Keeping dog sharp

[Payce]

Question, to keep a dog sharp on the off season how often would the crowd with experience recommend refresher training for a Chessie? Let’s assume the dog has been trained on longer marks, doubles and blind work out to 150 yards.

Sky’s not finished by any means, but had moved back to longer marks and doubles the last 30 days after a couple of months focus on blinds. Yesterday did a short session of walking baseball and she wasn’t sharp. Simplified to get the results back and finished fine, but got me thinking about offseason training of say a 5 or 6 year old dog and what to expect. No doubt it varies by dog and younger dogs more often than older seasoned veterans?
Thanks!

[Russell Huffman]

I train at least 3 days a week in the off season. I also run events so that is a big encouragement for me to get out, but training is fun for me and the dogs.

Russell

[Rick Hall]

No doubt it varies by dog and younger dogs more often than older seasoned veterans?

That pretty well sums up my experience with hunting Chessies: some needed precious little refresher, some considerably more. Those that hunt tested were all put through somewhat test-like paces before hand. Will also sometimes revisit walking baseball when handling deteriorates during the season (which it can after his hunting trumps my handling a few times), only we'll start simple to re-instill the notion in them that I know what I'm doing before extending ranges or memory requirements to nearly blinds. And the current young dog will see lots of live poison birds on the way to blinds shortly before the regular season, when he's not always as good about swimming past live and kicking marks to get to birds he didn't see go down on the flotant.

[Payce]

Thanks for the replies. Hoping this generated some additional comments and questions from those like me that are fairly new to the sport. Sky has along ways to go and this off-season will involve a great deal of addition work on marks, steady, and blinds. No plans to hunt test, but that can change. Once we get to where we want to be as a team I can imagine working 2 or 3 sessions a week. During the hot days of August more water work than anything else. Besides training is fun....not as fun as hunting, but still a great way to spend an evening.