How much time should I spend training my puppy.

This is a common question I get and always gets me thinking about what is training.

First thing to remember is training happens 24 hours a day not just when you are training and it is about the decisions you make almost unconsciously. In training you ask your dog to sit nicely rather than jump up and he does the rest of the time he jumps up, you practise walking nicely on lead when you are training but when you take him for a walk you let him pull, when you are training a come you are careful to set your pup up for success but then you let him run around crazy and you have trouble catching him etc . These things all mean that the things you do outside your training outweigh your training and confuses your puppy. So for example with the come I do a small amount of come work as part of my training sessions but when my puppy is running loose I make a real effort to reward her when she comes and checks in with me as this encourages her to want to hang out with me, I also try and encourage my puppy to come running up to me and then release back to play so the come starts to become part of our fun interaction.

I try to see all my interactions with my puppy as a way of encouraging the behaviours I want so if she offers a sit I reward her for doing that. The more I reward (what ever that reward is- not just food) the better she will understand what I like and the more likely she is to want to repeat those behaviours.

I love playing with my puppy and I use these play sessions as a chance to build our relationship while also encouraging things like good toy play.  I also do things like teaching her a few tricks – these are fun and both of us enjoy learning them and it is a great way of building your bond . These sessions are really short and we often do a number of things.

We also just hang out together and these are times when I reinforce that we can be calm and relaxed not just full on play- very important for a high drive puppy.

I do lots of tiny training sessions (maybe 30 sec maybe a couple minutes) during the day.  This is where I introduce concepts that I then get incorporated into our interactions during the day.  For example I might do some work on encouraging them to walk beside me and then this gets taken into the bigger concept. I also make a mental note of anything that is happening that I don’t like and then I make a point to do a few fun exercises to reinforce the behaviour I want. For example if my puppy was starting to get too focused on my chickens we would have a few short sessions on the value on focusing on me not the chickens

In summary I do several short sessions a day training my puppy in which I work on the concepts that I want in daily life, plus I do some work on specific behaviours I want to develop for what my future dog will need. However, my puppy sees training sessions as a chance to hang out with me and have fun and the majority of my training is in how I manage and respond during the rest of the time.