E46: Lori Stevens - "Having fun with Canine Fitness"

SUMMARY:

Lori Stevens is an animal behavior consultant, a professional dog trainer, a canine fitness trainer, an animal massage practitioner, and a senior Tellington TTouch® Training practitioner. She continually studies how animal behavior, movement, learning, fitness, and health all interact.

She uses intimidation-free, scientific, and innovative methods, in an educational environment, to improve the health, behavior, performance, and fitness of animals. Lori gives workshops worldwide and has a private practice in Seattle, WA. She is also the creator of the Balance Harness.

Lori’s most recent of three DVDs by Tawser Dog Videos is co-presented with Kathy Sdao and called The Gift of a Gray Muzzle: Active Care for Senior Dogs. It focuses on improving the life of senior dogs. She teaches the popular FDSA course Helping Dogs Thrive: Aging Dogs, and will be introducing a new course this session called Helping Dogs Thrive: Fitness in Five.

Links

• www.seattlettouch.com

Next Episode: 

To be released 1/26/2018, and I'll be talking to Chrissi Schranz about building reinforcers and recall training, so stay tuned!

TRANSCRIPTION:

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods.

Today we’ll be talking to Lori Stevens.

Lori is an animal behavior consultant, a professional dog trainer, a canine fitness trainer, an animal massage practitioner, and a senior Tellington TTouch® Training practitioner. She continually studies how animal behavior, movement, learning, fitness, and health all interact.

She uses intimidation-free, scientific, and innovative methods, in an educational environment, to improve the health, behavior, performance, and fitness of animals. Lori gives workshops worldwide and has a private practice in Seattle, WA. She is also the creator of the Balance Harness.

Lori’s most recent of three DVDs by Tawser Dog Videos is co-presented with Kathy Sdao and called The Gift of a Gray Muzzle: Active Care for Senior Dogs. It focuses on improving the life of senior dogs. She teaches the popular FDSA course Helping Dogs Thrive: Aging Dogs, and will be introducing a new course this session called Helping Dogs Thrive: Fitness in Five.

Hi Lori, welcome back to the podcast.

Lori Stevens: Hello Melissa. Thanks for having me back.

Melissa Breau: I am very excited to talk to you again today. To start us out and remind listeners who you are, do you want to recap who the animals are that you share your life with?

Lori Stevens: Sure. Since you made that plural, I’ll add in my husband because humans are animals.

Melissa Breau: Fair enough!

Lori Stevens: Anyway, I live with my husband, Lee, and I live with my 12-and-a-half-year-old Aussie girl, Cassie. You know, I used to teach about aging dogs without actually having one, and now I have one. So after several years of teaching basically senior dogs how to have a better life, now I have one and I’m putting it to work. So it’s nice to have a 12-and-a-half-year-old who’s excited about doing fitness, and going to the park, and the beach, and trail outings, and all sorts of good things.

Melissa Breau: You shared pictures. She’s clearly in great shape. She looks awesome.

Lori Stevens: Yeah, she’s doing well.

Melissa Breau: Good. I know from last time we talked that you’re an advocate for canine fitness — probably not surprising based on what you do. But can you share a little about why it’s important, especially for sports dogs?

Lori Stevens: I’ll start with sports. I have personal experience with seeing athletes go to the next level, and I think it’s the cross-training, because they’ll come in and basically say something like, “My dog keeps hitting bars. I think we need to improve something.” When we start doing some cross-training, or strengthening the core, or strengthening the legs that are involved in a jump, all those things, we see improvement in performance —surprise, surprise.

I think a lot of time in sports the training is going to classes, practicing the sports, but sometimes you need to do one more level of fitness to get that extra little bit. There are so many benefits in canine fitness, things like strengthens muscles is obvious, but it really strengthens and helps the dog know when and how to engage their core muscles. That would happen automatically. It’s not like they think, OK, it’s time to engage my core muscles, but we do exercises where we start engaging them a lot and then it becomes more natural.

You build better joint support through stronger muscles, improving flexibility, improve alignment and posture, balance and stability improve. And with that, what you get is fewer injuries, you get more confidence, you get more body awareness. And so dogs, when they’re faced with a quick decision or a quick body move, they’re more prepared and more confident to make that move, and stronger in that movement than they might be if they were just doing the regular training as a sport. It improves gait, movement, I just think it’s fantastic.

But another part of it, which I think we often leave out, is that it’s a behavior changer. I have worked with fearful dogs that that was the way that I broke through to them. That confidence they get with suddenly doing things with their body that they’ve never done before, like hind leg targeting, I think that’s a huge, huge exercise for dogs’ awareness of where their back end is, their confidence. It seems to be a game changer, really, in terms of behavior, I have found. It’s all the stuff you would naturally think of with fitness, but it also does a lot in terms of confidence, body awareness, and building trust even. I mean really being able to build trust, or doing something joyful that doesn’t have the pressure of competition in it.

Melissa Breau: I think that, for a lot of people, when they talk about fitness, they think about their own experiences. I don’t know about you, but for me at least, the gym is not my favorite place to be. How does that compare to how dogs generally feel about fitness and what’s the difference there?

Lori Stevens: I hate the gym. Can I just say that? Really hate the gym.

Melissa Breau: Absolutely.

Lori Stevens: I have a personal trainer now. I love my trainer. And so maybe that’s more like working with your dog. What pops to mind when I think of going to the gym is a sweaty place that doesn’t smell great and has a lot of grunting. Canine fitness, what pops to mind when I think about it, is joy, joy, joy. That’s what my canine gym is, my canine gym room. Doing fitness together is just a blast. I have to say that every dog I’ve ever worked with loves it, and that’s why it’s my sport. It’s my sport, I’m calling it my sport because I don’t have another sport, but to me, it really is. It’s truly a fun activity and it’s all about the joy. So they aren’t really comparable, those two things.

Melissa Breau: Fair enough, and I guess if someone was sitting there feeding us cookies for everything we did at the gym, we might enjoy it a little more too.

Lori Stevens: Yeah, true.

Melissa Breau: I think the other place that our concepts about our own fitness struggles sometimes hold us back is with the expectations around how much time we have to put into it. Most people probably think about spending an hour — or more, maybe — at the gym each time they go. Based on the upcoming course name, I’m going to guess that canine fitness differs there too. So how much time should people really be spending on canine fitness?

Lori Stevens: You know that five is five hours. No, I’m just kidding. It’s five minutes. You know, that goes for people too. When you’re out walking your dog, and you’re out in the woods, or on a trail, or in the park, it’s OK if it takes an hour. But when you’re in your house with your dog and you want to do some focused exercises, you want to stop and do a little training, so you might as well do a little fitness, five minutes is plenty. I do believe in warming up and cooling down, and the five minutes is the strengthening part, but if you wanted to turn that into two minutes of strengthening and a couple of minutes of warm-up, and a short cool down, that’s fine too.

I actually think, with people, they don’t need to do an hour workout either. If I stop and do five to ten minutes of working out, that’s better than if I don’t do any at all, so the time thing, I think, often gets in the way.

I also think we can over-train our dogs. I have a 12-and-a-half-year-old, and I set a timer. I set it for five minutes of training. If she’s cold, like if she’s been sleeping for a few hours, then I wake her up, I set my timer for five minutes, and we do five minutes of warm-up. Then I set it again, we do five minutes of strengthening, and then we do a few minutes of cool down, usually another five on the cool down. So I just set my timer. I think I got that idea of five, five, and five from Leslie Eide, a rehabilitation vet in our area. She also teaches fitness work. I think she’s done some for Fenzi.

I think the thing is that it’s important to warm up a bit and cool down a bit, but you really don’t have to spend that much time doing it. So all of the workouts that people are going to develop in my class are going to be five-minute workouts. We don’t have to overthink this, you know. We can be creative. We just don’t want to work the same muscles every day to fatigue. So we just want to be careful on that side of things.

Melissa Breau: How much do fitness behaviors — maybe including or maybe not including warm-up and cool down stuff; I’ll leave that up to you — but how much do those skills or those behaviors differ from other skills and behaviors that we teach our dog for sport or just for daily life?

Lori Stevens: It’s all behavior. How does it differ? I think the way it differs is that we need to be safe. So we need to pay attention to alignment, we need to start on the ground, and what I mean by that is we really need to build a foundation, just like with any sport. You’re not going to get past the foundation stuff. You don’t put your dog directly on a peanut and start doing things.

One of my goals in teaching fitness is to really teach people how to be wonderful, incredibly sharp-eyed observers, and teach them what to look for when they’re doing fitness, and how to start on the ground and build up. All these exercises that we do as foundation exercises, they’re all going to get harder because we’re going to be doing them on the ground first, on a stable platform, then an unstable platform, unstable equipment.

Training fitness is not training for a competitive sport, so the pressure isn’t the same, but you still have to have a good foundation for it. Just like with agility, you don’t go in and start running courses. You teach the dog how to get on the equipment, how to exit the equipment, how to use the equipment safely. This is all a good thing, in my view, and that’s why I can call it my sport, because there are a bunch of nuances.

But it’s also a very joyful thing to do. Not to say that sports isn’t joyful. Most people do it because it’s a blast. But precision is important in fitness training, just like it’s important in competitive sports. It’s just different in the sense that it’s something you can do year-round. You might change your focus based on what you see in your dog, and all of it is about teaching behaviors, so the better you are at training and timing, the better your fitness work will look.

Melissa Breau: You mentioned in there the idea of equipment. Do people need special equipment to do canine fitness?

Lori Stevens: I think people like an excuse to buy equipment.

Melissa Breau: Fair enough.

Lori Stevens: I really do. I think it’s funny, I do think they like that. But let’s just say they can’t afford it or they don’t like it. There’s a lot of things you can build. You can use things around the house. Do you have to have fancy cones? No, you can use potted plants. Do you have to have a fancy Cavalletti set with cones with poles through it? No, you can use your mops and brooms and put them on cans and use painter’s tape. Do you have to buy fancy platforms or an aerobic platform? No, you can use books and bind them with duct tape and put anti-slip material around them. You can use air mattresses and pillows for unstable equipment. I’m betting most people will want to buy a piece of equipment or two, but you don’t have to.

Let me just add that the outdoors, when you go for a walk in the park, it is full of exercise equipment. I’m going to give you yesterday’s example. We haven’t gone for our walk today yet. Yesterday’s example was we went to the park and Cassie wanted to jump on every park bench. She sees the bench and she starts targeting for the bench, and she wants to go on every single bench. She can put her front legs up to work her hind legs, or she can push up all the way to do a little jump. Then we do uphill sprints because I’m in Seattle, so there’s a lot of hills. We do uphill recalls and she sprints up the hill. We hind leg target curbs on our way to the park, and we were walking across a bridge, and I noticed there was this little shelf, a little curb-like thing that you could step up on. So we did ipsilateral work — I’d better say what that is — we did targeting with same-side legs on the little raised part of the bridge, and we turned around, did the other side, and I took a photo of it. We do that in the class, ipsilateral work. We ended with nosework in the park, followed by walking up a very steep hill. And I did a workout with her that day, too. But this was a really good workout just utilizing, there’s often a big rock she likes to jump up on, and there’s all sorts of logs that are a little slippery right now because it rains here nonstop for ages. There’s exercise equipment everywhere. Maybe I should do a class someday on just outdoor equipment.

Melissa Breau: That would certainly be cool. It would be interesting.

Lori Stevens: Yeah.

Melissa Breau: For those people who are interested in buying a couple of pieces of equipment, are there specific pieces you usually recommend for getting started, or good places to get their feet wet?

Lori Stevens: First a caveat: You’re talking to someone who has a ridiculous amount of equipment, so maybe I shouldn’t really be allowed to answer this question. Older dogs do really well with a balance pad, and you don’t have to buy it. You can get a balance pad on Amazon for people and it’s not very expensive. You can do a lot of things with a balance pad.

I like for people to have a Fitbone or two, or a couple of 14-inch discs. Those pieces of equipment, either one, a Fitbone or a 14-inch disc, or two Fitbones or two 14-inch discs, you can do a lot with those. Platforms are super-useful. Where do you buy a platform, right? A lot of people have been making platforms recently, so there’s a lot of how-to’s on that.

But you asked me about buying. An aerobic step bench is actually a useful platform. Michelle Pouliot has a place that she links to that builds platforms according to her specifications, so I’ve got a couple of those.

And then Paw Pods. They’re inexpensive and they’re a blast. You just have to make sure you get the ones that are nice and soft, so I get the FitPAWS ones. They’re really fun, because then you can target one paw at a time, target all four, do turns, and do side steps onto them and all sorts of things. Back onto them, back onto all four, there’s a million things you can do with the Paw Pods. OK, I’ll stop. Was that just a couple of pieces?

Melissa Breau: No, that’s excellent. Paw Pods are fascinating. I’ve never taught a dog to use them, but just in general I’ve seen some stuff done with them and they’re pretty cool. They require a real awareness of where all four of your feet are.

Lori Stevens: Exactly, and it is just fun. It’s fun to teach and fun to do them.

Melissa Breau: I know you have, and you mentioned this earlier too, this idea of fitness foundation behaviors. I know that’s part of what’s on your syllabus, so I wanted to ask you what you mean by that, and what are some examples of something that counts as a fitness foundation behavior.

Lori Stevens: One isn’t even a fitness behavior, but having a good nose-to-hand touch where your dog can … so targeting is a big one, so first a nose-to-hand touch, and that’s super-useful for positioning. Having an easy go-to default behavior they can do when you just ask them to do something and they don’t do it, you can just say, “Touch.” So when you practice that in all sorts of ways, and moving them into position with your nose-to-hand targeting, then you’ve got something that you can use during fitness training that gets them to a certain place, gets them on something, gets them off of something. Getting off of equipment sometimes can be challenging for some people.

So just to continue with the targeting, being able to target with one paw, target something, your hand, with each of your four paws — not your four paws, your dog’s four paws — targeting with one paw, two paws up, four paws up, is a useful foundation skill.

Hind leg targeting is, in my opinion, hind leg targeting is a useful skill for all dogs, period. Being able to hind leg target something is really important, but then, of course, it’s a foundation behavior when you’re just teaching a dog to hind leg target a mat. But it becomes more skillful and more of a fitness behavior when you’re targeting something unstable and higher up and asking to hold that position and maybe do shoulder exercises with their hind end up. So these things that start on the ground that don’t seem like that big a deal, they build and become more difficult and more challenging fitness exercises or strengthening exercises. Backing up, side stepping — both of those are foundation exercises, but side stepping on unstable equipment is a different thing than side stepping with all four feet on the ground. I call them foundations because you’re giving the dog the idea of what is side stepping and what is backing up, or asking them to do it on something difficult.

Melissa Breau: What are some of the basic exercises that you teach most often? What do those look like, and what are the benefits of doing some of them?

Lori Stevens: Let me just start with the simplest concept, and that is, when you put two front feet up on something, your dog is usually, not always, but you can help them shift their weight to their back legs, so the further they’re standing up, the less likely that they’ll have the weight on their front legs. The benefit of putting two paws up on something and holding is that the hind legs are being used more. If the hind legs are up, then the weight is more down on the front legs, so you’re building front leg muscles. Things like tuck sits and sphinx downs require more core work. There’s something that is often said in physical therapy, and that is, you stabilize, you strengthen the proximal, which is the core, which is the trunk, to get better distal mobility from a strengthen position. So it’s important to be able to have the strength of that stability in your trunk and in your core, your stabilization muscles, your multifidi, your transverse abdominus muscles. It’s important to be able to automatically engage those, your serratus, in order to do some of these other exercises. So the benefits of the core work is to be able to do more difficult things safely.

The benefits of some of the other exercises we work on, like, let’s just say crawling. Crawling, you’re down in a sphinx down position and then you’re moving forward on the ground. So you’re working the back muscles. You’re utilizing all four limbs, and those limbs, especially the back legs, really have to work the rotation of the hip. The benefits of these exercises are pretty amazing.

Another example would be with the dog standing on all four legs. If you lift the left front leg, you’re going to put more weight on the right back leg, so if you’ve got a dog that’s in a habit of standing to the side because maybe they hurt their right knee two years ago, so they got in a habit of unloading that leg, well, lifting the front left paw loads that leg, and in their body they start getting the muscle memory back of, Oh yeah, I can use that leg like I used it before. It doesn’t hurt at all.

Let me just add that I still think it’s important that everybody who does fitness is checked out by a veterinarian, and if they’ve had any sort of problems that they’re cleared for the exercises first.

But there’s a lot of benefits that come from doing this work that sometimes people don’t even see until they start doing it. It’s pretty cool.

And then there’s the behavior benefits, like I said earlier. The body awareness, the bonding that occurs, the trust and joy. And do you know that some of the agility dogs I work with have never slowed down, and they’re like, “Ha ha ha, my dog will never slow down,” and they walk over those Cavaletti poles. But slowing down helps dogs go faster, because in slowing down they really get to know their bodies better, and they get to know where they’re not just pushing through. Being the little masters of muscle compensation that they are, when you’re moving slowly, it all stands out. You have to know what muscles you’re using, you have to know where your feet are in a different sort of way, and so the slow work doesn’t slow your dog down on the course. It helps your dog because they’re even more confident and more aware, I think.

Melissa Breau: I wanted to ask if there are differences in the behaviors you’d recommend for daily fitness versus those you use to warm up and cool down, or whether the behaviors are multifunctional. Maybe you could just talk to all that a little bit.

Lori Stevens: The exercises are multifunctional, or at least some of them are. In my warm-up I might do a few tuck sits and a few tuck sits to stand. I might do some short recalls. I might do some targeting, some spins, some bows, some Cavalletti work. But I’m not going to do ten tuck sits to stands, three sets, with feet upon a Fitbone, as my warm-up.

So the concept of the exercise is the exercise might be the same, but I’ll just do two or three of them in a warm-up versus ten of them, really hard, three sets. I want the dogs, as they’re warming up, to go through the different movements. I want them to back up and side step, and all that’s on the ground during a warm-up, really.

I often just come in from a walk, like, I walk Cassie for however long, usually we walk at least 30 minutes, and we walk in the house and she’s pretty warmed up, so we just do a few exercises right after that. But it’s spins and turns to get the … or spins in each direction, sorry. It’s good lateral flexion for the spine, so it warms up the spine muscles.

Cavalletti work is a nice warm-up exercise when you’re trotting across them, but I’m not going to raise them real high and have a dog do high steps, or side stepping, or backing up over Cavelletti poles as a warm-up, because that’s taking it a little bit further.

So they’re multifunctional, but they’re done in the simplest way during warm-ups and cool downs. I probably made that into something longer than it needed to be.

In cool downs I’m even going to go lighter and do less in a cool down than I would in a warm-up.

Melissa Breau: You mentioned this earlier, and you talk about it a little bit in your syllabus, this concept of alignment. I wanted to ask what you mean by that, and if you can talk a little bit about why it’s important.

Lori Stevens: It’s super-important, and why it’s important has to do with the muscles that are engaging. I’m an alignment geek, I admit. If a dog sits with a leg shooting out to the side, or just a super-sloppy sit to the side, the first thing I want to know is why that’s happening and let’s change it. If a back is roached up or humped up, I want to know is something wrong. Hunched up, back roached, I don’t know how you’d say roaching, but hopefully people know what that is.

Sometimes what I see is a dog can stand with their feet under them perfectly fine, but as soon as they step up on a platform, their back feet go really wide, or their front feet go really wide. Have you ever seen people that are standing with their legs really wide? They’re not using their core. They’re just creating this super-broad base that they don’t have to use any muscles. I mean, you have to use muscles to stand, but it’s a rather lazy, non-core way of standing. Sorry if you’re thinking, I do that all the time!

So what I’m looking for is that dogs are using the muscles I expect, they have nice, long spines, neutral necks, their tail is not tucked. If the dog’s tail is tucked — some dogs tuck their tails a lot — but if the dog’s tail is really tucked and their legs are wide, then I think either, They’re not comfortable standing like this. Maybe we’re standing on something a little bit too high. Maybe for one reason or another they might or might not be hurting. It’s really hard to tell because you can’t ask. So I want to see if we can change their position in a way that puts them in better alignment and if they’re comfortable doing that.

Now if the dog regularly really goes wide in the back, I know how to encourage them to have their legs under them, but if I all of a sudden start doing the exercise with their legs in, they might be using muscles they have never used before. So I have to really be careful with not just bringing their legs in and then doing a million exercises, because the dog needs to get used to using those new muscles.

So anyway, alignment is a really, really big deal. It’s just safe. It’s safer. There’s no reason to do things with improper alignment. It’s the same thing in human training as well.

Melissa Breau: I’ll let you talk a little more about the class specifically. I know it’s called Helping Dogs Thrive: Fitness In Five, and it’s in February, so lots of f’s. What does it entail, what is it going to look like? Do you want to just talk us through a little bit?

Lori Stevens: It’s going to be fun, it’s going to be educational, it will benefit your dog and help him in sports. At the end of, so every week, I think this time I’m going to release everything the first day of the week. You’ll have lectures that will tell you a bit about why I want things to go a certain way, or things to keep in mind, or learning about fitness. So I’ll have lectures.

Then I’ll have exercises, and I’ll say how to get the behaviors, what they’re good for. I’ll say the setup, what you need in your environment, the instructions, the number of repetitions and sets, I’ll have video of the exercise. So we’ll do that.

And then, at the end of every week, I’m going to have something called The Five-Minute Workout, it’s just called Five-Minute Workout. I’m not going to create the five-minute workout. However, I’m going to give everybody the tools to create their own five-minute workout. So you can imagine what the homework will be. The homework will be showing the exercises, or for sure showing videos of the exercises that you’re having trouble teaching.

But also I’m going to want to see parts of the five-minute workout. The first week, you’re learning how to do a five-minute workout. You’re not all of a sudden, “Here’s my five-minute workout.” It’s going to build across the weeks, and every week your five-minute workout can incorporate, like, let’s just say we’re in Week 3. Your five-minute workout can include the exercises from Week 3, 2, and 1, so we can get creative and more mixing and matching.

Anyway, that’s basically how the class is laid out. I’m going to have lectures on things like raising criteria. I’ll talk about the benefits, the kinds of movements, the anatomical terminology, like what is cranial and what’s caudal, what’s lateral and what’s medial. I’ll talk about exercise frequency, repetitions, durations, and sets. I’ll talk about physiological issues, muscle actions. So there’s things I’ll just talk about, but then there’s the exercises, so people will have both. They’ll learn about fitness and they will learn the exercises.

Melissa Breau: They’ll learn both the whys and the hows.

Lori Stevens: Yeah.

Melissa Breau: I think you hit on the things that people are most likely to have questions about. I feel like anytime people talk about this stuff, it’s like, “OK, but how much do I do? How long do I do it?” and all those pieces.

Lori Stevens: Yeah, right. Exactly. And it’s really different from the Aging Dogs class. In the Aging Dogs class, depending on the age of the dog, for sure, I’m not always this picky about everything. I’m likely to be a little bit more picky about alignment and how we’re doing the exercise than I am in the Aging Dogs class. It all depends on the dog, but when you’re working with a 16-year-old dog, teaching him fitness exercises, you’re going to go really slowly, give that dog the time to learn them, and you’re not going to be super-picky about, you’re going to be as picky as you can be about alignment, but it’s different.

Melissa Breau: You hit on something there, and I didn’t tell you I was going to ask you this, but you brought it up and I think it makes sense to maybe talk about it for just a quick second. Is there a type of dog that is a good fit for the class, or maybe isn’t as good a fit for the class?

Lori Stevens: I would say if it’s a dog that … OK, first of all, if it’s a puppy and the growth plates aren’t closed yet, then puppies probably should not take the class, because everything about repetitions and sets aren’t going to apply to the puppy. Somebody could take it if they have a puppy. I recommend they audit it. Then, when their dog’s growth plates close, then they can start applying it, or they can take it again later. It’s a lot of material. You could audit it, then take it later, and still go, “Oh, I don’t remember doing this.”

If your dog’s coming off a pretty serious injury and you’ve got contraindications, things you really shouldn’t be doing, maybe don’t take it at Gold. Maybe just audit it. Check with your vet. It’s different if you’re coming here and you’ve been released from the rehab vet to come to me to do exercises. But if you are taking this as a fitness class, I’m going to assume your dog is pretty healthy. Other than that, pretty much all dogs can take it.

For sure the dogs that are pretty mobile that have been in my Aging Dogs class, they can take it. They may not be able to do everything, but the ones that are pretty mobile, there’s some I have in mind that could definitely take it. But if you’ve got a dog that can hardly move, this will be challenging, is my guess.

But there’s always something, you know? I have to do some harder exercises for the dogs that are more performance dogs. They’re strong and they’re used to doing things. And then you can always just stick with the basics and build really, really gradually until you’re ready to go up a level. So it really depends.

Melissa Breau: If people have questions, they can message you, right?

Lori Stevens: Whatever people have, yeah. I think it’s going to be a well-attended class, based on the interest I’ve seen so far, so I hope. It should be really fun. It should be a very positive experience for the dogs and people.

Melissa Breau: Well, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Lori. This is fun to learn a little more about this stuff, and I feel like every time we talk about it, I’m like, Hmm, I really should be doing that. So thank you for coming back on and talking through this with me.

And thank you to all of our wonderful listeners out there for tuning in. We’ll be back next week, this time with Chrissi Schranz to talk about building reinforcers and recall training. If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll subscribe to our podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice so our next episode will automatically download to your phone as soon as it becomes available.

CREDITS:

Today’s show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!