29 episodes
Fostering Excellence in Agility Megan Foster
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- Kids & Family
Megan Foster, Founder of Synergy Dog Sports and creator of Fostering Excellence in Agility, shares her passion, knowledge, tips and secrets for all things dog agility. Each episode, she will take you through a critical element of agility training and break down the history of it, the dos and don’ts, as well as some key action steps you can take today to continue your path to excellence. Discover how to approach agility training from a place of wellness and learn how to build an agility training program that fits your needs and fuels your passion for the sport. Megan has taken her experience over the last 25 years and developed a systematic approach to agility that applies the most innovative positive reinforcement techniques to both ends of the leash. Megan not only coaches students on their training and competitive goals but also mentors other dog agility coaches to hone their craft in the dog sport world. Ready to ignite (or re-ignite) your passion for this game? Hit subscribe & let’s go!
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Repairing Startline Behaviors with Sarah Espinoza-Sokal
029 Megan interviews Sarah Espinoza-Sokal about her experience repairing her Kelpie, Zi's startline performance. Megan and Sarah unpack the unique pieces of the training puzzle and discuss why each piece was important and how Sarah was able to implement it in training and in competition.
You can follow Sarah on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/agilityodyssey
Sarah invested most of her first 30 years into a passion for horses. In 2016, she decided to rehome her last horse and devote herself to agility instead. She quickly fell in love with international-style agility, and set her sights on one day competing in Europe.
Sarah’s first agility dog suffered a career-ending injury in 2017, retiring before he earned Novice titles. She started over with agility dog 1.5 — a Working Kelpie puppy named Zi — in September 2017.
Sarah and Zi competed in their first national competition at Cynosport in 2021. In 2022, they were fortunate enough to run at World Team Tryouts, the West Coast Open, the US Open, and European Open Team Tryouts, vastly expanding their skills as a team.
A lifelong writer and obsessive nerd, Sarah shares her story of pursuing excellence in agility on her Agility Odyssey Facebook page, where she loves to discuss both the smallest of training details and the largest of life lessons. -
How Outside the Ring Behaviors Impacts Inside the Ring Behaviors
028 Optimal level of arousal is necessary for optimal performance. Does your dog's arousal increase in the parking lot of the agility trial or is it later in the run, like at obstacle 15? Let's take a look at how your beginning of the run AND end of the run routines are impacting your dog's performance. In this episode, Megan mentions several other resources, including: Episode 27 How Trialing Informs Your Training
Cog Dog Radio, Reinforcement Misunderstandings
Training on Their Timeline with Sarah Stremming
Check back next week for an interview with Sarah Espinoza-Sokal to talk about the training that we did together in order to address Zi's startline in competition. Spoiler: the outside-the-ring behaviors were impacting the inside-the-ring behaviors!
That's all for this week! Follow on FB, IG, TikTok, and Youtube: @fxagility -
How Trialing Informs Your Training
027 Data from our training sessions inform future training sessions, right? What about trial data? Are you practicing during the week the issues that come up on the weekend? Is your current way of analyzing that data producing results for you? If not, it may be how you're analyzing the data is missing a few key questions that I'm always asking myself when watching my trial videos. Let's dive in to what "competition-only issues" may really mean and how to set up training to start improving those sticking points.
Mentioned in this episode: Different Types of Training and Training vs Working
Follow on Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, & Youtube: @fxagility
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Training on Their Timeline with Sarah Stremming
Sarah Stremming, Cog Dog Coach, joins Megan to discuss how their two youngest dogs, Rayya (Sarah's Icelandic Sheepdog) and Sprint (Megan's Border Collie) have completely different training plans and are on really different paths, but how those paths ultimately lead to the same place. These two coaches dive in to why these differences are so important and the reality of the extra time and care it takes to adjust each detail depending on the day.
To learn more about Sarah and her online offerings, visit her website: thecognitivecanine.com, and follow her on social media: Facebook: The Cognitive Canine, LLC
Instagram: Cognitive_Canine
Tiktok: @sarahstremming
Listen to her podcast: Cog-Dog Radio and subscribe to her Patreon Platform
Megan has a new website domain: www.fxagility.com and her social media channels all use the same handle: @fxagility to easily find her on Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, and Youtube.
Thanks for listening! -
Who Should Know Better?
025 When I hear, "Oh, they should know better", I cringe a bit. In this episode, I unpack how I understand the reality of needing to let criteria go sometimes, and what that means for the big picture of competing with our dogs.
I talk about cue escalation during this episode. To learn more about that I mean, read this blog post.
Follow me on Facebook and Instagram! -
Increasing Motivation
024: In this episode, Megan shares her thoughts on building more desire for training in our dogs. Using reinforcement consistently and in the right situations gives our dogs the confidence to be all they can be! Follow on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and Tiktok: @fxagility