Blazing Paws, LLC

07/12/2025

06/24/2025

Agility is full of ups and downs. Keep focused on what’s important to you and your dog.

06/10/2025

Had a chance to run Blast after teaching on Monday. Snippets from our training.

06/06/2025

🤔What factors do you think contribute to success in agility? Could it be things such as independent obstacle performance, speed, superior fitness, accuracy, and great handling? Those things are certainly important, but I think the most important factor is:
📣𝙍𝙀𝙇𝘼𝙏𝙄𝙊𝙉𝙎𝙃𝙄𝙋!
Keeping an eye on your relationship with your dog during training sessions is important. Why? Running a dog in agility is one of the most difficult forms of athletic competition. In order to do well, each individual member of the partnership, dog and human, needs to trust the other and have the upmost confidence in the process. Dog agility is an intricate partnership between different species. Runing a course is like a choreographed dance from start to finish. You must be in-sync and each partner must trust the other to do their job. The dog trusts us to accurately and timely tell them where to go while we remain supportive and positive. The human must trust the dog to go where it is sent and for it to understand the task.

During training sessions, we want to support what will be necessary in the competition ring. Practices are just rehearsals of the partnership working cohesively to solve the puzzle of the course design. Paying attention to supporting the relationship is component not to be ignored. Are you breaking down training so the dog understands? Have you asked to much and the dog is overfaced? Are you considering how mentally exhausting it is to run sequences? How often are you smiling? How often are you authentically rewarding the dog? Does your tone reflect how important they are? When your instructor gives you feedback, do you ignore the dog? Do you come into the ring as a team and leave as a team? Teamwork 100% of your turn?

In the end, I want to make sure I'm putting a great deal of deposits into the relationship bank. It's quite easy to make a bunch of withdrawals during training, if you've set it up with alot of failure. Yes, we want to grow skills, but in a way that is supportive and easy for the dog to understand. Building teamwork in agility is all about relationship. The strength of your relationship could be the key to great success when all of the other factors are strong too.

05/29/2025

Best of luck and safe travels to all of my students and friends heading to CPE Nationals. Enjoy every minute.

04/22/2025

Really good information

30 Questions to ask yourself as an Agility Handler from Iwona Golab
🧭 Reading Your Dog’s Line’s:
1. What line is naturally easy for my dog, and am I aligning my handling to it?
2. Where exactly do I want my dog’s eyes looking next?
3. If I were my dog, how clear would this cue feel to me?
4. Am I clearly guiding my dog’s ideal line, or am I playing not too lose?
5. What does my dog’s landing position tell me about my timing and cues?
💡 Decision Making & Strategy:
6. Am I choosing this handling because it’s comfortable, or because it's best for my dog?
7. If I had to run this sequence without my strongest skill, what would I do instead?
8. Have I considered at least two different handling strategies before settling on one?
9. Which handling choice sets my dog up confidently for the next obstacle?
10. What risks am I prepared to take on this course, and why?
🤝 Connection and Communication:
11. Am I truly present and connected with my dog right now, or am I rushing?
12. What is my body language saying to my dog in this exact moment?
13. Am I cuing clearly, early enough, and consistently?
14. When my dog is unsure, how do I immediately adjust to reconnect?
15. Do my verbal cues match my body language perfectly?
🎨 Creativity and Adaptability:
16. What is one fresh handling idea I haven’t tried yet on this sequence?
17. If I had unlimited confidence, what handling technique would I dare to test today?
18. Can I visualize at least two different successful paths through this sequence?
19. If this run wasn’t about results, what creative handling would I explore right now?
20. How quickly do I adapt when something unexpected happens mid-course?
🧠 Mindset and Emotional Control:
21. Am I making handling choices out of trust or out of fear?
22. What am I feeling before the run, and how does this influence my handling decisions?
23. If my dog makes a mistake, how will I respond constructively rather than emotionally?
24. Do I celebrate my dog's good choices enough during our runs?
25. How quickly can I emotionally recover and adjust after a handling error?
📈 Growth and Reflection:
26. What did my last run teach me about my handling style?
27. Am I honestly assessing my strengths and weaknesses as a handler?
28. What’s one specific skill that, if improved, would dramatically elevate my handling?
29. Have I asked for or watched objective feedback recently, and how did I apply it?
30. What’s the single most impactful change I could make today in my handling style?

04/21/2025

Spent two days at our club’s agility trial running fast and challenging courses from Rick Mullen. Thanks to all of my fellow Western Lakes Training Club members for putting on a great four-day trial. Zest came away with a QQ and a JWW Q. Blast earned two JWW legs and had two really close standard runs that ended with NQ’s. I’m most proud of this standard run. It was exhilarating and we had it up until the second to last jump.

02/26/2025

You know who you are ❤️❤️❤️

02/14/2025

🎙️ New Podcast Episode 🎙️
Episode 41 041 You need clear rounds to progress in dog agility, but focusing on clear rounds isn't the answer. Dive into this episode to shift your perspective on the sport and how you train for and compete for clear rounds.

🎧 Listen on your favorite podcast player, or visit the link https://fxagility.com/episode41

02/13/2025

Good read

One of the most powerful steps you can take as a trainer is to change your mindset from,
‘How can I get my dog to do it’ to
‘How can I get my dog to Want to do it’—

Stress for dogs, often comes from the teacher, not the task.
For some dogs, the resentment for the phase of work that was forced upon them, stays with them and could have been avoided if the handler had changed their approach.
For example, if you make a new concept difficult, even inadvertently, such as,
having expectations of how quickly your dog should learn, how proficient he should be, the wrong set-up
or if you try to force behavior, it could be that you are creating the stress that your dog then associates with that task.
—At the onset of training, it’s extremely important to differentiate, is the training issue one you can change VS. is it a genetic predisposition, that you can improve and manage but not organically alter.

Trying to force a dog to ‘push through’ an issue that stems from their genetics (ie too much eye, inherently wide, inherently fearful etc) is almost always to the detriment of the dog.
Instead, this is when you need knowledge and experience to help your dog or the self awareness to seek help from an expert.

Just like people, dogs can get bored when you do the same thing too often,
frustrated when it’s too arduous or disheartened when too often being told ‘you’re wrong’.

Instead of trying to accelerate your dogs training timeline, focus on your consistency, development and improvement as a teacher.
It's your continuous effort to adjust to your dogs response and body language that will help your dog become the best he can be.
Handlers sometimes find themselves waiting...for the day when they, win the competition, succeed at “X” , are acknowledged by their peers, or other.
Don’t let the pursuit of tomorrow diminish the joy of today, for you or your dog.
macraeway.com

02/04/2025

Here’s the thing about training or should I say playing with your dog. I hadn’t been feeling well on Sunday. I couldn’t put my finger on it, I wasn’t sick but felt emotionally drained and I soon found out early Monday afternoon why I had such a doomsday feeling. The loss of a good friend really takes its toll. I finished teaching and was almost going to not work with Blast but since I was there, I told myself just have fun with him and we did. The video is a compilation of what we worked on and breaks were taken during the session. Plans were to revisit some of our foundation skills, distance and some of our weave pole games. It really did a body good.

12/31/2024