Training Tip Tuesday – Getting into Agility

Super excited after messages from Donna and Kate about them investigating agility after reading about our adventures. How cool is that! Giving humans ideas on how they can spend fun time with their dogs.

So today is less about tricks and stuff for us dogs and instead about helping you humans with some ways you might get into this agility thing. This is Australian based, and Sydney based at that, but hope it gives some helpful hints.

Firstly this agility thing doesn’t have to be a competitive thing. You can just train in agility without every needing to go through to a trial (competition). A lot of training schools are just as interested in letting dogs and humans learn new stuff and have fun together. Canine Fun Sports was where we started out and they have classes for all levels. Similarly our friends are trainers at Goodog do an Agility & Games class. Both are casual classes so you make it when you can.

A lot of formal ANKC training clubs also do agility. These clubs, like NSDTC where we train, may have requirements like a certain level of Obedience, before you move to Agility. This is just for safety (and sanity) so there is a certain level of control as us dogs are often working off lead. It is best to check out the individual clubs for their requirements. ANKC affiliated clubs can be found on the relevant state websites such DogsNSW and DogsVictoria.

The alternative to the ANKC trials is ADAA. We will confess we have done all our trailing through ANKC so don’t have 1st hand knowledge of ADAA but have heard lots of good things about how they run trials. ADAA also has some good resources including a How To on your 1st trial which is really handy (and pretty much the same thing for any association).

If you don’t want to, have time to or don’t live close to somewhere that trains agility than there are still plenty of things you can do on your own. Our Training Tips Page has some ideas. Our friend at GameOnDogs also has lots of helpful videos and equipment and CleanRun based in the US is the Go To for all sorts of agility information and equipment.

By no means is this an exhaustive resource on getting started but hopefully a few hints that help and point you in the right direction. The main thing about all this agility stuff is to have a laugh… Just ask my mate Mawson and his dad who is always rolling around on the course having fun. If there is other stuff you would like to know drop a comment and we can answer it or try to find someone who can.

Thanks to everyone for their Congrats on our JD title over the weekend. Stoked to hear from you and appreciate all the support… We are going to need it as we make the step up to Excellent Jumping courses. If you decided to get into agility I hope you enjoy it as much as we do.