The benefits of sports training
There’s a sport for every type of dog. Here are a few options: agility, disc dog, flyball, freestyle, canicross, dock diving, herding, mushing, tracking, trailing, rally obedience, weight pulling, nose work, rally-o, earthdog, lure coursing etc. The list goes on! All these sports are fantastic exercises that challenge the mind and the body. For starters, they help your dog stay healthy, get rid of excess energy (a tired dog is a good dog!), strengthen muscles and increase coordination. They’ll also get you in better shape, increase confidence in each other, and strengthen the bond between you and your dog.
How a dog health monitor can help
If you’re serious about your dog’s sports training, platforms such as FitBark help you to be better informed and motivated so you can:
- Precisely quantify physical activity
- Help your dog achieve his ideal weight
- Avoid overtraining ahead of a competition
- Create an exercise plan with future activity targets
- Monitor compliance with an exercise or training plan that you or your trainer designed
- In team sports, share activity data, analytics and best practices with other team members
Our proprietary metric: BarkPoints
The primary metric FitBark tracks is a proxy for how active your dog is over time – from your dog’s point of view. If we chose distance as our primary metric, a 1 mile walk would be counted the same way regardless of whether your dog is running or walking. If we chose steps, your dog would get credit for fewer steps as he runs (rather than walks) to cover the same distance. This is why we developed a proprietary metric in line with best veterinarian practices, which also is the foundation for accurately estimating calorie expenditure.
