The importance and versatility of a Foundation Exerise

Do you know what a Foundation Exercise is?

It’s an exercise that is reasonable easy to teach and for dogs to learn. And it establishes a set of behaviors and skills that the dog will use now and later in life. It will help them in other situations, allowing them to do much harder things. Even better, a Foundation Exercise can be used with puppies, geriatrics, and elite athletes.

One such Foundation Exercise is Cookie Dance. 

The rules are simple – feet stay square, nose follows the cookie.

The Goals of Cookie Dance

• Enhanced balance and proprioception

  • From puppies and geriatric dogs to athletes, Cookie Dance enhances body awareness decreasing the chance of injury

  • In patients with neurological challenges, Cookie Dance helps reset the nervous system to bring back optimum quality of life

• Strengthening stabilization muscles

  • Beneficial for all dogs, Cookie Dance strengthens the muscles that stabilize the joints in all four limbs as well as strengthening the core

• Weight shifting

  • Cookie Dance can be used post injury or surgery to create more even weight distribution

Watch the video below to see how Cookie Dance is performed and difficulty is increased with a 12-year-old Mastiff and a 4-year-old ninja athlete.

Want to make it a littler harder?

Changing the surface the dog is working on immediately increases or decreases the difficulty.

• Flat stable surfaces - easiest

• Mildly unstable surfaces

• Difficult unstable surfaces

• Stabilized movable surfaces

• Non-stabilized movable surfaces - most difficult

A good exercise program teaches you a lot of simple activities, allowing you to tie them together into an exercise that is tailored to the specific needs of a dog. Ideally you want exercises that challenge every area of the body and enhance balance, proprioception, and cognitive function.  Cookie Dance is one of the simple foundational exercises needed to create such an exercise.

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Join us in learning more about exercises in our up coming course Optimum Geriatric Exercises for Veterinary Professionals as a debut to more in-depth education. Sign up now to get on our waitlist for the course. When we launch there will only be 30 Gold Level spots, and our waitlist members will have first access to these spots. Currently we have over 80 people signed up!  Join them and sign up for this exciting course.

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