Metronome Heeling with Stephen Hall

Find your Optimum Heeling Speed using a Metronome

The following is not meant to teach heeling specifically. There are many sources of instruction from online, members of our club and training classes for that. Rather, this is a way to establish the optimum heeling speed for both you and your dog which will pay off with improved connection and focus as well as an all round better looking performance.

A great way to improve upon your heeling performance is to give attention to both your cadence and pace by using a metronome, which can be obtained free as an app on your phone.

Cadence can be considered as the number of steps that you take in say one minute. Pace can be considered to be the length of your stride in any or every step. The challenge is to find the ideal cadence and pace that works best for you and your dog. As you can imagine, there can be difficulties in say a tall handler and a small dog or vice versa. This mismatch between handler and dog can take the form of forging, lagging, going too slow or going too fast. Once you lose connection with your dog, all sorts of other problems can creep in.

Start by familiarizing yourself with whatever metronome app you have chosen. It involves a little trial and error initially and the help of an observer or video recording.

Start by setting the metronome to an arbitrary setting of for example 120/130 beats per minute. Put the metronome in your shirt or blouse pocket, where you can hear it. Then, without your dog start heeling in a straight line while keeping up with the beat. Adjust the cadence if necessary. When you are comfortable with maintaining the pace and cadence, you can adjust the speed of the metronome to what you think would be right for your dog.

At this point, you can introduce your dog on leash and repeat the heeling, again in a straight line. Have your observer or examine your video watching for any mismatch, skipping steps, losing connection, etc. Now you stop to adjust the metronome beat until you find a speed of beat that is the best match for both you and your dog. Ideally, you should find that the dogs cadence will repeat with every step you take. For example, if your dog is taking two steps for every one of yours, it should repeat with each of your steps. You don’t want the dog taking say two steps, then three and then back to two for instance.

When you are happy with a straight line heeling, cadence and pace, you can start to think of introducing changes of direction, left, right, and about turn. Again, start without your dog. The important thing here is that your cadence should remain the same, but your pace will shorten or lengthen depending on which way you are going. For an about turn, left or right turn imagine you are marching on the spot, but maintain your cadence say to yourself, 1/2/3/4 1/2/3/4 or similar. Look at figure 8’s. your cadence should remain the same, but your place will lengthen or shorten, depending on whether you’re going left or right around the post. It is important here however that you maintain your correct distance from the posts otherwise your cadence and pace will become irregular and it starts to get and look clumsy.

When you are happy with your understanding of making changes of direction without your dog, it’s time to introduce the dog. At this time you may find that you need to make adjustments. Do so several times if necessary.

After you have worked on this for a while, you develop your own muscle memory and be able to repeat your own cadence and pace without the use of the metronome. You will find that you are probably counting to yourself whenever you are heeling with your dog.

Happy heeling,  Steve.

About Steve, Maggie & Winston

A dumbbell club member for about 12 years, first with my third English Springer, Winston who unfortunately had to retire at three years old and then with my present ESS, Maggie. Winston named after Winston Churchill and Maggie named after Maggie Thatcher. My wife Linda is more political than me so she bears the responsibility for name selections.

My first foray into dog obedience was with Karen Brierly in Rally and if you know Karen it was a lot of fun. Winston and I were quite successful achieving Excellent level however an early diagnosis of an arthritic hock bought that to a close. We went on to Nose Work for several happy years thereafter. Winston taught me everything I didn’t need to know about training…. Enter Maggie.

Maggie, now eight years old is a completely different dog. We benefited from some very early obedience training under the expert eye of Janice Gunn and later under Maureen Murray for several years. I have been very fortunate in being able to continue to train with some of the best trainers to be found anywhere. Maggie is a very quick learner and loves to be working. This coupled with my excellent training circles leads to a lot of fun and great friends.

We are now trying to achieve our first obedience Utility leg at the time of writing, having worked hard to overcome the little glitches along the way. Win or lose, it doesn’t matter. Its been great and hopefully will continue for a long time to come.