It has been my experience that most trainers do a lot of things in similar ways but no two trainers do everything completely the same. I don't even do everything I do the same every time, I tailor training to the dog whenever I can. You may use different techniques and they work fine and I'd enjoy hearing about it.
Take a look at the pictures below. The top two are the same dog performing a swimmer's turn off a two hole box after being retrained using a shoot. What happens now is that Hale comes down the course full tilt and makes a slight alteration in her line of travel after the last jump, just a foot or fourteen inches to the right. That allows her to approach the box at a small angle, and instead of 'hitting' the box, she actually jumps onto the box pedal, catching the ball as her front feet land and then pushing off with her rear. Instead of dissipating her forward momentum she converts it to motion in a different direction. The bottom two pictures are of Pepper doing the turn. Note that both dogs are getting all four paws up on the box pedal.
If the health issues aren't enough to persuade you to retrain for a swimmer's turn let me tell you what happened to our team after we did. We gained an average of 0.25 seconds per dog, and our average speed is now more than a second faster than it was before retraining the turn, and we are bettering our times every time we go out.
Now for the fun part. Here's how we did it. First we needed a shoot, so I made one, and a pair of two hole boxes. (for info on this check the hyper links to those pages from the index page)
There are four ball stations on the shoot, shown right. Keela is just coming off with a ball from the top right station. Its black velcro, but you can see it just above her rear towards the side.
The box turn I wanted to shape in the dogs is as illustrated above, jump on, jump off with little wasted momentum. To do this, I first had to place the ball high enough on the Shoot that the dog had to climb the shoot to get it otherwise they might just reach up and take it while stopped facing the shoot. Still, the dog might just run up the shoot, so I placed a jump in front. No problem, they know how to handle jumps, so over they went, landing on the box. It was natural for them to turn their head towards the ball, and where the head goes, the body follows so began the first stage of shaping the turn. Also, since this was new I made it easy for the dogs to stay on the shoot by setting it at a 15 degree angle the first week and for the first couple of jumps the second week, when I changed the angle to 30 degrees. The dogs performed the jump take turn jump at 30 degrees that week and part of the third week, when I moved the angle to 45 degrees. None of the dogs had any problems moving from angle to angle.
On the fifth week we did a couple of runs with the jump in place and then removed it and placed the cardboard corner supports in place to remind the dogs to still jump. They did. Week five and week six was like that, upper ball stations and the white cardboard reminders. (thanks Brenda) Each week the dogs were doing about 20 reps, almost 100 a month.
On week seven we started with the balls in the upper ball stations and then changed to the lower ball stations. The behavior held. The lower ball stations are in the approximate position they are on the two hole boxes, so we are setting them up for the box now, working reps to build muscle memory. Week eight and nine we worked the shoot in that configuration as well.
