05 Dub When to Start Training Advanced Obedience with Your Puppy
I am sure you have heard this notion of delaying your puppy’s training until it reaches some arbitrary age: 6 months, 9 months, or even a year. In most cases, when you encounter such “good advice,” it fortunately does not mean you should postpone housetraining or leash training your puppy. Usually, it is only concerned with “formal” or advanced obedience training for trials and competitions.
Some people think you should let your dog have his “childhood” and not overwhelm him with training at a young age. Although there is some truth to this, the unfortunate consequence is handlers missing out on the best, never-to-be-repeated-again period of their dog’s life.
Never will they be able to teach him the fundamentals so easily as at the tender puppy age, and they will struggle to make up for it later. You know I am a big advocate for training any dog at any age, even starting with older and mature dogs, and I stand by that. But having the opportunity to train your puppy from day one—or, should I say, from week eight when you get it from the breeder—is such a blessing and should not be squandered. If you are smart about it, you will reap the benefits of this for years to come.
Let’s talk about the two extremes that are very bad for your future training:
- Not training any advanced obedience at all. This is a huge, wasted opportunity. You can make up for it with some hard work in the future, but why waste it in the first place?
- Overtraining your puppy. This is just as bad as no training for numerous reasons. I have seen dogs who almost literally had their obedience routines more or less done by the age of 6 months. Heeling, retrieving, positions, everything on point—it looked great on Instagram videos, really. The problem was that a few short months later, all of it fell apart. The dogs were discouraged and overwhelmed; and some of them, unfortunately, had various health issues with their joints later on. It was very bad and arguably worse than not training at all, I’ll admit.
No Hard Work, Just Fundamentals
There is always a middle ground between any two extremes, and that is usually the correct way to go, including in this case as well. So, how should you approach the training of your puppy in a healthy, sustainable way that both of you will enjoy?
Training such a young puppy is less about the actual exercises and more so about instilling the joy of working with you. Little puppies are inexperienced and stupid—and I say that with all the affection I have for them. Just look at little Archer up there in the title photo from one of our early obedience sessions: cute, all ears, and very much naive.
It is very easy to convince a young puppy of something. Impressions made at this young age can easily last a lifetime, some of them negative (like the fear of something that scared the hell out of the little one) but positive ones as well. If you use this opportunity to convince your puppy that there is nothing more fun and rewarding than working with you, he will just go: “Ok, seems legit, I’ll roll with it. Mummy/daddy is always right about everything after all.”
If you teach him to love bumbling around with his head up next to your left leg in an easy heeling exercise, he will love heeling his whole life—if you don’t screw it up somewhere along the way, that is. I have already written about the foundational principles of obedience, the important things you should be teaching your puppy right from the start.
Of course, you also shouldn’t overwhelm your puppy and potentially damage its long-term health. Don’t do anything that is putting too much strain on your puppy’s joints, like any form of jumping, quick changes in direction or pace, or some over-the-top tug of war. Keep it simple and lowkey. There are tons of things you can work on without endangering your puppy’s body and health.
How to Work with a Puppy
Make sure your training sessions are short. And by short, I mean really short. Five minutes feels like a lifetime for someone who has been alive for 8 weeks. A minute is enough multiple times per day if your puppy is able and willing.
Let him get excited and all waggly when he sees the session is about to begin. Then, double-check if he is still excited and waggly when it ends as if he would much rather continue on. That’s the sweet spot.
Prolong your sessions very slowly, and always adapt to the present conditions. Take into account how tired your puppy is, what time of day it is, what other activities you two have been up to that day, etc.
Work on the easy, low-impact exercises. Show him the fundamentals of heeling, show him positions, start playing, and praise him as much as you can. Generally, strive to have a great time together and just, almost as a bit of an afterthought, do some work here and there without your puppy even noticing that he is actually working.
Let him get used to everything he is going to be experiencing throughout his life. Take him to the training field and show him around. Teach him how to relax in his kennel in your car. Show him the atmosphere of a trial or competition. Little 4-month-old Archer was with me at his first competition, excitedly watching other dogs perform, with me whispering in his huge ear that one day that was going to be him.
If you are smart about this, your dog won’t be able to heel perfectly at 6 months—that’s not the point. However, he will forever have his eyes light up when he hears the command “Heel!” and that’s so much more valuable for your future training. My little 10-year-old retired Finka, who enjoys snuggling up to me on the couch the most these days, still gets excited when she can heel with me for a bit.
So please, don’t overwhelm your puppy, but also don’t waste his formative weeks and months. Use them to make him as happy and excited about his future as a badass canine athlete as possible.
It’s not hard if you just give it some thought. Be mindful, and good luck with your puppy! Hope he didn’t leave you a “surprise” somewhere on the carpet while you were reading this article.