While many agility handlers would list weave poles as the most difficult piece of dog agility equipment to train, that doesn’t mean you should feel fear and trepidation about this obstacle. Weaves poles sometimes get a bad rap, but there’s plenty to love about weaves, including the following.
1. Weaves Provide A Great Form of Exercise
Agility weave poles provide your dog with a unique form of exercise. While a good long walk and a rousing game of fetch are always a good idea, this doesn’t necessarily target every muscle group.
When dogs move in and out of the weave poles, this targets a wide range of muscles and helps to strengthen their core. This is especially true once your furry friend masters the weaves and can head through them at high speeds.
However, it is important to put off weave pole training with puppies, as their bodies are not ready for this type of exercise. Typically, most dog agility obstacles should be avoided until your puppy has fully grown. Until then, you can teach a bunch of basic obedience skills and play skills, which will make agility training far easier.
2. Weave Poles Can Improve Coordination
Just like people, dogs can improve their coordination through regular exercise. Part of this is developing stronger muscles, but learning skills that require coordination are important, as well. A dog that can learn to head through weaves quickly, is a dog with good coordination.
3. Weave Poles Improve Focus
Focus is an important skill for all agility dogs, and this is a huge reason to love training with weave poles. Dogs absolutely must focus to perform this skill well, and once they are skilled at weaves, you should see a general improvement in their ability to focus on other dog obstacles.
4. If Your Dog Tackles Weave Poles, They Can Handle Anything
Agility weaves can be tough to teach and tough to learn, but if your dog can master this skill, they likely can master all of the other skills needed to compete on a dog agility course. That doesn’t mean that every obstacle will be a snap to teach, some are just easier for dogs to master than others, but generally speaking, weave poles are the toughest skill to learn.
5. Weaves Are Fun To Watch
We may be biased, given our love of all things dog agility, but we could watch those fun agility YouTube videos and Tik Tok videos all day long. While it’s cool to see a dog perform clean jumps and rush through a tunnel and up and down the dog walk on agility courses, there’s just something mesmerizing about watching them shift in and out of those weave poles.
Weave Pole Training Tips
Customers often ask us which piece of agility equipment should they train first. To be honest, it doesn’t really matter, and you certainly can start with weave poles if you like, although we don’t always recommend that.
Believe it or not, dogs gain a great deal of confidence as they master each agility skill, and this is why we often recommend that you begin with a dog tunnel or agility jumps before moving on to weaves. Tunnels and basic jumps are easier to train and learn than weave poles, so your dog can gain some early confidence learning these easier obstacles.
Once you introduce the weave poles, it can take a while to teach, and if you or your dog get discouraged, just take a break and go back to the jumps, the tunnel or other obstacles to boost that confidence back and up before going back to weave training.
Here are some tips that can make weave pole training easier:
Use A Training Chute – To make teaching weaves easier, training chutes can be used. These chutes can be adjusted, and you would start with the poles far apart and gradually move the poles closer together, working on accuracy and then speed.
Add Guide Wires – Guide wires attach to our weave pole sets and they help your dog to better understand how to enter the weaves and move through this obstacle. Once your dog has mastered the idea of weaving using the guide wires, you can remove them and start practicing without them. If your dog encounters a setback later on in training, you can just reattach the guide wires and try again until you achieve success.
Use The 2×2 Training Method – For this option, you would use stick-in-the-ground weave poles and simply start training with two poles and then add more poles as your dog gains confidence. You also can place the poles far apart and gradually decrease the space until the poles are arranged in a single line.
No matter which method you choose, patience and enthusiasm are crucial. Remember agility training is supposed to be fun! You are providing a great source of exercise for your dog and strengthening the bond between the two of you, and that’s far more important than mastering agility skills.
Weave Poles, Training Tools & Much More
At Carlson Agility, we have just about every piece of dog agility training equipment you might need, including weave poles. We offer sets with 12 poles as well as sets with six poles. We also offer stick-in-the-ground sets or sets with a PVC base.
Our training tools include a training weave chute with 12 weaves as well as a training weave chute with six weaves. We also sell training guide wires if you would prefer to use that training tool.
In addition to our full selection of agility weaves and weave training tools, we have every piece of dog agility equipment you need for your backyard dog agility course or agility training center.
This includes dog walks, agility a-frames, pause tables, dog tunnels and all types of agility jumps, including the tire jump. We also have a full selection of mini agility equipment for those smaller dog breeds. For those new to agility, we often recommend purchasing an agility starter kit, and we have several options, depending on what skills you wish to teach first. All of our equipment is handmade using the finest available components. If you have any questions about our weave poles or any piece of our dog agility equipment, just click on the Contact tab on our homepage and fill out our quick contact form and we will be in touch as quickly as possible.
