Dogs are such natural athletes, we forget their bodies have the same constraints as those of human athletes.  Now that we've competed our dogs long and hard in agility, we know that their bodies can break down too.  Eventually, we've all had our title aspirations nipped in the bud by a dog with an injury that we can't find, because we can't ask them where it hurts.  And like human athletes know, soft tissue and ligament injuries are extremely hard to heal.

You owe it to your dog to learn about how an athlete's body works, in fact you owe it to yourself.  Still, your dog has to do a lot more athletics in the agility ring than you do.  If you did not participate in any kind of competitive sport, take some time to learn about athletic conditioning. If you and your dog are "weekend warriors", you are setting yourselves up for frustrating and painful injuries that might take a long time to heal and interfere with your goals for your agility team.

Here are some principles that both you and your dog should follow:

• Get regular exercise of some kind.  You need both aerobic and strengthening exercises.

• Always warm up before exercise, especially the intense exercise of running a course at a trial, which is basically a sprint. Warm up gradually for at least 10 minutes before exercising.  Warming up is necessary to prevent injury before any kind of exercise, even a simple sequence in class or a single jump at full height.  Start your class with your dog jumping low and then increase the jump height after a sequence or two. Make sure you get on the trial grounds early enough to warm both of you up before your first run.

• Stretch after warming up and after competing.  Only stretch when your muscles are warm.

• Learn how to stretch and how to isolate muscles, for both yourself and your dog.

• Always "cool down" right after a run.  Don't ever just go back and put your dog in a crate.  A good cool down routine is to take your dog to rejoice a run, perhaps tugging and fetching.  Then walk your dog around the agility grounds or for at least 10 minutes. 

• Train your dog to jump.  Use exercises such as those developed by Susan Salo, Linda Mecklenberg, Nancy Gyes and Jim Basic.  Not only teach them how to jump, but continue to condition them with bounce work throughout their careers.  This is not about skill, it's about strength training.

• Do strength training work for your dog and other physical training such as pilates.

• Don't forget athletic training for yourself.  Join a gym or Curves or get a sport outside agility.  Think about the value of "cross training," that is, use your body in different ways to condition for your primary sport.