E267: 애슐리 에스코바르(Ashley Escobar) - 카나인 피트니스 및 카발레티 이야기

And it's really important to me that when I instruct other people that they build that bond and have that fun relationship with their dog. I love for, you know, all of my dogs start out as agility prospects, but you know what? They just don't always want to do it. So I'm perfectly fine. And I'm the first one to say, let's try something different for this dog so that they're happy. Cause I think that both parties should be having fun. So I would say I'm based on mutual fun and having that, just that loving relationship with your dog. Cause to me, that's what it's all about at the end of the day. So how did you go from showing horses to dogs to fitness? So what kind of led you into, um, that aspect of things? So from the horses to the dogs, it was, it was actually a pretty easy transition for me. I already had, so I trained, I had Jack Russell's and I did lots of training with them because they're Jack Russell's and they do lots of tricks and they're fun. And so the dog training just sort of naturally happened when within itself, just organically happened. Um, as far as the fitness, I have always been into physical fitness myself. So lots of physical activity for me and my dogs, but I really did not know the depth of importance of it at, you know, early on in my dog sports. And I had a, one of my performance Doberman sustained some pretty severe injuries. And in going through all of her rehab after some TPLO surgeries and then a shoulder injury. And I mean, it was like one thing after another, I started like reflecting on my equestrian past, past hood. And I'm like, you know what? Like, why are, why are there not specific programs for dogs to prevent these types of injuries? Granted, any injury can happen as we know, but with football players and with these elite hunter jumpers that, you know, I used to condition, I'm like, there's so many specific exercises that we do to really strengthen their rear and their core and their front end. And at the time there was in 2012, there was nothing for dogs that I, that I had readily available for me. So I ended up finding, um, connecting with Dr. Mills at the University of Tennessee. And I'm probably getting his name wrong because it's been a while and I've had a lot going on, but I learned about the canine fitness world. And it was, it was like that, that was me. Like, it's like, I'm all about it. I love it. It's fun. Um, and so that's kind of what got me started in that was because I sustained that traumatic injury with my dog and going through rehabbing her and trying to get her back up and running.

Kind of made you want to be a little more on the preventative side and a little less on the, uh, after it all goes wrong side, huh? It really did. And, you know, I met so many people and they were just like, kind of in the same boat. They're like, well, I mean, they're just dogs. They get injured. And I mean, it happens, of course, even despite all of our best efforts, just like football players. Right. But they condition and train for their specific abrupt moves and sharp turns and sudden stops. And why shouldn't we be training this with our dogs? It just makes sense when I really thought about it. So going and getting my certificate and doing the CEUs with the canine fitness has not only been super fun, it's, it's just life changing for the pet world and the sport dog world because even pet dogs get hurt. Yeah. So talk to me a little bit about Cavalettis in particular for anybody who maybe isn't familiar with them. Can you start with kind of describing what they are and how we use them? Yes. So Cavalettis are one of my all time go-to favorites for canine fitness. They are essentially ground poles that we ask our dogs to stride over, step over in a very controlled movement. Um, we use them in horses. We've used them in horses since the late eighties and I'm sure before then, but that's my experience with it with horses. Um, but they do a lot of different things. So depending on what your goals are with your dog, they can be used for just basic balanced movement and fitness, or they can be used for very specific things like the show dogs that want to have that really long sweeping side stride, um, gate where they have that nice, um, extension in their shoulder and just fluid looking movement. So they can be used for a, for any dog from a pet dog to senior dog, to your agility dog, to your competition obedience dog with that beautiful heads up healing position. It's kind of like the, and I, I'm, I cannot like the bow flags or whatever that equipment was that you could get where you could do like everything all in one with this one thing that you hung on your door that never actually hung on the door. Right. That's what Cavaletti poles are right. You can set them up and they literally can be used for anyone, a novice person with a pet dog that just wants to do something fun. They can do it. That's awesome. So talk to me a little more about some of the benefits you mentioned there. Um, what are the benefits of working with Cavalettis? How do they really contribute to a dog's performance? So in, in regards to performance, we are working, we can improve their stride balance.

So the way that your dog strikes the ground when they land. And this of course comes into play when you're adding a lot of motion, like through agility course, or even the competition healing where they're having to acutely have their head up in a very specific flashy position. And they're all rocked back on their hind end and making these really sharp motions and movements. So the Cavaletti poles gives your dog the proprioception to know where each foot is. So proprioception is just limb awareness for our dog. It's kind of like us driving a car. Like we don't have to look at our right foot on the gas pedal and both hands on the steering wheel. We just hop in. We know where all of our body parts are. Our dogs just are not born knowing that. So we help them out. We help them to learn that each foot and leg can move independently of the other. And Cavaletti poles are a great way to do that. How much training are we talking about to teach dogs to really use them correctly? What does that process kind of look like? It's actually a lot more simple than you might think if you split all the behaviors up. So this is definitely one of the things that through the years I have learned, you cannot lump the behaviors together. You want to isolate each individual piece, but because we break them up into such small pieces and it's really fun for our dog, I find that it's a pretty quick transition from going to just wrapping a cone to trotting over some Cavaletti poles. So if we want to do this type of work, if we're interested in teaching our dog Cavalettis, do we need a particular set of Cavalettis? Are there ways to make a set kind of at home? What do you recommend in terms of equipment? There are some rules with Cavalettis as far as we want to be safe and make sure that our dog has proper form over the Cavaletti poles because you can do them incorrectly and you can injure your dog. You definitely, the poles are never higher than the dog's hawk height. They can always be lower and you will still work your dog. So a lot of people have the misconception that the poles have to be really high and the dog needs to be really stepping up high. They don't. The highest that they would ever go would be their hawk. But 80% of all of the Cavaletti work that I do with my clients, it is lower than that. So they're very versatile. You can make your own. There's tons of plans online for how to make your own. That's the only catch is that it cannot be higher than your dog's hawk height. And then there's a lot of companies that sell pre-made ones that are nice poles. Ultimately, you need at least six to ten poles.

But for starting out, you can start out with three to four. Oh, okay. You mentioned the hawk height thing. And I'd imagine, you know, different size dogs. Obviously, we need things that are a little bit differently, different setups, right? So what are we looking for while we're working the Cavalettis? How do we tell if the setup is right for our dog? What are some signs maybe that we need to adjust things? So the biggest thing with the Cavaletti form for our dog is we want a neutral headset. So we want a neutral spine as they are striding over these poles. A lot of people, a lot of mistakes and stuff that I might see when people send me their videos is they're luring their dog over the poles, which causes the dog's head to be too high. And now they're weight shifting back. And now they're not balanced striding through the poles. So the headset is one thing that we look for. So when we train Cavaletti poles, we actually teach our dogs that when they get in the poles and they're reading the pole grid, they have that neutral headset. So that's something that we do from step one. The other thing is you will know that the poles are not the proper distance apart if the dog is double stepping in between poles or skipping poles. The pole spacing in between poles, you have a couple of different categories that they would fall into. If your dog is a square bodied dog, the distance between pole to pole would be the height that your dog is at the withers is the general rule. If you have a longer bodied dog, like a corgi, the distance between poles would be the length of their back. So our longer bodied dogs, we don't ever want to scrunch them up and ask them to do things where they're in roach back form. We want them to just be extending through the poles. So that's a couple of things to mention with that. So there are a few rules, but it's not anything too drilling that you cannot do. But we want to look for head. So we want neutral head position. We want the dogs to be striking the ground with a flat foot. We don't want them to be rolling from the outside of their foot to the inside. And they should ideally be down the center of the poles. They should not be hugging to one side or the other, because if they are, then they are really using the cones or what's holding the poles up as kind of their guideline. Instead of reading the jump grid and just being in the center of it or the pole grid. The other thing is it should be a slow, intentional movement. A walk, a trot, nothing faster. I'm sure there are some dogs that that's the hardest part to learn, right? It is very hard.

It's very hard for those speedy dogs. It's not as fast as you can go. So you said double stepping or skipping poles. Skipping poles, I think, is self-explanatory. Like they just like didn't step between two poles. Yes, they just overreach. So double stepping would be so ideally if you have your pole set up, it should be the left front foot, let's say, hits in between pole two and three. And then the right front foot would extend and reach in between three and four. So each front foot should hit in between the ladder, essentially, if you think of it like a ladder set up. Gotcha. Okay, that's helpful. So part of the reason we're talking about all this, right, is because you have a workshop coming up for us. It starts May 1st called Conditioning with Cavaletti Poles. Take your canine fitness to the next level. You want to just talk a little bit about kind of what you're going to cover in the workshop? Yes. So in the workshop, which I'm so excited to share with everyone, is we are going to learn how to properly train our dogs to work Cavaletti Poles. We are starting from assuming that your dog has never even seen Cavaletti Poles. And maybe they have seen them, but perhaps they don't have proper form over them because that is usually the case. We are teaching them from the ground up how to properly teach neutral headset, the proper striding, and then giving some options of some different exercises to move to if they advance along. Who is a good fit? Who might want to consider signing up? Are there any age limits or fitness limits or anything that people should think about? This is open for anyone. This is a really fun thing to do if you are a pet dog owner and you just have a companion dog that you want to keep healthy and sound and have something to add to your training. This may be kind of jumpstart your desire to do more with your dog. It's a wonderful relationship building exercise because you will be training your dog and splitting down the behaviors. And I find that the dogs love it. It is also phenomenal for confirmation folks who do a lot of confirmation. I do a lot of confirmation showing. This is one of the primary exercises that we typically do with my confirmation clients because it does help your dog get that balanced stride for their down and back. And it also promotes a balanced stand when they are standing because it really is the balanced movement. And you would be surprised where your dog might be more of a lefty or righty in this regard. So this will help with that.

And it's also wonderful for the agility folks who are wanting that proprioception work and really wanting those keen tight turns and that fast stops and abrupt goes from the they do stop contacts and then building that momentum to just power through that stopped motion into running again. So really, it's great for senior dogs. I have videos in the workshop of my puppy doing them since she was roughly like 10 or 11 weeks old. I mean, pulls her on the ground and the sessions are short, but it's wonderful proprioception work for the young dogs too. So it's one of those versatile exercises that certainly just kind of fits everyone. That's awesome. That's awesome. So long as people remember to keep an eye on their dog and as their dog grows, they adjust things, right? Yes, yes. And we spend quite a bit of time in the workshop talking about fatigue because fatigue is one of the things that you really have to pay attention to when you're doing any kind of canine fitness. Yeah. All right. So to kind of round out our chat with one last question, if we were to drill down kind of the stuff that we've been talking about today into a key piece of information or like a takeaway you really want people to understand after they've listened to our chat, what would that be? I would want people to understand that despite all best efforts, injuries do happen and injury prevention is kind of the path that I'm on at this point after having a dog sustain such an injury. And there are a lot of things that are preventable and taking just a few minutes a day to do some sort of canine fitness with intention of injury prevention is such a huge benefit that we have now in the dog world that I hope more people will look at and want to be a part of before they ever do. Hopefully not. But if they ever do sustain any sort of injury, having that injury prevention on hand is just something I hope that people take away from this. Right. Because I'd imagine not only does it help prevent the injuries in the first place, but if an injury does still happen, the dog has the understanding and the behavior is already on board to do some of that rehab work, right? It makes it so much easier if they already have that body awareness because they do, you know, unfortunately they do still sometimes get injured. But I also have to think that a lot of the injuries that I see when they're doing lots of canine fitness, they're less, they're not nearly as severe. So that would be my one takeaway is that people would put more emphasis on injury prevention with their canines. Awesome.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Ashley. This has been great. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We will be back next week with Sharon Carroll to talk about what's happening when a dog's performance begins to deteriorate. If you haven't already, subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice. Our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the Fensi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fensi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by bensounds.com. The track featured here is called Funny. Audio editing provided by Chris Lange. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training. Thank you. Thank you.