10 Essential Steps to a Great Workout part 1

general fitness Jun 25, 2019

There are 10 essential steps to having great workouts with your dog. If you follow these 10 steps, you will increase the effectiveness, increase the safety, and increase the enjoyment from each and every workout with your dog. Here are the first 5 of these Essential Steps, taken from our K9 Fitness Journal.

Step 1: Motivation.

            The first step to a great workout with your dog is understanding why you are doing it. What is your reason for fitness training with your dog? Is it to enhance performance? Or reduce the risk of your dog getting injured? Or maybe, you want to prepare your dog for your sport so your dog can have a long, and successful career. Try to hone in on your number one reason.

            Now you need to know what motivates your dog. Is it the high value food? The tug of the toy or the toss of the ball? Is it your undivided attention? You need...

Continue Reading...

Stable versus Unstable: Which is Best for Strengthening your Canine Athlete?

Stable versus Unstable: which is the best for strengthening?

Many dog sports enthusiasts train their canine athletes in fitness with the goal of reducing the risk of injury and increasing longevity in their sport, as well as hoping to improve their dog’s performance.

Studies support that strength training is the single most important component of fitness training to keep your dog injury free and thus able to compete for a long time. But there remains a great deal of confusion regarding strength training in dogs and just how to do it.

Strength training is a type of training that increases strength by gradually increasing the resistance the muscles must overcome.

In people, strength training often involves the use of external weights (think dumbbells, barbells, weight machines) and occasionally just body weight resistance (think push-ups, pull ups, and sit-ups.) In dogs, this is most often done using body weight resistance, but can also be done using external weights like...

Continue Reading...

Is Your Dog Strong Enough? Find out with this quick assessment.

Dog sports are physically demanding. Agility, flyball, and lure coursing are all performed at high speeds. Throw in some turns at speed and it gets intense. Agility and protection sports add obstacle performance requirements, and surface and course variations. These are all incredibly demanding on your dog. 

While the variety of dog sports is exhilarating and the speed is addictive, these are not sports for the weak of mind or body. Fortunately, most dog sports competitors understand that agility and other sports are not exactly a walk in the park and that our canine teammate is taking the brunt of the intensely athletic nature of the sport.

Every competitor must ask themselves if they have done everything they can to physically prepare their four-legged teammate for the challenge. Strength is the number one component of fitness that must be improved (and then maintained) in your dog throughout your dog’s sporting career. Click here to find out how your dog's body...

Continue Reading...

Using Videos in your Dog's Sport and Fitness Training

general fitness Sep 07, 2017

Videos are one of the most helpful, but often underutilized, tools that a canine sports competitor has available to improve performance. Performance in agility, fly ball, dock diving, conformation, herding or whatever your chosen sport, can all improve with the use of frequent video reviews. Videos are tremendously helpful in identifying performance issues, miscommunication problems, and weaknesses. For instance, in agility, reviewing video of how your dog is doing the weave poles in particular, can really help identify spinal or front leg issues that might be brewing in your dog. These video reviews not only help identify potential problems with sport specific skills but also provide feedback in your dog's fitness training progress.

We, at K9 Fitness Solutions, recommend that videos be reviewed often. Even when no issues are apparent, a quick video review may help identify minor issues before they become major problems. A video created and reviewed on a regular basis also...

Continue Reading...

Balance Training Improves Core Strength

balance core strength Aug 09, 2017

Balance is your dog’s ability to maintain its center of gravity without falling while standing and moving.  Balance is the result of many systems working together, including the visual system, the vestibular system, and proprioception (or body awareness.)

The muscles involved in balancing typically are the small muscles whose primary job is to stabilize joints in the limbs and the core. The core, includes the muscles that stabilize and support the spine, pelvis and hips. The core includes many muscles, many of which are hidden deep beneath the surface, including the multifidus, paraspinal muscles, and abdominal muscles.

 

Strong core muscles help to eliminate excessive or unintended movement in the spine and pelvis, transfer force from one part of the body to another, and mobilize the spine in movement, helping to reduce the likelihood of injury.

A strong core is critical to canine movement. It is the central link in the “kinetic chain” that is your...

Continue Reading...

How Your Dog Learns to Balance

balance Jul 13, 2017

Balance training is beneficial for any dog - old, young, performance or retired.  The fun part of balance training is that the dogs enjoy the challenge and you will see improvement quickly. In fact, with consistent training of 3-4 times a week, improvement can be seen in as a little as 2 weeks!

How is it that your dog's balance can improve so quickly?

It is a learned skill with a basis in your dog’s genetic predisposition. What that means is that some dogs innately seem to have good balance and some do not, but if your dog is not a natural, don’t worry. Your dog can learn to balance better- and learn it quickly!

Neuroplasticity refers to the moldable nature of the brain to form new, and reorganize, synaptic connections. This is the driving force behind the generation of functional neural pathways in learning and memory. Of particular interest to canine athletes, neuroplasticity is what allows for learning and maintaining new motor skills, like balancing.

...

Continue Reading...

Road Maps to Canine Fitness

general fitness Jun 16, 2017

Canine fitness is an ever growing area and the volume of information available is increasing quickly. With the rapid growth in the field, there are more and more exercises to choose from.  The trick is sorting through it all to find what applies to us and our sports, as well as knowing what our dog should be doing. What works for one dog may not work for our dog at all.

But how do we wade through the mass of exercises and information? What’s the best workout, the best routine for our dog?

To help navigate through the mountains of information, we have created “Road Maps” through the K9 Fitness Pyramid.

The K9 Fitness Pyramid shows us how the components of fitness build upon each other and provides a general order for working and building fitness in our dogs.  Exercises are broken down by the category, or categories, of the Pyramid that they support. But to get a more specific fitness program that best suits our dog, we need a bit more...

Continue Reading...

Boosting your Dog's Brain through Balance and Exercise

Research clearly shows that exercise boosts the brain

For years now, we have known that exercise protects against memory disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease. (And people who exercise regularly are 50% less likely to develop dementia.) Dogs who regularly exercise would also be at a lower risk for canine cognitive dysfunction syndrome, a doggie version of dementia.

Exercise also makes you and your dog smarter, with better focus and concentration, and helps your dog learn.

But how does that happen?

Exercise creates new brain cells and increases a growth factor called BDNF, brain derived neurotrophic factor.

This growth factor, BDNF, is a protein that leads directly to brain cells connecting to one another as well as strengthening cells and axons.These connections, called synapses, between cells become more dense.  BDNF stimulated connections are an important factor in learning and creating long term memories.

Overall, BDNF makes neurons healthier and is important...

Continue Reading...

Exercise is the Canine Fountain of Youth

retired k9 athletes May 04, 2017

Dr. William Buchan, an 18th century Scottish physician, wrote “of all the causes which conspire to render the life of a man short and miserable, none have the greater influence than the want of proper exercise.”

In people, the aging process typically begins around age 40. Strength begins to decrease and worsens as we age. Aging is the impact of time on the body and happens at different levels - cellular, hormonal, and metabolic.

Almost any type of exercise will slow the aging process, deep within the cells.

Aging, at the cellular level, is based on the number of times a cell has replicated. The more free radical damage there is to a cell, the more often it must replicate. After approximately 50 times of replicating, the genetic material in the cell can no longer be replicated accurately. This is due to shortened telomeres. So cellular aging is determined by the length of the telomeres.

But what’s a telomere?

The telomeres are the caps that sit on the ends of the...

Continue Reading...

How to put a yoga mat on the K9 Klimb

general fitness Feb 17, 2017

The Klimb platform is a great dog training tool that we use frequently in canine fitness. In this quick video, we show you how to add a yoga mat onto the Klimb for added traction during your canine exercise and fitness sessions.

Step 1:
Clean off the Klimb to get all of the dog hair, drool, etc off of it. Let dry.

Step 2:
Trim the yoga mat to the surface of the Klimb using scissors. It's better to cut a little too small, if you're erroring one way or the other.

Step 3:
Glue the yoga mat down using a spray adhesive. Use in a well ventilated area or outside. Start in the middle of the yoga mat and the Klimb. Wait one minute to dry.

Step 4:
Trace around the edges and corners using a pen, push hard, and you can follow along the edge/corners. Trim with a pair of scissors.

Step 5:
Use spray adhesive around the edges of the yoga mat. 

Step 6:
Let dry for 24 hours.

 Note that there is now a mat available as an accessory for the Klimb platform if you choose to purchase one...

Continue Reading...
Close

50% Complete

Free Fitness Journal

Check your email to confirm your email address.  Once you have confirmed your email you will receive a link to download your fitness journal.