This article is about teaching a Portuguese Water Dog jumping for agility. Often we are asked, “How many jumps should I begin with?” You can’t ever have too many single jumps to learn agility. One suitable starting place is four jumps. This is the minimum quantity of jumps suggested.
Teaching a Portuguese Water Dog jumping: Begin with Four
You can teach a Portuguese Water Dog many exercises, skills, and drills with 4 jumps. Four jumps will allow you to develop on a short jump chute or jump grid. You can practice on a “box” with your jumps and work on collection, handling, and 270 degree jumps. You can teach your Portuguese Water Dog jumping left and right. You can be out of the box and send your Portuguese Water Dog or you can handle from within the box. Your jumps could be staged in a horizontal line, so that you can practice serpentines and threadles.
Teach a Portuguese Water Dog Eight Jumps
Go to the next logical step and develop 8 jumps. Now you can setup 2 boxes with 1 starter jump. You’ve now increased the number of exercises that you can work on with your Portuguese Water Dog. Your jump grids can be of suggested size and quantity of jumps. You could also position the jumps in a circle with the jump bars normal to the circle or on the circumference of the circle. This pattern also enables you to train a variety of skills.
Teach the Portuguese Water Dog Double and Triple Jumps
Your next step is a double jump and a triple jump. You could position 2 or 3 single jumps together to make your expanded jump, however having double and triple jumps in your course work is really beneficial to practice. We’ve seen many Portuguese Water Dogs run a clean course and the last obstacle is a triple and the Portuguese Water Dog is not equipped to do it, and bang, down comes the bar.
Don’t forget to check out these other articles about Portuguese Water Dogs.Was this post helpful? If so, please take a minute to Tweet and Share below on Facebook. I would also love to know your thoughts so leave me a comment 🙂
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