Intermission - Let's talk plans! Part 2

Alright! We left off with the addition of those nudges/pertubations to the noodle. If you remember, we had this gnarly graph showing the skill up to this point.

If you think this is overwhelming, imagine what the dog feels.

So what happened after this?

What Happened Was...

At this point, I was starting to get the idea. I was oversimplifying everything up to now. Weirdly enough, just holding something and swinging it isn't a thing a dog normally does, so in reality it's pretty complex. Cool. I'll just suck it up and create an insanely airtight plan.

We would first add more weight...

We would then add precision...

And then add imbalance...

And then I would have also had to account for the other side as well, which would have been its own thing too.

So we did it with the a wood-cored noodle, and then... wait, did I just say "would have been"!?

Lol NEVERMIND SCRAP ALL THAT

Oh. Right. So we skipped all of that.

At some point between picking up a pool noodle and the grand master plan, Missile decided to lock in with his single brain cell and he just kinda... got it.

Not perfectly mind you, but he got it.

So I just said "screw it, we're generalizing the sword hold now."

ノಠ益ಠノ彡┻━┻

From here I really wanted to get both sides, but we sorta ran into some problems.

I really don't understand where this struggle came from

For whatever reason he defaults to dropping the sword when he holds it on the right side. (his left) I never mentioned it much because at this point I just decided to work around it. The left side (his right) is fine though. He has a bias. Sure. WHATEVER.

From here though? It was pretty straightforward! I covered in pretty decent detail how we managed the spin, and at that point we were basically home free. He took to adding movement beautifully, and while it took some practice, managing hits worked out well.

The Takeaway

Really, I just wanted to whine about my training woes. If anything though I'd say this is normal. You try things, sometimes they work, other times they don't. You learn and then try another thing. Nothing wrong with that.

Mind you, it's extremely freakin' tilting, but that's life. You aren't a failure, and your dog isn't an idiot. You're just learning how to communicate and figuring each other out. No big.

Take the L, brush it off, learn from your mistakes, and try again.

Wrap Up

For anyone keeping track, here's the final, complete skill web showing our path from zero to "My dog is now capable of using a sword". It follows pretty cleanly with the blog posts, so in total it took about two months. Not too bad!

Print it out and put it on your wall or something idk

As always, I'm glad you dropped by to read this! If you enjoy this kind of thing, (or you enjoy obnoxious diagrams), check out DogKatas! A really neat thing is it shows you all of the skills available, and in skill-map fashion, it also shows you all of their connections!

And it's growing!

I've found that getting from point a to b is really hard when you don't have it all laid out in front of you, and I very much enjoy leaving behind breadcrumbs for people to learn from my experiences.

It's all free, so go take a look! I promise you won't regret it! (And if you do, it's free, so HA!)

That's it for this week! We'll continue with swordfighting in the next!

Happy Training!