From a field dog trainer.....

Training is not testing.

There are endless ways to train a dog, but in a variety of dog sports, I see a lot of people do more testing than training. Everyday they run their dog through a setup that’s as close as possible to what they’ll see on test/trial day. Then they’ll correct their dog for their shortcomings and the next day they set up something similar, but slightly different, and try again. If you test your dog over and over again, with enough experience it can figure out what it should and shouldn’t be doing in most situations.

Then there are the savvy, intuitive, dog TRAINers who train their dogs everyday. They teach conceptual skills that allow the dog to be confident in the expectations and make good decisions in testing. These trainers are always going back to foundation work, even with finished dogs, to clean up tiny pieces of the big picture. They’re always willing to unravel the big picture and piece it back together differently rather than patch what they’ve already done. These are the “isolate, separate and recombine” people. These are the “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” people. These are my kind of people,

Hope this helps everyone understand what I mean when I nag about testing instead of training......