Push Heeling with Janice Gunn

Really good video

This video was absolutely perfect. As a trainer who has focused on pet dogs and had little to no experience with flashy and fun obedience, this video gave me my "aha moment". I loved the length of the video. It was long enough to be packed with great information but short enough to keep my attention and encourage me to finish it and apply what I learned. I HIGHLY recommend this video especially if you are struggling with how to get that happy and upward prance. If I could give this 10 stars I would!

I watched this video and I figured who better to learn from than the people who train for A.K.C obedience, which is their main thing: obedience. The style of heeling is a bit different than sport heeling in IPO, but it's still very, very good. I thought the video is only one hour long was a good thing, since the other Leerburg videos give a lot of content, for the price, and that's why they are very long. I think keeping it to one single hour actually is better, because it allows the person to view the entire video in one sitting. The video assumes that the person watching already has the following components in their background done as foundation: luring, engagement, and engagement. The Golden Retriever shown already obviously has good engagement and had a ton of work done to teach play, food, and other reward mechanisms as a foundation. So this video doesn't waste any time, and gets right into heeling pretty quickly. So the competition obedience crowd already knows all the theory before even watching, but the absolute novice who has zero background in competitive obedience is better off watching the Forrest Micke 3 part series that breaks it down into much smaller pieces, in terms of both marker training, and engagement prior to the heeling.

It depends on who you are in your competitive obedience work. If you're a person like me, who has been training for a while, using a variety of techniques, all the preliminary work, and language of operant conditioning is already part of our vocabulary. If you're a total beginner, this video is not where you would necessarily start.

I think Janice did an outstanding job teaching perch work, stationary positions and movement. I think she combined very nicely all the foundation work in stationary positions and she also shows how to use various tools that aid in the head-up position: something never shown in other videos. While these helper tools don't teach the behavior, it helps to better shape the behavior. The pretty prance and driving from the rear is shown. This is a different kind of finished product that you lately see in the IPO world, of head straight up, since attention heeling and watching the owner's face is not really shown. How to reward in the right position, not to cause the dog to wrap around you and forge is shown also. Again, very good technique and a bit different than you normally see in the IPO sport dog world, but still perfectly valid. I think if the introduction shows a reference to the other Leerburg videos of operant conditioning and developing drive and the food DVD from Michael Ellis and the Tug DVD, it would be better integrated into the Leerburg series overall. But this is a TERRIFIC different teaching method . The only slight criticism is to give the person watching some idea of frequency of events. Like for example, practice head-up position for 15 reps for 3 weeks, 3 times per day,before going to step2. In other words, giving a feel for the time it takes per step, would be helpful.

Overall, a very informative and useful video! Props to Leerburg to adding this well known AKC trainer into their stable.