ball, or simply just to teach better body awareness. She's super cute and a good worker, and it's fun to challenge her
I first looked at that Shiba on those, though, and thought Shiba torture! Or at least that's what my Shibas would think! Leo would enjoy chewing them I think. He esp. likes to chew plastic/rubber things!
This clip is from session #2. The first session where he saw these silly balance pods lasted about 3.5 minutes.
In session #1, he started mouthing the pod, thinking it was a chew toy. I told him to leave it and encouraged him to interact with the pod, offering anything other than chewing it. He got the idea of touching it with his feet at the end of session #1. We took a short break and then started session #2 (the one you saw here).
As you can see, he got the idea pretty fast and started targeting his rear feet on the pods. This is all done without luring him.
It is a similar concept that he learns from the balance pods shown above, but the task now is to stop at the end and put his 2 rear feet on the ottoman top and his front feet on the ground (hence the name 2 on 2 off).
All these were skills he learned before he was even shown the actual agility equipment (dog walk, teeter, A-frame). The concept/skill can be taught without an actual equipment and once the dog understands it, he can quickly get it and generalize the same concept on an actual piece of equipment.
In addition to training for Agility, these balance discs/balls/pods/peanut balls are also used in keeping the dog fit, rehabilitation from injuries. There are classes for canines and here is a video of showing some of the exercises taught in a class.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Zp30AfHmEYg
Flick, the Sheltie, is in the same class as Koji. He is fast and very drivey. However, he sometimes will jump off the contacts before he hits the contact zone (all the contact equipment are painted a different color and the dog needs to have at least 1 feet touching that zone before it leaves the equipment. This is for safety reason as you don't want a dog flying off or jumping off a contact equipment). Flick has a few other problems in this run, but even if he did everything else perfectly, what he did at 42 seconds time mark in the video (he jumped off the dog walk and not hit the yellow contact zone) would disqualified him immediately.
Especially check out time mark 35 seconds, where he did a great stopped contact on the Dog Walk. The FitPaws Balance Disc really helped us early in the process to teach him the stopped contact concept.
It shows he really knows the 2 on 2 off concept and put on a break to stop at the end of the Dog Walk as he was trained. Very good boy!
Nice work Koji and Sandra!
Nice! That looks like fun Sandra.