July 31, 2025 • 21 mins
In this deeply personal first episode of the Canine Handler Fitness Podcast, Liz Joyce opens up about the life experiences that shaped her — as a woman, a coach, and a movement professional. From wrestling in high school and working industrial jobs, to living with Crohn’s and finding healing through strength, Liz shares how movement became the thread that pulled her forward through every chapter.
This episode isn’t just about fitness. It’s about growth — the kind that happens when you learn to trust your body again, rebuild your strength, and carry that power into every part of your life. It’s also the origin story of why she’s so passionate about helping other handlers move better, feel better, and thrive in the sport they love.
In this episode, you’ll hear:
- Why movement became Liz’s anchor during some of the hardest seasons of her life
- What training 20,000+ hours taught her about how people move — and where they get stuck
- How coaching agility handlers opened her eyes to a powerful need in the sport
- The emotional impact of watching people finally feel strong and capable in their bodies
- Why she believes coaching is more than workouts — it’s a way to help people come back to themselves
Links & Resources:
- Learn more about CHF
- Grab your free Stretch to Handle eBook
- Follow Liz on Facebook
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hey dog sport handlers, welcome to the canine Handler Fitness
podcast. I'm your host Liz Joyce, your go
to expert for all things dog sport fitness.
Whether you're running, agility,doing protection work, tackling,
search and rescue, handling a tough tugger, or just looking to
build Frank for a lifetime of adventures with your dog.
Remember, you are half the team and I'm here to help you stay
(00:23):
strong, mobile and injury free. Join me as I breakdown the
unique demands handler fitness, speed, strength and germs and
everything you need to perform at your best, both in and
activating. Let's stay strong, stay in the
game and keep doing what we love.
Let's dive in. Hey friends, and welcome back to
(00:46):
the podcast. I am Liz Joyce and in
celebration of my amazing students reaching 60,000
workouts last year alone on my fitness app 60,000, we're doing
a massive giveaway. And today we're going to be
(01:06):
talking about where Canine Handler Fitness even started and
it started with me. First, I want to tell you about
this giveaway because it's amazing.
Here's what's up for grabs. 1 lucky winner is going to get a
full year of the All Access Pass2 coaching sessions from me.
(01:29):
They're also going to get six months of access to Megan
Foster's FX Agility Community webinar and access to the
Patreon page for Mental Management for Handlers, which
is a collection of mental management coaches that
specialize in dog handling. If you haven't checked out
(01:50):
Heather's podcast, she was on a couple of episodes ago, so make
sure you go check that out. And either a beginner or
intermediate conditioning coursefrom Kelly Daniels of Hybrid Dog
Training. And they get to choose their own
colors of Fit Paws Target mat and also a duo disk from Fit
(02:11):
Paws. They're going to be coming on
with a podcast. Tell us all about their research
and development process and I can't wait to hear about it.
In total, it's over 1500 U.S. dollars.
That's up for grabs for one lucky person.
Here's how you can enter. You can sign up for my
newsletter. I will be sending out all the
entry forms there. You can check any of the link
(02:35):
trees in my socials. We'll also have the entry form
there. You can check the podcast notes.
And there are a number of ways to earn bonus entries.
And it's super simple when you head on over to that form.
So in celebration of 60,000 workouts in one year, I'm really
(02:56):
pumped to tell you about where did all this even come from and
actually who am I because reading a bio online doesn't
really give the whole picture. So I'm excited to dive into this
stuff with you and let's grab your coffee and take our dogs
for a walk and read. Mind we're going back to high
school. I joined the wrestling team when
(03:18):
I was in high school. I was the only girl on the team
for half of it. I was about 115 lbs and I was
going up against guys that outweighed me by a minimum of 30
lbs and one was over 200 lbs heavier than I was and I was
losing like hard in practice andat meats.
(03:41):
I wasn't discouraged about this,but I was hissed and I didn't
want out. I wanted in, and I needed to be
better to do that, so I pivoted.I started lifting weights every
weekday morning with my dad before school.
(04:01):
We'd get up at 5:00 AM, get our coffee and our thermoses, and
get our asses down to the gym. We were doing a traditional
powerlifting split of specific lifts and one focus body part,
sometimes the secondary muscle group per day, and we worked our
asses on. I got strong, like really
(04:24):
strong. Also on a side note here,
because this was a really important and pivotal time for
me and it shaped a lot of how I interact with clients and how I
coach. I was very uncomfortable in the
gym, but because my dad was there to support me and shield
me from uncomfortable conversations and hold space for
(04:45):
me, I kept going. And I learned that having
someone hold space for me in uncomfortable situations was
critical to me growing. And I think about this a lot
when I'm working with my clientsand it's my goal always to be
that person for someone else, tohold space for them, to allow
(05:07):
them to grow in a bubble of support.
It changed my life and it changes a lot of people's lives
and I love what I do for that reason.
While we were lifting weights, Igot invited to join the Canadian
National Powerlifting team and Iwon nationals a few times and I
even won Worlds once. And what happened with my
(05:30):
wrestling during this time is that I found my fight literally.
I was battling heavy stuff, lifting weights, overcoming
serious challenges with my body in the gym everyday.
There's a certain kind of grit that's developed when you do
this over and over again. I wasn't there for a light
(05:54):
sportsman like experience. Yeah, I went in fighting and I
had the strength to move my opponents around and I went from
being last place for a full year, OK, last place.
There were dozens of people entered in my weight class and I
was the last. I went to winning provincials
both as an individual and as a team.
(06:16):
Women started approaching me in the gym asking if I could train
them, and I did. I trained anyone who would ask
and I loved it. I meet them after work with
their programs and show them howto use the equipment, how to use
their bodies and help them live in bodies that they enjoyed.
I was working full time as a millwright.
(06:37):
This is not cabinetry. When people hear millwright,
they think about mills and woodwork.
These are stationary mechanics and they work on things like oil
rigs, portable fracking units infactories.
They're a Jack of all trades. And that's what I did.
I was welding, doing electrical hydraulics and troubleshooting
(07:00):
systems during the day. The job was loud, physical, and
it was a hard hat, steel toe boots, big machinery kind of
world. And while I was good at it, I
felt like I was wasting my time,and not literally like the time
of the day, but my time, as in my time here on earth.
(07:23):
So all day at work I'd be doing my thing, and then I'd clock out
and go train people in the evenings, and that's when I
really felt like me. And at the time, the movement I
knew best was powerlifting, big lives, heavyweight and with my
(07:43):
feet Burnley planted on the ground.
Wrestling had taught me grit, but it had not taught me
lightness. And that changed when I met my
husband in 2008. His background is Muay Thai
kickboxing, and you should know that.
I am not talking about the localrec center gloves hanging from
(08:05):
the mirror with the gold accent to their T-shirts kind of guy.
He's like the real deal. He fought professionally and is
hands down the most athletic person that I've ever met.
Training with him introducing meto a whole new world of
movement, body weight, strength,balance, agility, control.
(08:27):
We focus on using the strength Ihad in smarter and more
efficient ways. This training experience taught
me a lot. After just four months, I had
cut my hiking time down. Listen to this in half.
What used to take me 4 hours wastaking me two hours and I felt
(08:48):
amazing. What doesn't get talked about
enough when people are into lifting really heavy weights is
the pain. I was having all kinds of pain.
My back was sore, my neck was sore, my hip was sore.
The body I had no more soreness,no more stiff neck, no aching
back, my hips and shoulders feltstrong and stable, my cardio was
(09:10):
dialed in and I felt unstoppable.
That feeling of being able to dowhatever I wanted to do with the
drop of the hat, being physically and athletically
capable of doing whatever it wasthat my mind dreamed up was so
cool. And that is what I love to bring
(09:31):
to my clients lives. At first I was worried that I
was going to lose the muscle that I build, especially in my
arms and my clues. But that didn't happen.
In fact, the opposite happened. My figure became more balanced
because I was doing functional movements.
Imagine that. That makes a lot of sense when
(09:52):
you hear it out loud. When you're doing functional
movements and moving in a way that your body is designed to do
an imbalanced way, of course your body is going to be more
visibly balanced. In 2009, my husband and I moved
from Calgary to Vancouver and for the first time I made
fitness my full time job. But that same year, everything
(10:16):
changed for me and I learned some very valuable lessons that
have impacted how I coach clients.
I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease and I was incredibly
sick, and I spent the next few years in and out of hospitals
and sometimes barely hanging. I almost lost my life.
(10:38):
This experience reshaped everything that I thought I knew
about fitness. I'd always lived in this all in,
do everything all the time. What is capacity?
Let's just do absolutely everything I can get my mind
around doing, and my body will just do it.
It's what my mind wants to do. My body will follow soon.
(11:00):
But having Crohn's and being sick forced me to slow down.
I had to stop treating it like amachine and start treating it
like a partner. And that shift was humbling and
it was hard and it gave me a deeper empathy for my clients.
I understood for the first time what it was like to truly not
(11:24):
have the spoons to do all the things that they have to do and
the need to adjust physical intensity.
I got hired at one of the top personal training studios in the
city and it was such a blast. I worked with high level
athletes, seniors, weekend warriors and total beginners and
(11:46):
I really loved it. They worked at this facility for
a couple of years in Vancouver. There are large personal
training centers that are set upfor independent personal
trainers and they house 406080 personal trainers and all of
their clients. The trainers that go to these
(12:09):
facilities as independent trainers are not the ones that
you're going to run into at a rec center.
They just finished their weekendcertificate or someone that has
playing soccer and they lift some weights in their garage and
now they think they're going to show you how to change your
life. These are true professionals
that know what they're doing. I went to one of these personal
(12:31):
training facilities where I was surrounded by the very best
personal trainers in a city thatis known to be active and thus
the personal training industry is saturated and these folks
were the best of the very best. I got to work with alongside
(12:52):
them, shadow them. I learned so much from my peers
in this time and really honed inmy training style.
I love the variety of humans that I was able to work with and
they taught me so much about adjusting workout intensity,
layering exercises, adapting workouts so that they weren't
(13:16):
too sore to engage in their lifeafterwards, and also being able
to appropriately assess where someone's exertion level should
be for them to get to their goals.
I've logged over 20,000 in person client training hours and
many more online coaching hours.Great coaching is not just about
(13:39):
pushing hard, it's about knowinghow to challenge someone and
also make them feel supported. It's designing sessions that
build momentum, restore energy and people forward, and not just
make them sweat and giving them something that spills over into
every part of their life. By 2015, I was finally in
(13:59):
remission and I knew exactly what I wanted to celebrate a
German Shepherd puppy. As a kid, I was terrified of
German Shepherds and that changed.
My mom brought one home. This dog's name was Martha.
She was culled from the RCMP forest and she was intense,
(14:20):
eager and completely captivating, and her and I spent
hours exploring together. From that point on, I knew I
wanted a dog of my own someday. Enter Hazel.
She was my remission gift. She came from Schutzenlein.
When I saw her parents working with their handlers, I remember
(14:41):
thinking, they can do that, so can she.
And if they can do that, so can I.
Of course. Y'all.
I quickly learned what it means to live with a teenage German
Shepherd and I threw myself intotraining.
I found the best local trainers that I could.
(15:04):
I stuck to them like glue and absorbed everything that I
could. And along the way, I made some
incredible friends and many of them became clients.
Agility handlers, IGP handlers and helpers.
Nose work and obedience folks and I studied their sports,
trained their bodies and it was a really really cool time.
(15:26):
They come to me with sports specific injuries and or
movement issues and I'd adapt when I knew to meet these needs
and over and over again we tweakand test until we got it just
right. With the IGP helpers I work with
we focus on rotational and anti rotational core strength and
they also need to be able to drop into squats quickly to
(15:50):
absorb force of their dogs and also do that with a load coming
from the front. So we play a lot with cable
systems and squads and split squads and doing rows and doing
them on balance pieces. Shoulder stability became
another rabbit hole that I dove into for these folks so they
(16:12):
could resist impact from the dogand keep their shoulder safe.
Agility handlers had a differentset of challenges.
These women primarily were very active people.
They walk their dogs all the time, they did agility a couple
times a week, they trialled regularly and for them, they
(16:34):
thought that they had a really good fitness routine that was
dialed in. There is a huge difference
between having an active lifestyle and being fit for the
sport demands that your dog sports.
Asking of you and The women who came to work with me were
struggling with deceleration, direction changes and sustaining
(16:55):
their speed and control throughout a run.
Most of them had good forward moving power, but their
eccentric string was underdeveloped and that lack of
control was costing them time and creating injuries and making
obstacles hard to execute. We worked a lot on single leg
(17:17):
string, we worked a lot on the control when they're lowering
from these different positions. We worked a lot on again
rotational and anti rotational core stuff brought into play
more thoracic or rib cage mobility so they could connect
with their dog with more ease and all that stuff worked super
(17:37):
well. We also played a lot with ladder
drills and doing other footwork in the gym that would help them
have lighter footwork when they were on course.
I kept hearing the same story. My dog biz, my dog bad.
My dog's so amazing, and I thinkto myself, you are too.
(18:00):
Dog handlers are some of the most passionate, persistent, and
dedicated people I've ever met, but they're also some of the
worst at prioritizing themselves.
And I get it. After a long day of work,
leaving your dog's :) to go train yourself for an hour can
feel and be impossible. And missing a morning walk to
(18:23):
squeeze in a workout can be so guilt ridden it's not even worth
doing. This is one of the reasons that
I'm such a huge advocate for home based training for a lot of
handlers. It gives a much better balance,
more FaceTime with the dog, and you get time to take care of
yourself. Then COVID happened and the
(18:45):
world shut down and I started sharing simple workout videos on
my Facebook profile. I was in this place where I was
feeling like there's got to be something that I can do to help
the people that I know. For me, when life gets hard, I
(19:06):
always lean heavy into my workouts.
Having that consistent injectionof endorphins, that routine,
that system in place when everything else feels chaotic
has always kept me on the balance, and I was hopeful that
I'd be able to give that to other people, too.
(19:27):
Shade Weitzel. She's become a good friend of
mine. She reached out saying that she
want to do that kind of thing, and she was the first person
that I coached online that started in March or April of
2020. And that's really where Canine
Handler Fitness started. Next week I'll share what
(19:49):
happened after CHF launched, what I've learned, where it's
going, and how we keep building this together, and I will see
you then. Thanks so much for being here
with me today and choosing to spend this time investing in
yourself. I hope you feel encouraged to
(20:10):
take action. Even the smallest steps for will
add up in ways you cannot even imagine yet if this episode gave
you something to think about or lifted you up.
Please share it with your friend.
You really never know who might need these tools today.
For more information, practical tools, and resources to help you
(20:32):
get stronger and confident both in and out of the ring, head on
over to caninehandlefitness.com.You can also find him all the
circles under the same name. So come on over and say hi.
I'm here to help you build the skills, knowledge, and believe
you need to reach your goals. Keep going, keep learning, and
(20:52):
most of all, keep showing up foryourself.
You've got this and I'll be herecheering for you every step of
the way.
Hey dog sport handlers, welcome to the canine Handler Fitness
podcast. I'm your host Liz Joyce, your go
to expert for all things dog sport fitness.
Whether you're running, agility,doing protection work, tackling,
search and rescue, handling a tough tugger, or just looking to
build Frank for a lifetime of adventures with your dog.
Remember, you are half the team and I'm here to help you stay
(00:23):
strong, mobile and injury free. Join me as I breakdown the
unique demands handler fitness, speed, strength and germs and
everything you need to perform at your best, both in and
activating. Let's stay strong, stay in the
game and keep doing what we love.
Let's dive in. Hey friends, and welcome back to
(00:46):
the podcast. I am Liz Joyce and in
celebration of my amazing students reaching 60,000
workouts last year alone on my fitness app 60,000, we're doing
a massive giveaway. And today we're going to be
(01:06):
talking about where Canine Handler Fitness even started and
it started with me. First, I want to tell you about
this giveaway because it's amazing.
Here's what's up for grabs. 1 lucky winner is going to get a
full year of the All Access Pass2 coaching sessions from me.
(01:29):
They're also going to get six months of access to Megan
Foster's FX Agility Community webinar and access to the
Patreon page for Mental Management for Handlers, which
is a collection of mental management coaches that
specialize in dog handling. If you haven't checked out
(01:50):
Heather's podcast, she was on a couple of episodes ago, so make
sure you go check that out. And either a beginner or
intermediate conditioning coursefrom Kelly Daniels of Hybrid Dog
Training. And they get to choose their own
colors of Fit Paws Target mat and also a duo disk from Fit
(02:11):
Paws. They're going to be coming on
with a podcast. Tell us all about their research
and development process and I can't wait to hear about it.
In total, it's over 1500 U.S. dollars.
That's up for grabs for one lucky person.
Here's how you can enter. You can sign up for my
newsletter. I will be sending out all the
entry forms there. You can check any of the link
(02:35):
trees in my socials. We'll also have the entry form
there. You can check the podcast notes.
And there are a number of ways to earn bonus entries.
And it's super simple when you head on over to that form.
So in celebration of 60,000 workouts in one year, I'm really
(02:56):
pumped to tell you about where did all this even come from and
actually who am I because reading a bio online doesn't
really give the whole picture. So I'm excited to dive into this
stuff with you and let's grab your coffee and take our dogs
for a walk and read. Mind we're going back to high
school. I joined the wrestling team when
(03:18):
I was in high school. I was the only girl on the team
for half of it. I was about 115 lbs and I was
going up against guys that outweighed me by a minimum of 30
lbs and one was over 200 lbs heavier than I was and I was
losing like hard in practice andat meats.
(03:41):
I wasn't discouraged about this,but I was hissed and I didn't
want out. I wanted in, and I needed to be
better to do that, so I pivoted.I started lifting weights every
weekday morning with my dad before school.
(04:01):
We'd get up at 5:00 AM, get our coffee and our thermoses, and
get our asses down to the gym. We were doing a traditional
powerlifting split of specific lifts and one focus body part,
sometimes the secondary muscle group per day, and we worked our
asses on. I got strong, like really
(04:24):
strong. Also on a side note here,
because this was a really important and pivotal time for
me and it shaped a lot of how I interact with clients and how I
coach. I was very uncomfortable in the
gym, but because my dad was there to support me and shield
me from uncomfortable conversations and hold space for
(04:45):
me, I kept going. And I learned that having
someone hold space for me in uncomfortable situations was
critical to me growing. And I think about this a lot
when I'm working with my clientsand it's my goal always to be
that person for someone else, tohold space for them, to allow
(05:07):
them to grow in a bubble of support.
It changed my life and it changes a lot of people's lives
and I love what I do for that reason.
While we were lifting weights, Igot invited to join the Canadian
National Powerlifting team and Iwon nationals a few times and I
even won Worlds once. And what happened with my
(05:30):
wrestling during this time is that I found my fight literally.
I was battling heavy stuff, lifting weights, overcoming
serious challenges with my body in the gym everyday.
There's a certain kind of grit that's developed when you do
this over and over again. I wasn't there for a light
(05:54):
sportsman like experience. Yeah, I went in fighting and I
had the strength to move my opponents around and I went from
being last place for a full year, OK, last place.
There were dozens of people entered in my weight class and I
was the last. I went to winning provincials
both as an individual and as a team.
(06:16):
Women started approaching me in the gym asking if I could train
them, and I did. I trained anyone who would ask
and I loved it. I meet them after work with
their programs and show them howto use the equipment, how to use
their bodies and help them live in bodies that they enjoyed.
I was working full time as a millwright.
(06:37):
This is not cabinetry. When people hear millwright,
they think about mills and woodwork.
These are stationary mechanics and they work on things like oil
rigs, portable fracking units infactories.
They're a Jack of all trades. And that's what I did.
I was welding, doing electrical hydraulics and troubleshooting
(07:00):
systems during the day. The job was loud, physical, and
it was a hard hat, steel toe boots, big machinery kind of
world. And while I was good at it, I
felt like I was wasting my time,and not literally like the time
of the day, but my time, as in my time here on earth.
(07:23):
So all day at work I'd be doing my thing, and then I'd clock out
and go train people in the evenings, and that's when I
really felt like me. And at the time, the movement I
knew best was powerlifting, big lives, heavyweight and with my
(07:43):
feet Burnley planted on the ground.
Wrestling had taught me grit, but it had not taught me
lightness. And that changed when I met my
husband in 2008. His background is Muay Thai
kickboxing, and you should know that.
I am not talking about the localrec center gloves hanging from
(08:05):
the mirror with the gold accent to their T-shirts kind of guy.
He's like the real deal. He fought professionally and is
hands down the most athletic person that I've ever met.
Training with him introducing meto a whole new world of
movement, body weight, strength,balance, agility, control.
(08:27):
We focus on using the strength Ihad in smarter and more
efficient ways. This training experience taught
me a lot. After just four months, I had
cut my hiking time down. Listen to this in half.
What used to take me 4 hours wastaking me two hours and I felt
(08:48):
amazing. What doesn't get talked about
enough when people are into lifting really heavy weights is
the pain. I was having all kinds of pain.
My back was sore, my neck was sore, my hip was sore.
The body I had no more soreness,no more stiff neck, no aching
back, my hips and shoulders feltstrong and stable, my cardio was
(09:10):
dialed in and I felt unstoppable.
That feeling of being able to dowhatever I wanted to do with the
drop of the hat, being physically and athletically
capable of doing whatever it wasthat my mind dreamed up was so
cool. And that is what I love to bring
(09:31):
to my clients lives. At first I was worried that I
was going to lose the muscle that I build, especially in my
arms and my clues. But that didn't happen.
In fact, the opposite happened. My figure became more balanced
because I was doing functional movements.
Imagine that. That makes a lot of sense when
(09:52):
you hear it out loud. When you're doing functional
movements and moving in a way that your body is designed to do
an imbalanced way, of course your body is going to be more
visibly balanced. In 2009, my husband and I moved
from Calgary to Vancouver and for the first time I made
fitness my full time job. But that same year, everything
(10:16):
changed for me and I learned some very valuable lessons that
have impacted how I coach clients.
I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease and I was incredibly
sick, and I spent the next few years in and out of hospitals
and sometimes barely hanging. I almost lost my life.
(10:38):
This experience reshaped everything that I thought I knew
about fitness. I'd always lived in this all in,
do everything all the time. What is capacity?
Let's just do absolutely everything I can get my mind
around doing, and my body will just do it.
It's what my mind wants to do. My body will follow soon.
(11:00):
But having Crohn's and being sick forced me to slow down.
I had to stop treating it like amachine and start treating it
like a partner. And that shift was humbling and
it was hard and it gave me a deeper empathy for my clients.
I understood for the first time what it was like to truly not
(11:24):
have the spoons to do all the things that they have to do and
the need to adjust physical intensity.
I got hired at one of the top personal training studios in the
city and it was such a blast. I worked with high level
athletes, seniors, weekend warriors and total beginners and
(11:46):
I really loved it. They worked at this facility for
a couple of years in Vancouver. There are large personal
training centers that are set upfor independent personal
trainers and they house 406080 personal trainers and all of
their clients. The trainers that go to these
(12:09):
facilities as independent trainers are not the ones that
you're going to run into at a rec center.
They just finished their weekendcertificate or someone that has
playing soccer and they lift some weights in their garage and
now they think they're going to show you how to change your
life. These are true professionals
that know what they're doing. I went to one of these personal
(12:31):
training facilities where I was surrounded by the very best
personal trainers in a city thatis known to be active and thus
the personal training industry is saturated and these folks
were the best of the very best. I got to work with alongside
(12:52):
them, shadow them. I learned so much from my peers
in this time and really honed inmy training style.
I love the variety of humans that I was able to work with and
they taught me so much about adjusting workout intensity,
layering exercises, adapting workouts so that they weren't
(13:16):
too sore to engage in their lifeafterwards, and also being able
to appropriately assess where someone's exertion level should
be for them to get to their goals.
I've logged over 20,000 in person client training hours and
many more online coaching hours.Great coaching is not just about
(13:39):
pushing hard, it's about knowinghow to challenge someone and
also make them feel supported. It's designing sessions that
build momentum, restore energy and people forward, and not just
make them sweat and giving them something that spills over into
every part of their life. By 2015, I was finally in
(13:59):
remission and I knew exactly what I wanted to celebrate a
German Shepherd puppy. As a kid, I was terrified of
German Shepherds and that changed.
My mom brought one home. This dog's name was Martha.
She was culled from the RCMP forest and she was intense,
(14:20):
eager and completely captivating, and her and I spent
hours exploring together. From that point on, I knew I
wanted a dog of my own someday. Enter Hazel.
She was my remission gift. She came from Schutzenlein.
When I saw her parents working with their handlers, I remember
(14:41):
thinking, they can do that, so can she.
And if they can do that, so can I.
Of course. Y'all.
I quickly learned what it means to live with a teenage German
Shepherd and I threw myself intotraining.
I found the best local trainers that I could.
(15:04):
I stuck to them like glue and absorbed everything that I
could. And along the way, I made some
incredible friends and many of them became clients.
Agility handlers, IGP handlers and helpers.
Nose work and obedience folks and I studied their sports,
trained their bodies and it was a really really cool time.
(15:26):
They come to me with sports specific injuries and or
movement issues and I'd adapt when I knew to meet these needs
and over and over again we tweakand test until we got it just
right. With the IGP helpers I work with
we focus on rotational and anti rotational core strength and
they also need to be able to drop into squats quickly to
(15:50):
absorb force of their dogs and also do that with a load coming
from the front. So we play a lot with cable
systems and squads and split squads and doing rows and doing
them on balance pieces. Shoulder stability became
another rabbit hole that I dove into for these folks so they
(16:12):
could resist impact from the dogand keep their shoulder safe.
Agility handlers had a differentset of challenges.
These women primarily were very active people.
They walk their dogs all the time, they did agility a couple
times a week, they trialled regularly and for them, they
(16:34):
thought that they had a really good fitness routine that was
dialed in. There is a huge difference
between having an active lifestyle and being fit for the
sport demands that your dog sports.
Asking of you and The women who came to work with me were
struggling with deceleration, direction changes and sustaining
(16:55):
their speed and control throughout a run.
Most of them had good forward moving power, but their
eccentric string was underdeveloped and that lack of
control was costing them time and creating injuries and making
obstacles hard to execute. We worked a lot on single leg
(17:17):
string, we worked a lot on the control when they're lowering
from these different positions. We worked a lot on again
rotational and anti rotational core stuff brought into play
more thoracic or rib cage mobility so they could connect
with their dog with more ease and all that stuff worked super
(17:37):
well. We also played a lot with ladder
drills and doing other footwork in the gym that would help them
have lighter footwork when they were on course.
I kept hearing the same story. My dog biz, my dog bad.
My dog's so amazing, and I thinkto myself, you are too.
(18:00):
Dog handlers are some of the most passionate, persistent, and
dedicated people I've ever met, but they're also some of the
worst at prioritizing themselves.
And I get it. After a long day of work,
leaving your dog's :) to go train yourself for an hour can
feel and be impossible. And missing a morning walk to
(18:23):
squeeze in a workout can be so guilt ridden it's not even worth
doing. This is one of the reasons that
I'm such a huge advocate for home based training for a lot of
handlers. It gives a much better balance,
more FaceTime with the dog, and you get time to take care of
yourself. Then COVID happened and the
(18:45):
world shut down and I started sharing simple workout videos on
my Facebook profile. I was in this place where I was
feeling like there's got to be something that I can do to help
the people that I know. For me, when life gets hard, I
(19:06):
always lean heavy into my workouts.
Having that consistent injectionof endorphins, that routine,
that system in place when everything else feels chaotic
has always kept me on the balance, and I was hopeful that
I'd be able to give that to other people, too.
(19:27):
Shade Weitzel. She's become a good friend of
mine. She reached out saying that she
want to do that kind of thing, and she was the first person
that I coached online that started in March or April of
2020. And that's really where Canine
Handler Fitness started. Next week I'll share what
(19:49):
happened after CHF launched, what I've learned, where it's
going, and how we keep building this together, and I will see
you then. Thanks so much for being here
with me today and choosing to spend this time investing in
yourself. I hope you feel encouraged to
(20:10):
take action. Even the smallest steps for will
add up in ways you cannot even imagine yet if this episode gave
you something to think about or lifted you up.
Please share it with your friend.
You really never know who might need these tools today.
For more information, practical tools, and resources to help you
(20:32):
get stronger and confident both in and out of the ring, head on
over to caninehandlefitness.com.You can also find him all the
circles under the same name. So come on over and say hi.
I'm here to help you build the skills, knowledge, and believe
you need to reach your goals. Keep going, keep learning, and
(20:52):
most of all, keep showing up foryourself.
You've got this and I'll be herecheering for you every step of
the way.
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