And the winner is…

Reading through all entries in the contest was a real joy! Here are a few of your thoughts:

Biggest challenge is to keep it fun bor both of us so as to be able to go through real distractions

It has been a great experience to get training tipps every day and it was lots of fun not feeling alone while training. My dog is only seven months old, so we can’t do more than three small sessions a day, we paused one day and every other day we did heelwork during our walk. We really enjoyed your challenge!

I thought it was a great motivator. Some days I would be busy but staying motivated I would do 2-3 sessions a day for 3-5 minutes per session. I think more than anything it made me get better at rewarding. Thank you!

I loved the challenge. So happy that you had the idea to post every day a new heelwork training part. For me and my little Cocker it is realy necessary to train the dull heelwork. He now knows his position (but only at home ;-)) it´s realy difficult for him to hold the position when we are out and at the moment there is no chance for him to heel with me when there are other dogs and helpers. It was great to train with you and we learned a lot. thx

I found it really helpful and a good reminder to get tips and targets each day. I still have work to do, but I can now get my dog to walk nicely to heel and even do it without the lead.

The challenge was great! It opened my eyes on so many things regarding heelwork training. Especially the training blog post about the “bouncing ball” issue was mind blowing to me. I finally know what caused the problem and since then we are working on it.

Kept me motivated to work on heelwork every day. Will now step up to introducing more challenging situations/distractions.

Really Nice to have a challenge! It’s hard as a newbie to learn everything by yourself. Very good to have a reminder and be told that nothing gets better without training! Thank you so Much!

Really liked the variety of things to work on as it helped break down the different components of heeling.

I’m so happy to hear that you enjoyed the challenge – and in total your heelwork has improved quite a bit! The average was 3.64 out of 5.

So, I’m not keeping you in the dark anymore – the person who’s done the most heelwork training during the challenge has done 805 minutes of training – that is roughly 60 minutes per day during the two weeks the challenge lasted. And the winner is: Phil! Congratulations! Not just has your heelwork improved, you’ll also get a private online session to discuss your training even further!

Thank you everyone for participating in the challenge! We’ve got a few ideas for upcoming challenges – a challenge on recall, steadiness, disctraction, casting or something else will be coming up!

And if you missed the challenge you can still find the training blog posts here: https://www.retrievingforalloccasions.com/heel-work/