Improving Flyball Speed

From FlyballDogs.com:

Kevin McNicholas says: What you do at training sessions is far more important than actually having a training session. If you want to increase speed you should have training sessions with that in mind. Compare it to tennis players that wants to improve their service, they would practice serving in training. You need to practice speed training, leave the rest of the training on the back burner for a while or budget your time at each training session: 10 percent individual box training, 10 per cent team practice, 10 percent passing practice and reserve 70 percent of the time for speed training. In my opinion you must take this sort of approach to make any real improvement.

To increase speed you must increase motivation. Each dog is an individual and must be motivated in it's own way. One of the best general methods is to hold the dog at the box end (two rear feet on the box) and get the handler to call the dog back to them, when the dog has got half way back get the handler to run as fast as they can away from the dog, when the dog reaches the handler get the handler to provide a huge reward, ball, game, tug of war, food or whatever the dog wants.

It's a good idea to time all the dogs before you start a speed training regime, handlers are then motivated by watching the improvement of their dogs.

Having said all that it is also important to ensure that dogs are fit, ask the handlers to fill in exercise charts so that thh amount of 'free' and 'on lead' exercise can be monitored. Weight can also slow down the dogs, it can also lead to premature illness and injuries, be very critical of excess weight on any dog that you are expecting to compete as a canine athlete. Have dogs thoroughly checked, xrayed and passed as fit by a vet before undertaking any dog sport, if there is any underlying problem with your dogs health or physiology dog sports will reveal it, so find out first. Consider breed/type differences, just because some border collies will run all day that does not mean all dogs, even border collies will do it. Don't over do training with any dog, especially if it is a dogs that get bored easily. Always end on a good note at the dogs peak performance and most importantly keep it fun for the dogs and handlers.

FlyballDogs.com