Maryna Ozuna: Proprioception and Learning Capacity

Maryna Ozuna nee' Sheryl Studley, B.S. Biology Vassar College; J.D. Thomas Jefferson School of Law, IACP # 1372 CDT (International Association of Canine Professionals), certified member of NADOI (National Association of Dog Obedience Instructors) is the owner of the Arizona Doggy Dude Ranch training center, the founder, and principal practitioner of the Canine Kinaesthetics (tm) system of bodywork, and the founder and principal instructor of the Movement Markers (tm) clinics.

In this conversation, Maryna and I explore proprioceptive mapping in dogs (and people) and how it directly influences learning capacity. We unpack the roles of collection, balance, and recruitment in motor control, and how these concepts intersect with drive states and emotional regulation. As always, we return to one of my favorite subjects: the profound role of touch in shaping safety, awareness, and connection.

This was a truly fascinating discussion, offering eye-opening insights into how modern dogs may need more support than we realize. At the root of learning, confidence, and relationship is a healthy, functional, and coordinated body—because how a dog moves and feels in their body shapes how they learn and engage with the world.

You can find Maryna Ozuna at these websites and socials:

www.azdoggyduderanch.com
www.dogbodycare.com

IG: Movement Markers

Facebook: Movement Markers

Please also check out my new project: Center for Canine Somatics where I will be giving courses like:

Co-Regulating with Your Dog

and webinars such as: 

Foundations for Canine Health: Exploring the Nervous System

Transcript

Leah Lykos: 0:03

Welcome back friends to another episode of the Somatic Hound podcast. Today I am very excited to speak with Marina Azuna. I hope I said your name right. Yes. I found Marina on Facebook on a group where somebody linked to an article you had written on the five-week puppy syndrome. And that was fascinating to me. And then I started reading your other blog posts and realizing that you do all this really fascinating work with dogs, not just with behavior, but um as it relates to proprioception and balance and movement. And um, so if you want to give a brief introduction for for anyone who doesn't know who you are and and what your work consists of, I'd love to just get you to introduce yourself a little bit.

Maryna Ozuna: 1:01

Sure. Um let me take us back a little bit. Um my dad was the coach, so I've been involved with um, I'm 71 now, so been around for quite some time. Um, but I've been involved with sports and athletes since I was a kid. And I just thought it was normal dinner table conversation to talk about the orientation of the shoulders in the spin of a skater or or the inclination of the legs of a skier or the inclination of the hips of a soccer player. I just thought that was like what everybody knew at six years old. So fast forward, um I'm uh um my parents were first generation to go to college, so I was of the generation that was expected to go to graduate school. And things like bodywork weren't a profession in those days. And even in the sports world, sports therapists wasn't a profession back in those days. So um went on, you know, got my uh biology degree at Vassar. So, you know, very much trained in the biological sciences, and then went on not to medical school, but to law school. So, again, trained in the analytical sciences, though, and um back in San Diego in graduate school was introduced to alternative health modalities that were just starting up in California. The the very first book on massage, the art of massage, um, came out in the in the mid in the early 70s when I was in college. So all of that sort of evolution of bodywork and alternative therapies as legitimate modalities was just birthing when I was a young person. So I came into the world of animals, um, starting with the horses, through the sports portal. So I got very involved in the world of endurance riding after graduate school and crewed for various people and started working on the horses and studying the few people out there who were doing work on the horses. And I would, you know, in any given race, it was sort of the height of the endurance world in California at the time, in Northern California. So I was very, very lucky, and I was lucky on another level in that I had a little silky terrier that um was a puppy mill puppy. I didn't know anything about puppy mills at the time. I went into the mall to buy a suit to go be a professional and came out with a puppy. So um, and Patches lived to be 18 years and traveled the world with me. So um, not too bad for a puppy mill puppy. But we didn't even know such a thing existed back then. But it happened that the Watsonville Dog Training Club in the county that I was living in was the second largest dog training club in America at the time, second only to Bill Keeler's club in Long Beach. So I just happened to be in the right place at the right time for the height of things in the horse world and the height of things in the dog world. So um in in the endurance world, I I began doing things like you know, we would have like 250 horses in a ride. And if I was working with the vets, volunteering as a vet secretary, we would have like four to five vet checks, and maybe more, including pre-ride vet check, and post-ride vet check. So I would be sitting at the side of an experienced endurance vet watching, you know, like we might have had three or four vets. So let's say of that 200 horses, well, I got to see 50. But so I got to see 50 six times through the eyes of that experienced veterinarian and take notes. And I did that like a couple weekends a month for years, years and years and years. So I built a vocal movement between that and all the work I had done with my dad over the years. I built a vast movement vocabulary that still to this day is like my ABCs. I I learned my my how to play the the piano, so to speak, my scales in the endurance world. But I as I developed you know my own protocols and worked with more and more horses, I had the hunger to learn. And so I just got my hands on everything, and I was graced to be allowed to touch everything from show jumpers to dressage horses to eventing horses to cutting horses to Clydesdales, to ponies, to stock horses, to, you know, a million Arabians, and uh to thoroughbreds, to working on the track, to being backside on the track and working with the trainers. And I just I'm just one of those people that if I'm fascinated by something, I just pursue it until I grind myself into dust. But um it just gave me this vast, vast vocabulary in my hands. And again, at the at the time I entered that whole world through the performance sports portal, but at the same time there were um innovators like Linda Tellington Jones discussing the fact that body instabilities led to behavioral instabilities, and I was certainly finding that in my own hands, and so there came a time when I was asked to consult in the dog world, and then that rapidly um became obvious in the dog world was the huge correlation between what I was finding under my hands, and then as discussion would unfold, what behavioral problems were going on. Flash forward through many evolutions, and we can come back to some of the pieces of the puzzle. But nowadays it's almost always uh although I would say more and more it's sort of a balance again back into the sports world. But probably for the last 20 years, the entry porthole has been dog behavior, that that became the red flags to me looking for body issues or structural irregularities or movement irregularities. So it flipped all the way to the other side of the coin for the last 20 years of you know teaching people when they were reporting behavioral problems to start looking beyond, you know, which quadrant do we fix to. Maybe we're not about quadrants, maybe we need to have a functioning body and a functioning brain before we can even get to the training equation, whatever aspect of the training equation you're going to access. Let's start with having a foundation that we can train to, not just assuming that this is a trainable entity. And since I'll just add as a caveat and then flip it back to you, um, you know, since COVID, we're seeing astronomically more behavior-body-linked issues because of and not just the lack of socialization with COVID puppies, which we've almost outgrown, although many of those dogs are are, you know, only three, four, or five years old, and we're still wrestling with the aftermath of those developmental issues. But even more than that, or equal to that, I should say, we're seeing huge, enormous issues of lack of perperceptive development. So dogs are just in flat backyards, they're not being taken out, and sort of it's a complex puzzle because one of the few things that people could do in during COVID was to get their dogs out in the woods and go for a walk because they'd be separated. The problem being that everybody with their untrained dogs started wandering through the woods so that, and many of them with their dogs off leash with no recall. So many of us have stopped going to some of the places that we habitually used to develop the dogs because now there are potential issues of aggression and dog dog aggression issues to avoid. So it's become a bit of a quagmire in terms of developing young dogs correctly, fairly, in a balanced way, both mentally and physically. So just seeing a huge amount of pups or young dogs coming into training in what we would call per perceptive deficit. They have no idea where their body is, they have no idea their relationship of their body to you, to a doorway, to a wall. Um, and so lots of um what we may consider bad behaviors that aren't coming from malintent, but from being clueless in Seattle about how to problem solve anything, whether it's mentally or physically. So I'll stop there, and I know you had some avenues you wanted us to go down. So let me toss it back to you at this point in time.

Leah Lykos: 11:54

Okay, yeah, I appreciate that so much. Um, just giving a really in-depth background. It's interesting that you mentioned the work with the horses because as I was reading your blog posts and your Facebook posts, first of all, your vocabulary is very extensive, and some of it's very technical. So I had to look up some of the words, but it reminded me almost of um like dressage work with horses, and made me think of some of those concepts because the way I was taught from my mentor, uh, a lot of the exercises and therapeutic things we were doing with the dogs actually correlated with some of the same concepts that are in dressage work, like collection and supplements. And so I've had like a little bit of an introduction to some of that stuff, certainly not the type of background that you have, but it really fascinates me, especially since I work mainly with behavioral cases, and I see these dogs who are like really confused about how to use their feet and like even jump up on a little platform. And that to me tells me the their proprioceptive mapping, like you said, it's there's a deficiency there. They don't have the confidence to even jump up on a little box, then something's not right. And then you can't really expect them to function in the world if they can't even move their body, right? So one of the things that I started doing with my dogs is getting them out in the woods walking along creeks where there's boulders and they're like climbing over boulders and like trying to make sure they're, you know, they're athletically able to do that before you just like let them go totally wild. Like you don't want them to injure themselves, but slowly building up their muscles and their coordination and then walking over these uneven surfaces and even like using uh a tree trunk as a balance beam and actually doing all this stuff with them. So I'm also improving my own capabilities, and it's extremely regulating if you can, like you said, find a place out in nature where you're not going to be running into a bunch of off-leash dogs. We're really lucky we have a sniff spot that um is basically somebody's just really long driveway alongside of a creek where there are like swimming holes. And so we go there, my dogs are off-leash, and we don't have to worry about running into other dogs. But I feel like that's one of the most therapeutic things that I've done with my own dogs, and I really encourage my clients to just get their dogs out into nature and onto these different surfaces and environments. So, yeah, if you want to expand on that.

Maryna Ozuna: 14:53

I love all of that. So let me start at the top. I took some notes while while you were talking. Much of what I do comes from the horse world. I'm like the bridge between those two worlds. It used to be like at my very first ICP conference, 0.85% of us were also horse people. So the vocabulary flowed between one world and the other, and it didn't require translation or explanation because the vast majority of us were of a foot in both worlds. Now, if we're lucky if 15% of all dog trainers also have a horse background, so it's completely reversed. And so part of the role that I play is bringing those old-fashioned concepts from one world back into the world of modern dog training. That's precisely the origins behind the clinics, the movement markers clinics is was creating a curriculum to explain those concepts. So let me just give one brief example from that, or well, I'll give two actually. But you mentioned the dressage and and the term collection. Well, for people watching, collection is when an animal is really using their hindquarters and pushing off their hindquarters to um come forward, go over a jump, take a retrieve. But also in the most simplest of exercises of walking by our side, when a dog rocks back into a sit and isn't lunging forward, or if a dog just stops in balance as opposed to pulling forward, that's collection. That's basic collection. And for so many of these behavioral challenge dogs, especially dogs that are reacting forward or pulling forward, you know, I see a little way too much pressure being applied to move them back into position when they don't have the capacity to collect into position and maintain their bodies in an unaroused state, in a neutral behavioral state, in the correct physical posture and in the correct mental posture. So all of these concepts that we use here at the ranch and in the clinics around helping dogs to find their body and find their balance points are critical, not just for advanced sports stuff, but for the most basic of behaviors around the house or out on the sidewalk or wherever we go. They impact every aspect of basic dog behavior. Because I'm of the of the school of thought of what do we want the dog to do instead of that behavior? Well, we want the dog to rack back and pay attention to the owner, right? Well, they can't do that if they don't have the body and the brain in the right postures in order to be able to do that. And 90% of the pups and young dogs, even if there's no reactivity that are coming into training now, have no ability to do that whatsoever. Now, with respect to what you're saying about taking them out in the woods, 20 years ago it used to be I'm very lucky, I sit on 50 acres. So I uh it's not completely dog fenced, but I'm pretty intact from any visitors, so other than some occasional wildlife. So 20 years ago when I was starting the dogs, it took one to three days out on the trail on a on a long line, they all get started on a long line, um, to do what I might refer to as, and what you're referring to as a perperceptive reset, where we're, if we think of perperception like lights on an old-fashioned switchboard, that as the dog moves over uneven ground, we're stimulating all those perperceptive receptors in all of the motor joints of the body. So we're essentially turning on light switches in the brain. The perperceptive system, for those who may never play in this realm, is a completely separate yet linked neurological system. It is its own intact neurological system, but it is certainly obviously linked into the rest of the neurological system and the brain. But when we move dogs over uneven ground that haven't had a lot of exposure to that, we're lighting up lights on the switchboard that may not have been previously activated. So anymore, that process usually takes me about seven to eight days, sometimes ten days or two weeks now. So when you hit that moment, it's like you literally see the lights turn on in a dog's eyes, like all of a sudden they're home. They're like they're home. So now I have a brain I can train to. And I'm I'm starting patterning way before that. I'm starting simple patterning, but I don't do any short leash work until that light comes on. So I see a lot of trainers trying to pattern behaviors they want, like leash walking or don't leave lunge forward or sits or downs when there's no lights lit on, lit up. The switchboard's not on. You've got nothing to train to. Me, I do what you do. I am I'm training out on the on the long line. You know, I'm doing probably anywhere from 30 to 50 reps of gallop out and come back to me for a reward. Gallop out, come back to me for a reward. So we are setting up that dopamine bank account for sure. You know, I'm not waiting until all the lights come on to start building that bank account. But once the lights come on, now I got a dog. You know, now I've got a real dog. It's back, it's home, it's in its body, it's in its brain. So yeah, lots of lots of thoughts on on what you just brought up. So back to back to you.

Leah Lykos: 21:42

Okay, yeah, we could go in a bunch of different directions. Um, it's just exciting to me to be able to talk to somebody about collection because it's I I find it difficult to explain to people that collection will help us teach the dog not only to sit down, stay, but also to heal because it's a moving collection. And it's really about how the dog is carrying himself uh respective to his center of gravity. And then you, of course, just want the dog to sit and stay and not pull. So I don't know if I even need to be explaining all that to them or just kind of showing them mechanically how to get the dog to do that. But I think what you're pointing to is that we're missing this foundational piece where the dog is almost dissociated from their body and not able to learn. And also their emotional capacity is very low. So the thresholds are very difficult to work with because their capacity to deal with stress is so low. Um, I think they go over threshold way too easily. So I'm all about building capacity. The other thing that I've noticed that's the really key now to my work, especially teaching people how to help their dogs, is actually teaching them how to touch the dog. I call it touch without talk because I really want them to be quiet and have it be a moment of co-regulation between the person and the dog and to sort of like get their own breathing under control before they start touching the dog and like stimulating the dog. I want it to be calming, but I I'm really interested in your body work, you uh, the way that you do your manual therapy. I know you have a background in craniosacral. So if we want to maybe go in that direction.

Maryna Ozuna: 23:40

Yeah, let's pause a minute on the bridge because you brought up something really exciting to me. And um, and let's take a minute to go down that that road because um you talked about threshold and capacity. Um, and then in answer to your question, no, I don't explain all of this just to most clients, some I do, but more I would say, and that'll that leads me to our our bridge here, that that being able to rock back into position changes where their brain is at. So that's the other piece here is that it's not about just allowing the body to be in the position we want it to be in, but it shifts drives and it shifts arousal levels. When a dog has the ability to balance back, they're moving out of defense drive. So if that dog was not just in prey drive forward lunging, most dogs are typically not in full defense drive, contrary to what most people believe. They're flipping between prey drive and defense drive and prey drive and defense drive. But if they come back into a more neutral physical posture, we're not just putting them in the nice beside me position that we want. We're shifting gears in their brain. We're literally shifting them out of defense drive into pack drive. Now, if someone's got a death grip on the leash and keeping the leash loaded while they're at our side, no, we're not getting that shift. But that's the whole point of developing the body into soft neutral postures, is that that allows us to gear shift down out of the wrong drive and back into the drive we want, whether it's pack or prey. So these abilities, these advanced concepts of movement and balance. And one of the things we teach in our clinics is how to recognize point of balance. Is the dog in neutral? Are they on the forehand? Are they, you know, neutral? Are they on the hindquarters? Where are they? And what are the implications of that? Just like a horse, most young dogs are 60% on the forehand. And so when you ask them to stop, they have to like really organize their bodies to get back into this position. But also dogs that are ingression are on the forehand. So teaching them how to move back into a more balanced posture helps to connect the neural circuits to downshift out of that gear as well. So every every single step of this movement and posture and balance and touch equation involves both pieces of the puzzle. And one of the things that we do here in clinics is really make those explicit. Like we'll stop and I'll ask, all right, where's the point of balance in this dog at this moment? What drive is this dog in? Where do we need him to be? So we start making all of those invisible pieces visible to people and building a common professional vocabulary around recognizing these issues rather than just correcting the dog because they're being an idiot and not responding to us. Are they being an idiot? Maybe so. I'm happy to acknowledge that. But are we going to move them from being an idiot to being balanced and focused by just, you know, correcting them out of it? Whether that's purely positive, throwing a trillion treats at them or an adverse correction, it doesn't matter. I don't care about the quadrants. What I care about is if that dog has no balanced place in their body to go to, it doesn't matter which quadrant we're using. They don't have the ability to recruit the information, regardless of which quadrant it comes from, regardless of which learning pathway it comes from, even if it's coming from my much more vast learning web than just, you know, one concept of learning. If they can't receive the information, it doesn't matter. So for me, at every stage of training, those juxtapositions between body and brain are critical. So before I get to the touch piece, your thoughts on thoughts on that from you.

Leah Lykos: 28:37

Yeah, I I try to look at it like dogs are really living in the moment with uh really no separation between their mind and body. So whatever they're doing physically is telling you what they're doing mentally. So yeah, even a slight shift forward is a huge deal, a huge deal. Or like when the ears prick forward. Or even like, hey, did you notice your dog's limping? Maybe they're in pain. Maybe that is inhibiting their ability to learn. And so teaching a little bit of observation of gait or um, yeah, these types of things where it's like, let's make sure the dog is healthy and functioning first, exactly what you said, that we need a functional body. We want to make sure they're as pain-free as possible. Obviously, as they age, they're gonna have aches and pains like we do. Um, but if there's a really obvious um like uh pacing instead of trotting, or, you know, I try to point that out and say that it might be okay, it might not be okay. Let's let's get checked out by, you know, a rehab specialist or a physical therapist or something. Because I'm not that advanced in my studies. I can like sort of notice it and be like, hmm, that might be an issue. Let's go to somebody, let's refer out to somebody who's an expert in that and can say, oh yes, actually there's hip dysplasia, or no, actually, this is just the way the dog moves. He's okay.

Maryna Ozuna: 30:21

Well, I'll give you a good example. We've had a couple in the recent recent history. Um, one of my colleagues contacted me. She had a dog in training who um they knew had some behavioral, you know, had some behavioral issues, but she had to um take it to the vet to have something done. I'm not remembering right offhand. And that she got the dog in the car at home reasonably okay, but after, you know, mild amounts of stress of dealing with whatever they had to deal with at the vet, which wasn't a very big thing, um, went to get the dog back in the car, and the dog was muzzled, thank, thankfully. Um, the dog just flipped out, just absolutely flipped out, and um came up the leash, you know, sunfishing, screaming, as full a protest as you could possibly get. So she contacted me right away and um said, I think we got something going on. So I had her film the dog coming out and back, and we ran a bunch of still pictures. And when we looked at the still pictures, the pattern on the back and the pattern of the muscle development was very askew. Not so that you'd see it from a distance if you weren't looking for it, but clearly showing up in the still pictures that we took top down or with the dog in a sit. And the videos were confirming irregularity in the gait, and so much so, and I had just had another colleague's very nice dog, but that we'd seen the same pattern on. And sure enough, when we ran the x-rays, mild dysplasia, three out of the four limbs, so two mild dysplasia in the hip and one mild dysplasia in the elbow. That's even if that's say only kicking up at a two-three on a scale of one to ten discomfort, that's three out of the four legs at a three on any given occasion. So my colleague was super familiar with my work and you know, was super aware when the dog freaked out to think about there being a physical component to the aggression. And this was interestingly enough, in terms of starting our conversation on the collection and balance, this dog couldn't sit at all. And it could, it could have huge difficulties to lie down. And so, you know, I saw some of some of that on video, and it was just a nightmare. I mean, the dog was just like, I can't, I can't do this, I just can't do this. And of course, when we got the x-rays, you know, the x-rays were not of sufficient severity that the dog couldn't do that, but the task of trusting someone enough to work through the discomfort to try and get to the position that was being asked of it, there wasn't enough trust in the brain pan or learning capacity at that time to work through the fear of the discomfort when it was asked to do something. So, you know, it completely informed our training program, and they've made huge progress with the dog, needless to say. And I think the dog is now on some pain, pain meds for the discomfort, and it's just you know, long way from home still with this particular dog, but on on on the pathway. So, yeah, I mean, we can see, I mean, that's a more severe case of what we see, but unfortunately, movement is being assessed less and less by the veterinarians, and I'll just toss in not because they're untrained or or not knowledgeable, but literally the way in which veterinarian offices are being constructed to maximize output, there's no there's very short hallways, there's literally no physical place unless they take the dogs out into the parking lot that's long enough to do gate evaluations. And so my vet regularly does them out in the parking lot, but not all vets do. And so literally the logistics of modern veterinary practice is contributing to a lack of um gate diagnosis and and subclinical lameness diagnosis, where the gate is irregular, but the dog isn't completely lame. So I'm working on solutions to that, but that's a that's a another little contributing factor. But um just to double back for for a second with respect to the proprioception, and then um I want to touch on your your touch component that you referred to. Um we do an enormous amount with reorganizing the brain here using both just the natural ground of the ranch, and we have a 24 obstacle proprioceptive course. And we do that, um so we do that in that that's a really specific per perception, perperceptive reorganization protocol, and we do that in hyper, hyper slow motion, one foot at a time. It's time consuming um to go through all 24 objects one foot at a time, but the mental and physical reorganization we see with just one go of that. We've taken to now when dogs are here, we do it every day, first thing in the morning, and the difference in their mental and physical capacity to just do that 20-minute exercise once a day, astronomical, astronomical, it's the equivalent of four weeks of training, one go on that 24 obstacle, because what we're doing by individuating the legs so that each leg is doing something different over any given obstacle, and is like adding a multiplier to all of those lights being lit up on the switchboard. And it's also because we're doing it in slow motion, we're also allowing new recruitment neurological pathways to form. So we're super, super strengthening the recruitment pathways from the hind end to the front end and from the hind end and the spine to the brain. So and that truly came out of all of the old books on jumping and developing a jumping horse, and the old cavalry books on cavaletti and all of the foundational evenness of gait exercise. I started playing with them 30 years ago, gosh, almost 40 years ago now. Um, and there was nothing in the dog world. Agility was just getting started. There there was nothing, the only thing that existed was cavalletti exercises from the horse world. So I stole them from there. And some of my obstacles are still my old horse's cavaletis. So um let me let me stop there before we jump over to the touch component, because um yeah, this the whole correlation between body and brain goes from the subtle to the to the severe, like the dog with three dysplastic legs.

Leah Lykos: 38:38

So right. Yeah, that's so cool. Um I really need to come to one of your clinics, or I don't know if you have any upcoming workshops, or I'd love to see that that course.

Maryna Ozuna: 38:58

Getting a little little up there for all the travel. So, and we have ever so much more capacity to do things here at the ranch. So come on out. Okay. It's bright, bright, clear, and sunny here.

Leah Lykos: 39:11

It's beautiful. Yeah, I definitely, I definitely need to because I'm just really finding that, you know, even for trainers or dog handlers, owners or guardians or whatever term you want to use, um, you know, who are not dealing with behavioral issues, like I'm super fascinated with reactivity and aggression and all that, but like somebody who has a sport dog or somebody who wants to compete in obedience, I think all of this can be so beneficial. Again, not to sound like a broken record, but as the foundation, like a dog that is performing really well, maybe doing your 24 obstacle course could take them like way to the next level, you know, because. We all benefit from it. All all everyone benefits from you know increasing proprioceptive mapping and and and I think it directly relates again to the behavioral stuff. So I'm looking at increasing dog's emotional capacity or learning capacity. But yeah, performance, somebody who has a performance dog, a sport dog, um, I think could also be really interested in this stuff, which I'm sure you work with some of those people as well.

Maryna Ozuna: 40:27

Well, one of the most fun things has been that quite frankly, I didn't anticipate. I wasn't even sure if it would be okay to do, is the absolute unmitigated joy that every senior dog that we've ever put on the course has with doing the course. It's with the exception of one obstacle, and all of them did it anyway, much to my shock, um, which was a little bit of a jump up onto something. Um, all the rest of the obstacles were mainly a foot off the ground and or easy for them to walk up like an incline, like an A-frame. Um, but they'd come off the course just so proud of themselves and like, oh, I'm home, I'm back. We were just shocked. I first really got to see it at a clinic in in Carolina a few years back in Charlottesville, where we just happened to have a bunch of senior dogs that colleagues brought with them. And I said, and we had at that particular clinic, we had some really great, very sturdy obstacles that um my colleagues had used on their, they had a sniff spot kind of um place that they ran, also, and they'd had they'd built obstacles there, and so they were very sturdy, and they schlepped them all back for us to have for the clinic, and the senior dogs just went crazy for it. We have video and pictures, and we all just dropped our jaws because you know, I had always considered maybe it's not appropriate for the senior dogs, err on the side of being super conservative, but these obstacles were so safely built that I was like, well, let's go for it. That was the beginning of a whole new chapter. So, you know, for I absolutely 100% agree with you, but it's even more across the scale, like it increases learning capacity in any dog, from puppy through reactive through sport through old age, like any single dog, it either increases or brings back learning capacity. Absolutely, and it's so fascinating to me. I mean, it's just so so fascinating to me. Um you know, that you know, I'm just flashing on all the dogs we've we've seen go go through it. And oh, the other piece is you know, that you were talking about is we've done play days here where just owners and their dogs, not even, you know, like clients of colleagues just come down for a play day, and the increase in handler ability and focus, but also the the increase in connection between handler and dog. So not just learning capacity, but but handler skills, handler coordination, and handler-dog connection, which are side benefits that I didn't anticipate when I developed this years ago, but I've and particularly since COVID, where you know, people's fine motor skills just went, you know, all of us, including all of us professional trainers, even if we were training, I perhaps less so than most because I had all of my 50 acres to play on, you know, discreet from any visitors. So I didn't much change what my daily life looked like. But you know, I've seen with my colleagues who've come here who perhaps were in a more suburban or urban situation, um, it affected all of us. It affected all of us, and it's been really fun to watch handler bodies and mental focus and acuity change working the course. That was very unexpected for me. Shouldn't have been, if I think about it, but I didn't have it in my intention. So that's been fun. We've it's really forced us to look at the whole learning puzzle of both handlers and dogs in a different way. So flipping back to your question, should I explain all this to my owners? No, just get them on obstacles because the collection will happen in their bodies, not their brains. So being forced to go one step at a time with their dog one step at a time forces them to step and rock back, step and rock back. And so uh I'm gonna actually walk it in the next few days and I'll give you that answer. But I don't know how many footfalls it is to do the whole course. I've never measured that, but I need to know that. I'm gonna write that down here for a second, footfalls. Because that's how many lights we're lighting up on a switchboard with both dog and handler. So that's really fascinating to me. So onto your touch piece. So it seg right through that because one of the things I find people nowadays there is they're touching the dogs too much, but not in a way that gives us any kind of brain food, or they're not touching their dogs at all. People have gotten very non-tactile, and trainers especially have gotten very non-tactile. And I understand because sometimes they're handling too many dogs that are reactive and they don't want to get bit, but if we're doing pet dog training, these dogs have to be handleable. They have to be handleable. So many of the touch techniques that we teach here in the from the old canine kinesthetics body work that I developed, or in the movement markers program that's more brain-body focused. Um just go back to basic pet dog pet owner handling techniques that can enhance their relationship. So, because just learning how to touch their dog one direction with a firm cupped hands, that's the first step of perperceptive mapping that a therapist would do to a post-stroke patient in the hospital. It's just, you know, like if this were the effective side, just touching down the side or having the person gently bump into a wall to get that touch inner interface on their body. So, you know, you were saying just getting your handlers, getting your owners to touch their dogs. Oh, it's critical. It's just really critical. So I'm curious what your experience has been and what some of the challenges to getting people to be more tactile with their animals have been.

Leah Lykos: 48:14

Yeah, it's really interesting, and it kind of actually goes back to a little bit what you were saying with the owners getting embodied themselves and like experiencing your obstacle course, and maybe they maybe they're dissociated from their own body. And so it's really hard to get uh a really true connection with the dog if you're not even in your own body, and then you have no concept of like what it means for the dog to not be proprioceptively mapping because like you have no idea that you're not even doing that yourself. So yeah, it's really interesting. It's it brings up a big question that I've always had is like, how much work do I do with the owner before they even touch the dog? Like, should we do a meditation or should we do a, you know, some sort of body mapping for the owner so they get in their body because they can't really convey that sense of safety that you feel when you truly are grounded and in your body? They can't convey that to the dog if they're not feeling it. One thing I noticed people pet their dog up way too fast. And I'm like, can you slow down? Can you slow down even a little bit more? A little bit more, make it a little slower. That's the biggest thing. They they go too fast and the dog's getting stimulated. And I'm like, we want this to be soothing, not stimulating. So that's probably the key is speed and then pressure. Dogs who are very touch sensitive, the ones who are really reactive are often touch-sensitive, or there are certain parts of their bodies that you can't touch. And maybe the owner is afraid to touch that part of the body because they've been growled at or snapped at. So working through some of that and building up the dog's tolerance to touch, um, and helping the owner to feel that it's safe to do so, and that the more we touch the dog and build their tolerance, the safer it will be. So we have to start, even if it's just little baby steps. Um, so yeah, I'm sure you can talk to that point.

Maryna Ozuna: 50:24

All of the above. You know, and it it's I've tried it many, many, uh, you know, addressing the question of how do we how do we bridge this to the owners? You know, they're coming so that they can leashwalk Fluffy, and Fluffy isn't trying to attack grandma at the door or the postman, um, you know, to reduce the complexity of modern suburban training to some cliches. How do we introduce that? One of the things I find is that, golly, I've probably tried every learning pathway on the face of the planet um as I look back, some of them with hilarious impact. I mean, I've done exercises where we've tied owners' hands and led them around like a dog. I've I've sat owners in front of videos and you know to watch Tward Rugas' calming signals so they could learn all the calming signals. And after many tries in many directions, I will tell you what I find is that people are so cognitively overloaded with computer interfaces, work interfaces, healthcare interfaces, you know. I mean, all the jokes and memes about, you know, you have to log into the patient portal to log into the patient portal to log into the, you know, people have literally, even my smartest entrepreneurs, they've got no more brain room. They've just got no more brain room because it's just like saturated. Not that they don't have more capacity, but right now it's just like it's just like spaghetti in there. So if we start from the motor end of things and and from like just getting them doing physical things, getting them out on the ranch, out on pack walk, out on the course, learning some basic body work, but just keeping the instructions really simple, really rhythmic. We do everything in terms of rhythm and just rhythm counts. So for us, we touch to a nine count like a waltz, so it's like one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. And the reason for that is that mimics the waves of the cerebral spinal pulse in the spinal column. So we're moving into that calming space. And so, for example, with touch, I teach my owners not just the soothing touch, but I show them like if I want to jack my dog up before going into the obedience ring, I might want to like do like fluffy touch, like silly touch. But like it's a line, you know, with like relaxation here and up arousal over here. I say this, it's not that there's right or wrong. It's not that you're touching the dog wrong. It's just like this is a line. Which direction do we want the pendulum to go in? Do we want which way does this dog need to go in this moment? I might want my dog calm in one moment and want them jacked up before going into trial in another moment. But where do you need Fluffy right at the moment? One of the things I think is really important, and I'm not perfect at it, but I sure try, is there's no right or wrong. Like get that out of our linguistics and just like really get people thinking in terms of balance levels. Like, where do we want Fluffy to be at the moment? If we're going out the door, we need Fluffy to be kind of calm at our side, don't we? And so don't touch Fluffy with with hurry up, fidget touch. Touch Fluffy with closed fingers, one direction firm petting. But see, that would be a typical instruction for me. Closed fingers, one direction firm petting. That's a one, two, three rhythm instruction. So I don't do sentences with my clients, I do rhythm instruction because again, particularly post-COVID, particularly with the vast upswing in everything being computer dependent, people's brains are like old spaghetti. They're just not gonna be there. So you have to like break things down into bullet points and break, but break things down into bullet points, not just in writing, but in your verbal, in your own verbal. Stop blah blah blah. Nobody's gonna take it in. They're just not. Not my my my spar smartest colleague students, they're not gonna take it in. You know, I do some of that when we're doing theory or science explanation, but then I bring it back to getting their hands and their bodies in rhythm. So rhythmic instructions, short bullet point instructions, starting from the physical end, not the cognitive end, those are all really critical to building instructional pieces because I see, you know, as you know, I sit on a couple of large professional dog trainer groups as kind of um you know, senior statesmen on the on the groups, and I just see over and over and over again the same problems. And you know, do I get the words perfect with each and every person or client? Heck no. It's you know, being the best teacher that you can be is uh an hourly practice in trying to get better and better. Um, but I've really I I know those things to be true. I know that we need to get out of the blah blah. I know we need to get more in rhythm with short, punchy, rhythmic instructions. I know we need to stay in the physical. Those things I know. Finding the right words for the each person, that's always that's always the challenge. But I know we need to move in that direction, and we're gonna need to move in that direction more and more uh as people get even more disassociated from nature and and things move in that direction even more and more. But you know, that's a challenge, and it's one of the things that we're trying to do here at the ranch is really shift people out of older models of instruction and and sequencing with the with the dogs. Not that there's anything wrong, but it just doesn't fully meet the needs of modern-day people and modern-day dogs because they're coming in with very different thresholds than they came in 20 years ago, 30 years ago. I wrote an article which I'll send you, um, I should have sent you before. It says, Are are dogs still dogs as we knew them? And the answer in the article is no, they're not. I mean, when we all first started training, you know, when things started really moving into people hiring professional trainers, because that didn't used to be a thing. If you wanted to train a dog, you went to a dog club. There were no professional dog trainers way back in the dark ages. Um, but when we all started developing the practice of training, you know, you'd get in, oh, I'd have three or four six, seven, eight-month-old pups at a time. I had, I didn't have to do behavioral reconstruction. They came in proprioceptively appropriate for six, seven, eight months of age. They came in, you know, with a modicum of social manners to other dogs or to me, you know, whether someone had just like, you know, moved through them in a kitchen or whatever, they they had some ability to read social signs and signals from a human or a dog. They were, you know, receptive to learning. They were, you know, they sequenced normally. You could you could sequence through a normal state of affairs. Occasionally, I get I still get you know really nice, well-developed pups like that. That's not the majority of what dog trainers are seeing. That is not remotely the majority of what dog trainers are seeing. What dog trainers are seeing is dogs in perperceptive deficit, dogs who can't sequence past three repetitions when normal for their breed or their age is 30 to 50, dogs that can't remember commands from day one to day two. So there's, you know, it's like 50 first dates, you know, like 50% of the crossbreeds out there. It's 50 first dates. You know, you train, you know, every day. I'm fielding, I just feel like a terrible trainer. I did this and this and this, and it's day five, and I feel like I'm at the beginning. You know, we just call it 50 first date syndrome dogs. It's not you, darling, but you have to step back from the picture and not take it personally. This is what's going on with the dog. So I think we've done more progress in to some extent looking at the dog piece of the puzzle, but I don't think we've done, you know, you're really bringing up some interesting things for me. We I haven't done enough writing about the people end of the leash because their learning capacity, both their capacity and how they learn in sequence, is different than even four years ago. So interesting thoughts you're bringing up for me.

Leah Lykos: 1:00:38

Okay, yeah, this is really fascinating because I've been going through my own challenges with my personal dogs and just feeling like I am a terrible trainer because my dogs, if I train them every day on a specific thing really consistently, we'll make a little bit of progress every day. And I'm like, oh, they're getting it. And then if I take a day off and we go back, it's like it's all gone.

Maryna Ozuna: 1:01:05

What kind of dogs and what ages?

Leah Lykos: 1:01:08

Um, I have an English mastiff, and he's six, and then I have a little mixed breed. I don't really know what she is. They're both rescues. They both had multiple owners before me, multiple types of trauma with physical abuse and food insecurity, et cetera. So I'm like, maybe developmentally there's just something that didn't connect. I don't know.

Maryna Ozuna: 1:01:40

Well, no, I think that's really important to just that's very astute. And I think it's really important to step back from the picture and and just state that okay, I've got some huge developmental holes here. How might I plug them, if at all possible? And not take it personally, like take that in as information. Okay, we're sequencing and not retaining. So what's learning capacity? Learning capacity is the ability to absorb information, retain information, sequence, generalize, extrapolate, and problem solve. Okay. We'll leave extrapolate and problem solve apart right now. That used to be just the domain of working dogs, but suburban life has gotten so complex that all suburban dogs are forced to are being forced to extrapolate and problem solve when they don't necessarily have the brain capacity to do so. So let's just focus up though on the first four absorb, retain, sequence, and generalize. What we're seeing is from that step one happens, like you can make progress in a lesson. Retain information is become an enormous problem. So on the Mastiffs, have you ever just to play this out for a second for our observers? Um, have you ever run hip x-rays on him or elbow x-rays?

Leah Lykos: 1:03:25

I have not, no.

Maryna Ozuna: 1:03:27

So that would be money being no object. So let's just take this as if this were a consult. Money being no object, it would be the first thing I would do. 50% of all mastiffs have hip issues, even if they're not showing up in gait, they're showing up in mental instabilities, and they can have very um unstable knee structure. So, again, that's showing up in drive flipping from in if we don't go all the way to defense, we're going from happy, confident pack into insecure insecurity, even if we're not going all the way into defense. And that insecurity really affects prey and play development in the dog. So the other thing that's super, super high in incidence of elbow dysplasia, super, super high. But the other hidden thing is super high anymore in transitional vertebra in the spine, which makes collection, which makes leash walking, healing, sits downs, all problematic. Now, TVs don't necessarily mean it might not be problematic because of a TV, a transitional vertebra. Mike Shepherd has a TV that causes her no discomfort with anything, except it was hard for her to do the extreme top of an A-frame in Schützen. Jumping was not a problem, retrieving was not a problem. The very top of the A-frame was a problem. And interestingly enough, for dogs with TV, swimming is an issue because it aggravates that lower lumbar region. So one would think that swimming would be the first thing you would do with a dog like that, but not so much. Um, so with like problem-solving development with a mast if you know, like I were doing a consult with you just to give our observers a reference marker. First thing I would do is want to know the stability of those joints because super high incidence in the breed of them not being stable. And so let's say the results were maybe a little bit of something, but not so much. Then the second thing I would want to do is assess motor recruitment, and that would be getting them on something simple cavalry, some simple obstacles to see where the recruitment level is at? I bet you dollars to donuts that his recruitment level is below five.

Leah Lykos: 1:06:00

I would bet any amount of I don't even know what recruitment level really means.

Maryna Ozuna: 1:06:04

Well, like if he goes to step over a log, how able is he to do that? If he goes to step, particularly stepping down from a log or a rock, does he kind of like hesitate and then find the front end and then find the back end?

Leah Lykos: 1:06:21

Yes.

Maryna Ozuna: 1:06:22

That would all okay, that would all put him below a five for me on my imaginary one to ten. If the dog is below five, I'm gonna guarantee you they're gonna have information retention issues. Goes one to one. I don't want to get a whole long into the science. You can I can go there later, but but I will just say that it goes one to one. If I've got recruitment issues of finding the body below, like the dog can barely find his body when we give him an obstacle, you're gonna have retention issues of information. You it's just gonna be, and however lower than five you're going on the discoordination scale, it's gonna go one-to-one. It's gonna increase our lack of ability to retain information. So to the extent that that can be solved, I really solve that with obstacle work. Because if I can even raise recruitment one click, that still gives me one whole click more of brain capacity. One of the things that we can do is look at video to see, yeah, it looks like we have a little bit of movement impairment here. And so let's modify things by doing X, Y, or Z. So that's also a possibility. With your little mix breed, that's a classic scenario of lots of different mental pathways conflicting with each other. So, you know, it depends on what she's mixed with. When I first started training in Arizona, I saw if I saw one, I saw a hundred. Um, for whatever reason, Labrador Retriever and Pitbull Crosses. That was the dog de jour of Arizona when I started here. Who what brilliant idiot decided to do that? I have no idea. But it was easy because we just had two genetic pools. So you just extinguish the one and strengthen the other. So we just strengthen prey drive in the Labrador piece of the brain and not reward the other and just over-dopamine reward the one pathway. When you dopamine reward one pathway, when I say extinguish, it's not like we did corrections. When you dopamine reward one pathway, the other just fades away. So we just strengthen the re the prey drive and got a happy, happy family pet. The problem is with like your little girls, we probably have like a lot of web, a lot of web in there. You can still do that though. You can still dopamine extinguish a lot of the conflicting pathways. You just have to be really systematic about it. And and that's that's where looking at um a lot of the sports videos that are out now with different practitioners that are using timing and marking and really lovely sports development work can really help with pet dogs like that, because it really helps strengthen certain pathways by dopamine rewarding them with a treat reward and letting the others kind of quiet down. So, you know, if you think of all of that genetic stuff, when dogs crisscross to dogs that aren't of their related genetic pool, it doesn't necessarily mold into one dog. You can have lots of conflicting uh recruitment instincts, um, drive levels all happening kind of at the same time. And that just sets up like static in the brain, so to speak. It's like, you know, your information isn't going to come through, not because the dog doesn't want to, the dog's not interested in it, but it's got like a layer of static there that stuff isn't coming through easily, like maybe little pieces of it are are coming through, but not at the level to retain it that we might like. So, again, you know, I would just really urge you and a lot of trainers, you know, young, old dogs have changed, and we really need to step back from the picture and not take things so personally, but be more scientific, like, okay, this isn't working. What's going on here? What can I change? We we're gonna have to be more creative because less and less people are owning um intentionally bred, well-bred dogs, and more and more people are owning genetic puzzles that don't respond well to traditional training. So I see this all every day is in particular my younger colleagues who've never known, you know, doodles haven't been around for more than a decade, or maybe a little bit more than a decade. 70 to 80 percent of everything that people are seeing as professional trainers anymore is a crossbred. They didn't exist 20 years ago. So we have a deeper pool of what normal looked like. Y'all don't have a pool of what normal looked like because you don't see many much normal. Most of what you see is abnormal, so you don't necessarily know what to reach for because you've never seen what any of those isolated pools of genetics look like when it's properly functioning. So that's another big challenging piece of the puzzle for younger dog trainers, is all you get to see is abnormal. If you never know what normal is, how do you know how to get there?

Leah Lykos: 1:12:32

Okay, this is a really interesting because I've been having like this existential crisis because I had a dog that was a crossbreed, but she was a lab mixed with a boxer, and I got her when she was like 12 weeks old. And I loved working with this dog. She was like compared to all the dogs I've had since, she was like a dream dog. And I'm looking back at videos of me working with her, and I'm like, oh, I was a way better trainer back then, because look at what Sophie's doing, and now I can't get my dogs to do any of that stuff. And I'm thinking, oh my God, there's something wrong with me. Like I've completely forgotten how to train dogs. It's really been very like weighing heavily on my psyche because it's like I can't even train my own dogs. Like, what kind of a trainer am I? You know, like it's it's really been a big issue for me, to be honest, to get kind of personal here.

Maryna Ozuna: 1:13:30

No, I think it's very, very um courageous of you to speak up because I'm seeing easily 10 posts a day with the same issue, easily, which is why I wrote the article, Are dogs still dogs as we knew them? But what you and I are doing today is taking it much deeper in terms of what does that mean in terms of learning pathways? What does that mean in terms of retention of information? What does that mean in terms of what do we need to do to develop this dog? So one of my colleagues did a fabulous, fabulous job of rehab on a um a mastiff breed dog, but um and was very patient with the dog, but he always felt like there was a another piece of the puzzle, and so he contacted me and sent me some video, and I looked at it and I and he said, I think that you know, I mean, I I can see that the dog is off, but I'm not sure which leg. And I said, Well, the problem is he's often three out of the four, and it was another three out of the four, and bless his heart, you know, he he, you know, because it wasn't somebody I knew well. They they trusted me and they took the dog in, and sure enough, spit spot on dysplasia in those three legs. So I think what's really important for us as animal professionals in this day and age is obviously, I mean, I'm not right at the moment, but up until two years ago, I took lessons constantly. I drove to Texas to spend a week with Dave Croyer every year. My rally and obedience coach I worked with weekly until she ran away and moved to Oklahoma. And then I spent time with her traveling back and forth to other clinics. So I stopped there and did refreshers. And when she was teaching in this area, we she stayed here and we did refreshers. So one of the things that I don't like that I see is trainers like thinking that they know how to train. No, you don't, because you you haven't begun to push the put your potential. So you know, at 71, I was still doing either weekly or regular lessons until two years ago, since I've been in my 20s, very regular horse and dog. So I think it's super, super important to push your skill sets. But given what I see going on now, I think it's also super important to stop self-blaming. If you feel like you lack a skill set, go get it. Go take your dog through rally competition to push your skill levels. I don't care if you like competition, it builds it. One of the things about rally, rally is like canine dressage. You know, you're working a dog one side and then the other, and you're learning balance, you know, balance, flexion, balance, flexion, balance, flexion. It's terrific exercise. I don't care what your goals are. If you just want to be the best pet dog trainer in the world, learn balance, learn coordination. But I think we also have to step back from the picture and really look at these more complex issues of neural development, you know, as we've brought out this talk, and just to, you know, we're closing on our time, but um with our handlers, ourselves, and the dogs. It's a it's a three-way equation. You know, what are we doing since COVID to build our motor skills back up and our ipsilateral, bilateral, contralateral coordination? All those things that come into play when we're balancing a tricky dog. And then what are we doing to really take a look at um the complexity of learning for these dogs with all these developmental holes? So, you know, I just want to shift the narrative in closing to say, like, oh God, I'm like the worst dog trainer in America. We all have those moments. I have those moments every day. You know, you there's no perfect day. I feel like really blessed if I have an 85% day. That's like a really good day. But like, step back and picture and like, okay, what do I need for this dog that I don't have? Is there somebody I need to call? Is there some video I need to look at? Is there some skill set I need to go acquire? What do I need that I don't have? Okay, what's going on with this dog that I need to step back and take a look at? Okay, you know, both your dogs not acquiring information, each of them for separate reasons, not retaining information. Chart that okay, we have a information retention issue. Okay, what are the possible pathways that might be causing this? You know, the mixed breed, it's easy. Mixed scrambled genetics, their brains like scrambled eggs with a mastiff. 90% of the time it's a body from hell. So, you know, now I'm really careful not to just jump to those conclusions and do the analysis necessary to decide whether I'm on the right path or it's something completely different. But, you know, there's some red flags that we can kind of generate our general area of inquiry. But I think there's there's not enough information about out there yet about you know, stopping and looking at these developmental pieces rather than just trying to, oh, I just don't have the right protocol, or I'm just a bad trainer, I just you know there's a whole dog component of this. Don't take it personally. Don't take it personally, but there are skill sets out there that we can bring to the fore to enhance our abilities both to recognize, to analyze, and to problem solve. So that's what I'm trying to do. That's what I'm trying to do here.

Leah Lykos: 1:19:49

Thank you so much. Excuse me, it makes so much sense. And, you know, I've been training, kind of like had my business or training professionally for like 10 years. And I feel like I still know nothing. Like I feel like a little baby trainer after 10 years. So if that this is just really reassuring to me, um, you know, that we all need to keep learning, we all need to keep exploring, and we all need some self-compassion and to look at the bigger picture that like maybe some of these dogs genetically are not okay or confirmationally. So it's kind of like I'm preaching this stuff, but then when it comes to me and my dogs, I like have no compassion for myself. Join the club. This was an awesome, awesome conversation. And I just really appreciate your, you know, your depth of knowledge and your passion about going like really deep into these subjects.

Maryna Ozuna: 1:20:50

Thank you so very much. I really enjoyed being here. It was a great talk.

Leah Lykos: 1:20:54

Okay, you take care.

Maryna Ozuna: 1:20:56

Bye-bye now.

Leah Lykos: 1:21:01

Okay, my somatic hounds. That was a really cool conversation. I'm so excited about all the new information that I have. I did forget, like I always do, or usually, to ask my guest to give their information of where they like to be found. So you can, you know, follow Marina and contact her and get all the pertinent information that you might need about your dog. So she can be found at dogbodycare.com or az doggyduderanch.com. I will link both of those in the show notes, as well as the Instagram profile, which is movement makers. No, movement markers. Make sure it's movement markers, not movement makers. And Facebook, you can also follow movement markers. So I want to also announce a new project that I am launching, which is the Center for Canine Somatics, where I'm starting to build out some online courses. And this is the platform I'll use moving forward now to give my webinars. I have an upcoming webinar called Foundations of Canine Health, a polyvagal perspective. So if you want to learn about your dog's nervous system, that would be a great place to start. I'm also going to launch a course called Co-regulating with your dog. So I will link to the new website that I have called Center for Canine Somatics. And I hope to have you join us for the next episode of the Somatic Hound podcast. Thanks for listening.