Episode Details
Back to EpisodesInterview with Amanda Nelson - "Distance in Agility and Teaching Confidence"
Description
SHOW NOTES:
Summary:
Amanda Nelson 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 with her own dogs.
Links mentioned:
Next Episode:
To be released 6/30/2017, featuring Sara Brueske.
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 plus years teaching all levels of agility with nearly all dog breeds. She focuses on teaching teamwork and how to create a strong connection between the dog and the 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 the 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 these techniques have resulted in Amanda earning numerous top agility titles with her own dogs. Hi, Amanda, welcome to the podcast.
Amanda Nelson: Thank you for having me. This is great.
Melissa Breau: I'm excited to chat. I'm not an agility person, so it'll be fun to learn a little bit more about the sport and hopefully learn some things that I didn't know before.
Amanda Nelson: Yeah.
Melissa Breau: So to start us out, do you want to just give us a little bit information about your dogs and what you're working on with them?
Amanda Nelson: Yeah. So, in the house I actually have three dogs, but one of them belongs to my boyfriend, who's Trip. I obviously work with him in a lot of stuff, but Jimmy runs him and competes with him and all that, so he's in my house but he's technically not my dog.
I have Nargles who is 8 years old, and everybody always asks me what her name is and it's from Harry Potter because I'm a huge nerd like that, so Nargles is 8, and this season I'm working towards doing conditioning with her and getting her prepped to go to the NADAC Championships in Ohio in October, so that's my focus with her this year. Then I'm also working towards earning her Platinum Speed title, which is a NADAC title that consists of...it's a certain number of runs that all have to be extremely fast. In NADAC there's DRI which is the dog's run index, and you earn so many DRI points kind of for how fast your dog goes and a Platinum Speed Star, an award, that focuses on how fast your dog is. So I'm working on running that with her this year as well as taking her to t