Training

Keeping your dog well-exercised has a variety of benefits. Not only will you keep them at a healthy weight and their muscles limber, you can also use exercise as a way to bond with your dog and provide them with mental enrichment.

Before you begin an exercise routine with your dog, there’s a lot to know. We chatted with canine physical therapist Dr. Courtney Wheeler, PT, CCRT, from Walking Paws Rehab in Boulder, Colorado, and canine conditioning coach, Kirsten Belinsky, CPDT-KA, CSCC, from Canine Athletics Training Center in Longmont, Colorado about all things dog exercise.

Dogs can learn to respond to all sorts of sounds and cues, but among the most effective for a solid recall, or “come,” is...

Free dog training apps are convenient, budget-friendly, and address behavioral issues and training. They can even help you teach your dog tricks. However, with so many apps available, it can be challenging to determine which ones use only positive reinforcement to train dogs. Be careful out there! Sadly, many dog trainers still use negative reinforcement and balanced training, both of which we do not recommend.

Michigan State University (MSU) trains its athletes using five golden rules as a guideline to ensure positive reinforcement works. Not only do we think these five golden rules are excellent for human athletes, but we found that the coaching advice can apply to dog training as well. MSU’s five golden rules of positive reinforcement are:

Everyone who owns a dog can benefit from professional training, whether it’s for basic training to taming aggression to working as a service or therapy dog. Dog training costs can vary significantly depending on where you live and the type of training you seek.

The term “balanced dog training” is often misunderstood to mean taking a holistic approach to teaching dogs. However, in the dog training world “balanced” refers to the use of both aversive and non-aversive training methods. A growing body of research is showing that dogs trained using aversive techniques (e.g. leash jerks with a choke or prong collar, shock delivery through e-collars, hitting or yelling at the dog) experience poorer welfare both within and outside the training context compared to dogs trained with reward-based (positive reinforcement) methods.

Do you use hand signals to communicate with your dog? You should! When dogs know both hand signals and verbal cues, they are far more likely to respond to the hand signal than a verbal cue. A study published in Animal Cognition shows that “while dogs respond to both gestural and verbal requests, gestures are more salient than words.”

Sit is one of the first things many people teach their dogs, and it’s a helpful trick. It’s the foundational skill for a sit-stay...

Outdated practices and philosophies of dog training, such as dominance training or the need to be the “alpha” pack leader persist, despite being debunked by modern science. Let’s take a brief look into the history of dog training to understand where practices like alpha dog training originated.

Although many dog parents want to train their dog to ring a bell to go outside, this is an option that dogs most frequently learn to use for alternate purposes. Especially if you combine pottying with walks or if you have a fenced yard.

How you train a dog to use a peed pad changes when you are training a mature dog

Training with treats is cornerstone of positive reinforcement dog training. It’s dog-friendly, it’s fun and the basics are easy for trainers of all ages and skill levels. At its core, the concept is simple: feed behaviors you want to see happen more often.