But, isn’t a walk enough?
Weeelll, it’s a start. While a regular walk is a great part of many dog’s lives, walks alone are not sufficient to meet your furry family member’s needs
Your dog is a natural-born athlete, and just like human athletes, incorporating strength and conditioning into their life can enhance your dog’s overall health and well-being, as well as confer protective benefits against strains and injuries.
Like us, canines require regular exercise to keep their muscles and bones strong, to improve cardiovascular health and help maintain a healthy weight. A lack of regular exercise not only can lead to multiple health problems including obesity, joint pain, and cardiovascular disease, but also behavioural issues through unreleased energy and boredom. Regular exercise helps to lessen stress and anxiety which can lead to a happier and better-adjusted dog (and calmer home).
But here’s where we go beyond the regular walk. Physical strength and conditioning is not solely “exercise”, but rather a complete system to optimise your canine athlete’s performance, whatever form that might take.
What are the benefits of incorporating a strength and conditioning program?
- Improved overall fitness, balance, flexibility, and strength, which confer protective benefits for your dog and improve their quality of life
- Helps to lessen age-related muscle-loss (sarcopenia)
- Weight control (we can work with your veterinarian to develop a safe conditioning program to support weight loss, too)
- Improved body awareness and proprioception, which translates directly into safer navigation of terrain for your dog and improved performance in sports
- Increased cardiovascular endurance, letting you explore further together
- Increased muscle strength and balance, helping to guard against muscular imbalances.
- Improved gait symmetry and quality
- Improved sport performance
- Increased confidence and optimism, as your dog repeatedly “succeeds” in learning to navigate fitness equipment
- Adds mental enrichment with all of those tremendous benefits
- Helps to build the bond between you and your dog, as you work together to be successful. Puppies, Rescues, and new teams will find the inclusion of conditioning exercises especially powerful tool to relationship building
And finally, but most importantly – It’s FUN!! Dogs and handlers both LOVE it. My dogs will race to stand on any fitness equipment that I may bring down because they know that good things happen around it.
What We Do
Taking care to consider your dog’s age, weight, and body structure, as well as any physical limitations that may be present – both in the handler and the dog – we create Balanced Conditioning Programs comprising Strength, Flexibility, Balance, Cardiovascular, and Mental Challenges to meet the needs of your unique canine.
Conditioning exercises should be purposeful to prepare your dog for real-world situations, whether that is navigating uneven terrain on your local hikes, paddle boarding with you, climbing the stairs, or competing at the highest levels.
For those of you enjoying sports with your dogs, sport-specific considerations are built in to your program to optimise performance and help to mitigate muscular imbalances that can develop with focused training.
Our Values
Canine fitness is NOT a substitute for rehabilitation or veterinary services
Canine fitness professionals DO NOT diagnose or treat injury.
Our focus is ALWAYS on minimizing injury risk and maximizing the years that you and your dog can adventure together.
By training at home or class in controlled environments, we focus on correct form and staged increases in load, thereby preparing your dog for all of your adventures.
Our One-to-One programs are individually designed, which means that we create a program which will work for YOU and Your Canine, regardless of handler ability or mobility.
Group classes also include exercise modifications as necessary to best suit each participating team.
Conditioning exercises can be adapted to use in indoor and smaller spaces, too, meaning that they can continue even during nasty winter weather, or summer heat domes.
Remember…
It is important to seek out a canine fitness professional who is trained to understand proper canine exercise form, technique, and program design for optimal fitness and injury risk mitigation.
