Rebound trouble

Need some advice. Our rebound has completely fallen aart. Remember how great it was? Well for some reason now she is not hitting me right. She'll hit with her front feet. But instead if hitting me hard with her back feet and pushing off she's just letting them kind of touch me and drop. I cannot figure out why and nothing I do seems to fix it.

I tried just rewarding for better attempts but there are so few of them, and if I'm not rewarding pretty much every one she refuses to continue.

I tried rewarding from my hand but that just seems to confuse her.

I tried going back and running through the steps quickly from the beginning. The first few steps will go okay, as soon as I go ack to almost standing it falls apart again.

Tried using a smaller target (towel instead of blanket).

I'll try to get a video tonight... but seriously what the heck? I'm confused as to how this fell apart when it was going so well for a week. Bleh! Help!

We ran into this issue too. Short sessions and engaging the opposition reflex a bit. Step into her so that if she doesn't compensate for the force she'll lose her balance. Start sessions when she's energetic and enthusiastic and do just a handful of repetitions. Make your primary criteria the back feet push off, and maintain it.

Just so I'm clear, you're suggesting that when she jumps up to hit me that I lean into her?

Problem with maintaining the criteria is that right now I don't seem to be getting it at all. I'm not really sure how this happened... I let one or two slip somewhere along the way I guess, but it was almost like one day it was perfect and the next day she wasn't doing it anymore. lol. I guess I'll go back to the start so I can try to get the criteria back.

Is it helpful to remove the target earlier? I thought I would leave it until she was really comfortable and then try to fade it out, but as soon as I tried to fade it out I think that's partly when trouble started... like without it she didn't know where to put her feet. I'm thinking I'll just retrain from the beginning with a smaller target and keep going back to the beginning with smaller and smaller targets....

Yeah, lean in to sort of meet the force of her feet with your own so, ideally, she springs off a bit more. It kind of throws the dog off balance if it's not expecting it, but once they learn to anticipate a push they'll push back. Your mileage may vary, as I'm doing this with a headstrong herder.

I'd also go back to where you were successful. I think that's a good idea. Also consider some rear end awareness exercises. She's probably forgotten almost entirely that she has a back end. It'll probably take a bit of time to re-train, but you'll work your way back up pretty fast.

Okay, thanks for the thoughts. I'll have to go back and tweak. So weird how they can suddenly decide the criteria have changed. ha ha. I'm sure it was my fault somewhere along the way though.