Tips for Building a Fun Freestyle Routine

It Doesn’t Have to be Stressful!

There are many paths to Freestyle and one isn’t necessarily better than the others. Many very successful teams come from obedience. And just as many freestyle dogs start as trick dogs. For some, freestyle is their first foray into dog sports. Whatever your path, at some point you’re going to put a routine together.

1. Keep It Simple

When you begin putting moves together, think short and simple. You don’t need to do marathon sequences in order to build stamina. In fact, you shouldn’t be creating longer sequences until you have a good understanding of which behaviors to put together and which should not be put together. The goal is to combine behaviors in a way that creates ease of movement for the dog. Aim for sequences of just 4-6 seconds and follow them with a healthy reward of release, several treats and verbal praise before moving again.  It’s much easier for the dog to perform longer sequences when we’ve been thoughtful about what behaviors go into those sequences.  Length and duration should not be the goal – Ease of movement should be.  Once you have that, duration will come naturally and easily.

2. Use Reliable Behaviors

Often Musical Freestyle is associated with fancy tricks, but you don’t need any elaborate tricks to choreograph a solid Entry or Newcomer routine. What you do need are a few reliable behaviors on verbal cue and a dog who stays with you in the ring. Using solid behaviors in your choreography also helps to get the kind of performance-ready quality we’re after. Incorporating behaviors that our dogs are confident executing and that we trust they’ll perform without additional information from us like hand or body signals not only helps keep stress levels down, it also allows us to move freely and confidently without worrying about where our dog is. This is a big advantage because handler movement is also judged in freestyle.

3. Keep Improving

But we also need to ensure that we’re reinforcing quality, not just quantity. By selectively marking and rewarding only reps that meet criteria, you teach your dog what’s expected. This is another reason to keep sequences short when you first start out.

Be picky in practice. The competition environment is distracting and demanding, even if you’re entering a video event. Setting the bar high in the lower stress practice environment, gives you a little room for error on the big day.

4. Pay Well

Pay attention to how you’re reinforcing during practice. It’s very easy to habitually toss a treat or hand your pup a cookie while you’re thinking about what to do next. But those treats or quick moments of tug are why your dog is working. So reinforcement should be equal to the job. Freestyle is hard. Your pup is working hard for you! When you’re practicing sequences, the reward event should take the same amount of time as the sequence you practiced- or longer! Yes, give bonuses once in a while! Pay more for working longer. Use longer lasting, more valuable rewards after a sequence instead of just a single treat. Too often, when things are going well, we want to keep going, but asking for a little bit more instead of rewarding all the good stuff your pup has already done can actually cause a backslide.

One of the challenges freestylers face is keeping our dogs motivated as we start to sequence behaviors and continue to add difficulty. Although this may sound weird, we, as handlers, have a goal.  That goal is to dance with our dogs, and sequencing gives us that feeling. So it’s reinforcing to us.  But, not so much for our dogs. For them, it’s a lot of work and their goal is to find the most efficient way to get to the reward. You’ve heard handlers say how much work heeling is for a dog?  Well, freestyle is heeling on steroids!  We need to be highly considerate of our dogs when sequencing. It takes some discipline on the handler’s part, but keeping sequences short and rewarding will make things fun and exciting for your dog and he’ll want to do more!

5. Make a Plan

While being able to improvise when things don’t quite go as planned is a great skill for handlers to have in competition, planning out what moves you’re going to sequence together ahead of time will make your practice session more productive and can reduce your pup’s frustration. Put some thought into where you need transitions in order for your dog to change direction or position, and what moves will flow together. Run through each sequence with your pretend dog before tiring your real dog out doing a lot of behaviors that don’t work well together. Of course, even the most well-planned sequences can be improved upon. Your dog will likely offer suggestions. Listen to him! Making those adjustments to the choreography is a lot easier and more fun than the additional time it will take to train something that’s awkward for your dog. Put some thought into how you can string together your partner’s strongest behaviors with transitions that allow for ease of movement and you’ll see how much easier it is to work for longer stretches without reinforcement.

 

In the next part of this series on “Building A Fun Freestyle Routine,” I’ll offer some tips on choosing music and organizing all those ideas dancing around in your head into choreography you and your pup can actually dance to!