Below are general dog training principles and tips to remember as you work toward raising an obedient happy puppy that is easy to live with.
The Marker
The first and most important dog training tip is to use positive reinforcement training that includes the use of a marker. If you’ve seen any of our videos, you’ve probably noticed that we always say “yes” before giving our puppies their food reward. You may be wondering why we do this. Why not just give the dog the food and forget saying “yes”?
We’ll have a detailed page on our blog soon explaining why we use a marker. For now, in summary, we use a marker because it gives a means for good communication and because it builds strong motivation for a dog to want to work with a person.
How to Use a Marker
Say “yes” before you reward with food. Saying a word like “yes” or using a device like a clicker is called marking a behavior. When you hear someone saying to mark a behavior, it simply means to make a sound (like saying the word “yes”) to tell your puppy that he got it right at that particular second. In our case, the marker sound is the sound of us saying “yes” in a particular tone of voice.
If a puppy learns that he will never get food until after he hears the marker sound that he has been conditioned to, he’ll realize that there is no point in focusing on the food until after he hears the marker. Instead, he’ll be inclined to listen for his marker sound and to pay attention to earning the reward instead of obtaining it. A dog that is focusing on how he can get the food cannot give you or his work his full attention.
Don’t even start to give the food until after the “yes” has been said.
Once you start the process of giving the food, the dog is no longer listening to your “yes”. If he stops listening for the “yes”, his focus will quickly turn from you to accessing his reward, even before he’s earned it.
The “yes” tells your dog that he is finished working for the reward and can now turn his attention to taking the reward. Using a marker frees your dog up from focusing on two things at once. Once he learns that the marker always comes first, he’ll begin putting his entire focus on you before he hears the marker word knowing that after he hears the marker word, he can put his entire focus on getting the food.
Train Below Your Puppy’s Threshold of Success
A second dog training principle to keep in mind is this. Train below your puppy’s threshold of success as much as possible. The threshold of success is that point at which a puppy will be successful if you train at a level below it and your puppy will fail if you train above it. Training below this threshold (even far below it) will build your puppy’s confidence in the exercise, his self-control, and his ability to remain still.
You will occasionally accidentally ask too much of your puppy and he will fail. When you do, reduce your criteria and get your puppy successful the next time.
Contrary to popular belief, you do not have to push your puppy to perform to his maximum potential in order to move your puppy forward in his training. For example, if your puppy’s threshold of success on a down/stay is for you to back away from him 10 feet for 10 seconds, you don’t need to be practicing at that level to increase his threshold to 11 feet. Practice at half of that (5 feet for 5 seconds) repeatedly. As you practice at this lower level, your puppy will gain confidence, self-control, and the ability to stay longer.
Occasionally throw in the longer stays that are getting close to your puppy’s threshold, but don’t do them repeatedly until your puppy’s threshold is much higher.
Changes in the Threshold
Your puppy’s threshold of success is always changing. If you are doing a good job in training him, it will be moving in general upward. However, it won’t move upward continuously. Some days (or some training sessions), your puppy’s threshold may dip down. These ups and downs are normal and part of the process as long as the general trend is towards improvement.
The increases in the threshold are the result of good training and improvements in confidence, self-control, focus, and motivation for the work. Temporary decreases in the threshold are related to the puppy’s state of mind. A puppy who is full of energy is unable to maintain self-control as well as that same puppy later in the day when he has less energy to control.
Training a puppy when his threshold is lower does not mean that you are permanently lowering his threshold. It simply means that for that particular training session, you need to expect less of him before rewarding him. You are still building the same basic threshold of success.
For example, if your puppy can hold a down/stay for 15 feet for 15 seconds in the afternoon, but first thing in the morning, he can only hold it for 7 feet for 7 seconds (max), practice at 5 feet for 5 seconds in the mornings and you will not only be building his morning threshold, you will also be pushing up his afternoon threshold by allowing your puppy to practice what he is able to do while he is full of energy.
This same principle is true when there are more or less distractions. Your puppy’s threshold of success is greatly affected by what’s going on around him.
The Threshold of Success Will Be Lower When a Puppy is Working with a New Person
When you first get home with your new puppy, you must lower your criteria for success and in a sense start back at the beginning with the training. The puppy must get used to your tone of voice, your mannerisms, and your physical ques. You must learn your puppy and how to communicate what you want to him. It takes time for you to become a team.
Therefore, I suggest that in order for you to both be successful, you start with the very basics: backing up one step for one second. Build from there as your puppy demonstrates understanding and as the two of you build a bond.
Give Your Puppy Your Undivided Attention During Training Sessions
Don’t do as I do on puppy pick up day, but rather do as I say do. On puppy pick up day, I will be talking a lot and the puppy will be ignored a lot. This is necessary for me to transition the training from me to you. Most importantly, my focus on you and lack of focus on my puppy is temporary. If I repeatedly had these types of training sessions, the puppy would lose interest in working with me.
Train When Your Puppy is Hungry
The third dog training principle that we’re going to discuss is this. For any type of positive reinforcement training to work, the dog must want whatever it is you are reinforcing with. Initially, with our training system, you are rewarding with food. The dog must be hungry. Therefore, you must train before a meal.
Occasionally, we have a person contact us a month or so after getting their puppy back home with them saying that their puppy is no longer interested in the work. This problem is usually caused by overfeeding and increasing the feeding amounts too quickly. If a puppy won’t work (enthusiastically) for his food, he is usually growing too fast. The problem could be that the person is expecting far too much from their puppy and the puppy loses motivation for the work for that reason. However, overfeeding is the most common problem we’ve seen.
What to Reward with and How Much to Feed
Our puppies are trained so often that if we reinforced behaviors with anything other than the puppy’s own dog food, their diet would be very out of balance. Don’t use treats unless the amount of training food is negligible compared to the puppy’s regular food. Also, make sure that you are taking the amount of food used for training out of your puppy’s daily food ration.
Our 11 week old puppies eat ½ cup of food three times a day. If you are training for breakfast, measure a half cup food into your training pouch. Train your puppy with it. Then dump whatever is left in a bowl and give it to him in his crate using our crate time feeding routine.
At 11 weeks of age, reward with 3-5 pieces at a time. More is okay as long as you can handle the food without dropping it. When first learning to work with your puppy, train with only 1-2 pieces of food until you learn to handle the food with minimal dropping.
By 12 weeks, increase your puppy’s food to a heaping ½ cup three times a day. By 13 weeks, your puppy’s food should be increased to two cups total per day divided into three meals.
How to Hold the Food
Most people tend to hold their food at the tips of their fingers. This causes two problems.
First of all, the puppy won’t be able to gently take the food from you. He’ll be forced to take the food with his teeth. I want my puppies to lick the food out of my hands which is impossible if you are holding the food by the ends of your fingers.
Secondly, you cannot successfully transfer the food from the tips of your fingers into the puppy’s mouth without dropping food on the floor.
The best way to hold your food is in your palm between the base of your first two fingers. With the food in this place, you can further support the food and keep it from falling to the floor by using your thumb over the food if necessary to guide the food into your puppy’s mouth.
When You Drop Food
As much as possible, try not to drop food on the floor. Practice handling the food without the puppy before practicing delivering the food into your puppy’s mouth. However, you will drop food. Everyone does. Therefore, until you are proficient at handling your food, don’t train in the grass. You won’t be able to see dropped food, but your puppy can smell it.
When you drop food, try your very best not to let the puppy get it. If the puppy begins thinking there might be dropped food on the floor or the ground, he’ll lose focus on you as he goes into search-the-ground mode.
If possible, try to keep the puppy from knowing that you dropped the food to begin with. I do this by discretely putting a foot on top of the dropped food. Then, I’ll ask the puppy to do something else (a sit for example). I’ll reward the puppy for sitting with one hand and while the puppy is busy and distracted with taking his reward, I’ll pick the dropped treat up off the floor with my other hand.
By being discrete about my dropped treat, I’m avoiding a game of race-for-the-food. If the puppy sees me scrambling to get the dropped food, he’ll race me to get it (even if he didn’t see the dropped food to begin with).
If the puppy sees you drop the food, but ignores it and instead looks up at you, immediately mark and reward the puppy.
Which Hand to Reward From
When working on the heeling exercises, you must reward from the left hand.
However, for the other exercises, you can reward from either. It is best if you are inconsistent with which hand you are rewarding from when practicing the stay exercises. I sometimes reward from the right hand and sometimes from the left. Varying your reward hand is one of many ways to get your puppy’s mind off the food he’s working for and onto you and the work itself.
Repeating Commands
Repeating commands will encourage your puppy to tune you out. If your puppy doesn’t respond to a command the first time, he needs time to process it. Just wait a few seconds. Most likely, you’ll see the light bulb go on just before your puppy figures out on his own why he’s not getting his reward.
If after a couple of seconds, the puppy is still just sitting, or standing, or lying and looking at you, you’ll need to give him some more help. Repeating commands is not the kind of help he needs. Instead, start chattering in an upbeat voice to let your puppy know he’s wrong. Don’t be a Debbie Downer with solemn “no’s” but be an encourager. Tell him cheerfully to “try again”. Ask him to show you what else he can do.
A puppy who has been trained with shaping will recognize that this is his que to try different things in order to figure out what you want.
When the puppy hits on the right thing, quickly say “yes” and give him his reward.
If after chattering for 5-10 seconds, your puppy remains frozen or can’t seem to figure it out, re-set him by moving to a different spot and continue chattering.
Weaning Off the Food
We don’t recommend a process of weaning off the reinforcements. The more you reward any behavior, the stronger it will be. However, as you continue building value in good behavior through marker training, the dog will eventually perform the behavior out of habit and simply because he enjoys it.
Frequent rewards never hurt a dog’s ability to perform well. The more you reinforce a behavior, the more the dog will like doing that behavior. Once sufficient value is built into good behavior, the reward will be enjoyment of the behavior itself.
Also, don’t forget the power of habit. Whatever is practiced on a regular basis will become part of a dog’s life.
More Helpful Tips for the First Few Days When Making the Transition from Our Home to Yours
Make sure you don’t push your puppy too far. Remember: your puppy needs to learn your voice, your hand signals, and your expectations. Start off making it simple and gradually build back up to the training your puppy demonstrated when you picked him up.
Don’t forget to work the exercises at easy levels often. Puppies who are consistently pushed further and further without practicing at easy levels will at best get confused. At the worst, they could totally loose motivation to work with you.
Set your puppy up for success. Gradually increase the difficulty. However, don’t increase the criteria for reward so much that your puppy is making mistakes more often than 5% of the time.
Don’t work your puppy too long. Quit your training session before your puppy gets bored. Leave him wanting more! Short frequent training sessions are better than infrequent longer ones. For most people, I suggest keeping your training sessions under 10 minutes. Jenna and I are experienced trainers. We know how to keep puppies’ attention for much longer periods of time than most. Still, we rarely train a puppy for over 20 minutes at a time. If you are really ambitious and want to move your puppy forward rapidly in his training, don’t increase the length of your training sessions. Instead, increase the number of times you train during a day.
Memory Lapses After Puppy Pick Up
Expect memory lapses. Some days very young puppies will have “off” days where they will seem to completely forget a command. They are not being disobedient but rather are confused.
When Your Puppy Gets It Wrong or Freezes
If your puppy seems to have forgotten a command, do the following if you’ve asked him to change position and he continues to stay in the same position.
- Give your puppy a minute to process what you’ve asked him to do.
- When he gets it right, quickly say “yes” and give your puppy the food.
- Don’t repeat the command.
- If after about 3-4 seconds, the puppy is still not doing what you ask and just staying in the same position, talk to the puppy just with chatter to let him know that he’s got it wrong and he needs to try something else. I usually say things like: “Can you try something else?” or “What you gonna do?” or “Show me what you can do?” It doesn’t really matter what you say as long as it is in an upbeat voice to excite him to try something different. Then when he finally does what you ask him, repeat the command ONE more time as he is going into the correct position. The repeat of the command must come simultaneous with your puppy doing what you ask. The purpose of this is to help your puppy to better match the word (and your tone of voice when you say the word) with the behavior you are asking for. Make sure you mark and reward the behavior immediately afterwards.
- If after 5-6 seconds of chattering, your puppy still doesn’t understand, stop your training for long enough to move to a new place (just 5 or 6 feet over from the original place). Start over again so that your puppy’s brain gets “unstuck”.
- In the unlikely event that your puppy still isn’t “getting it”, back off with your training and make it easier until your puppy’s brain re-sets.
