What Do Dancing and Training Have in Common?

When the pandemic triggered a lockdown last year, this online Zumba class was a welcome distraction. Now, let’s be clear: I am not the most coordinated person, nor do I love physical exercise. However, the positive community and fun music made this a class I looked forward to. 

I will say that practicing training skills with animals such as chickens, pigs, cats, and dogs has improved my hand eye coordination. But my feet and hips eye coordination was a steeper learning curve. Shrugging my shoulders and laughing at myself certainly helped.

What helped even more is when the Zumba instructors demonstrated the moves slowly, giving the class enough repetitions to practice, then bringing us up to tempo. This helped me finally figure out how to floss. Don’t judge, cut a Gen X gal some slack! 

The same instruction model should be applied to dog training! I encourage you to practice your training skills without your dog first. Practice in front of a mirror with your imaginary dog. Fine tune your visual signals or cues until you can repeat them flawlessly. Make sure everyone in the family can give the same visual cues the same way.

Using your imaginary dog, practice where you’re going to feed your dog. No, not the room in your home, but your dog’s position! As you may have noticed, if you feed your dog too high or too low, your dog will leave the position you are trying to reward. 

After you’ve practiced without your dog, start practicing with your dog. Start slowly. Since you are both learning, train easy behaviors first. As you both advance your training skills and repertoire, you may start training more quickly and more challenging behaviors. Enjoy the journey and ask for help as needed. Remember the saying, “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” If I can learn to floss online, you can learn how to train online!