How to Increase the Difficulty While Keeping Your Dog Successful
For a dog to progress in training, he must be able to master increasingly difficult exercises. Examples of increasing difficulty would be to make a down/stay more difficult by moving further away from the dog before returning.
If you don’t increase difficulty, training will get stagnant and boring for both you and the dog. It will not move you towards your goal of a well-trained dog. However, you must be careful as you increase difficulty. Here are some guidelines to help you balance increasing difficulty while keeping your dog successful.
1. Don’t increase difficulty so fast that you cause your dog to fail. You can’t always identify the exact level that your dog is capable is performing. You must guess. As you guess, err on the side of caution. You won’t mess your dog up by training at too low of a level. You can set your training back if you train at a level too difficult.
2. Only increase one aspect of difficulty at a time. For example, don’t increase both the time and the distance at the same time when training a down/stay.
3. Try not to go over threshold, but when you do, make it easier the next time so that the dog doesn’t repeat the mistake.
4. Remember that every time your dog is successfully working under threshold, you will be bumping the threshold up higher.
5. Remember that every time your dog is pushed too far and asked to work over threshold, you will be knocking your threshold down.
6. Remember that a dog’s threshold of success will vary depending on the environment, the dog’s energy level, the dog’s hunger level, the trainer’s skill level, and even on the dog’s momentary mood. Dogs, like people, have good days and bad days. They even have good moments and bad moments. We as trainers must always be evaluating where our dog’s threshold of success is and adjusting our training to stay under it.
7. Do not push your dog to work longer or with more difficulty than he’s able. Don’t worry if progress seems to be slow. Progress should be exponential, not linear. The basics need a very long time to train. Once the basics are trained, progress is surprisingly fast.
8. Increase difficulty gradually. A big increase in difficulty will hurt confidence (even if the dog appears successful!).
What Can Happen When Increasing Difficulty too Quickly
I once increased the difficulty of a down/stay far too quickly when training two large litters of puppies that were just a few days apart in age. There were about 15 puppies total between the two litters.
I had been experimenting with training at lower than normal difficulty levels to see what the results would be. Prior to these litters, I had followed the common advice of increasing the difficulty level at a pace that would yield about a 20% failure rate. With these two litters, I had trained at a rate where the goal was 100% success. What I found was that by training at almost perfect success, the puppies gained the ability to stay longer faster. After training at the easier level for much longer than I had in the past, I began increasing criteria. I was pleased to learn that I was able to increase the difficulty much faster than I had in the past and the puppies were remaining far more successful.
I decided to take the puppies out and video their excellent results. I wanted to push them just once to see how far I could back away from them and for how long. In addition to increasing the distance and the time, I also increased the distraction level by doing this test outside where the puppies had limited practice.
I had been practicing the down stay at a distance of about 10 feet for about 5 seconds over and over prior to this day. Each puppy would perform at that level up to 20 to 30 times in a row but still there was lots of reinforcement in between. On this day, I decided to back up over 20 feet for at least 10 seconds each time and to see if I could do it just three times in a row. To my delight, all 15 puppies were successful. None of them got up. I was thrilled.
The next morning, I took the first puppy to my training room. He got up and followed me as soon as I backed up from him. I took him back to his place, asked him to down, and backed up from him again. Again the puppy got up and followed me. Hmmmm….what had gone wrong?
I decided to end this puppy session so I could ponder how to correct the problem. I brought another puppy into the training room. The second puppy did the same thing! He seemed to have forgotten all of the work we had been practicing for weeks now. Both puppies were worse at 9 1/2 weeks at the down/stay than they were at 6 1/2 weeks!
I brought all fifteen puppies into the training room, one at a time, and none of them could perform…..not a one!
Even though all of these puppies seemed to be successful while I was asking far more than they were used to on the day before, all of these puppies’ thresholds of success were being beaten down. Their confidence in their ability to perform was diminished as they pondered the fact that maybe my not returning to them in close to the time-frame they were accustomed to meant that maybe they were wrong in staying there. Therefore, when they got with me for the next training session, they all decided it was time to try something different. The sitting and staying to them must have been wrong. Their reinforcement wasn’t delivered as quickly as they thought it should have been had they been correct in their behavior.
I was initially panicked over how my puppies were performing because the new owners were coming to pick up their puppies in just a few days! Fortunately, when I simplified the training to the very simplest, it didn’t take but a couple of sessions for me to re-build my puppies’ confidence and to get them built back to where they were.
My take-away from this experience was that you must be careful not to increase a dog’s criteria too quickly even when the dog appears to be successful with the increase!
