Teach Your Dog to Back Up
This issue’s Training Tip is brought to us by Mandy Baker CPDT-KA CBATI CCUI, who has been training and competing with All American Dogs for 16 years in rally, agility, scent work, freestyle and more. She shares her tips for getting a fantastic back-up, an important skill for many sports!
Teaching your dog to back-up is a very useful and fun behavior and is used in several sports, including freestyle, rally and obedience. It can be used to help dogs increase their understanding of contact position in agility as dogs are able to find the contact with their back feet.
Backing up also helps keep a dog’s hind end muscles strong and healthy, and it is quite a crowd pleaser when your dog can back away from you independently.
There are lots of variations of a dog backing in freestyle, including:
- Dog backing as you walk towards them
- Dog backs up independently from you creating distance and then turning and walking backwards towards you, quite often backing between the handlers legs
- Walking backwards in a circle around your legs
- Walking backwards in a figure eight around your legs
- Backing around a prop
The options are endless. There are also several variations of the dog backing-up in rally in the Excellent and Masters levels.
Lure Method: There are two ways I teach a dog to back-up, the first being to lure the behavior. Start with several treats in one of your hands but put both hands together in front of your dog’s nose, take a step towards your dog, and as soon as your dog takes one step backwards, mark and reward. Make sure to keep your hands at your dog’s nose level
when he is standing. If you hold your hands too high, that will bring up the dog’s head up and the dog will quite often sit. If you hold your hands too low, the dog is likely to lie down. Repeat this several times, only looking for one or two steps initially. If you wait for too many steps backwards, the dog will start to arc and not stay straight so keep the repetitions only a few steps and keep the reinforcement rate high. I am not giving any cues at this stage.
The next step would be to remove the food from your hands, still keep the hands in the same position, but when you step towards your dog mark and reward from your pocket, bait bag, etc. When your dog can walk backwards with no food in your hands, you can add the cue of your choice for the behavior. You will also want to start fading your hands from the position of them being in front of your dog’s nose. Do this very gradually moving your hands and arms in small increments towards a natural position for them.
Target Method: For dog’s who are sensitive to body pressure in their space, using a target to teach the dog to back up works much better. This method will also teach the dog to back up independently of the handler.
- Teach your dog to place his hind legs on a platform or texture that is different from your carpet or flooring; this can be done by luring the dog into the position. I use a large binder that I cover with a piece of a yoga mat so that it doesn’t slip.
- Once your dog understands where his back legs need to be, place a treat on the floor just in front of his front legs so that he does not have to move out of position to get the treat. Once he has eaten the treat, mark when he brings his head up to look at you and place the reward treat in the same position on the floor. Repeat this several times. This may seem redundant as the dog’s legs are not moving, but they are engaging their rear end muscles as the dog brings his head up to look at you. I have found this to be an important foundation for the training of the behavior which also applies to Step 3.
- Next start placing the treat a little bit further away from your dog’s front feet, so that he has to stretch a little to get the treat but not remove his back legs from the platform. In the same way, mark when he brings his head up and place the reward treat in the same position.
- Once you have a good foundation at this level, place the treat at a distance that when your dog reaches for the treat on the floor one back leg moves off the platform. But when he brings his head up to look at you, the foot immediately steps back into position on the platform. From this point, you can gradually ask for the two back feet off the platform, and the dog is able to return to the platform by stepping backwards. Keep your dog successful. If he struggles and makes a couple of mistakes, then make it easier by returning to the previous level at which your dog was successful.
Once you feel your dog is understanding the concept, you can add the cue of your choice.
When using this method, sometimes the dog will back up by stretching his back legs, feeling for the target, so start to vary the number of back up steps you ask for. Mark and reward before the dog reaches the target, so the target can also be faded from the training.
If your sport is rally or freestyle then working on back up in different positions e.g., heel position, becomes easier for the dog once they have a strong understanding of the behavior.
North Carolina resident Mandy Baker has been training and competing with her dogs for 16 years in the sports of freestyle, rally, agility, scent work and parkour. In the sport of freestyle, her first two All American Dogs are titled with WCFO and MDSA and received championship titles with Dogs Can Dance. She has been teaching classes at Teamworks Dog Training for 18 years, and due to one of her own dogs needing behavior modification for aggression, she has focused on understanding and changing behavior and is certified in Behavior Adjustment Training and Control Unleashed.