Photo by Willie Moore, wmConsulting.
Bobbling at the box can be caused by a number of factors and some of the ball catching exercises may help with bobble problem. However, many times it is because the dog is not in the correct position to catch the ball. “Ideally, you want the dog’s front feet and shoulders over the ball when they catch. If they are too far to either side of the ball, the body has to adjust by using the box as a walk way to get to the ball.” Sonya, Sure Shots .
I have found that most of the time, if you have used the Flyball Training Manual to train your dog, you will not have a problem with this. However, if your dog is having problems being in the correct position on the box, one way to correct this is with target training.
Target Training
You can use a piece of duct tape for this or anything that will stick to the floor, chute, and box. You will need to start by training your dog to touch the target (i.e. tape). If you are familiar with Clicker training you should not have a problem with this. Once they are consistently touching or jumping on the target you will need to transfer the target to the chute and/or box. You can follow the training in the Flyball Training Manual for Lessons 4 and 5 for chute and box training. In place of the hit-it command, you should use the command “touch” or whatever command you used when training the dog to touch the target.
A Word About Retraining
If you are retraining a dog that has been playing for some time, this could be a long process. I am sure that you have heard of dog muscle memory. This is something that is rather hard to overcome. Just think of retraining in this context, if the dog has hit a flyball box 1000 times you will need to have him hit it 2000 times correctly to change his turn. This means that you will need to pull the dog from all tournaments and just work on him hitting the box the correct way. For dogs that have been playing for some time, it may not be possible to correct the dog’s turn. You may improve it but may not ever correct it completely.
I welcome your input and any other suggestions that you have for correcting ball bobbling and box problems.
Larry
15 comments ↓
I’m wondering if you can give me some advice . . . we have a veteran dog on the team that within the last year has started busting his lip on the box. At first we thought he might be catching it on the matting, but we replaced everything that looked suspect. We then video taped it and put it in slow motion and you could see that he was basically just smashing his face straight into the box. We adjusted how we were propping. He’s a large BC we put the jump prop about 20″ from the box and use a knee to put him out and around. This has helped a little, but he is still injuring himself before the end of the first day at tourns to the point that he must be pulled. I thought about putting another prop between the last jump and the box to force him to take an extra step and slow down a little. It also seems to me like having the prop closer to the box would give him more control in his turn. Others have countered that larger dogs need the prop furhter out. Some video at http://youtube.com/watch?v=Eh9rEPUOKMo Any advice would be great.
I started to reply to this as if he was a new dog but after rereading your comment, I see that he is a veteran. Have you had is vision and hips checked? Has he ever used props or are you just using them to try to slow him down?
I have an older dog that was never trained to do a box turn and was always a face smasher. We didn’t realize her hips were bad until the face smashing got worse. It hurt for her to slow down at the box because of her hips so she never slowed down. The sports vet at Auburn University told us to keep playing her because it was good exercise but she ended up with an injury to her eye. She had cyst come up in her eye, which was caused by blunt force. We had to retire her from the game she loved.
If this is not the problem let me know. I plan to have a Correcting Problems section.
Well, a large part of you problem is that prop.
You are putting it 20 inches out, and giving him a knee
to push him over. This is causing your dog to hit the
box way too low and way too far from the ball. There
is no way that dog will be able to catch like that.
Their front feet should hit the box much higher on the
box and much closer to the ball. Move the prop to no
further than 12 inches out. Nice sound track on the video. A very unnatural turn like that can be very hard
on the shoulders. It’s not balanced, and the dog cannot
support it’s weight because the front feet are not under
the dog. When a dog hits the box with their front feet
that low, they basically fall over foward and crash.
Teach the dog to get higher on the box, especially the
front feet.
I started to say this and even posted it but then I deleted it when I reread the comment and saw that he was a veteran. It looks to me like the dog never had a turn to begin with now he is hitting the box too hard and they are trying to slow him down. I think the first thing that needs to be checked is whether there is some physical or visual problem with the dog. Once this is checked there are many things that can be done to help him.
Ideally, you want the dog’s front feet and shoulders over the ball when they catch. If they are too far either side of the ball, the body has to adjust by using the box as a walk way to get to the ball. It looks like your dog is using his face to balance. Think of walking a tight rope and using your arm to keep your balance. His center of gravity is too far away from the ball to snatch and turn and go. Thus, he has to “catch himself” with his face, get the ball, turn around, and go. That is also why he was bobbling, he can’t catch the ball and his balance at exactly the same time. So, he falls forward and then goes after the ball. I bet he is “trapping” the ball on the ledge when he hits a little closer to the ball, so it looks like a clean catch, but he is still using his head to balance.
If this dog was not originally taught a swimmers turn, the set up you have in the video is probably not going to do what you want it to do. It is allowing him to hit too low and forcing his front end too far to one side. You want him closer to the ball, but to learn to set himself up for a swimmers turn so that he isn’t coming in too straight.
excellent advice here - I hope these suggestions help out this dog. you might need to pull him from racing for several months until you’re satisfied that his turn is truly corrected. if you let him continue to race in tournaments without the correct props, his turn will very quickly deteriorate back to the original smash turn. problems like this can take a long time to fix, but be patient.
What I’m doing with one of my dog is to put barriers(plexi-glass are the best types) on either side of the box and adjusting the distance of the barriers. This keeps the dog from going too far on either side while teaching him to tighten his turns.
BTW, I tend to agree with Robbie about Clark
We had a big problem with bobbling, and I was really annoyed b/c it was messing with my youngest dog’s confidence a whole lot & I was trying SOOOO many things to figure out what was wrong or how to fix it. We were really struggling and she was trying so hard but we were both getting frustrated. When confident & flying she was doing a very nice turn, but the more she bobbled the worse the turn got. Specifically she was starting to have a bad approach to the box, slowing, etc. By the end of the day she’d be running around 6 seconds if she was clean, box turn was almost head on.
So I finally looked at a lot of video & decided maybe the ball was the problem. I think it had something to do with how the ball is shot out, especially small balls, but some of the dogs using big ball had similiar problems. So I got some squishy balls (magic sheltie balls) to experiment with. What the heck…I’ve tried EVERYTHING else, tried to get lots of advice from other trainers. Well, almost instantly she was “fixed”, well after I got her to understand that the squishy ball was indeed a ball! Then another teammate with a bobble prone dog tried it. We went from running tourneys where those 2 dogs bobbled probably 1 heat out of 5, and passing was hard, to the first tournament after switching in practice with those 2 dogs running 99% clean. My dog’s times dropped considerably, now running at around 4.9-5.3 vs 6 seconds. Her box turn is now awesome, just like we trained it to be in the first place! I’m sorry we have 3 sizes of balls, but nobody is complaining when it means clean runs, easy to pass dogs & lots more WINS!
So now almost all the bobble dogs, including several with lots of experience switched. It’s been amazing to watch, we even had 1 dog who didn’t so much bobble but her turn was less than stellar try them, and her box turn has greatly improved & so has her speed, almost a 0.5 second improvement!
Blah Blah Blah…long story short, it’s important to know if the problem is the dog, the ball, the box, the prop placement. We went sort of backwards, finding a fix really helped identify the problem.
You are so right about the different balls, which was something I failed to mention in my post. The dogs on our team with bobbling problems were moved to squishy balls with very good success. I think it has a lot to do with the speed of the ball coming out of the box and the harder the ball the faster it comes out. I am no expert in this area but it sound logical to me.
where do you get squishy balls? what’s the brand?
I bought a bag of them in Sports Authority and they were Wilson balls. You can also look for Gamma First Set Balls. They are actually soft training tennis balls designed for beginners.
I found some of the soft tennis balls at big 5 they were called penta
Thanks for the squishy ball info -
it’s a question I had to ask about but it sure is something to laugh at (snicker, snicker) when you see it written…. (I’m easily amused).
Seriously though, I was not sure if they were actual “fuzzy” tennis balls or more like a racket ball which I thought would pop out even faster because they seem even more firm than a tennis ball. Thanks for the heads up on this one, Larry and BCollie -now I know.
Our squishy balls are made of foam, (aka Magic Sheltie Balls) actually they are stress balls. I got tennis ball look-a-like stress balls on ebay, had to search very hard for them though. Got our original test batch at a party supply store, they had smiley faces on them
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