Free Puppy Training Tips

When you bring your puppy home, it is important to establish the rules that you will be using when he is an adult dog right away. If you don’t want dogs on the furniture, then the puppy shouldn’t be on the furniture either.  By putting the rules into place now, it is more of a fact of life and less of a thing you need to teach your puppy.

Make it age appropriate:
Never expect more than your puppy can give you.  Most formal training doesn’t begin until your puppy is 11 weeks of age but if you do start earlier than that; don’t expect them to perform the command perfectly for a few more weeks or months.  Usually the first training you will start with is potty training and crate training.

Click Here to Get Truly Great Puppy Training Tips

Socialization is very important:
If you can, I strongly recommend taking your puppy to socialization classes.  This will help get them used to other dogs and people and will begin teaching them how to be a polite dog.

If you can’t find a local puppy socialization class, try to find a local network where you can bring your puppy around other pups and take them out to a variety of places where dogs are welcome.  In addition, make sure people come to your home to provide different opportunities for socialization.

Keep training sessions short:
When you are training your puppy, keep it short.  Don’t expect a puppy to focus for twenty minutes straight. Instead, make it a five-minute training session and then play with your puppy before returning to training.  This will keep training fun and will give them plenty of reward afterwards.

Use his natural behaviors:
Although we want to teach our puppies to sit, stay and come, you can start training by simply using your puppy’s natural behavior.  When he sits in front of you, simply say, “sit” and praise him immediately.  This is a more informal way to train but it lays the foundations and doesn’t force the puppy to do something he doesn’t want to do.

Make it fun:
Remember that training should be fun for both you and your puppy so don’t take it too seriously at this stage, instead, provide time during training for playing and also start and end it on a positive note.  If you end up getting upset with your puppy, don’t stop training, follow through with something he does know and then praise him for doing such a good job.

Set the schedule:
One thing I have seen countless times is a little puppy losing interest and deciding for the owner that training is over.  Don’t let your puppy do this and when he loses interest, bring him back for one last command and then end the session.  By doing this, you will let him know that you are in charge.

Bait the command:
When you are training your puppy, you will use bait to put your puppy into a command.  So, for example, when you are training your puppy to sit, instead of pushing on his rear end, you would cup bait between your fingers and thumb so he can smell the bait but not get to it.  Then you would move the bait from in front of his noise up and back making him drop down into a sit.  As you bait him, you would give the command and then praise him.

Don’t repeat commands:
One of the worst things that you can do when training your puppy, besides hitting him, is to repeat the command more than once.  A command should only be given once so when you are teaching sit, you would give the command and then bait him to sit without saying it again.

Properly praise your puppy:
Lastly, make sure that you properly praise your puppy.  In the beginning, you puppy is going to be food driven but if you don’t properly use food, you will find your puppy only listens when you have food.  To praise properly, when your dog does a command, praise him verbally and then give the treat.  If it is a come, touch his collar, praise verbally and then treat.  The treat should always be last.

Click Here to Get Truly Great Puppy Training Tips