E362: 켈리 다니엘(Kelly Daniel) - "웰니스와 카나인 아슬리트(Canine Athlete)"

There's lots of physical measurements that we can do because we can't ask them how they feel about things. We have to get really good at reading their behavior because their emotional responses and their emotions are exhibited through the different behaviors that they do. So it's about being aware of a number of factors and being able to consciously like take measurements and, and look at those factors. So both their behaviors and also their body and how they're moving and how they feel. So let's talk a little more about the emotional wellbeing piece kind of before diving into more the physical stuff. So what types of things are you looking at to determine emotional wellbeing? You mentioned body language. Yep. So, um, so for me, basically when I'm looking at a dog and evaluating as a whole, first I look at, do they have any, what we would consider as humans problem behaviors? Often there's a normal dog behaviors, but for us, they become a problem and the environment that we put them in. Do they have any big problem behaviors that we need to address? Often those problem behaviors come from, um, a lack of needs being met, health or, um, issue, or they have big feelings about things. So problem behaviors, first of all, and then I'm going to look at the sort of all of the other aspects of their life and if their needs are being met, if their needs are being met, um, and they don't have any huge problem behaviors and we're getting really good at reading their body language, we can kind of assume that they're feeling pretty good about things. Are we just talking about enrichment here? I know enrichment's kind of been a buzzword for the last few years. Is it more than that? Yeah, no, definitely. I think enrichment is a big part of that. Um, I had a student in class recently ask me like, what is enrichment? Because she said, I give Likimats and that's definitely what we tend to think of enrichment. So, but it's, it's huger than that. And we have dogs that are very varied. We do lots of different sports. We have lots of different breeds. They're bred for different purposes. They have different inbuilt needs. And that's what enrichment covers. So enrichment is things that make dogs' lives better. But the important part of it that we sometimes miss is it's also a chance for them to do natural behaviors for the dog. Um, and that for me is definitely a big part of what I missed for a really long time with enrichment until I got my spaniel. And one of his needs was flushing things. And if that need was not met, that behavior would come out in other areas where it was

really not ideal for my dog to be trying to flush birds out of the agility weave poles. Or when we're walking on lead, trying to flush the birds out of a, out of a hedge, you know? So it's definitely things that we can do, everyday things that we can do to make our dogs happier and their lives better. But it's also creatively thinking about how we can safely and in a way that we enjoy and our dog enjoys, let them do the natural behaviors that they're really like bred to do. So we've talked before, um, previous times you've had in the podcast about physical well-being. And I think a lot of canine handlers have come to see the value over time and kind of fitness and conditioning. Can you talk a little bit about maybe just warmups and cool downs on competition days? Yeah, totally. Um, so, and I totally agree. We've got more and more competitors that are taking an interest in the physical health of their dogs, which is amazing because we ask our dogs to do so much, especially like on a trial weekend. I think it's really important that we're caring for their bodies. Otherwise their bodies potentially can fail. Um, so a big part of this on the day is your warmup and your cool down. Um, and it's something that often we don't find the time because we don't potentially see the relevance in it. It is hard on a trial day to fit in the timing and make it work when you're trying to line up with other people that are running or you've got multiple dogs. Um, the thing to think about with your, especially with your warmup is not only does it reduce the chance of injury occurring because your dog is moving properly and they're nice and physically warm. Um, the joints are moving through proper range of motion and their muscles have already been warmed and stretched. But it's also going to increase your performance. A dog that's properly warmed up like, like a human. So all the research from this comes from humans. Unfortunately, we don't have very good dog specific research. Um, a human that's warmed up properly will perform better. That means they will move better and they will go faster and they'll be more powerful. So there's benefits for your performance as well as the injury prevention. So your warmup should really be composed of two main parts. One is physically getting warm and the blood moving around the body because that's needed for the muscles to stretch and move to full capacity. Um, then we're going to try and move joints through their range of motions. So flex and extend, open and close them. Um, and then the last part of that's going to be performing movements that are specific

to the action and the sports that they're about to do, but it's not going to be as sort of high intensity as in the sports because we're slowly going to build up intensity. So warming up the body, moving joints through range of motion, and then doing the sports specific movements that you're about to do in the activity. So if that's warmup, is there something you maybe want to add just around cool down? Yeah. So technically the cool down should be the reverse, um, of that. But the most important thing for me is that you're taking time that it's hard. It's really hard to like do that whole thing in reverse. That's a huge amount of time, but as long as you're taking the time to slowly reduce the, um, respiration rate and sort of how much the heart is beating and allow that body temperature to return back to that normal, that normal level, um, instead of just putting them away, panting and hot. So for me, the most important part of a cool down is I will walk them around for quite a long time. I'll do a few active stretches to make sure that they're not sore, to make sure that we haven't, um, tweaked anything and to just gently stretch those muscles out that have might've been overstretched a little bit in performance. And I'm just waiting for them to get their breathing levels back to normal and not feel so hot and panty. And so that might take 10 minutes. Can you talk a bit about the elements that are common to most canine athletes versus those pieces that may be, you know, need to be customized either based on the dog or based kind of on the sport that they're playing? Yeah. So, I mean, every dog should be moving through all of the joints range of motions. Um, so opening and closing the different joints. The easiest way to do this, um, because the old school way would be we'd grab them and move their legs. Um, research shows that this passive method of stretching and flexing and extending joints is potentially more damaging than useful. Um, so we don't want to do that anymore. So instead we can get them to move through their range of motion by asking them to do different positions. So when a dog, um, sits and stands and lie down, lies down and gives a paw, they're going to move the joints through adequate sort of flexion and extension and then spinning and twisting in each direction to move the neck and the spine, um, laterally. So to the side, they're the most important general moves that we would need to do. Um, and they're the ones that everybody should be doing in their warmup. Definitely. How can we maybe anticipate, you know, just looking at physical wellness, um, how things,

you know, anticipate, expect them to maybe change over the course of the dog's lifetime. So from the time that they're like a baby puppy to the time when they kind of reach that senior status, maybe they're starting to slow down. Um, what do we need to be looking at? Um, so we're looking at how their body changes and we want to make changes in what we do with them performance and sort of fitness wise to best suit their body. So baby puppies are bendy, flexy little things that haven't finished growing. Their bones aren't all hard. Their joints haven't finished. They're just floppy little beasts. So, um, my focus for them fitness wise is teaching them to move their body. That's how we're going to reduce injury and we're not going to put too much strain. We don't want to do strength exercises with a baby dog because they're too bendy and floppy. It's not useful. It's not very good for their developing joints. So baby dogs, it's all about teaching them that proprioception and that they have legs that they can control and that they can do it in a controlled way. As my dogs start to mature, I'm going to start to teach them more grown up positions and movements so they can start to develop some stability around those joints that are starting to finish their growth. Um, so I'm starting to very carefully add some strength specific work in, but I think a lot of the time we forget how long it takes for young dogs to actually finish physically maturing. So we used to use the measure of growth plates as a measure of a dog, you know, having finished growing. But, um, in terms of what we see now in injuries and, um, some of the other factors that we might measure in terms of growth, it actually takes a lot longer than that because once the bones finish growing, then the soft tissue around the joints needs to finish developing and then the musculature needs to develop to support those bones and those joints. And that takes a really long time. Um, Eva, my border collie is one of my bigger dogs. He's not that big. Um, and he could start, he started competing in 18 months and that was probably too early for him, mostly because his brain wasn't able to function then. Hence why I do the things that I do now. Um, but looking back, I don't think he reached full physical maturity in terms of his strength and his musculature until about two and a half. He really shouldn't have been competing that early, um, because he wasn't emotionally or physically like finished growing yet. So it's a really careful period between puppyhood and they've finished growing to develop musculature

to support their bodies, but not overdo it and, and cause potential harm to those joints. It's a really delicate period in their growth. It's also a really delicate period because we generally start competing with them over this time, but it's also the time that sometimes we can have joint issues show up that weren't there previously. Um, my spaniel flurry was clinically perfect with her knees sort of through nine to 12 months ish. Um, she had no issues. She was moving beautifully. She looked great. Um, then she had her first season and she had a huge hormone surge. It was a much bigger than normal season. Um, there was some issues. We ended up at a reproductive vet, but she started having bilateral luxating patellas, um, about 13, 14 months after that season. And if I'd started really pushing her strength wise and agility wise earlier, I could have potentially done a huge amount of damage to those knees. So that almost grown up periods are really delicate time of adding strength and muscle, but not doing it in a way that's going to put potentially damage developing joints. Then we need to maintain that strength over their adult period. I see often in the majority of dogs that start really getting into fitness work at sort of two, three, four, five already imbalances in their muscle because of the activities they do every day. It could be because they do lots of heel work and they're always on the left side. So their head's turned up to their handler, which actually shifts more of their body weight onto their rear left leg. So I see these imbalances all the time. It could be from a behavior that they tend to do in their life. So grid tends to go the same way through the hedges when he does his flushing. So I actively stand in the way and bump him so that when he does his flushing through the hedges, which I cue and I allow, he's going in both directions. So we don't get muscle imbalances. So through that middle period of their time of their life, it's managing how much they do and also maintaining muscle, continuing to build muscle and making sure that all of that muscle and those movements are even in their body. Then they had an age, which always is a shock and is always seems sudden, where they start to drop muscle. So they move into that older age category. Some dogs, it can be a lot earlier and there's many contributing factors. They might have some arthritis in their joints, so they change their movement patterns. They might just all of a sudden, like my old chasey dog, all of a sudden get old. Um, she was sort of 12 and a half before I really noticed substantial muscle loss that

impacted how she moved. Um, my Evo has stopped doing agility because of a health thing at the moment and he's nine, almost 10. And I've just noticed that he's started to drop some muscle. So he's not doing as much agility and he's dropped muscle because of that. So this is a really critical time for us in terms of caring for our dog's body. If they drop muscle, they're going to move differently. That's going to point there, put their joints at risk of moving in ways that they shouldn't, can potentially cause damage. That can cause the cycle of an arthritic joint that doesn't move properly, which further reduces their movement. Um, we don't want our old dogs to be sore. They've had a huge life. They deserve to be happy and not sore. So it's a really important time to be super proactive in, um, their health. But a big part of this, the new research is showing and the new sort of way of approaching older dogs that are potentially sore and arthritic is actually doing correct exercise. So we used to just hold off and like reduce how much we did so that they weren't sore. But now the sort of way to approach the older dogs is to help them do correct exercise. So they're moving their joints appropriately and they're rebuilding some muscle to support those joints to try and interrupt that pain cycle. All right. So the reason we're talking about all this, right, is that you've got a new class, this term called caring for your star athlete. Can you share a little more about the class, kind of what you'll cover and who might want to join you? Yep. Um, it's a super fun class because it's everything that I love. So it's lots of fitness. So we're looking specifically for that, the star athletes in class that they can do the general fitness stuff well, but also they can know their dog, know their dog's needs and the goals that they have and make sure that some of the fitness they're doing is specific to their dogs, their needs and their goals. Because whilst we have like general things we should all be doing with fitness, um, we are busy people and we want to make sure that fitness is specific to their needs and their goals. And for us geeky dog people, often that's dog sports. Um, so that's a big part of it, but it's also looking a little bit bigger picture than just the fitness they can do. So we're looking at their everyday life and the other movement and activity that they do in their life. Um, we're looking at nails and feet because I'm one of those geeky people that are like, oh my gosh, the nails, it matters. Nails matter. As much as I have dogs also that hate having their nails done, it matters.

It's looking at the professionals you use with the dog and if you're getting, they're getting the adequate support with their health and their other wellbeing aspects in their body. Do they need to see a physio? Do they need to see an osteopath or a massage therapist? Have they had some blood tests done so that their general health has been checked? So have they got that aspect covered? So lots of different aspects of physical health as we're including fitness. Um, then we're going to have a look at their emotional wellbeing. So we're looking at making sure that people can read their dog's behaviours and infer the emotions their dogs are feeling. Um, we're having a look at any problem behaviours that might be happening. And whilst we're tackling the dog sort of on all these different aspects in class, we're also going to have a look at that behaviour, um, that they might be having trouble with and changing how they feel about that behaviour. Because most of the time the behaviour is a problem because of how the dog feels. Um, they have big feelings about things that might be hatred of things. It might be fear of things. It might be they just don't see the value in those things. It might be fear and confusion. Um, so we're going to have a look at changing some behaviours and how they feel about things. Um, we're also going to, because a big part of dogs, sports dogs and their feelings is their handler's training and communication. So we're going to fine tune the people and their training mechanics and the geekiness because this is what I do every class. But it's a big part of this. A lot of the time we see these problems in sports and how our dog feels because of either how we've trained a behaviour, because how we train a behaviour and how they feel when we're training a behaviour actually will translate to that end behaviour. So if we did a crap job at training it and they got super frustrated along the way, most of the time, even when we're finished training their behaviour, those residual feelings will linger. So if you had a lot of trouble and a lot of frustration teaching weave poles, it's likely that those feelings will come back when your dog does the weave poles later on. And that can cause problems further down the line. So training and mechanics. The other problem that we have for performance sports teams often is we haven't got adequate processes in a show environment and we haven't got a way of doing things at the shows. And that can cause gaps in our dogs because their needs aren't being met in that particular environment.

So we're going to make sure that dogs are happy and comfortable and feeling good in the show environment and that trainers have adequately prepared for that competition environment. Because another reason that dogs can have issues in the ring is because we as trainers haven't transitioned to them appropriately with delayed reinforcement and those ring procedures to make sure that they understand what's happening in the ring because it's different to in training. And that's why sometimes we can see those problems occur in the ring that don't come up in training because we haven't adequately prepared the dog for the ring being different. We're looking as well at home life and are we meeting their needs in different aspects over home life. So decompression activities, different enrichment activities. Are their dogs happy and having their needs met? That's actually usually going to reduce some of those problem behaviors. So for example, if we have a dog that in the ring environment is routinely, big surprise, if we have a border collie that's hurting people at the end of the run. Um, it's possible that in its everyday life, maybe it's not getting an opportunity to do that natural behavior and it's getting frustrated and it's coming out in other places, right? Like with grid with the, um, the chasing the birdies. So we're making, so we're making sure that they have adequate and safe because we can't let the border collie herd people all the time, but adequate and safe opportunities to decompress so relaxed, but also do those behaviors that their bodies sometimes just really need to do. Um, yeah, so that's kind of, that was a long explanation, but basically emotions, body, home life, training, competition. Fair enough. Any, um, final thoughts or, uh, key points you maybe just want to leave folks with on the topic? Yeah. Yeah. Um, I always say that as a partner with our canine athletes, it's our responsibility to look after their bodies and make sure that they're adequately prepared for what we ask them to do. But with this class, I'm really asking you to look whole picture and make sure that your dog is not only physically prepared for their sports, but mentally prepared as well. Um, because we want our dogs to be happy and healthy and here for a really long time and continuing to be our canine stars that they are and be our partners. And we need to look at all of the different aspects to make sure that that occurs. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Kelly. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. And thanks to our listeners for tuning in.

We'll be back next week with Ellen Lawler to talk about reliable distance downs. If you haven't already subscribed to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzie Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzie 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. Music