Canine Conditioning (2024)

Canine Conditioning (also K9 Conditioning, K9 Fitness) is a workout with the help of specific exercises for healthy dogs, to improve muscle mass and strength, general fitness level, coordination and balance – for s better physical preparation, which contributes to injury prevention durng activities as well, should they be training, competing, work or just fetching balls and playing with other dogs.

Since injuries usually occures during the (excessive) lengthening/stretching of the muscles that are not prepared for such a load, we try to prepare the body as much as possible to resist the accidents more easily and effectively.

Read more:About the trainings

In spite of the fact that fitness training IS NOT and let it NEVER BE a replacement to regular walks with your dog / jogging around in forrests, meadows, hills, playing or fetching balls, doing only these common activities is also far from enough for the body to resist explosive and unforeseen movements of a sudden force. Furthermore, a tremendous factor for occuring injuries is the tiredness of the dog – when a dog is tired, he cannot maintain his position due to physical or psychological fatigue, and trips or stumps more often. These common activities are good only to maintain power in large muscle groupes – while small, seemingly unimportant, muscles deeper in the system remain »neglected«. And exacty these muscles are activated when a dog suddenly loses balance or tries to avoid slipping on a slippery surface, and are therefore the most common places at greater risk for getting injured.

One of the most commonly damaged (and undiagnosed) muscles is the iliopsoas muscle (consisting out of m. iliacus and m. psoas major), which lies deeply in the pelvic region, and is responsible for flexion and adduction of the hind limb in the hip joint. Dogs are usually interminentally lame with no obvious reason. The muscle is difficult to cure by itself – and it is often overlooked by general diagnostic procedures (x-ray, general orthopedic examinations). In addition, also ligaments and tendons are oftenly damaged, and we should put extra attention to their strenghtening by targeted fitness training.

The goal of fitness exercising lies in certain repetitions of specific movements – only »been able« to perform an exercise, or a trick, does not also mean training. In order to improve muscle stregth, appropriate repetitions and load are required to induce wanted muscular response. We can stregthen specific target muscle groups with different exercises (for example exercises to strengthen the front of the body, or the hind legs, core stabilizers, flexibility,…) or we can increase endurance (cardio training).

Planned training to improve physical fitness do not take as much time commitment as you might have thought at first – as little as 15min 3-5x per week can amazingly improve the condition of our dog, and we can do it at home or during walks in the nature. However, consistency, a gradual progression in difficulty (do not ask more of your dog than he is physically or mentacally able!) and the correct and, above all, safe performance of exercises, are the most important things to follow in fitness training – because by lack of knowledge, fitness might result in the muscle pain or even injuries.

We offer quality trainings in a form of:

• individual hands-on trainings,
• workshops,
• seminars,
• or via on-line contents,

whereby we try to give owners of both sporting and companion dogs the necessary knowledge for a successful and safe workout at home.