Steady, ready, GO!!!

I just wanted to share a trick that has been very useful for us - steady, ready, GO! I first found it out years ago with Rocco, when we were going to swim. He just loves swimming and to make it even more fun we made this competition - with both of us looking at direction of lake, I held him back with my arms and told him with excited voice - steady-ready and on GO we both raced to water. He learned to love it very fast. Later we used it for our agility-games and in what ever situation - steady-ready gets him alert and quick. Now, with Lucky, I found out that our trainer uses the same method. So now Lucky too knows the meaning of it. And it works so well. Steady-ready-come is the best way to get him coming very-very fast. Steady-ready-sit/down don't work so well yet, as he starts barking and doesn't listen for the real command, but usually tries to quess what I want form him next :o).

And another trick that's very useful in everyday life, is running around different obstacles. We use it with Lucky for our forest-agility :o). There's not very many opportunities for him to run fast, if he doesn't have another puppy to play with (I'm snail-slow compared to him:o) ). So we pick a group of 4-5 trees with enough distance from each-other to be our agility-obstacles and run 8-s and rounds between them. As Lucky just loves action, he learned very fast to go to direction I show him and he is fast and barking happily :o).

I'm not sure if my english is good enough to explain what I ment, so I'll try to have someone to take a clip of it if I have camera and trees and light and someone at the same time :o)