Articles Tagged: fitness

Dogs participating in agility need a variety of strengthening exercises not only to keep them at their peak performance, but also to protect them against potential injuries. It is essential to offer your agility dog cross-training activities on at least a weekly basis, and a daily basis if possible. If we examine human athletes, they participate in a variety of activities in addition to their normal sport. For example, an athlete involved in track and field not only trains for her individual event, she participates in strengthening and conditioning activities including weight lifting, plyometrics, swimming, sprinting, and long-distance running.

As owners of athletic dogs, we are always looking for methods to improve their strength, power, and endurance. This is even truer in dogs that have suffered an injury or undergone surgery to correct a problem and are working toward a return to agility. As an adjunct to agility training, strengthening exercises should be done with a healthy dog on a regular basis, and absolutely must be done before an injured dog returns to agility. In this article we’ll discuss exercises for increasing hind-end awareness as well as exercises for increasing strength of the gluteal and hamstring regions.