E441: 활동적인 반려견을 위한 피트니스 및 부상 예방

So it turns out that, you know, in most sports, almost 90% of injuries are soft tissue injuries. And those are the hardest ones to identify. They're subtle. They go on for a long time. They sneak around. And, you know, if you just know a few things about how to use your cell phone, you can have so much power to identify things early. And that's what I'm going to talk about, using your cell phone to check your dog out in every which way. It's not going to take a long time. But what to look for, how to use the cell phone, how to view the videos that you get from it. We all have this amazing electronic box in our pockets, and we can do so much with them. Awesome. All right. So let's jump in. So what factors are we looking at or what factors influence whether a sports dog becomes injured? I'll answer that one from my point of view. It's definitely true that the bigger they are, the harder they fall. So we know that there's just so much more pressure. There's an exponential increase in the amount of pressure on a dog's body as they become larger in mass. It's not a linear relationship. It's actually exponential. And so that's one factor. But the interesting thing is the smaller the dog, the harder it is to identify injuries. So that's kind of the mixture that we get. So when the little dogs are injured, boy, they can hide it so well. But I think size, mass in general is a big factor. But there are so many other things. Fitness is a big factor. Nutrition is a big factor. Training and, you know, the amount of total work that a dog experiences is another factor. And there's so many things. And structure is another factor. There's so many things that play into that. So, Ashley? I totally agree. And there's lots of variables. It's really hard to just put it all in one box. But one thing that I do see on the rehab side of things a lot of times is a dog that is, they have an understanding of how to use their body, how to move their body, how to have good proprioception in the task and in the sport that we have chosen for them. If they get injured, their recovery is much smoother because they already have these skills of, oh, okay, this is how I weight shift. This is how I move my body. And if you, on the flip side of that, if you have a dog that's injured that has never done any kind of fitness or proprioception is like, well, they came with what they came with kind of a thing. Those dogs really struggle to rehab successfully and smoothly because you have to teach the dog how to move their body. And I think that is something that's overlooked so often, especially with sports. We want to do the thing.

But we don't think about the kindergarten and the elementary school, the foundation type stuff that these dogs need and how to move their body. We just take for granted that they get out there and do the thing because we've asked them to do it. And not only that, but it's not as much fun, you know, so people don't even want to do it, you know, if they knew about it. A hundred percent. It's not, it's not the fun stuff. It's the, what I tell people, it's the, the necessary means to be able to do it. And just because you can, doesn't mean you should. So you have to put in the work on the beginning. Yeah. Which, which really leads to where I wanted to kind of go next, which obviously like sometimes you just have a freak accident, right? Sometimes something is just outside our control. So it happens. But there are things, you know, you're starting to talk about the pieces we can do to help prevent injury. Things that we can impact. So how do we decide which pieces to focus on for a particular dog? Since even if, you know, let's do all the things to possibly prevent injury might be ideal. It's probably not, to use Chris's word, fun or practical necessarily. Or realistic. Yeah. So how do we decide, how do we look at the dog and the sport and figure out which things are the important things, I guess? I, I'll go first. I look at the sport that they want to do. And then I automatically look at the dog structure. I come from the confirmation world. So I have no issue telling someone this sport that you want to do with your dog is not the most ideal sport for your dog long term. Here's why. If you want to continue on, these are the things that really need to be strengthened on your dog, right? For example, the longer back dogs in agility, the excessively longer backed corgis in agility with the short legs and the really long backs, right? We're asking them to do a lot of things in transverse plane of motion and the quick turns and the contacts and just the general shock absorbers that are being impacted. So those dogs naturally are going to need more core work and more rear end strengthening versus a border collie that's a very light bone, right? We're going to work on different things with that dog. So I think really taking an honest look at the dog that you have in front of you and the sport that you have chosen because the dog did not come to you with a note and say, this is the sport I want to do, right? We have picked this sport for this dog. So I think we owe it to them to figure out where they are weak because all dogs have a weakness physically somewhere just like people do.

So just isolating those regions and knowing where your dog's weaknesses are so that you can spend what little time you're willing to give to fitness and conditioning. You can spend on highlighting those areas that really need some extra work. And I think that that really goes a long way and long term. It really helps. Yeah, I really agree about the confirmation you think. I think that so few people look at that and it's so important because the dog is the most varied species on earth by far. And I just think it's so important, that initial assessment and understanding. And then once you have that and you know your dog's strengths and weaknesses, to know what to watch for as you're training, the little hints to watch for. And to make ongoing decisions all the time about how you're going to modify your training for this dog that you know has these strengths and weaknesses. And to be able to work with people, you know, your trainers, for example, that understand that they may have a group of dogs in their class that include a Great Dane and a Corgi and a Golden and a Border Collie, but that not every one of those should be doing their prescribed, let's say, sequence the same way. And that not all of the criteria should be the same for every dog. I think that's really important, too. That made me have a thought that I had to write down. I'll mention it to you guys later. Just thinking that it'd be really interesting to do something for the students on how to evaluate their dog's strengths and weaknesses. Like looking at that piece of it from a confirmation standpoint and from a fitness standpoint, right? I'm actually going to be covering that in my talk. Awesome. Even better. Nice. It's good stuff. That was a good segue there, Melissa. It was. I'll take it. Are there things, speaking of your talk, because I know it's super relevant to this question, but are there things that while our dog is fit, while our dog is not injured, that we should be doing that will make life easier should they become injured? Like what pieces should we be thinking about now? So I'd like to address that one first. So I have a policy where I take a standing photograph of my dog from the front, from the side and from the rear every six months. And I just store them all in the same place. Because, and when I say standing, I don't mean that you're going to stand the dog up and stack and put their feet down into specific places like you would in confirmation if you show that way. But rather to have your dog move into a standing position and stay there. What they feel comfortable, how they feel comfortable standing.

And it is amazing how you see, over time, subtle changes, subtle differences in the way they hold their top line. And subtle things like always standing with one foot ahead of the other. And you start to see these things. And I think that that's been huge for me and for a lot of my clients in being able to catch on that something's going on early on. So I really like to do that as one thing. I love that. So when I have clients come to me in person in the studio, we work on exercises and groups of exercises for six weeks at a time. So we also do the moving into the dog's free balance stand as what I refer to it as where the dog just walks. And then we ask them to stop. And we take pictures. And we take video of them moving into that stand so that we can see how they're weight shifting. Because even at a walk, you'd be surprised if the dog is off a little bit or has a little bit of they're not perfectly symmetrical, which no one or anything is. But if they have a little more, I see it. I'll tell you where I see it the most is my competition obedience teams. Because they do so much left-sided healing. The dogs really become notably unsymmetrical with their balance and their weight loading because they're so used to that head-up precision healing. So that is one big one there. As far as foundational pieces, I have everyone and I encourage everyone to teach your dog in a calm, methodical manner to target their front feet to objects while their rear feet are not. And teach them rear foot proprioception to the point that they can target items and objects with their rear feet in a safe manner with control to their movement. And then, of course, just working on physical impulse control where the dog can physically, in a slow, methodical manner, move their body into different positions. Because the class that I'm actually teaching now is all about that. Being able to mentally just have the headspace in the dog where they can slowly step onto a platform. And not just fling their body onto the platform or not just use momentum to get through life. So being able to pay attention to your dog and make sure that every little exercise that you're doing, lots of people use the pivot disc and have their dog pivot around into heel position. But are the dogs truly stepping with adduct-abduct steps? Or are they using momentum to swing their rear end around? Like those are two very different things happening and really easy things that you can do at home little by little without a lot of outside help. I like that. And I like thinking about kind of – especially for a pivot bowl exercise, right?

That's something that if you're doing obedience, you're probably doing the exercise anyway. So why not take the couple extra minutes to make sure your dog's doing it really well with good form? So to dive a little more into the fitness side of things, if you were to make kind of a suggestion for one thing or maybe two things – I know one thing is a little restrictive – that dog sports handlers should do on the fitness front to help with injury prevention. Like one thing you just wish everybody would just get on board and realize they just need to do. What would it be? I know what it is. I bet Ashley has two core strength. Core is so important and so forgotten. I know. No one thinks about it. It's the magical midsection, I call it, in my classes because it's just – it's always all about I need my dog's front end to be better for weave pulls because I work with a lot of agility teams. Or I need their rear to be better for takeoffs and tight turns. And I'm like, what about the core? No, I would say of the last 100 patients I've looked at, over 50% of them have had back problems that are not recognized. And this is at its essence a core issue. Also, I work with military dogs and some of the federal dogs like FBI and Secret Service, et cetera. They're all missing core two. And what's the number one thing that takes them out? It's back problems. And we – that is so subtle and so irritating and painful for dogs and they just don't let us know. It's all – it all starts in the core. And there's some – you know, there's some really simple exercises that can be done while you watch TV, for heaven's sakes. It doesn't take a commitment for you to say, okay, now I'm going to do some training with my dog. Do it while you're watching TV because there are so many of them. And very little equipment. I always get that. I don't want to spend $2,000 on equipment. I hardly use – You have it in your home. Any of my – like I use some of the equipment, but I use so much of just practical stuff that I already have available to me. And I travel so much. I'm not traveling with all my inflatable equipment. But, you know, so if there was one thing that I could get people to do because I just see this happen where dogs get injured at events. And that is a consistent, real, effective, like intentional warm-up for their dog. Like taking your dog to potty is not a warm-up if you're going to go run agility or if you're going to go dock dive your dog or if you're going to do Frisbee or anything where the dog is going to be exerting. Muscular strength at high speed.

Walking them to go potty, it's just – it is not – that's not it. That's not enough. And nor is jumping one time after another after another after another over the jump. In the – you know, that's not a warm-up either. Yeah. So, yeah. So I'd love to have you guys – just because you mentioned that there are some simple core stuff and then the kind of warm-up piece. Do you guys mind just going into those two pieces just a smidge more? So, like, what are we talking about when we say a simple core exercise? There's something really simple. What should they be doing while they're sitting on the couch? And then, you know, from a warm-up perspective, if the practice jump and a potty walk isn't enough, what are we talking about? So, I'll go first. The core exercises that I have everyone do when they first come, before they get to do all the fun, sexy stuff that they really want to do, we have to be able to have our dog in a stand where they're comfortable. Not a compensatory stand, right, where their front is way out in front of them or their rear is way underneath them and the back is arched. But the dog is standing balanced symmetrically for them, not a hard stack where you have physically moved their legs. And I like to start with just basic weight shifting. Head goes up as close to 12 o'clock as possible. Head comes back down. You just do simple weight shifting. And then I also like to take that to a sit, a balanced sit. Not my knees are pointed east and west and my toes are who knows where and the front feet are all askew. But a true balanced sit for the dog. And if you need a position box to help your dog get into a balanced sit, that's cool. I like stable equipment for this. And then just simple weight shifting. The dog pushes forward. The dog goes back to neutral. All of those engage the core at a very fundamental level, right? You're not going to exert a lot of time and energy and effort doing just some little things like that. So, I'm going to, I love that. And I completely agree with that. And I'm just going to expand it into a little bit more. It's into one of my favorite. There are so many core exercises that can just be done stationary like that. But I'm going to expand that a little bit. And that is doing the plank where you have the dog's front is on one board. And you're going to elevate them a little bit so the dog doesn't move around. So, I actually like to have my dog's front on a narrow board like a two by four that's covered with something non-slip. And then the rear on another plank. And I'm going to put my hand on the dog's chest. And I'm going to use food to lean the dog forward.

And while pushing him back or stabilizing him with my hand on the chest. And then I'm going to separate those two boards apart a little bit at a time so that the dog has to really grip themselves on each of those boards and keep themselves stable. It's just the next step in the stabilization exercise that Ashley was talking about. And that can make a huge difference because it works all of those muscles that are the ventral, the lateral, and the back muscles as well. Ventral abdominals, lateral abdominals, as well as the paraspinal, those muscles. A big bundle of muscles on the sides of the spine. So, I think that's even just the next step that you can go with. And this is not hard to do. And, you know. The cost of a two by four. Yeah. I mean, you know, and there are other little, there are little, there are boards like these. You know, you can buy little elevated boards that have a nice foam cushion on them. I can't remember what they're called. But there's lots of things you can purchase like that, too, that are nice and stable. They'll be on the carpet in your living room while you're watching TV. They won't move, you know. Or you can have them on a little piece of foam, you know, that whatever, like yoga matting or whatever. Did you want to talk a little bit about warm-ups for just a sec? Oh, yeah. Okay. So, I'm a stickler for warm-ups. And I like to find, I primarily do agility with my dogs at this point. So, their warm-ups consist of things that we can do in a controlled manner that mimic and engage the muscles that they're going to use on course. So, they're in the ring for less than 30 seconds. So, it's not like the warm-up has to be 10 minutes long, right? But I want to make sure that the shoulders stabilize our muscles and their hip flexors and their entire spine, their neck. Everything is nice and warmed up and loose. So, different stretches in motion, right? They can weave in and out of my legs. Just different little, you can almost turn it into tricks is what I have most people do. So, they can do, and I like to do it in a patterned routine so that I can also keep my dog mentally in a state of thinking because most of my dogs would lose their mind if they were not constantly having to check in with impulse control heading up to the line. But I literally start my warm-up after the dog potties, and we will warm up all the way up to our turn in line in the ring with different stretches, different lateral side pass stepping. There's usually steps or higher elevation places where trials are held. And so, we can do some rear foot targeting. We can do some bow stretching.

We can do some weaving in and out of our legs, some orbiting around us. But very thoughtful exercises. And I don't tend to change my warm-up for my agility dogs once they get their set routine because, again, I do like to keep it very predictable for them so that they're very aware of what's coming next. And it just allows them to maintain a level of mental clarity and composure and block out a lot of the noise that's happening. And I have found over the years that by doing that, the dogs have way more clarity and focus when we go into the ring and actually get on the start line versus if I were to just take my dog and take her for a potty break and then just do, like, random things, right? That she's like, well, this is not what we normally do, right? Then I can lose her very easily to arousal that way. And see, what Ashley is describing is dynamic stretches. There's two kinds of stretches. There's static stretches where you take a dog's leg and you move it into position. And there's dynamic stretches where the dog does it on their own. And that's what we want to be doing, not static stretches. What Ashley is describing is dynamic movements that are under the dog's muscular and neurological control. Now, there's been at least two meta-studies that I know of, which are big studies that look at all the other randomized controlled trials. And they looked at static and dynamic stretching in humans, human athletes. So static would be, and what they describe as a static stretch is a movement of the leg that moves the leg or, well, the arm, but in the case of dogs, the leg or the body part into a position where they feel a stretch or a certain amount of pain or discomfort. Well, we can't know what that is for dogs. We should not be doing that. That's, and actually the studies have shown that they're absolutely useless. And what they do is they actually reduce performance by almost 4% and they increase the risk of injury. So we're not going to be taking the dog's leg and drawing it forward and stretching it like that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. We are going to ask the dog to do movements that are like, that recapitulate what they're going to do in their activity that they're about to do. And that's what we, what kind of stretches we should be doing. And I see so many people grabbing their dog's legs and pulling them in this direction and that direction. And I'm just like, I'm horrified when I see it. And I want to go in and say, don't, well, anyway, you can't, but, but let's, let's do dynamic only. I know. You really want to jump in and say, no, no, no. Stop pulling that.

Trust me, I'm repressional. Yeah, right. So obviously, like no matter how much preventative stuff we do, sometimes dogs get injured anyway and they end up on restricted activity or they come up a little funky and we're not entirely sure why. And so we take some time off or, so do either of you have good tips and tricks for managing our sports dogs when they're on restricted activity? Do you ask for extra meds if the ones you're given don't seem to have an impact? Is there more to it? What can we do to kind of help our sports dogs stay sane? Oh, I think it's all about mental stimulation. You know, I mean, mental stimulation can be just as, as exhausting to a dog as physical stimulation. And you can see that, for example, when dogs spend an entire day doing scent work, for example, which may not involve a lot of actual physical rapid, you know, changes in motion, et cetera. But they come home and they're exhausted at the end of the day. And I think scent work is actually a fantastic thing to do for dogs that are, that are restricted physically because you can really exhaust them mentally that way. And that would be one thing that I would turn to for sure. Yeah, I, I, I do a lot of things. Yeah. Any kind of mental and fitness because you can do so much fitness in a non, depending on the injury, right? If the dog can still partake in some weight shifting and some basic fitness stuff, right? Then that is a huge outlet for dogs. And I will tell you, I had one of my border collies in her prime, um, puncture her eye and almost lose her eye. She was off any kind of anything off leash for 12 and a half months. And she was a two year old, you know, um, Welsh bred herding dog. So I, everyone's like, how much drugs does she get? I'm like, she doesn't get any drugs. Like we do some sniffy games, we do some mental stimulation and we, it was her eye that was injured. Right. So, I mean, she had bulging muscles. We did lots and lots of fitness stuff with her and she was fine being on leash. I mean, would she have rather run the fields and herded sheep? Sure. But there's lots of different options. And I think it's important for people to not view it as a pure set of limitations and setbacks. And it's just part of the process and part of the journey and just find something else to do with your dog that's productive. So I'm sure that injuries do vary a lot, like by breed and by sport and all those pieces. And I, but I know that like Chris mentioned earlier that a lot of them are back or core related things. So what are some of the more common injuries in particular that, that we see in sports dogs?

And what, what causes do we have for those? Well, in agility dogs, in agility dogs, there's two main areas. It's lumbosacral disease and shoulder injuries. Those are the really big things we see. There have been, there have been studies showing that, as I said, as I mentioned earlier, like almost 90% of injuries are, are in, in various studies are soft tissue. And shoulder and back came up, lower back, lumbosacral area came up as in the studies, the most common ones. And affecting something like one third of all agility dogs will have an injury in their lifetime. And that's a pretty big number. And, you know, and about equal amounts of back and shoulder problems come up as number one. And, you know, everybody thinks about the ACL or CCL. Everybody thinks about cranial cruciate ligament injuries. And it's partly because we do see them, but, you know, we don't actually see them. That's like number three and four in performance dogs. We see them in a lot of pet dogs. But they're expensive. They're hard. They're, you know, they take a long time to rehab, et cetera. So everybody focuses on those. But really, those shoulders, you know, they're, they're not attached to the dog's body by a joint, only by soft tissues, muscles, tendons, ligaments. And those get, those get really, really strained under repetitive motion and repetitive weight bearing, especially things like landing from jumps. And one of the things I encourage people, you do not have to train at full height all the time. This is just not something that any athlete, human athlete would do. And, you know, we use a lot of our principles from humans. I mean, muscles and tendons and ligaments look exactly the same in both species and almost work almost the same. And so we can take from that, that, that there are ways in which we should be always cognizant of how much total work is our dog getting. And total work being how frequently they're trained, how intensely they're trained, and how long they're trained for each time. And that presents, those three things together make up total work. And what you want to do when you're training your dog is you want to always think about what's the total work that I'm giving. And I'm not going to gradually just increase that in a straight line. I'm going to increase it a little bit, back off a little bit. Increase it a little bit, back off a little bit. And I'm always going to back off before a big competition, like a national or regional competition or whatever.

And it's hard to do because, you know, maybe there's little weaknesses in your skills and you want to keep practicing them again and again and again. But, you know, your dog isn't like a little machine. And, in fact, machines wear out too. So we have to have a plan rather than it being a random. So I think I'll do this today. That's not a good way. Yeah. Anything you'd add, Ashley? I wish and hope that moving forward, more people would put in the foundational effort and time spent on teaching dogs how to jump. Just specifically referring to jumping. Because so many people, I feel like, just assume because they put a hurdle in front of their dog and they go over the hurdle, not through it or under it, that the dog knows how to jump. But there's so many parts of the body that have to work effectively to be able to do and execute jumps repetitively. And that's 80% of what's on an agility course, for example. And so I just hope and always encourage people to teach dogs how to move their bodies with no speed and then slowly start adding in speed to a jump on a turn. How to land safely. Like, I see such an improvement with the dogs that know how to move their bodies in an effective manner versus dogs who just frantically go out there and take the things because it's in front of them. So instead of going through it, well, they just jump over it. But their takeoff, their landing, everything that comes before and after the actually getting over can either look very well put together and intentional or it can look like, wow, that, I mean, the dog is frantic and going fast. Right. So just teaching them little things on the fundamental level. Again, it's not the fun stuff. Right. It's the stuff that, you know, it's not the sexy, fun stuff and the exciting stuff that's social media worthy. But it really does make a difference in helping our dogs learn how to move their bodies in space. That's so true. You know, the gradually getting better at it. You know, there was a probably there's a there's a. A group that of thought that if you don't start the dog doing it really fast, as soon as possible, the dog will never achieve their final speed. And I think that's so wrong. You know, you didn't learn to read by doing paragraphs first. You know, phonetics and what the words mean and stuff like that. And that's how to get the best. No, no athlete, whatever, you know, whatever, no human athlete, whatever, start the fastest they can possibly go. That's just not how how we train the body's physique to do things and how we how it gets gradually better.

Gradual is the key. And I really I really want to emphasize that, you know, we get hung up because it's so exciting to see. And we see this thing and we get a reward ourselves. We get a dopamine release from watching this amazing creature do these amazing movements. But we have to stop and think about it. I really want to emphasize what Ashley said on that. All right. Well, any final thoughts or key points that you guys want to kind of leave listeners here with as we wrap up? No, I just want to say to everybody, thank you for joining this really important subject matter. And for and this this this entire day conference on this, I think these may be the most important topics you can ever think of for your athletic dog. I really do. And I I appreciate them all going together into one place. And and and thank you guys for considering signing up and go for it. Yeah, absolutely. Yep. Awesome. Anything else you want to add, Ashley? Are we good? No, I'm good. I'm excited for this. Awesome. Well, thank you guys both so much for coming on the podcast. It was awesome to get to chat with you guys. Great talking to you. Thank you for having us. And thanks to our listeners for tuning in. And again, the conference is January 10th and it is the Active Dogs Fitness Planning and Injury Management Conference. And hopefully we'll see some of you guys there. Thanks for tuning in. We'll be back next week. Don't miss it. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzie Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzie for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty free by bensound.com. The track featured here is called Buddy. Audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training.