Your Dog Hits It in Practice.
So Why Does It Fall Apart at Trials?

You've seen your dog nail the A-frame at home a hundred times. Then you walk into a trial and watch them fly right over the contact — and there goes your Q.

Here's what's really going on:

Your dog is happy to take the reward. But do they actually know what they did to earn it?

Most of the time, the honest answer is no. The dog performed the A-frame, something felt right, a cookie appeared — but the dog was never taught the precise behavior that mattered. There's no clear criteria. So at home, in a low-pressure rep, it works out. Add trial speed, distraction, and adrenaline, and the whole thing gets fuzzy. The contact gets missed.

That's not an excited dog problem. It's not a talent problem. It's not you not working hard enough.

It's a criteria problem — and it's completely fixable.

Great A-Frame Training Isn't Agility Training.
It's Dog Training.

I'm not just an agility instructor. I'm a dog trainer first — a Karen Pryor Academy Certified Training Partner — and that's the whole difference training the A-frame.

The running A-frame isn't hard. But it lives or dies on the details: what exactly you're rewarding, how you break the skill into steps small enough that the dog can't get it wrong, and how you know the dog truly understands each step before you move on. It's easy to think you're rewarding the right thing when your dog is really just running and grabbing the cookie — happy to be paid, with no idea which part earned it.

This course keeps the criteria unmistakable at every step: your dog learns that one specific thing — their feet hitting the box — is what pays, separate from where you are, how fast you're moving, where the A-frame sits, or whether you're training at home or standing at the start line of a trial.

When your dog knows their criteria — clearly, specifically, deep in their body — the contact holds up. At speed. Under pressure. Whether you're ahead, behind, or right next to them on course.

The steps are simple. The details matter.

How the course is built:

12 step-by-step instructional videos. Each video teaches one simple step — how to train it, how to work through the common struggles, and exactly how to know your dog is ready for the next step. You follow along, step by step, in order.

The multi-dog training library. A whole separate section of real training sessions with a variety of dogs, clearly labeled by step and by dog. Each dog comes with a background — brand new to it, a retrain, a small dog, a big fast dog — so you can find the dog most like yours and watch how their sessions actually went. This is real training, not a polished demo.

Advanced topics. Troubleshooting, retraining from a stopped contact (and why that switch has so many benefits), maintaining long-term consistency, transitioning to stride regulators — when to use them, when not to, and why you start with the whole box instead of just a stride regulator — plus how to build more speed.

The one rule that matters most: don't skip steps. Follow them in order and this can move quickly. I trained my young border collie, Banner, from scratch to a consistent competition running A-frame in about two weeks. Retrains usually take a little longer, but not much.

Why the Box Method — and Why Start With the Whole Box?

The box method has been around a long time, and for good reason: it works.

What this course does is lay it out in a clear, simple order that leaves nothing out — so you always know what to do next, and why.

The backyard foundation is the key.

The prep you do with just a box and three jumps, before the A-frame ever comes in, is where your dog learns exactly what the behavior is. Get that part right, in small, clear steps, and the A-frame stage at the end goes quickly — because your dog already understands the job.

Here's the whole equipment list.

A training box (I'll show you how to make your own or where to buy one) and three jumps for the foundation work. That's it to start.

You only need an A-frame at the end.

Once you've done the foundation and you're ready for the final stage, you'll want to get on an actual A-frame a few times a week. That's the only part that needs the equipment — and by then your dog already understands the job.

Start with the whole box, not a stride regulator.

A lot of handlers want to jump straight to a stride regulator because it looks like the fast way. Inside the course I'll show you why you start with the whole box instead: it builds your dog's real understanding of the behavior, not just a physical prompt to lean on. Then I'll show you how and when to transition to stride regulators — and when you don't need them at all.

Any dog handler can train this.

The foundation is all backyard work. The A-frame comes in at the end, when your dog is ready for it — and that's when it goes fast.

No secrets. No special tricks.

Just good, solid training, in the right order, that actually holds up.

Meet the Dogs

You'll see all three of these dogs — plus others — working through the method inside the course, so whatever your situation looks like, you can watch it done for real.

Banner — From Scratch. My younger border collie had never done an A-frame before I trained him with this exact method. Start to finish, consistent running A-frame in about two weeks, and he's holding up beautifully in competition.

Star — The Retrain for Speed. Star had an extremely reliable stopped A-frame. I retrained her to a running A-frame specifically so I could be more competitive at national and international events, where those saved seconds matter. Proof that you can trade up to speed without giving up reliability.

Buttercup — The Small-Dog Fix. My Lhasa Apso. I never formally trained her contact behavior — she's small, she was hitting it fine, so why bother? Then she started missing it. Because she never actually had any criteria. This is the single most common small-dog story in agility, and Buttercup is the fix on video.

A missed contact is almost never a small dog being small. It's a dog who was never told what the job actually was.

Your Instructor

Hi, I'm Heather.

I compete in dog agility at the highest levels of the sport, including representing the United States at the IFCS World Agility Championship. I run Heather's Dog School in Corfu, NY, where I've coached handlers of every level for years.

But the thing that actually matters for this course is how I'm trained.

I'm a Karen Pryor Academy Certified Training Partner — a dog trainer, not just an agility instructor. Great agility training starts with understanding how dogs learn: how to read what a dog is telling you, how to break a skill into steps the dog can succeed at, and how to know which step broke down when something goes wrong.

Here's something I see constantly: a handler is sure their dog knows the job, when the dog actually has no idea what earned the reward — and from the outside, most people can't tell the difference. Spotting that gap, and knowing exactly how to close it, is where being a real dog trainer matters most. It's the difference between coaching this as a craft and coming at it as a hobby.

That's the foundation this whole method sits on. It's why the A-frame you build here isn't a trick your dog performs and hopes is right — it's a behavior your dog genuinely understands. And that's what holds up when it counts.