Built to Last: Smart Training for Long-Term Success
Turning Data into Decisions That Stick
There’s a kind of rush that comes with the start of a new season. The promise of a blank calendar. The excitement of fresh goals. The scribbled plans that evolve with each muddy pawprint, missed cue, and unexpected turn.
Over the years, I’ve learned that how we prepare matters just as much as what we train. It’s easy to stay busy in agility. It’s harder to stay purposeful.
This post is about how I bring purpose to my training. Not through perfect drills or magic formulas, but through a framework grounded in sport science, shaped by experience, and flexible enough to adapt to different dogs, goals, and stages of development. Whether you’re starting with foundations or peaking for world-level events, this is the system I use to map, track, and adjust the work so skills stick from week to week, year to year, and across an entire career.
The Four Pillars That Guide My Planning
If you’ve been following along in the series, you’ve seen these four domains before; they’re the core elements I use to focus my training plans:
- Physical: Strength, speed, conditioning, recovery.
- Mental: Focus, confidence, stress regulation.
- Technical: Obstacle skills, movement patterns.
- Tactical: Decision-making, course strategy, timing under pressure.
Together, these elements give structure to the six principles of sticky practice. They help me identify where to focus at different points in training so that each phase of our work supports meaningful progress.
What’s Not in This Post (On Purpose)
You may have noticed that I haven’t listed every skill I train under each domain. That’s intentional.
There are many incredible instructors and coaches out there breaking down the details: from conditioning plans and mental prep strategies, to handling moves and obstacle skills. This series isn’t about replicating that. It’s about building a system that supports those drills. One that aligns effort with purpose, and helps you decide what to train, when, and why. One that’s built to last longer than a single season, and flexible enough to grow with your team.
Because in the end, the skills that stick aren’t just the ones we train. They’re the ones we planned for, practiced with intention, and shaped through ongoing feedback.
Building in Blocks: Because One Season Doesn’t Fit All
There was a time when agility seasons followed a fairly predictable rhythm. You’d build up in the spring, hit your stride for summer events, and ease off into fall. These days, that rhythm has shifted.
With qualifiers, national championships, invitationals, tryouts, and international events spread across the calendar… often across multiple organizations… many teams now need to plan for several performance peaks a year, each with its own set of goals, surfaces, and travel demands.
To meet that challenge, I build plans using a block periodization model. Each block centres on a key event or goal, and includes a purposeful build-up, a competition window, and a period of recovery. It’s not about pushing through. It’s about managing workload, making smart decisions about what to train when, and protecting time for recovery, so both dog and handler can reset and come back ready before the next push.
Some seasons only need one block. Others need more. It depends on your goals, your dog, and your calendar.
Here’s a quick way to think about it:
You might use a single block if…
- You're focused on only one major event this year
- Your dog is still developing or returning from a break
- You’re focused on steady progress and enjoyment
You might need multiple blocks if…
- You have multiple “big” competitions across the year
- You need to cycle through building, peaking, and recovery phases
- You’re managing a seasoned dog and want to support peak performance and longevity in the sport
Each block still follows the three-phase arc:
- A pre-competition phase, where we build fitness, reinforce technical foundations, and layer in new skills.
- A competition phase, where we shift towards mental prep, tactical execution, and maintaining sharpness. Tapering happens here too; a purposeful reduction in training volume right before high-stakes events to allow for peak performance without fatigue.
- And a recovery phase, where we breathe, step back, and reflect. Letting both body and brain rest before the next build begins.
Tracking What Matters: From Notes to Patterns
For more than a decade, I’ve tracked my training using a custom-built Google Form. It’s not flashy, but it’s flexible: easy to fill out on my phone, and automatically feeding into a spreadsheet for charting and review. It’s helped me log and reflect on:
- Surfaces and session types
- The balance of physical, mental, technical, and tactical work
- The structure and focus of each session
- Notes on energy, execution, and mindset
It’s a system that’s helped me train through multiple dogs, build toward major events, and avoid the ruts we fall into when we train on autopilot. It’s given me a way to capture patterns, catch blind spots, and train with intention instead of instinct. It’s helped me stay honest, not just about how often we train, but how well we’re training.
But the times, they are a changing…
As a member of the Canine Sport Science Consortium, I’ve had the opportunity to work with researchers and practitioners exploring new frontiers in canine athlete monitoring. Members of this group are actively working on wearable technology and algorithms to track elements like load, fatigue, and recovery in real time. It’s leading us to ask new questions like: How much load is too much over multi-day events? What does meaningful recovery look like? And how can we access these insights more easily?
What makes this work so exciting is how it’s bringing together human sport science, quadruped performance models, and the unique demands of agility, in ways that could transform how we train.
For now, simple systems, like the one I use, remain powerful tools. They help to connect effort with effect, especially when we take the time to review performance patterns: how often skills hold under pressure, where breakdowns happen in sequences, or how many successful repetitions it takes before it’s time to progress. The difference is that, right now, tracking that kind of insight takes more than intention, it takes a fair bit of manual effort too.
But I can see where we’re headed: toward a future where the most helpful data is easier to capture, faster to interpret, and more seamlessly integrated into how we train. The insights won’t be new, but the effort it takes to get them will be a whole lot less.
From Data to Insight: Seeking Patterns, Not Perfection
At the end of each month, I set aside time to review what we’ve done. Not to judge it, but to learn from it. The insights aren’t always dramatic, but they’re always useful. Here are a few of the ways I use those patterns to guide what comes next.
1. Knowing When to Progress a Skill
Let’s take the running dogwalk as an example. When I’m introducing this obstacle to a young dog, there are a lot of components that need to come together: confidence on a raised plank, striding over a contact mat on the flat, adapting to different entries and exits, moving onto to the dogwalk itself, introducing obstacles before and after, and eventually adding in motion and speed. Each of those pieces builds toward the finished behaviour, but only if the foundation is solid.
In the early stages, I’m focused on precision. I want to see consistent, confident performance in simple setups before I start increasing complexity. For example, when I’m introducing mat work, I’ll begin with controlled conditions: straight approaches, low arousal, limited variables. And I’ll stay there until I see about an 80% success rate. That threshold isn’t arbitrary. It’s drawn from motor learning research, and it’s a useful benchmark. Once a dog is successful 80% of the time under blocked conditions, we can begin introducing variability.
That might mean changing the approach angle, or varying my position. I’m not yet adding in full speed or complex sequences, just gently expanding the conditions around what we’ve already established. I’ll repeat that pattern at each stage of the progression: accuracy first, then variation, and only once both hold, will we move towards the next step in building the final behaviour.
Figure 1 shows an example of how I use success rate to decide when to add challenge in my training. This chart shows a recent series of sessions with Vela, tracking her first experiences with the contact mat as we transitioned from blocked to variable setups. It’s a simple way to confirm growth, and gives me confidence that we’re ready to stretch the skill a little further.
Tracking that progression, and knowing when to stay or when to stretch, helps reduce overtraining, avoid confusion, and keep the learning curve steady. It’s not about chasing perfection. It’s about recognizing when the current version of the skill is strong enough to grow.
Figure 1:
2. Catching Bias in What We Train
It’s human nature to gravitate toward what feels good: the drills we like, the skills that show off well, the patterns that feel productive even if they aren’t actually moving us forward. For me, that often means defaulting to working technical skills over tactical decision-making scenarios. But that’s not the only form of bias that can sneak in.
Sometimes we leave a seminar or trial with a clear sense of what needs work. Maybe a missed weave entry, or a sloppy turn. We make a mental note: homework. But without tracking what we actually follow through on (and how often we circle back), those intentions can fade. We stay focused on what’s familiar or urgent, and overlook the subtler patterns. It’s easy to confuse what’s fresh in our minds with what’s showing up in the data.
By tracking domain focus (physical, mental, technical, tactical), I can start to see where I’m drifting. Sometimes it’s an obvious gap. Other times, it’s a sign that I’m stuck in a feedback loop… confirming what I already think needs work, and ignoring the skills that are ready to progress (see Point 1), or that I’m unconsciously avoiding altogether.
And it’s not just across domains. Bias can show up within a domain too; training only one type of technical skill (like wraps or threadles) and neglecting others (like cueing collection or extension, or directional cues). These blind spots are harder to catch unless we’re looking for them. You can see an example of that kind of bias in Figure 2: teeter work made up only a small fraction of Beacon’s technical training this month, despite it being one of her known weak spots. Guess what we’re working on this week…
It’s not about hitting perfect proportions. It’s about catching the patterns we miss when we only trust our instincts. Bias isn’t a flaw; it’s just a tendency. But without awareness, it quietly shapes everything.
Figure 2:
3. Mapping the Rhythm of a Block
Zooming out, I want to see the shape of our training. Not just what we’re doing, but when and why. That starts within a block, using the periodization model to structure phases with purpose: a heavier focus on physical and technical skill-building in the pre-competition phase, a shift toward mental readiness and tactical elements during competition, and a return to light physical/technical work and recovery protocols in the post-event phase.
This pattern isn’t rigid, but it should feel deliberate.
Because the goal isn’t to train hard, it’s to train smart. Build fitness and precision when there’s time to grow. Peak when it counts. And rest before the next build. This kind of structure is what I’m aiming for within each block. You can see it visualized in Figure 3, showing how training emphasis shifts across phases: from building, to peaking, to recovery.
Looking at the structure of a block also helps me double-check for drift. Are we tapering deliberately to peak, or pulling back because we’re worn out? Are we sharpening decision-making, or just repeating sequences out of habit? It’s a way to balance instinct with insight, and make better calls in real time.
Figure 3:
Over time, I don’t just look at a single block, but at patterns across multiple blocks, across a season, and across a career. That’s where the deeper trends start to emerge. It’s also where our dogs’ needs shift. A young, athletic dog might thrive on higher training volume and dense technical work in early seasons. But as that dog matures, or as the competition calendar stacks up, year after year, I’m watching out for signs of physical strain or mental fatigue; the kinds of overload that aren’t always visible, but still impact performance and wellbeing.
That doesn’t mean doing less. It means being more intentional about when to do what, and why. Because longevity in this sport isn’t just about keeping dogs sound; it’s about protecting their wellbeing, sustaining their joy, and building the resilience they need to keep thriving over time.
Reviewing the data doesn’t replace instinct. It sharpens it. Sometimes, it confirms what I already feel. Other times, it reveals what I hadn’t noticed. But either way, it gives me the confidence to adjust, not reactively, but intentionally, with structure and purpose.
Wrapping the Series: From Plan to Progress
This post wraps up the Sticky Practice series and I hope it’s helped you think differently about how skills are built, strengthened, and sustained over time.
We started with the science behind learning. Then we explored the conditions that make practice stick. And now we’ve zoomed out to look at how those principles can shape an entire training season, or a career.
You don’t need to implement every tool I’ve shared. Start with what speaks to you. Try tracking one session a week. Review what you’re already doing. Use the structure not as a rulebook, but as a framework, one that helps you train smarter, recover better, and build skills that stick. Even small shifts in how we plan and reflect can lead to big gains in performance and joy.
Thanks for following along. 💛
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