Dynamic Body Awareness and Coordination Boosters

Confidence Boosters
(that sneakily also improve body awareness and coordination 🤓)

Benefits for you

Hey, I'm Mari Valgma

I am a Certified Professional Canine Fitness Trainer, helping dedicated dog training enthusiasts train their dogs to move with precision, awareness and confidence, especially in situations that may otherwise be called "challenging".
 
My passion is to help you achieve training goals faster, without overloading your dog’s body with repetitions in challenging training scenarios or placing your dog in dangerous situations over and over again.  

After working with more than 500 dogs over 5 years, I found traditional canine fitness training often lacking the elements that link the fitness exercises to real life challenges. Elements like movement and context - your dog is rarely still when doing the sport!

Hundreds of hours of brainstorming, researching and testing resulted in dynamic body awareness and coordination exercises for dogs: Movement Puzzles - a concept I first taught in 2020 and that has now become an integral part of everything I teach.

Movement Puzzles are more than exercises for fitness. They can also be used for boosting your dog's confidence, focus, independent exercise performance, ignoring handler movement as a distraction...

The options are limitless once you know how to build and use Movement Puzzles!

Hélène Lawler

Canada

Fenzi Dog Sports Academy instructor, Founder of Shaping Chaos and Dog Sport Scholars

USBCHA herding Open handler & coach

"My dogs and I are absolutely loving Movement Puzzles, which have become my new go-to for building foundations."

This unique skills-building program is so powerful that I believe it has the potential to completely change how we train our dogs for work and sport. Not only that, it SHOULD change how we train for work and sport.

Mari’s systematic program teaches both dog and handler the skills we need for performance excellence without danger of over-arousal (hallelujah!), all the while building confidence and developing excellence in communication.

Her step-by-step lessons are clear, easy to follow, and well organized. Her insights are paradigm shifting. Which, as a lover of rabbit holes, is my favourite part of working with Mari. But my dog is very grateful too! Particularly since the exercises allow her to tell me exactly where I need to improve, and how.

"Mari has a fresh approach to developing the underlying coordination and balance needed for dog sports...

... that dovetails beautifully with current training concepts such as loopy training, performing in flow, slow is the new fast, and forward focus. In a warm, engaging manner, she pulls together these bits and pieces into a cohesive whole. And my dogs love the exercises!"

Kathryn Kuhlen, USA

"Mari’s Movement Puzzle class was a surprising adventure into a new way of training and thinking."

I worked with my then 10-month old BC pup and my 5 year old field Labrador. It was enlightening to observe their balanced movement progress, development of body awareness for performance of the challenges, and mental acuity to solve the puzzles. My observation skills improved and I consequently became a more effective partner for them.

Mary Young, USA

Bobbie Lyons

CCFT, KPA CFT, Program Director CSCC, KPA Faculty

"From my first exposure to movement puzzles I was super intrigued with the concept and now I use it often for so many different things.  "

I love it for puppies and old dogs. It is a great way to teach clicker mechanics to new students. It is a great way to teach proprioception to dogs and for dogs to learn and think at a distance from their handler.
I continually find more and more uses for movement puzzles. Thank you Mari for sharing this concept.  It will always be part of what I teach.