A month ago Inky, my 10 month old Lab and I failed the kennel club silver test. This wasn't a huge surprise but it did make me re-evaluate what I was doing. I decided to go back to basics and watched some You Tube kikopup videos.I ordered a treat bag and got my clicker out of the drawer where it had been gathering dust and started again with basic sit and lie. A few goes and the difference was amazing, I think I had got a bit lazy and bored with that bit of training! Then I tried the "stay" exercise which we had failed spectacularly and again much improvement. Today Inky lay on the front grass while I wheeled the bin by him.I've added more training like tug and drop and am re teaching hand touch although he's a bit enthusiastic about that. When we walk I'm much more inclined to stop and do some training which I knew I ought to be doing but again it had slipped. After discussion with the trainers who are very supportive, I decided to continue with the training, I feel you always learn something and it's a new set of dogs which means new distractions to practice with. We still have a long way to go but Inky just views it as playing with treats so he always seems up for "training"!
Pleased you've decided to persevere. With the stay, can I suggest you make sure you have a release word so it's clear to your dog when they can move. Of course you may well do this already, but I've been teaching a silver class and have found it quite difficult to persuade everyone to do this. Another suggestion is to do lots of different length stays - from just a few seconds to the 2 minutes you need. From my experience with Molly she finds down stays much easier to hold than sit -and in silver you can choose which position you leave your dog in. I also found it helped to move a bit in the actual class (in practice at home I moved a lot)-not enough to distract the other dogs, but just swaying from foot to foot, moving my arms to different positions, as I think when I was standing absolutely still Molly was watching me for any little clue that the stay was over.
Good for you for revalidating and starting again, it's so easy to slip a bit and the something happens to get you focussed again. I've been going back to basics with Cassie too and at 16 months she's a lot older. But I think they do enjoy having that sort of engagement with us.
