The body of a dog works really hard when performing sporting exercises.<\/p>\n
But we have also learned that if we only consistently train in a sport, the muscles in the body lose their symmetry and become unbalanced. When this happens a dog is not able to have balance in his movements or power and he’s not able to have that balanced control in order to maneuver and control his body through the movements required in his sport.<\/p>\n
Although our dogs are moving at great speed and they love doing it, and everyone in the audience goes “Wow!” it is important to understand what is happening in the body. That’s something that we have to look at and focus on when conditioning our dog’s body for his sport.<\/p>\n
We have to understand how only sport training can counterproductive to our sport. If you’re only doing sport training, it’s counterproductive to high-quality sporting performances especially when it comes to the physicality of your dog. You are creating imbalances and you need to counter that because you are actually taking away from the performance of your dog.<\/p>\n
This is quite interesting because even with my own dog, Ornella who’s 10 and a half now, if I do any heel work with her, she’s still powerful in her heel work. But if I do some basic conditioning exercises, she has got muscle weaknesses and they really show. Even I was surprised. I saw that I need to strengthen her properly to make sure that she remains balanced.<\/p>\n
This can all be remedied through conditioning exercises, targeted at balancing, strengthening and ensuring flexibility of the areas that her body showed weaknesses in.<\/p>\n
When you looking at your sport, look at what the sport is doing because there is a connection. You can’t just do a universal conditioning program.<\/strong> It has to be targeted with what’s happening in your sport along with what is happening in your dog’s body.<\/p>\n And why am I saying this?<\/strong> <\/p>\n Some sports may cause and create a shortness of certain muscles while other sports will cause and create over flexibility of those same muscle areas. Both sports will cause weaknesses of those muscles, but for different reasons. The conditioning will have a different focus due to the sport even though strengthening is required for the same muscle area.<\/p>\n That’s how your injuries start to appear. If we look at agility, the dogs are doing a lot of jumping and the core muscles are stretched out, but a stretched muscle is also weak muscle so those stretched muscles become weaker. That’s why you get core muscle strains for agility dogs, because they don’t have that ability to contract the muscles quickly.IGP dogs can contract their core muscles in, but they can’t stretch them out as most of the exercises required in IGP call for contractions of the core muscles and fewer exercises are trained asking the dogs to stretch those muscles out and remain powerful in the movement. <\/p>\n We can see therefore, that your sport, your dog and how you address those weaker areas are slightly different for each sport. This is something we have to bear in mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","class_list":["post-8397","tva_lesson","type-tva_lesson","status-publish","hentry","tva_courses-the-k9-athlete-workshop","post-wrapper","thrv_wrapper"],"yoast_head":"\n