05/22/2026
Food for thought for your competition dog. Once you understand what is being said in this post and adjust your training program accordingly, you also get variety and a well adjusted Team.
I recently saw a post about the “bounce effect” from an agility competitor, and it really got me thinking about how often we see the exact same thing across dog training and dog sports as a whole. While the conversation was centered around agility, the concept itself applies far beyond just one sport.
Originally, this idea comes from the horse racing world. I recently listened to an interview with Cherie DeVaux, Kentucky Derby winner Golden Tempo’s trainer, discussing how carefully trainers manage workload and recovery to have horses peak at the exact right moment. This is how.
Top trainers are experts at conditioning horses to peak for specific races, and it all comes down to how they manage workload leading up to major events and how much recovery matters afterward. The goal is not to do the most possible work right before a big performance. It’s to have the athlete physically, mentally, and neurologically fresh at the exact right time.
The same thing applies to dogs.
If you want a dog to truly peak at a major event, certification, trial, or deployment, the management BEFORE and AFTER matters just as much as the event itself. A lot of people get both wrong.
One of the biggest mistakes handlers make is assuming they need to cram in more work right before something important. More repetitions. More drilling. More pressure. More “fixing” things at the last minute trying to squeeze in one more good session before the event.
But by that point, the dog already knows what they know. You are not building a new dog in the final few days. More often than not, you are simply adding fatigue.
That magical “ON” performance everybody wants at a big event? It costs the dog something physically, mentally, and neurologically. Peak performances often require higher adrenaline output, deeper nervous system activation, and greater physical and cognitive effort than average performances do. And that’s exactly why deloading and recovery BEFORE major events matters so much.
The best trainers are intentionally managing workload so the dog shows up fresh instead of already overloaded. Fresh minds and fresh bodies perform better.
Whenever I have a student take a break for a few weeks, something I frequently hear upon their return is, “We haven’t trained in ages, but today my dog was better than ever.” Often, they’re seeing the bounce effect in action.
In both nosework and professional detection, people frequently underestimate how demanding the work really is. Good searching requires constant problem solving, environmental processing, odor discrimination, decision making under arousal, physical navigation, sustained mental engagement, and the ability to work independently while still remaining connected to the handler.
Then add in difficult environments, travel, long operational days, inaccessible hides, blank areas, contamination issues, weather variables, and constantly changing search areas. That adds up fast.
For some high drive dogs, the impact can be easy to miss because they genuinely love the work. Many of these dogs will continue searching through exhaustion, stress, soreness, and mental fatigue long after they’re no longer performing at their best. They still LOOK like they’re working, but that does not mean they’re actually working well anymore.
That’s when we start to see subtle changes show up: unexplained misses, difficulty sourcing odor, walking odor repeatedly without committing, frantic or disconnected searching, environmental distraction, slower processing, frustration, reduced independence, and mistakes that suddenly don’t make sense for that dog.
Sometimes the dog still technically passes or finds hides well enough that people overlook what’s happening underneath the surface. The decline gets written off as inconsistency, distraction, handling issues, or random mistakes instead of recognizing that the dog may simply be mentally and physically overloaded.
But what we’re actually seeing much of the time are signs of unresolved fatigue. That does not necessarily mean the dog is injured. In many cases, it simply means the body and nervous system have not fully recovered from the previous workload yet.
That recovery piece matters just as much as the preparation beforehand, which leads us to the AFTER.
Sometimes after a deployment, trial weekend, intensive training block, or just a mentally heavy stretch of life, the best thing a dog can get is actual recovery time. Not more drilling. Not jumping immediately back into hard work. Not trying to train through a newly discovered problem.
Real recovery.
Let them be dogs. Free movement. Sleep. Sniffing. Swimming. Hiking. Playing. Decompression walks. Time existing without constant expectations or pressure.
Because when we give dogs room to truly recover, they often come back clearer, more confident, more thoughtful, and more capable again. Not because they did more, but because they finally had enough room to recover from everything they were already carrying.
We have a duty to listen to the dog. The best dogs are not always the dogs doing the most.
A lot of the time, they’re the dogs being managed the best.
