I stink at training pivoting

Tips, tricks, methods?

Gnome has two front feet on the object (box, thick book, upside down bowl, etc).

But I can only get her to pivot with tons of side pressure.

girlfriend is a FEND for food so she does get TOO excited and wants to just leap around. Pondering doing some running/tug work prior to get her mind back in the game.

Can you post video so you can show what you're doing to teach it now?

How are you using pressure to get her to move? I'm guessing that the more you push on her to get her to move, the more resistance she's applying back.

I might suggest just trying a new method. (There are millions of pivoting youtube videos out there.)

A couple ideas:

While she stand on the bowl, wait for her to move and reward any movement. She'll start offering more and more movement around the circle and only reward her when her front feet stay on the bowl.

or

Try standing next to her, reach your arm over her back with a small piece of food and make her look away from you, forcing her back end to move toward you.

Just try mixing it up and see what works for you two!

Teaching pivots is my favorite thing!

With Carma, I chose to lure. Just manipulated the food with my hand until her hind end moved. Eventually added the finger flick cue to it and got her moving independently of the lure. Added in the basic heel position and BINGO. Her turns and pivots are awesome.

Baby Carm pivot foundation
[YOUTUBE]cOqAPaLWpCg[/YOUTUBE]

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Young Carm
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Carms turns and pivots from November-ish
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Now
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I spend a lot of my puppy foundation teaching this because it is heavily pointed in IPO obedience, so Tulah is currently working on it now. I decided to do as close to pure free shaping as I could for her, as she is much more independent than Carm was. So I would click for any movement on the perch at all and eventually it led to spinning around, moving to heel, and introducing the pivot.

Tulah 8 weeks
[YOUTUBE]4faZCeOqvE0[/YOUTUBE]

14ish weeks
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Last night
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Thanks for all the videos! I'm going to check them out after toenail Tuesday.

I was lining up with her on my side and stepping into her but it was very awkward.

Though if I'm lucky my honey is in there with her right now getting a pivot while I work another dog.

Yeah, in general you don't want to teach them by stepping into them, but rather by moving away, because you want them to be comfortable working close.

Yeah, I taught Penn by teaching her to step away from me. It's hilarious because now I can't figure out how to get her to step into me ..thankfully, a glorious pivot isn't that important in agility aahaha

This is one of the most important things I learned from Denise Fenzi's precision heeling class. If you teach them to move away from you, you're always going to have problems with their butt being out.

Another important thing I learned from her is to reward with the correct hand for teaching pivots. If you are moving around the disc counter clockwise (so moving to your right) you will feed out of your right hand. If you are going clockwise (to your left) feed out of your left hand. I was feeding out of my right for both directions and my clockwise pivots were bad. Feeding out of the correct hand fixed the problem quickly.

I tried to teach pivots on my own but never really got it until Denise's class. I started with him in front position on a disc and lured a bit. I quickly moved the lure from right in front of his nose to being in my hand near my waist. He learned to follow my body movement instead of my hands. Once I moved back into heel position he "got it" and I didn't have to lure at all to get a pivot at heel. Previously I had been trying to lure in heel position without much luck, but starting in front position seemed to solidify the concept for him.

Early video - teaching him to stay up on the disc, and starting to pivot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcHUWa-Bzoc

About a week later, much better pivots:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MNQarlH8ok

Pivots have been put on hold for the next couple of nights as the house is a disaster and there's no food in the fridge AND we slacked on nails this week. And little miss is teething and a bit of a pissy pants.

Really excited to give some of this a try and we're starting Silvia Trkmans' puppy foundation/tricks class on Monday.

She has pretty good rear end awareness and control for a 16 week old but i'd like to have it in my pocket for the future!

My recommendation is to stop working on it, and come back to it 6+ months later, because that's what I did, and it totally worked!

I tried to train this around 9 months, 12 months, and 18 months. It didn't go very well at 9 months, a bit better at 12, and now at 18 he picked it up very easily with no issues. I think it was a physical maturity and general rear end awareness thing for him that made it so hard at first.

Oh Tulah, the cutest pivots ever.