Episode Details

SUMMARY:

Amanda has been traveling the country and teaching seminars for 20+ years, teaching all levels of agility with nearly all dog breeds. She focuses on teaching teamwork and how to create a strong connection between dog and handler.

She works with all styles of handling, from running with your dog to distance handling, and tailors each training session, large or small, to the dog and handler. She's always looking to help bring out the best in each team.

Amanda's handling system, "Cues for Q's," works off her three base cues: Upper Body Cues, Lower Body Cues, and Verbal Cues. This system was derived from the natural cues that most dogs read and pick up quickly. Amanda teaches handlers how to use all of these cues together to create a customized handling system that can be tailored to their unique dog. All of these techniques have resulted in Amanda earning numerous top agility titles on her own dogs.

Next Episode:

To be released 6/15/2018, featuring Denise Fenzi, talking about camp this year!

TRANSCRIPTION:

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods.

Today we'll be talking to Amanda Nelson.

Amanda has been traveling the country and teaching seminars for 20+ years, teaching all levels of agility with nearly all dog breeds. She focuses on teaching teamwork and how to create a strong connection between dog and handler.

She works with all styles of handling, from running with your dog to distance handling, and tailors each training session, large or small, to the dog and handler. She's always looking to help bring out the best in each team.

Amanda's handling system, "Cues for Q's," works off her three base cues: Upper Body Cues, Lower Body Cues, and Verbal Cues. This system was derived from the natural cues that most dogs read and pick up quickly. Amanda teaches handlers how to use all of these cues together to create a customized handling system that can be tailored to their unique dog. All of these techniques have resulted in Amanda earning numerous top agility titles on her own dogs.

Hi Amanda! Welcome back to the podcast.

Amanda Nelson: Hi, it's so great to be back again.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. To start us out, can you just refresh our listeners' memories by telling us a little bit about your dogs and what you're working on with them?

Amanda Nelson: Technically three dogs, although one of them is my boyfriend's. My older dog, Nargles, is 9 years old, and I'm spending most of this year getting her ready to go to the NADAC championships in the Stakes Division, which is a distance class, basically.

My young dog, Ally, is 5 years old, and this will be her first year going to championships, again hopefully in the Stakes Division. So I've been practicing a lot of distance stuff with them, really trying to fine-tune Nargles and build up Ally's confidence and all that good stuff for her pushing out and doing all that good distance stuff.

And then my boyfriend, Jimmy, has Tripp that I've trained with him. He, too, is going in Stakes, hopefully, so it's a whole group of them all going together, so that's a lot of fun.

Melissa Breau: I don't train agility with my dogs — at least not yet. I do know that most competitors who do have a lot of foundation skills they work on with dogs for jumps and tunnels and contacts. How common is it to include foundation skills for distance specifically in that "beginner" work?

Amanda Nelson: I think it's fairly common, especially if that's something that you're wanting to do in the future, it's a goal or something that you're looking towards. I think it's fairly easy to go ahead and incorporate those distance skills in w