verbal or non verbal?

There is a lot of talk these days about whether you should use verbal cues or physical cues to tell your dog what they are to do in the agility ring.
Obviously there are two schools of thought here.
If you are of the "non verbal" trainer, then you use your body language to direct you dog. Body language is definitely easier for a dog to pick up than verbal language.  In agility, we are often told that our mouth is saying one thing, but our body is saying another. The dog invariably "listens" to the body rather than the mouth! We spend lots of time practicing specific body moves, such as front crosses, blind turns, pull throughs etc, so that our dog know instantly what we mean him to do. Body language speaks the language dogs find easy to understand.
If you are a "verbal" trainer then, in its purest form, you stand in the middle and direct your dog with a series of specific verbal commands that you have faithfully taught him previously.
So which is best?
Well, the top handlers are mostly using body language, and they do well. But hang on, they're mostly young people.... and they do give verbal commands too. On the other hand there are some great distance handlers out there, but much fewer of them, and actually they use body language as well, albeit at a distance from the dog, rather than by his side.
I am neither young, nor a distance handler, and, as I have observed before, probably the norm for the majority of agility competitors. So in my humble opinion there is no "best", just what best suits an individual. Having trained using both verbal and body language gives you twice as much likelyhood of getting good understanding from your dog.
A word of caution though, you do have to train verbal commands, dogs don't automatically understand  English. A common misconception I find!