Professional Dog Training Techniques
Surprisingly Easy Tips and Techniques to Improve Your Dog Training Skills
If you like to do things well (like me), are getting a little nerdy about dog training (also me), or just want your training to be as efficient as possible to get it over with (still me), here are a few tips to help you train your dog more efficiently and effectively.
One: Focus 100% on Training
If you are totally focused on the task at hand, you can get a lot of training done in 5 minutes. Plus, your dog will have more fun! So, leave your phone in another room, tell your family to stop talking to you, and dive in.
Research suggests that a rate of reinforcement of about 10 treats per minute is ideal for dogs who are new to training. That’s an impossible pace if you have to deal with distractions.
It will also be easier for you to notice any little things they do that are on the right track. The more reward-able behavior you notice, the more information your dog has to go off when they try to figure out what they are learning.
Like a chef getting ready to cook, you want to prep all of your supplies before you start your training session. You’ll want to cut up your treats and grab any supplies like clickers, treat pouches, leashes, or props.
Two: Reward Generously
There are two important elements to rewarding generously, the quality of the reward and the quantity of it.
Quantity of Rewards
When your dog is still trying to figure out what you want, each rewarded behavior serves as a clue, giving them more information. Once they are doing the behavior you want, each reward strengthens the connection forming in their brain. Cutting your treats up into pea-sized pieces will help you reward frequently without overstuffing your dog.
Quality of Rewards
Your reward has to be more interesting to your dog than what is happening around them. In your living room, working on simple behaviors, veggies, cereal, or dry dog food will do just fine. On a hike, at the dog park, or while practicing leave it, human meat or cheese will serve you better.
Three: Always Follow a Training Plan
The goal of dog training is to take your dog from what they can do now and get them to what you’d like them to be able to do in the future. A training plan shows how you’ll get from here to there.
You should be able to find a training plan online or in a book for just about anything that you want to teach your dog. Working from a trusted, professional trainer’s plan can save you a bunch of time. They’ve probably taught that same skill to a bunch of dogs and refined their plan along the way, helping to save you from making mistakes.
If you need to make a plan of your own, check back soon for a guide on making your own training plans.
Four: Keep Track of Your Dogs Successes and Failures
Tracking your dog’s success rate helps you know when you should move up or down a step in your training plan. If you make those decisions it by gut feeling, you will inevitably be off one way or the other, which slows you down.
Here’s how Jean Donaldson recommends doing it:
Train in sets of five repetitions.
At the end of each set, look at your dog’s success rate.
Follow these rules to decide if you should make things harder or easier, or stay the same.
4 or 5 successes out of 5 – Make it one step harder.
3 successes out of 5 – Stay at the same step.
0 to 2 successes out of 5 – Make it one step easier.
Five: Retrain Skills in New Environments
One big difference between dog brains and human brains is that dog brains stink at generalizing. That means that they really struggle to take what they’ve learned in one context and apply it in a different one. So, when you teach your new dog to sit in the living room, there’s a good chance he will have no idea what you are asking if you try it outside or if your partner tries to ask him.
Here are a few factors that can affect how a dog figures out how to respond:
Boomer learned how to roll over with anyone, anywhere.
The Trainer
Who is asking? What that person’s body is doing? Are they sitting or standing, giving any hand signals, holding treats or not?
The Location
Where you are? Have you been here before?
Any Distractions
Are people, dogs, or critters nearby? Anything that your dog finds exciting or scary? How distracted is your dog by these things today?
The solution is to train new skills in a variety of environments and with any new trainers. You start in the quietest, most boring ones and work your way up the excitement ladder.
Six: Only Give Cues One Time
Our instinct is to teach dog’s new words in the same way we teach babies – by chanting them over and over. It makes sense that we would try that, but dogs actually learn new stuff by recognizing patterns. For instance, “sit” > putting their tush on the floor > a treat! It’s harder to figure out what “sit” means if the pattern isn’t there 80% of the time you hear the word or see the hand signal.
It’s ok if there is a bit of latency between when you gave the cue and when your dog did the behavior. Unless you totally lost their attention, they are thinking through it and making the connection.
If you find yourself tempted to repeat cues, you might be in need of a drop in your training plan or increased patience and latency after your cues.
TL;DR
These tips will help you reliably get more out of your training sessions with your dog:
Stay 100% focused on your dog during training sessions.
Use teeny treats to be able to reward frequently. Go with human meats and cheeses for important behaviors or in distracting environments.
Follow a training plan to help you get from what your dog can do now to what you want them to be able to do in the future.
Keep track of how your dog is doing to objectively decide when to make training harder or easier.
Retrain new skills in lots of new scenarios to compensate for how bad dogs are at generalizing.
Give your cues one time to help your dog learn how to respond the first time.
YouTube Video
Prefer to digest new information via video? You can check out these same tips on our YouTube channel!
Resources
Patricia B. McConnell, PhD. and Karen B. London, PhD. have written a number of short, practical books about dealing with various behavior issues. They have great training plans in them.
Emily Larlham from Kikopup has an amazing library of training videos that could be great help when you are in need of a training plan.