Raising the Bar: Increasing Speed & Power for Canine Athletes

Is your dog performing at their very best? Are you doing everything possible to make the most of your training sessions together? It’s no secret that fitness and health are essential for our dogs to excel, but what if you could help your dog develop speed and power beyond what you ever thought possible?

Imagine your patrol dog running faster, biting harder and fighting with more intensity. Imagine your detection dog having more endurance for a challenging search, improving search accuracy, and recovering faster from long training days. All of this is possible when you consistently train for fitness, but building exercises for speed and power into your training can help your dog reach a higher level of fitness.

It might be obvious that speed and power are needed for patrol dogs, but what about our working canines whose sole purpose is to search? How can detection dogs benefit from exercise programs that are focused on developing speed and power? Below are just a few examples of how strength and speed exercises can help all dogs reach their fullest working potential regardless of the type of work that they do.

Why Focus on Speed and Power

It’s essential that dogs have a solid fitness foundation before integrating exercises that emphasize speed and power into their exercise program. Once your dog is ready for more advanced exercises, however, training for speed and power is a perfect way to take your dog’s fitness to advanced levels. A great way to begin building speed and power is by adding strength training exercises to your canine fitness program. Strength training creates stronger muscles that will help protect and support the body from long-term wear and tear. As a result, you can decrease the risk of injury. In addition, maintaining strength is vital for our working dogs as they get older. Just like us, dogs start to lose muscle mass and tone as they age. Strong muscles are needed if our dogs are going to keep active and work longer into their senior years.

Building both strength and speed go hand in hand in hand. Sprint training helps build muscles, elevates the heart rate, increases caloric burning, and can help the body get better at supplying oxygen to muscles in a more efficient way. This leads to dogs getting stronger, running faster, and improving their overall cardio endurance. Even if you work dogs where speed and power aren’t necessarily needed for their jobs, these dogs can still greatly benefit because these exercises can lead to enhanced fitness, increased stamina, and a faster exercise recovery time.

Getting Started

Before focusing on exercises that develop speed and strength, it’s imperative that your dog is already in good health and excellent physical condition. Developing a solid fitness foundation prior to focusing on strength and speed is essential because strength training and intense sprinting activities have the potential for severe loading on tendons, ligaments, and the muscular skeletal system. You're increasing the risk for injury when focusing on speed work with a dog that doesn’t yet have a solid fitness foundation because of the considerable strain it can place on the muscles and connective tissues.

Having a solid fitness foundation means that your dog has already been engaging in consistent fitness training for a number of months. A solid fitness foundation also means that your dog is following a balanced fitness program that emphasizes strength, cardio, flexibility, and body awareness. Focused fitness training should already be happening at least three days per week on a regular basis. Your dog should be in good weight and should already have excellent balance, flexibility, and body awareness. Before engaging in a challenging cardio workout that might include things like sprinting and hillwork, your dog should already be engaging in cardio activities that include at least 20 minutes or more of continuous activity (at a trot or faster) at least three times per week. If you don’t establish a foundation before asking your dog for more physically demanding work, you are putting them at a higher risk for injury.

Advanced Exercises

To maximize the effectiveness of exercises that build speed and power, be sure to always begin your training sessions by warming up your dog. You want to gradually increase your dog’s heart rate and warm up the muscles before asking your dog to do the more intense workouts. I like to warm up my dog by trotting him in circles, tugging with him, and eventually doing some short retrieves. For safety reasons, I never ask a high drive dog to chase a ball that’s rolling or bouncing. Instead, I restrain my dog, throw the ball, wait for it to stop rolling and then release my dog.

Short retrieves can then build into longer retrieves after your dog has already been warmed up. If I want to build more speed and drive for the retrieve item, I simply build up some frustration in my dog while restraining him and letting him watch me throw the reward. By holding him back and using my voice (and sometimes patting his side) to get him more excited, the excitement that’s building can result in a faster sprint to the reward. You can also have somebody at the end of the field show your dog the reward to help build up that excitement. Want your dog to have even more explosive power? Adding focused strength training exercises to your program can help. Examples of resistance training exercises include the following:

• Incorporate drag work through weightpulling into your training. Be sure to use a proper weightpull harness to avoid injury and start gradually with light resistance for a very short distance.
• Add hill work to your training routine. Walking uphill can eventually lead to trotting, and you can also work your dog on a treadmill set at an incline. If you are working on a steep hill, be sure to have your dog come down slowly and at an angle if possible to minimize impact on the shoulders.
• Add interval cardio training with bouts of speedwork into your weekly cardio routine. Speedwork consists of high intensity sprints over short distances. When starting, be sure to keep the sprints on flat ground so that your dog’s body has time to adapt to the more challenging workout before making them even more difficult by sprinting on an incline.
• Incorporate plyometric exercises to your training routine. These exercises involve muscles exerting maximum force in short intervals of time, with the goal of increasing power. Plyometric training is intense and has benefits such as increased muscle, power, explosiveness, and athletic performance. It focuses on learning to move from a muscle extension to a contraction in a rapid, or "explosive" manner (Chu, 1998). An example of plyometric training includes “bounce” exercises where your dog jumps over multiple jumps in a row. Another example of a plyometric move is when a dog jumps up onto an object from a standstill. 

PROCEED with CAUTION!

Hill work, speedwork, resistance training, and plyometric “jump” training all put considerable strain on your dog’s muscles and connective tissues. These types of exercises put an unfit dog at a much greater risk of injury because of the extra stress placed on the body. Because of this, these types of exercises should only be done as advanced fitness exercises for adult dogs who are already in excellent condition and who have already been participating in fitness training multiple days per week across many months. If you are already doing these types of exercises with your dog but have not yet built a well-balanced and consistent fitness program, I recommend taking a few steps back to build the fitness foundation that’s needed to safely proceed to advanced exercises.

Many of the working dogs that I meet do engage in some of these advanced exercises. The problem that I have most frequently seen, however, is that this training is not consistent. Dogs are not training multiple days per week, and training can be sporadic. This means that dogs can actually be losing conditioning between training sessions when you mistakenly think they are improving. If you are serious about helping your dog reach and maintain peak working condition, you must be committed to maintaining a regular fitness program where training occurs multiple times per week.

Finally, always make sure your dog healthy and free of pain before moving forward with a fitness program. Any time you introduce something new, start with one day per week and keep it short. Closely monitor your dog to see how it responds to the new activity. Gradually increase the workload over time, changing one variable at a time, and stop activity the instant you see any behavior that could possibly indicate soreness, pain or injury. Don’t forget to include rest and recovery days, and seek help from a canine fitness professional if you are unsure about how to design a balanced fitness program that’s designed to increase your dogs cardio endurance, flexibility, body awareness, and strength.

References: Chu, Donald (1998). Jumping into Plyometrics (2nd ed.). Human Kinetics, pp. 1-4.

Original Publication: This is a revised version of a similar article published in USPCA's Canine Courier magazine.

Erica C. Boling, PhD, is a former Associate Professor of Education from Rutgers University and the owner and founder of Northeast K9 Conditioning, LLC and Northeast K9 Conditioning Academy. Erica helps sport and working dog handlers create peak performance, canine athletes by teaching them how to integrate canine fitness into their training programs. Erica is a Certified Canine Fitness Trainer (CCFT), Certified Canine Massage Provider, member of the United States Federation of Sleddog Sports (USFSS) and a member of their USA National Team. She is also one of the founding members of North Pocono Search, Rescue and Recovery. Erica has taught canine fitness to officers at the Atlantic County John “Sonny” Burke K-9 Academy. She also has experience in narcotics detection and has titled her two Belgian Malinois in French Ring.

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