are you reading your disc dog

Are You Reading Your Disc Dog?

Knowing how your dog moves is the key to Team Movement and flow in disc dog freestyle. This knowledge requires more than just chucking discs and picking up more and requires more than just drawing up and practicing your routine. Check out this quick discussion with Jack Fahle, founder of the UpDog Challenge to hear a bit more about the topic of reading your disc dog.

Playing vs Practicing

You can’t practice what you don’t know. This fact is a big problem in the game of disc with dogs. People move on to practicing and training skills before they know what it is they are practicing or what it is they are doing.

What direction does your dog turn after a catch? What direction does your dog turn after a leg vault? How does your dog land on a flip?

These questions have to have answers before you can train and practice and these answers change how and what you will train and practice. Have you asked these questions? Do the questions have a standard answer?

Spend some time playing around with different throws and examining your moves for answers to these questions. Use those answers to try to do new things and explore you and your dog’s movement together, as a team.

Learn how Flatwork fits in to the mix and how you can move and shape your dog’s movement and create flow. You can’t practice that stuff until you have played enough to know what is possible.

The Freestyle Routine

Most new players jump all over building a routine. “I’ve got a flip and a vault and I can throw a couple of cool throws, so I need a routine to get better.”

Working a routine won’t make you better. Working a routine will lock you down into performing the skills you have on hand. This is great if you have a lot of tricks and skills, but if you only have a few tricks and skills and are trying to learn how to put them together, building The Routine™, will put your learning on hold.

A Freestyle Routine is an oxymoron. As Jack mentions in the video, the routine locks down the freestyle. As a player, trainer, handler, and team, it is more important to learn how to play than it is to lock down a routine.

This is not to say that you should not put together a routine. Creating and setting up a routine is a valuable part of learning, but it is not the only thing you need to do.

It’s a Mix of Both

More wisdom from Jack at the close of the video, it is a mix of both. You need to have some structure, and a routine can deliver that structure, but you must do some playing, both structured and free play to learn how you and your dog work together.

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The Purpose and Value of Recognizing Shapes in Disc Dog Freestyle

Shapes are created by the position and movement of dog, handler, and disc. And shapes can be created by the dog, the handler, and the placement of the disc. Shapes are a fact of disc dog freestyle.

When the dog leaves the handler for a catch, that tends to create a line. When the dog is away from the handler and moves across the field to make a catch, as in a Zig Zag or Around the World, that tends to create a Shape.

Throwing With Intent

Throwing with Intent is throwing a disc to your dog with the intent to make them look good. Throwing the disc to promote a big leap, to hit the dog in stride on the run or throwing a disc that your dog is going to flip for 10 yards away, is the sign of a mature handler.

Patron’s Choice: Shaping a Leaping Catch | Creating a Late Read

Reading the disc is a skill that astute dogs and humans pick up rather quickly. The float, the spin, and the speed can reliably be gauged and predicted after several reps. Of course this changes with wind, disc choice, and throwing ability but, generally speaking, the flight path of a disc is easily predicted.

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