What is foundation training and why does it matter? (or... how do dogs learn?):

Back in the old days of agility, we introduced dogs to agility by putting them on each piece of equipment immediately.  We'd spend weeks and months getting the dogs confident on the equipment and giving ourselves the impression that the dog "understood" its job.  But all kinds of things went wrong when the dogs were asked to perform the equipment in new places and under stress, i.e., at agility trials.  It became quickly obvious that the dogs did not really know what we thought they knew based on their performance in class.

Dogs learn best by mastering isolated behaviors and then chaining them, all under high reinforcement to perform and repeat those behaviors.  In fact, dogs and people aren't all that different that way.  Dogs and humans both need to repeat these skills many many times to perform them reliably under the stress of competition. 

Each piece of agility equipment in fact requires mastering several different skills, never mind the overall skill of putting the equipment all together in a single, smoothly flowing course that the dog has no way to know in advance.  In other words, in addition to equipment fluency, the dog has to gather all this information communicated by a human partner, racing a course at 4 or 5 yards per second, negotiating up to 19 obstacles in under a minute, usually 30 or 40 seconds to run a competitive course.

That's hard.  Trust me.

Wait, there's more.  You obviously know you need to train your dog to do agility.  Do what?  Last I checked, it's the dog that does all the equipment.  You never do. You can't possibly know how to jump a jump with four legs.  You never scramble over an A-frame.  You never test the balance point of a teeter-totter.  You never bend your body through a set of 12 weavepoles at speed, with your teammate squealing at you.  You get the idea.  YOU the human member of the team expect the dog to know one heck of a lot more than you'll ever know.   For some reason that still escapes me, dogs just LOVE agility.  They love to run and jump and climb.  They love to be a human's teammate.  They put up with all of our bumbling attempts to communicate with them.  They put up with all of our frustrations and temper tantrums when every single cue we're giving them tells them to go over the "wrong" jump.  We screech to a halt, fume, ask the dogs "why'd you do THAT?" when the answer is obvious.  We told our dog to do that because our handling and communication suck.  And we may have never given the dog the tools she needs to succeed.   

Foundation training is the easiest way for both dog and human partners to master essential skills.  The complex act of completing each piece of equipment and getting between each two pieces of equipment in a course is broken into isolated, individual bits.  Dogs work on skills they need and humans work on communicating with their dogs.  Pieces are chained and built into more complex skills as each bit is mastered by both partners. 

Would you rather build on success, OR rush out and fumble and spend precious moments (and $$$) at a trial discovering what you can't do and then going back and fixing and retraining?  Put this way, of course we'd want to build on success.  But what is the time balance sheet, really?  Is 6 months of "foundation" enough?   How fast can you make it to your first trial?  How fast can you wrack up the title goals you've set for yourself? 

I'd like to convince you not to think about "foundation" versus "real agility".  It's all training. All of it.   With the program we're following in this class your dog might not actually "do" a piece of equipment for months...6 months if you do all your homework and diligently train, or maybe 12 months if you can't give it the time or your dog has special challenges.  But I guarantee you, when it's time to bring it all together, suddenly your dog is just doing the equipment one day and running a challenging sequence.  You, and your dog, won't even notice the transition. That first time the dog goes over the teeter and sticks a perfect contact behavior will seem like you've been doing it for a year.    Then when you first compete, running a novice course will only be about learning how to trial with your dog.  In class you and your teammate will be mastering skills you'll see only at the excellent level.