Training – Rules to live by

3 minutes! Concentration, environments & distractions

When is it best to start training with my puppy?

Training is the process of teaching and the student learning. In the case of puppies, they are the eternal student and the trainer/teacher is the world around them, not just you. 

An 8-week-old puppy is a little sponge constantly absorbing information, sometimes not the information you want them to learn either! 

The short answer is start teaching them and training them what you do want from the moment they come home, housetraining, where they are allowed and not allowed to go and also how to sit, what their name is etc. 

I have trained numerous 5 week old puppies, still with their littermates and mum how to sit. 

No your puppy is not too young to start training! 

Training does not mean they cannot have fun and enjoy puppyhood. Training means you start bonding quicker and are making your life easier together right from the start. 

The trick (no pun intended) is to keep things brief and keep it fun! 

Just 3 minutes each time! For puppies or adult dogs, it’s been proven that little spurts of training and often is better than longer periods. Puppies can’t concentrate for long and I’m sure you will be tired from all the other bits of caring for pup too.

When you boil the kettle to make a hot drink just train puppy until it boils, or when the adverts come on if you are watching TV. 

If you like me are finding yourself getting carried away and training for longer than say 5 minutes each time, then use a timer on your phone or use an egg timer to keep you on track! 

Puppy may still be keen to carry on after 3 minutes but it’s always best to leave them wanting more rather than training until they switch off or get bored. Alternatively just put 15 little tiny morsels of treats to one side and work through them in training one by one then do something else, finishing the session. 

What’s even better is training will really tire your puppy out, ten minutes training is equivalent to an hours walk! You can’t walk puppy that far while they are young and certainly you should not be walking them for an hour so this is a great way to ensure you get some peace too. 

So now you have been practising sit, down & look at you etc for a while and you are now trying to get them to do it when you take them to your friend’s house and you are trying to show off  a little but puppy looks at you blankly as if you have never taught them these things before, you get frustrated and disheartened.

Why does this happen?

This is totally normal, because dogs don’t generalise well. What this means is once you have taught something new at home, inside and out in the garden then try and do it somewhere esle they think well I’m not where I normally am so I don’t understand what you are asking me to do. 

How do we help them?

Whenever we are asking something of them that they have learnt before but in a new environment or place, we take it back a few steps to remind them and then we can progress quicker through the training steps than what we did originally teaching the exercise. They need to find confidence, so making things easier will help them and remind them that even though things are different we still would like them to do the same thing. 

You need to practice everything in at least 5 different situations/ places/environments before you can start to expect them to know what you mean and want from them wherever you take them.

The other thing to consider is how distracted they are. Going from doing a sit stay at home when its quiet and the kids are in bed is very different to being on a busy high street with people and dogs walking by all the time. 

This is often why you may find the first week or two at training classes difficult as your puppy is so excited and distracted by everything going on around them at class. 

We should always try and built up distractions slowly, starting with distractions far away and then when we have success, we gradually ask them to do it again with the distractions closer and closer. Baby steps and lots of practice really works! 

If you find that they are struggling to focus, then just get more distance away from the distractions (most often people and other dogs), ensure they have a few repetitions where they have got it right before then slowly trying to make it a little harder for them again. The closer they are to something they want the more likely they are to ignore you and want to go investigate the distraction.

Remember to always try and set them up for success, make things really easy for them to win and hard for them to get wrong. This way of training makes for a confident, willing and eager to please pooch. 

Keep it brief, set them up to win and keep it fun for both of you! 

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