The Complete Dog Training System: Beginner to Advanced

What you're about to watch is over a decade of dog training experience condensed into a single 5 and a half hour course. This course became the highest rated course on the Sitday Stay Learn platform with the most five-star reviews. And it has already helped thousands of dog owners better understand, train, and communicate with their dogs. In this course, I'm going to teach you the science behind training dogs, how they learn, how they process information, and we'll cover things like food handling skills, classical and opera conditioning, how to get your dog engaged and focused on you, positional work, recalls, loose leash walking, and with this understanding, you'll even be able to tackle behavioral issues. I've designed this course around three main goals. First, to help you understand the science behind dog training. Second, to improve your skills as a handler. And third, to help you train that well- behaved dog that you always wanted with reliability control both on and off leash. Now, some of you may be wondering why a course that used to be paid is now being released for free. Last month, I lost my dog Ari. She was my number one dog, my training partner, and one of the biggest reasons why I am the trainer today. And this course was the last major project that her and I worked on together. June 21st would have been Ari's 11th birthday. So, what better way to honor her memory than by making this course available to as many dog owners as possible. I'd also like to thank Sit Daylearn for supporting the release and helping me honor Ari's legacy. I truly hope that this course helps you and your dog build the kind of relationship that made Ari so special to me. Welcome to my instructional series to teach you how to train your dog. My name is Nate Schmer. I'm a certified professional and master dog trainer. I've been training dogs professionally since 2012. You may have even seen me on my show on Animal Planet Rescue Dog to Super Dog. I've done seminars throughout the country. I've trained in AKC competitive obedience as well as Shitzen, IGP, PSA, and Mandio ring. And I want to show you some of the fundamentals that's going to get you to take your dog from where they are right now to where you want them to be. So, let's get these dogs and let's start training. In this course, I'm going to be showing you skills that you're going to develop that's going to make you a better dog trainer. We're going to work on food handling skills initially. Then, we're going to be doing some luring positional work, followed by luring movement exercises. We're going to teach the dog the concept of leash pressure, turning on and off pressure so we can get them to comply to the commands and obedience that we want them to perform. After that, we're going to be adding commands. And then last but not least, we are going to be doing corrections if that's something you want to add within your training. So, let's go ahead and get started. In this course, we're going to be using some basic equipment, but not very much. So, number one, we're going to have a leash. I like to use a 4ft nylon leash. Number two, we're going to have a collar on the dog. This is a martingale collar. This is what I prefer to use, but you can also use a flat basic nylon collar or even a prong collar if you want. Then we're going to have a cone. Now I have the pole to make it convenient when moving it around, but you don't need the pole. It does make it easier if you want to use that and the cone. And then we have the climb bed. So this is going to help us with teaching some of our exercise like the stay command or commands from a distance. And then we're going to have our training vest or a training pouch somewhere where you can keep the treats that you're going to be using to keep your dog motivated for the training. And of course, we're going to want some food that we're going to be using. So, we got the equipment. Now, we're ready to start training. Now, we're going to be using food when training our dogs. I like to use the dogs food and not treats. So, if we give them too many treats, they're going to be getting a bunch of sugar and it's not very healthy. But, we can get them to work for the meals in which you feed them. So, this is the way that I like to do it. If I'm going to train my dog, let's say, three times, then I take all their food for the day and I break it down into four equal piles. three for the training sessions that I'm going to be doing. And then the fourth pile is going to be for any random thing that I might do with the dog throughout the day. I always want my dogs to believe that I have a way to pay them because again, everything our dogs do is bo based on motivation. Either motivated to access something pleasant, motivated to prevent something unpleasant, or the behavior itself is fun. Now, if you have a dog that has low food drive, you can increase that food drive by making your dog play for all their food. I used to say make them work for all their food, but really we want them to play. We want it to be fun. We want that strong positive association for obedience training paired up with their food. And using a lot of movement can often help increase our dog's motivation. So, if you bring your dog out and you go to offer your dog food and your dog says, "No, I'm not interested." No big deal. put the dog away, put the food away, and try again later. But don't give them free food in the middle of training. We want them to know that they have to play in order to get their food. And this is going to make training significantly easier. I promise you, every dog is food motivated. And again, we can use that to guide them into the positions that we want them to perform with positive attitude because training should be fun. Something I tell all my students to keep in mind is what I like to call the environmental difficulty assessment. And this means when you're training in an environment, you want to think about how difficult that environment is for your dog within the training. I like to do a scale of zero through five. So five would be the most difficult environment for my dog to train in, and zero would be the easiest. No distractions at all. This would be training inside of your house or training in an empty training building somewhere where your dog's not going to be distracted by things within the environment. And that's what a competitive motivational factor is. It's other things that's going to draw your dog's attention away from you. And the more of those there are in the environment, the more difficult that environment becomes. So, if you want your dog to perform well in a level five environment, make sure you teach them first in a level zero, one, two, three, four, then five. Now, this doesn't mean that you can't take your dog to a level five environment before they've done training in the other environments. Just adjust what you're asking them to do. If I have a brand new dog and I've only trained that dog in a level zero environment, I'm not going to expect it to do the same thing in a level five environment. But, I could take the dog there. I might have the dog on a harness and I'm just preventing the dog from practicing any behavioral issues, but I'm not going to expect the dog to fly into perfect heel position or do these automatic sits and movements into a down stand and stay. I'm going to have to work my way up to that because our dogs have to be generalized to the training. They have to understand that it applies everywhere. And this is why in this course, I'm going to teach you how to teach behaviors in multiple different positions relative to you, the handler, as well as within the environment. That's going to help them become generalized to the training, which is going to make that process of getting them to obey and perform in different environments nice, smooth, and easy without any conflict. One of the things you want to be aware of is common mistakes that people make and you want to avoid these because they can have a negative impact on your training. So, the very first thing, I talked about it a couple times in this course that you're going to see, but number one is don't yell at your dog. Yelling is not a good use of positive punishment. The only time I will yell at my dog is if it's in an emergency situation. Meaning, maybe my dog's running towards something and I need to stop it or something bad could potentially happen. So, because I don't yell, when I do, it's going to have an impact. If you yell all the time, either your dog's going to become desensitized to it, or your dog's going to be very uncomfortable and fearful around you. When we yell, it makes us inconsistent and unpredictable to our dogs. So, don't yell. Which brings me to number two. Never train your dog when you're feeling frustrated. You don't want to train when you're frustrated because that energy is going to transfer to your dog and now dog training is not going to be any fun. Which also means we don't alpha roll our dog. If you're not familiar what alpha rolling is, alpha rolling is when we hold our dog down in order to assert our dominance. We don't want to assert our dominance and hold them down. Remember, we're working with our dogs together on a team towards a common goal. Then, we don't want to take things from our dog. Taking things from our dog can cause a dog to have resource guarding issues. And this goes back to that whole concept of being the alpha. We think that we should take things away because we want to be the alpha. An alpha, by the way, in the dog world is priority access to limited resources. So if you have two dogs and one dog has priority access to limited resources, if you throw one treat down and one dog is allowed and the other dog doesn't take it, you know which one is the alpha. But we don't want to take things away. We want to teach the dog a drop it command. So we can ask them, we can do that by using something known as value transfer. And that's a technique that we can use to teach behaviors like the drop it command. But we don't want to just take things away unless it's an emergency. So you can trade something or you can teach the dog a drop it command. But if you start taking things, especially when the dog's a puppy, you can create resourceuarding issues, which is something we definitely don't want to do. We also want to be careful of being inconsistent with our commands, not being clear with what we want. We're telling our dog to do one thing, then we switch it to something else because they didn't do the first one. And by being inconsistent, it's going to slow down the training process. That also means we don't want to praise our dog when they're doing something that we don't want. If my dog is next to me and my dog is barking at another dog, I don't want to go, "It's okay, baby. Very nice. It's okay." Because the dog is hearing, "Oh, that's a good dog. Bark at that other dog. Very nice." So, we don't want to praise our dog when they're doing things that we don't want them to do. And then we don't want our dogs to pull when we have them on leash. We don't want that to become a habit. So, if you are walking and you haven't gotten to the part of how to teach the dog to walk nicely on a loose leash, if your dog pulls, just stop moving. Don't allow the dog to pull you in any direction unless they have a harness on. But if your dog has a flat collar on, don't let them start pulling you everywhere because that's going to make the loose leash training as well as the leash pressure training more difficult for you. So, those are some of the most common mistakes people make and you want to avoid those from the beginning. Now, something that I often hear from students that I'm training is what if they come across somebody, let's say a client that they're working with or maybe they themselves want their dog to perform without constantly having to show them food. This is known as a dog that is reactive. And I'm not talking in the sense of being on a leash, but rather the dog is reacting to the reward that we are showing them. Now, this is very normal. All dogs start off this way. You get your dog, you ask them to do something, they look at you, they go, "I see nothing of value." We pull out the treat, the dog goes, "Oh, okay." And they perform the behavior. And then we reward them. But there's certain things that we can do to start removing the treat from the visual to get the dog to perform while they're believing that the treat might possibly appear. So they learn that instead of their behavior being driven by the reward, we are going to have their behavior drive the production of the reward. And there's a couple techniques that we can do to help facilitate this. One of my favorite ones is capturing. So capturing, think about like taking a photo and putting that photo in your dog's brain and they're going to remember that position. This is where we use markers. Now, we're going to get into markers more in this course, but a marker is a word or sound that predicts any one of the four quadrants of opera conditioning. That's your positive and negative reinforcement. Positive and negative punishment. Now, the one that most people use is a marker that predicts positive reinforcement. This is if we use a clicker or we say yes and then we follow it up with a treat. After enough repetitions, if I tell the dog yes and I give them a treat, eventually I say yes and the dog goes, "Oh, here comes the reward." because they've learned that pattern. So now when your dog is doing things throughout the house, anything that you like, you want to capture it. So let's say you like when your dog goes and sits on their bed. The moment they do that, you would click or you would say yes. And then you would follow it up with a treat. Your dog randomly sits. Yes, you give them a treat. Your dog looks at you. Yes, you give them a treat. You didn't ask them to do anything, but their behavior made the reward magically appear. This is all part of that concept of opera conditioning. Operate conditioning is a dog that understands that their behavior has an effect on their environment. So, they start to realize that they can make good or bad things happen based on their behavior. And this is going to start to teach the dog that you're a reward dispenser. You always have a way to pay your dog, even if they can't see it. And this is going to increase the likelihood that they do the behaviors, but not only do the behaviors, but do them with enthusiasm. Do it with excitement because dog training should be fun. As I said before, now the other technique that we're going to use is our leash pressure training. When we teach a dog the concept of the leash, it becomes a cue just like a lure does. We can start to manipulate our dog's position in all these different exercises just using the leash as a physical cue or guidance to get them to do what we like them to do. Now, this helps us remove the treat. Because when we're using a food lure, the dog sees the food and we're moving them into position. But when we use a leash, we can get them to do the same thing. Once they do the behavior, then we can follow it up with the reward. So these things are going to help our dog start performing without that constant visual of the treat. But in the beginning, we do use a lot of that treat visual to keep them motivated and excited for the training. And then of course, the last thing is spacing out rewards. Once a dog starts to perform without any additional help. If I have a dog that there's two main ways. one following a food lure. So I can guide them into all kinds of different positions and the dog understands that pitcher. I can do a quick little movement and the dog jumps into heel position or I can quickly guide the dog through my legs and they run around and they go to the center or the sit down etc. Once the dog knows that physical cue, I can start chaining multiple physical cues together. So I might have the dog do a sit down, come heel center, flip back into the front, maybe a spin and a stand. Then I can reward the dog. Since the dog knows those physical cues, we can start asking for more before we reward them. And then it's the same thing when we start to add the verbal command. Once I get the dog performing to the verbal command, then I can start spacing out the rewards as well. So, it's part of the learning process. And we're going to be talking about fading, which is where we take a cue to get a dog to do something and we make that cue, that physical cue, less and less noticeable. When it comes to teaching our dog to perform behaviors, people always want to understand, what do I need to do to get my dog to sit when I say sit? What do I need to do to get my dog to go into a down position when I tell them down? There is a process to do that. One of the most common mistakes that people make is they start trying to put a verbal command on a behavior before they can even get the dog to do the behavior. You see it all the time. You may have even done it where we tell the dog down. We're saying down as we're pointing, but the dog doesn't even know what we're trying to get them to do. And we're repeating the command over and over. So instead of doing that, first we want to teach the dog how to do the behavior that we want them to perform. Once we can get a dog to perform the behavior every single time on a physical cue because that's how they learn initially, through physical communication. Then we add the verbal command. And I want to explain this in the beginning because you're going to notice for a lot of the exercises in the beginning of this course, I'm not going to be using a command. I'm going to save that for later. That's the process that we want to follow. I want the dog to really understand the concept of luring. I want the dog to really understand the reward event and really understand how to follow a leash into these different positions. Then when I have all that down, now I can start adding the command. So, if you're watching the course and you're thinking, "Oh, I I'm ready to add the command for this behavior." A good thing to keep in your mind is if you love it, name it. If you don't love it, don't name it yet. So, if I have my dog, let's say, going into the down position, but my dog is still going down a little slow or maybe a little bit on an angle, I'm not going to name that command yet because that's not how I want the dog to perform it. When I get the dog dropping quickly to their elbows and they have that very nice sphinx position. Okay, now that's what I like. Now I'm going to put it on a command. And when we put a behavior on a command, the command must come before the physical cue. This is incredibly important. It's known as overshadowing. If we say the command at the exact same time we deliver the physical cue. So if I go sit or down, the dog's not going to learn the verbal command. We have to say the command then present the physical cue. So I have to say sit then lift down then lure the dog into the down. It has to be a pattern that's predictable to the dog. They have to go, "Oh, I heard you make this noise and every time you make this noise, you then show me a behavior to perform. Once I perform that behavior, you reward me." So then the dog goes, "Oh, once you say sit, I'm just going to jump into the position and I'm not going to wait for that physical cue. I'm just going to do it. And once the dog starts doing that, then we know the dog now understands the verbal command. I like to also call this questions and answers. Our commands to our dogs are questions. The physical cue that we use to get them to perform the behavior. That's the answer. So when we have our dog in front of us, we go, "Hey buddy, do you know what to do when I tell you down?" The dog goes, "No, I I have no idea what to do when you make that noise." And then we say, "Here, I'm going to show you." And then we assist them. But it goes like this. Down, then the Q. The dog does the behavior. Yes, we mark it, then we follow it up with the reward. So, it's command, motivate. Motivate is the physical cue. Mark the behavior, then deliver the reward. In addition, it's important to know that when we teach our stays, you can use a verbal stay once we get to that part of the course. But I like to do what's known as the implied stay. Meaning, if I give a dog a commanded position, they must maintain that position unless I give them a new command. I use my terminal marker or termination marker, which means release plus reward. Or I use a release command or a release word that lets the dog know that they are released. I like to call it a release word actually instead of a release command because a command says you need to do this, but a release word is just telling them, hey, you're released. You can keep hanging out there if you want, but you can now get up. So those are the three ways that we release them from a stay. So if I tell a dog down, that dog is now in a down stay. And because of that, when I start adding commands, I chain a bunch of different commands together pretty quickly. So I'm not having the dog hold a position. Keep in mind, duration often kills motivation. So I might have the dog sit and then go right into the down and then into a stand and then into a sit front and then I could reward them. Or I am going to reward them after every single command. So, I'll tell the dog down, cue them into the position. Once they're in the position, I use the terminal marker and then I reward them. Now, for the dogs that I'm training, the terminal marker that I'm going to be using is the word free. Now, don't get confused by the dictionary definition. When I tell my dogs free, that means you did the behavior correctly, you are going to receive a reward, and you are released from the position. If I want duration in a position, we can just use verbal praise to let the dog know that they're doing it the right way and we can follow it up with the rewards. So, keep this in mind when you're going through this course. If you want to start adding the commands early because your dog's performing it the way you're happy with, you can go ahead and start doing that or you can jump to the part of the course where I demonstrate and explain how to do this in more detail. This part of the course, we're going to be going over food handling skills. Now, this isn't something that I always taught my students, but I started to teach it because students when they had their new dog, especially if you're training a puppy or a dog with a very low attention span, you want to be good at handling treats. I had this one student that had his treats in a satchel. And so, every time he would reward his dog, he'd have to open it and find the treat and get the other piece. And in between that time from getting the first treat and getting the second treat, the dog was already checked out. The dog went, "Oh, it takes you way too long." The dog would look at them, "Okay, I got a treat. Where's the next one? Oh, nothing's happening." The dog would start sniffing the ground and doing whatever it wanted. And that started to happen after every single time the dog got the reward. So, we want to make sure we have good food handling skills. As I said earlier, I want you to think about not just your dog's performance, but rather your performance as a handler. Let's enhance your skills so you could be the best handler possible. There's something that's very commonly said in the dog training world is you can take a really great handler and that handler can make a very untrained dog look very nice. Or you can take a very poorly trained handler and that handler can make a well-trained dog look very bad. So, we want to focus in on your skills. And when your skills get better, your dog, as a byproduct, is going to perform significantly better. So, we have multiple different exercises. These are very simple, and these are designed to help you with your food handling skills. First, I want to show you how we're going to be handling the food. Now, you can take the food and hold it in your fingertips and give it to your dog, but you're never going to get them to perform as well by using that technique. What we want to do instead is we want to take the food, place it in our hand, and then all we're going to do is use our thumb to secure it in position. This creates a little valley for our dogs to place their muzzle into, and it's going to help us manipulate the dog's head, which is going to manipulate the dog's body. So, we can control where the dog goes by controlling their head. Wherever the head goes, the butt does the opposite. So, we can start getting them to perform these behaviors when we hold the food that way. Now, the first thing you're going to want to do once you get used to holding the food that way is you want to show your dog how it's going to look. So, one, I like to drop my hand straight down and let the dog take the treat. Now, if this is the first time you're holding a treat this way, there's a good chance that your dog is still going to go for your fingertips. If that happens, just be patient and wait. He will find or she will find where the food is. Once we've shown them that picture, we want to show them the opposite picture. Remember what I talked about before getting a dog generalized? We have to show them all the different ways that it's going to look, even having to look up to get the treat. Same thing doing on the opposite side. Once the dog knows how to get access to the food, then we're going to start jumping into these food handling exercises that I talked about. This should be very easy. Again, if your dog takes a moment to find it, don't worry about it. Your dog will find it. Once your dog is grabbing grabbing at the food each time without any issues or without getting your fingers, then you're going to know that you're ready for the next step. Now, I want to show you a exercise known as hand touch. This isn't really as much a food handling exercise, but this does add some value. And the main thing is we want our dogs to know that our hands can be used as targets. This is what the hand touch is for. Now, in the beginning, we're going to have food in our hand, but then we're going to get to a point where we don't have food. I'm going to show you how to do that. It's very easy. You're going to have to have your marker charged in order to do this, which I teach a little bit later in the course. So, if you haven't taught the marker yet, you can come back to this after you do, but you can start the first step. So, the first step, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take a piece of the food and I'm going to place it in between my fingers. And this is so I can hold my hand straight out like this. This is going to be the picture I want my dog to see. And I'm simply going to drop it to the side and let my dog take the treat. Once he takes the treat, I'm going to load the other hand and I'm going to do the same thing. Now, he got distracted by a bird. That's part of that environmental difficulty assessment that we were talking about earlier. So, again, we just place it between our fingers and we have the dog get it. So, this is teaching him to target the hand. And the food is pretty small, so it's not a big visual. So, you see he's going to it each time. Now, what we can do once you have your marker charged, we can mark the behavior the moment he touches our hand and then we can follow it up with the reward from the other hand. So, I can show him the picture. Free. And now I'm going to reward him right here. Free. Free. And remember, free is his termination marker or terminal marker. Free. And this is adding that positive association to the hand. So, if I need to guide him into a position later without food, he's going to still follow my hand. So, again, very simple exercise. First, place it in your hand. Show him the picture. Get them going to grab the food each time. Then, remove the treat the moment your dog's muzzle touches your hand. That's when you mark. And then you can deliver the reward with the opposite hand. Or you can put a treat in the hand that he just touched and feed him with the same hand. Either option works. Again, this is a great exercise to get the dog to have that very high positive association to our hands and willing to follow it even when they don't see the treat. So, now I'm going to show you the first food handling exercise. You can do this with your dog or you can do it without a dog. If you're doing it without the dog, you just drop the treats on the ground and then pick it up afterwards. So, I'm going to often mention throughout the course, maybe not too many times, but a few times so you know what I'm talking about. We have our supply hand and we have our reward hand or our distribution hand, but often I call it a reward hand. So, the reward hand is the hand that we're using to reward the dog. The supply hand is going to hold the rest of our supply. This is important so you're not always having to reach into your vest or your pouch every time you want to reward your dog. When I'm working dogs, I will fill my hand up and then I'm transferring the food back and forth throughout the session. again, especially in the beginning when we're working with a young puppy. So, if you have a young puppy, their attention span is very short and we want them to get lots of rewards in the beginning and then we can start spacing it out more as they understand the game and their focus becomes better throughout the training. So, this exercise, what we want to do is we're going to keep I like to keep my hands up against my body. So, we want to think about reward placement. reward placement is going to get our dogs to go into certain positions. So Maverick here, for example, has been rewarded in this position a lot. So because of that, he finds this position. It even matters with your dog's head position. If I want his head to be up, then I'm going to reward his head up. If I always reward his head straight this way, then he's going to end up dropping his head, and I like the head to be up. So think about the reward placement. this exercise, we're going to be rewarding the dog directly in front of us. And because of that, a common thing that a lot of people do, and it's fine, it's all based on personal preference. So, for example, if you're okay with your dog being far away from you, so you we can see we have some distance here between me and my dog. If you're okay with that, that's fine. But I like my dogs to be right up next to me. So, because of that, I reward right up against my body. So, I'm going to keep my reward hand and my supply hand close to my body, and that's where I'm going to be rewarding my dog when we are rewarding. So, this is the first one. It's very simple. All we're going to do, so think about your left hand as a Pez dispenser, and you're feeding the treats into your right hand. So, it should look like this. So, he gets the one treat. My hand is center mass on my body because I want him to be center, and he's nice and close. I feed another treat in, and I reward him. And this is it. It's super simple. We're going to keep the same reward hand and same supply hand throughout. Just like that. Now, we can also do, and I recommend switching it to where we have our reward hand. Now, the left hand is the reward hand and the right hand is the supply hand. And we want to be good at feeding those treats in and rewarding our dog. Again, this is a very simple, very basic exercise, but it's the foundation to a lot of the other things that we're going to be doing. As I said, you can practice without the dog. Once you feel confident in your skills, then bring the dog in. Often we may think we're doing something well or we think we have it in our mind, but the moment we bring the dog out, we have so many other things that we're thinking about. So often honing in on these skills before the dog comes out is going to make you be more successful. So that's the first exercise. Now, what we're going to do, it's very similar to the last one. You're going to see how these skills build up upon each other. This one we're going to be switching our hand each time. So, as you go to reward, the way that I like to do it, my hands are getting pretty messy with saliva and whatnot, but we're going to reward. And then, as we're bringing that hand up, we need to be prepping our other hand to switch the food over. So, I place my thumb on one of the treats and then I drop the pile into my other hand. Once you start getting saliva on your hand, they're going to start to stick. If I drop it and I still have two in my hand or even three, I don't worry about it. It's not always going to be one treat or one piece of kibble remaining in your hand. But again, what we're doing is we're locking one piece down. We're dropping it over and then we're rewarding the dog. So, I'm doing this back and forth. Now, you see he's at a distance. And this is so you can see what I'm doing with my hands. But when I'm doing this exercise, just like the other one, I like to keep the dog nice and close. So, I'm going to reward. Come up. Switch hands. And it gets difficult once you start getting that saliva on. And you want to be quick about it. See that one? There was about five pieces. So, it starts to stick, but that's fine. The idea is being quick at handling the food and switching hands. So, that's going to be that exercise. And again, you can practice without the dog. When you're not using the dog, you're not going to have the saliva, so it's going to be easier once the dog starts taking the treat. That saliva makes it stick, and it does become a little bit more difficult. But the main thing is think about your dog's position. Be quick with switching that supply hand and that reward hand, and try not to drop a lot of pieces. Now, this exercise is known as the backwards follow exercise, but I've incorporated it into the food handling skill. You're going to see it's the same as the stationary. The only difference is that we're moving. When you first start this exercise, again, keep your hands up against your body if you want your dog nice and close. You're going to continue to walk backwards and as your dog comes to you, you're going to deliver the reward. Now, dogs in the very beginning, they'll take a piece of food and then you'll notice that there starts to become a gap between you and your dog. Once your dog finishes the food, they catch back up. They get another piece. you create that gap again and they keep catching back up. But then eventually they go, "Oh, I could just stay in this position and keep getting food." And this is the foundational exercise for our recall. Now, recall, the come when called doesn't mean the dog just coming to us. Now, you could teach that if you like, but what we like to do to make it very clear for our dogs is to teach them a position. So, when I call my dogs to me, it's not run to me and go wherever you want. It's the sit front position where they're sitting directly in front of us. That's the recall. So, this is the foundation of that exercise. Now, the first one is going to be we're going to have the same reward hand and the same supply hand throughout. We're doing the exact same thing in the stationary exercise. We're just going to be moving. So, I'm going to show you how this is going to look. And the taller your dog is, the more uncomfortable it could be with your wrist if you're trying to keep it close up against your body because you want that nice precision. If that is uncomfortable, you can reward your dog with your hand down like this. You just have to show them where it is. So, the way our hand is is often going to manipulate their position. So, with him, if I hold it here, you see how he's turning his head? I don't want him to turn his head too much. So, I hold my hand like this, which is also uncomfortable, but it gets him nice and close. And it's a little bit different. It's not as much pressure on my wrist. So, whatever works best for you. So, we're going to walk back. Reward, resupply, reward. So, you see how he's staying nice and close to me. Now, he got distracted there, but he caught back up. And we're just going to walk backwards and give our dog all the treats one at a time until we're out. Once we're out, then you can either resupply and do it again or you can end that session. So, now we're going to do the second version. And this one is more so for your food handling skills. When you're working your dog, you don't have to uh switch the reward hand, supply hand all the time, but you are going to have to do it throughout the training. There's going to be times where you're switching it based on what you're doing. And remember, we want to make the training fun. So, if we're slow, if we are boring, our dog's going to become disinterested. It's not going to be fun, and we'll never have that performance from our dog the way that we want. So, we want to keep it fun and exciting. Another thing we want to do before we start our training sessions, I didn't mention this earlier, but when you get your dog out and you're ready to do a training session, let them know the training session is about to start. So, what I like to do with my dogs is I go, "Are you ready to train? Are you ready?" They hear that and they go, "Oh, okay. We're getting ready to train." So, now on this one, you're going to do the same thing, but you're switching hands each time. Again, this is for your food handling skills. So, we're going to reward. Switch hands. Don't reward your dog if they jump like that. And that's just um negative negative reinforcement. We're not rewarding the jumping. So you see each time I'm switching the reward and the supply hand. All done until I'm all gone. All gone. And I'm out of the treats. And then if you run out of treats again, you can resupply or you can end the session there. So on this exercise, another food handling exercise what we're going to be doing and also on the other exercises if you want to test your food handling abilities, you can also do those with your hands behind your back where you're switching the food and you're bringing it out with your hands behind your back. So that is something you can do to challenge yourself a little bit. For this one, what we're going to do is we're going to reward our dog on each side going back and forth and the center if you want. So, we step back, we reward our dog as they're moving towards our hand. We switch the supply and the reward hand, and then we move back in the opposite direction. Sometimes we're going to reward center, sometimes to the side, but we want to keep that backwards movement each time, increasing our dog speed again, which is going to increase their motivation. Maverick. So, I got a little supply and my reward. Not too much. He's already starting to get a little tired. So again, we're going to drop off to the side and then off to the other side. We'll get a center one. Very good. Back off to the right. Good job, buddy. And you see he's starting to look on the ground. That's because I dropped a piece earlier. So, we want to try not to drop it because it can often cause those issues, even though I haven't dropped a single piece since. And that's it. It looks easy, but this is very difficult for a lot of people. And these skills are going to aid in your training throughout this course. So take the time to get good at this. Make it feel natural. If it feels awkward, it's probably not natural yet. Once it no longer feels awkward and it feels natural, then you'll be ready to start working with your dog beyond the food training or food handling exercises. These are what I like to call my lateral exercises. This is also going to help when we start adding some of our commands like the sit and the down. As I said earlier, we like to teach the dog how to perform these behaviors in multiple different positions relative to us as well as relative to the environment. So, with this exercise, we're going to guide our dogs to our right. We're going to shift our weight to one leg. Once the dog gets the food, we are going to transfer the dog over to our opposite hand and reward the dog in the opposite direction. What I like to do with this exercise is I try to keep the dog in a straight line and I also don't want to jam the food in the dog's face. This is a common mistake that people make. They have the food, the dog's following it. They want the dog to get the food, so they shoot it back in the dog's face. What this does is it will often slow down the dog. It's going to slow down the dog because the dog is anticipating that it's going to come flying back into their face and it's going to decrease the speed. Well, slowing down the dog, same thing, because of that. So, what we want to do is we want to continue our movement so the dog has to catch it. This is what they call in the dog training world the suicide rabbit. There's no such thing as a suicide rabbit. If a rabbit is running away from a predator, it's not going to jump back into the predator's mouth. So, don't do that with your treats or your toys if you're using toys with your dog. Be a normal rabbit. The rabbit's going to move away and try to get away from the dog. If we do that, the dog's going to increase their speed, which is going to increase their motivation, desire to train, and then we're going to get that performance we want. So, what we want to do is we want to release it right at the end and then transfer the food over. Release it right at the end. Transfer the food. So, we're doing this movement. Now, this is a little difficult, but I think you can do it. So, I'm going to bring Maverick over here. Come here, Maverick. Come here, my boy. Good job, buddy. And we're going to guide him to the side. There he gets the treat. I switch. So, it's almost like doing a little figure eight. Oh, he was faster than I was there. and I dropped it. So, we want to try not to drop it, especially if you're training in grass like this, cuz then they're going to take time looking for it. Good job, buddy. Very good. Excellent. Do a couple more. There we go. And that's going to be our lateral exercises. Have your supply hand, have your reward hand. Keep it in a straight line. Don't shove the food back in the dog's mouth and try to beat your dog. Meaning, have your other hand ready by the time your dog turns around to get that other treat. Now, we're going to be building what I like to call the reward event. We've already been been rewarding our dogs. And now, the reward event is when we reward our dog. It's pretty simple. It starts when we want to reward them and it ends when they get the reward. depending on what the reward is is going to depend on how long or short the reward event is. If I give my dog one piece of food, then that was a very short reward event. If I give my dog a couple, if I give her a reward here, here, and here, now that's a slightly longer event. I might pull out a tug toy or a ball on a rope, that's going to be an even longer reward event. But the reward event, we want to give away to our dogs for free in the beginning. We want to say, "Here you go. Here's a bunch of reward events. We want to build the desire for the dog to want the reward event. And once we build that addiction, then we start putting barriers in front of the reward event that the dog has to walk or work through or navigate through to get to those reward events in the form of engagement training or luring exercises, leash pressure, all the stuff that we're going to be doing. Now, there's a couple that I like to teach my students that are very basic, but I want you to be creative with your reward events. These are simple ones that you can think of. So, I have nine different basic reward events that I'm going to show you. And these reward events once you once you get good at doing this, this is going to lead into our engagement training. So, make this just like with those other exercises feel very natural. So, the first one is we just give our dog a reward. That's one reward event. Or we can give our dog a reward with praise. Good girl. That could be another reward event. Or I can give her a piece of food. Good girl. Praise her and pet her. That could be a reward event. I might give her one piece of food and then another piece of food. Praise and pet her. That could be the fourth reinforcement event. And we want to reward our dogs on occasions with a variety of rewards instead of always doing the same thing. If you always give your dog one piece of food or one piece of kibble after they perform something, then they're going to learn that pattern. And often dogs will check out once they get a reward. Like we were talking about earlier, they go, "Oh, I got my one reward. I'm gonna take a quick break." But if the dog thinks they might have more rewards coming, they're going to be more invested in the training process. Now, I might reward the dog with movement, which is going to add some excitement. We're going to be using that prey drive by moving something away from our dog, the play drive by making it fun, and the food drive because we're using food. So, we're going to drop back like we did on that um that that reward exercise or that treat handling exercise and reward our dog. So, that could be a reward event. Maybe I drop back. Good girl. And I praise her as she gets the treat. Or I can do that praise and pet and give her some affection. That could be a reward event. And as I said before, we can go back and forth. And then a really great simple one that we utilize throughout our training is simply going to be tossing the treat. Now I have bigger treats from earlier instead of the kibble. So these are pretty big nuggets. If I'm tossing it, I want it to be easy for my dog to see. So again, this is the reward event. It comes into play. Often it starts after we mark a behavior. So if I tell her free, we've entered that reward event. She's in the event. Now I'm done with giving her the reward. So that concludes the event. So build these up. Make it feel easy for you. Your dog should understand it. Your dog should have focus and engagement. And once you feel really comfortable doing these, then we're going to do the next step, which is engagement training or loading the markers. But you want to have this down first before you start that. Now, we're ready for engagement training. Engagement training is to allow us to teach our dogs the markers or the words that predict those rewards that we talked about earlier. So, this is classical conditioning. Now, if you remember earlier in the course, if we say the word, this goes with commands as well as markers. If I have a piece of food and I go yes, as I give the food to my dog, she's never going to become classically conditioned to the word yes. I have to say the word, pause for a half second, then deliver the reward. Now, markers are very, very valuable for two main reasons. Number one, it bridges the gap. This is why people call it a bridge between when the dog does the behavior and when they get the reward. A lot of times people don't really even know what a marker is for. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people just walking and clicking a clicker randomly. The click or the yes pinpoints the moment in time the dog does the behavior that we're trying to capture, like we talked about before. And then the reward comes after that. Once our dog is classically conditioned to the sound that predicts the reward, you're going to see a change of behavior. So, the most common ones that I see are opening the mouth, licking their lips, salivating, moving their paws, or wagging their tail. So, if I get my dog in front of me, like, watch. You'll probably see a change of behavior when I say the marker free. Do you see that? It was subtle with her, but she moved her body. She heard the marker. She knew something was coming. Once the dog is classically conditioned to the marker, we have as long as it takes to get the actual reward to the dog as long as we don't lose the dog's focus. So, if I have my dog all the way at the other side of this field and I tell her to sit and she sits and I tell her yes and I start walking towards her, she's going to be paying attention to what's happening. She's going to be going, "Oh, here he comes. Oh, there he's reaching into his treat pouch. There's the treat. I'm gonna get paid." and we made the connection. But if I'm walking towards my dog to reward her and she's going, "Here comes the treat. Here comes the treat. Here comes the treat, squirrel." Now I've lost her focus and now we've left that event. So again, this is the reward event. Now a reward event can be broken if we lose the dog's focus. But as long as the dog maintains focus, we have lots of time to deliver the reward. So, if you understand the concept of markers, this can really help out your training. So, you don't feel like you have to rush all the time to get the reward to your dog within that first second or so of them completing the behavior. Now, of course, the dog's going to learn better and faster the closer the actual reward is to the behavior. But you're not always going to be able to get the reward to your dog within that first second or so of them completing the behavior. So, we use our markers to help facilitate this to where they know it's coming even though we can't get it to them right away. So, let me show you what I mean. I'm going to tell her to go to the climb bed. All right, climb. And then I'm going to walk away so her Yes. If I say that, she knows. And I say it slightly different than how I'm saying in conversation. If I say that, she's going to know that I'm going to bring a reward to her. So, I'm going to walk back a little bit. And once I say it, as I start to walk towards her, you're going to see she'll be licking her lips and she's going to be excited that I'm coming to get the reward or bring the reward to her. Yes. So, you saw that she licked her lips once. She didn't do it that many times, but she knew that the reward was coming. So, markers are incredibly valuable. Remember, I said two main reasons. one, bridge the cap gap between the behavior and the consequence. And then number two, it helps us pinpoint very fine details within our training. So even if I am able to give the reward to my dog, so like if I'm trying to get her to sit, I can just give her the food the moment she does the behavior, I don't need the marker. But even if I have the dog right next to me and I can get them the treat quickly, sometimes we could use that marker to pinpoint a very fine detail within the training. So, let's say I'm doing that backwards follow exercise that we were doing earlier for those reward or food handling exercises. I can start bringing my hands down, which is known as fading. We're fading that physical cue. And as I bring my hands down, she's looking straight up at me. Then I can mark the behavior of her looking up at me. And then I can follow it up with the reward. And even if she drops her head down to get the treat, she still knows it was looking up at me that triggered that reward event. I'll show you what I mean. So, I'm going to use the come and call. I'm going to keep my hands behind my back. Come. And see, she's looking up at me. That's the picture that I want. Free. And now she starts looking for where the reward's going to come. Now, if you notice, she looked off to my left. I will reward opposite hand of what the dog is expecting the reward to come from. So, if my dog looks to the left, I'm going to reward off to the right. And that's because dogs will end up usually choosing a preference. They'll pick a side that they prefer and then your dog's really going to be focusing on one hand if you always reward in the direction your dog is looking. So keep that in mind as well when you are doing these exercises. But that's the value of the markers. They are incredibly incredibly powerful. So again, we are going to charge the marker by saying the word before we deliver the reward. We do that enough times until the dog becomes classically conditioned. So that was uh by Pavlov the whole dinnerbell theory. And he also discovered that if the sound came at the exact same time or if the sound came while the dog was eating, they never became classically conditioned. The sound must come before the reward. So now what we're going to do is we're going to take those reward events that we had practiced earlier and now all we're going to do is we're going to put that marker before the reward event. So, we mark the behavior, we enter the reward event. Once she gets the reward, that concludes that reward event. And then we do it again. And what I'm looking for is I want my dog looking up in my direction. So, we can have our dog focus on two different things. Either one, we can have our dogs focus on the source, which is fine. So, they're focused on the food source, or we can have the dog focus up on our face. Like, she's looking at my hand here. So, now I'm going to pull it away. There, she's looking at my face now. So, we can have them look at our face or our hands. Either one is fine, but I do like to get them used to looking up. So, I hold my hands up by my face when I start this exercise. When the dog looks up at that direction, whether they're looking at the source or my face, then I'm going to mark the behavior. There's going to be a half second pause. Then, I'm going to enter the reward event. So, I'm going to show you what that looks like right now. I'm going to get my dog in front of me. Don't worry about commands. A lot of times when people start this, they're trying to tell the dog to sit or down, do it. Don't worry about that. All you're looking for is your dog looking up at you. Whether they're sitting or standing, it doesn't really matter. You're going to say the marker. The moment your dog looks at you. Now, she's staring at me because we've done this plenty of times. But when you first start, the moment your dog looks, that's when you mark. Remember, duration can often kill motivation. If your dog looks at you and you're sitting there and you're going, "All right, I got to say the word. I have to pause and then I'm going to move. I got my supply." If you have all these things going on in your head, you're going to do it very poorly. So, you want to be good at this. This is why we practice a lot of this stuff prior to build these skills. Dog looks, we mark, pause for that half second, enter the reward event. So, this is what it's going to look like. And I'm going to use one marker for every single one. If you want, you can use different markers, but the easiest way is to start with one. This is going to be a termination marker. It means release plus reward. Free. Notice the pause. Free. Very good, Ari. Nice job. So, that was a bigger event. Free. That one I gave it to her. Free. Good job. Couple in the center. Free. Very nice, Ari. Excellent. Free. Good job. And you see how she's starting to move before I do. Free. Very good. Nice work. I want to see if I have another big piece. No, I don't. I don't think so. Bummer. All right. I'm not going to toss it because I don't have a bigger piece. I don't want her sniffing the ground. But you could also say free and toss the treat. Free and toss the treat. Free. Very nice. Free. And if you're using a clicker, this is where you would click and then move. And again, notice we have that half second pause. Roughly the half second pause between the free and the movement. Another thing is I say free the same way every time I'm going free. I sound like a broken record. You don't want to do this. Your dog performs well and you let's say you're using the word yes. Very common. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. That's not a marker anymore. So clickers were very successful for two main reasons. One, the click always sounds the same. And number two, it's much easier for most people to separate a physical from a verbal. Click or I'm sorry, a uh it's much easier for someone to separate two physicals, click reward, than it is for them to separate a physical and a verbal. Yes, reward. That's harder for most people. So those are the two main reasons why clickers were successful. these exercises. When I do engagement training with the dog, maybe I'll do it for one to three minutes. It's very short. It's fun. Lots of movement. The dog should enjoy it. Then we end the session when they're still invested. You want your dog to go, that's it. It's over. You're like, "Don't worry, we'll do it again later." And then they're going to have more excitement, more energy for the next session because we ended it when they were still invested. You don't want to do this when your dog's already full. And you don't want to do this to the point where your dog's like, "Oh, I'm stuffed. I'm not interested anymore. And they go lay down. You want them still invested when you end the session. So when you're done, you go all done. And then you can go and put your dog up or inside or whatever. And this, if you do it correctly, if you say the marker before the reward event, most dogs can become conditioned, classically conditioned within a couple days. So Pavlo came up with that whole concept of classical conditioning. And classical conditioning is just when we take a neutral stimulus like the word yes or the word no and we pair it up with something that is either good or something that the dog perceives as unpleasant if we're using no as a correction. So it makes the dog change the way they react because we take a neutral stimulus. We pair it with the unconditioned stimulus which is the actual primary reinforcer food toy affection or even a correction and then they end up having a conditioned response to the neutral stimulus. And that's basically what classical conditioning is. You probably have also heard or maybe someone has mentioned at some point counter conditioning. Counter conditioning is the exact same thing as classical conditioning. The only difference is we are pairing a fearinducing stimulus to something that the dog likes. So that's the difference if we're looking at classical conditioning and counter conditioning. But we use classical conditioning throughout our training and throughout this program. So it's important for you to understand how that works. Now, we're going to start working on our luring and positional work. It took me a long time to figure out how to structure this course because if we're trying to do something like teach our dog a sit, for example, and I want to get the dog generalized, as I said earlier, I want the dog to be able to sit in multiple different locations relative to myself and relative to the environment. Well, in order to do that, I have to be able to get my dog into these different positions. So, what we're going to do is we're going to break down all this positional work so you know how to transfer your dog into each position. We're going to start with the sit because that's the easiest to do in each one. And once we have that foundation down, then we are going to start adding the other positions like down, stand, and spin in these positions relative to us. I know I said positions a lot. So, we're going to be working on the sit front, the dog directly in front of us. We're going to have the dog in the center. We're gonna She's being goofy right now. We're going to have our dog on the right side, left side, and we're going to be able to get our dog to go from one position to the next in multiple different ways, and I'm going to show you how to do exactly that. So, this is a lot of fun. Luring is really excellent. I do luring with my dogs like she knows all the verbal commands, but I still like to do luring exercises with her because it's a lot of fun. It increases that enthusiasm and it's a great way to strengthen the relationship that you have with your dog. So, we're going to start that now. This is going to be the easiest one, and you basically have already done this by doing some of those food handling exercises. All we want is our dog to move forward. So, your dog should be able to do this. We take the food and we lure our dog forward and then we give them the food as they're following the lure. So, this is those lateral exercises that we did earlier. Now, this movement we're going to transfer to the climb bed. So, remember what I said earlier. If we want our dogs to perform a behavior, we have to be able to present a physical cue. So, we're going to guide our dogs off of the climb bed and then we're going to guide them back on. So now I'm showing her how to get off the bed, which this is great because you could transfer this over to different things like get out of the vehicle. I tell my dogs off, they'll jump out of the vehicle. Or if your dog jumps up on the sofa and maybe you don't want the dog on the sofa at this time, you can say off and your dog can jump off. So I like to teach them off and I like to teach them climb in the same session. It's very easy. And all I'm doing is I'm using these lateral exercises, these food handling exercises that we practiced earlier. And I'm giving her the treat. I know you can't really see it in the video, but she's getting the treat right there. Once all her paws come off the climb or once they all go on the climb, I give her a reward. Now, there's something that you want to keep in mind. It's known as assisted shaping. So, assisted shaping, I use this all the time with dogs that I train. Not every dog is going to jump right off of the climb bed right away. Not every dog is going to go on the bed when you lure them. Some dogs might be a little bit more hesitant. So, those dogs might try to go around the bed. You just keep working it until eventually one paw steps on the bed. Boom. Then you reward that. Then your dog might place two paws on the bed. You reward that. So, we're rewarding the dog for taking steps towards the final pitcher. This is important because if you only reward your dog when they complete the behavior, the exercise you're trying to get them to do, if you have a dog with low perseverance, then they might quit in the middle of the exercise. You're trying to get your dog to go on the bed. Your dog's not able to do it. Your dog's not following the lure. Your dog's not getting the treat. And your dog goes, "Ah, I can't do it." And walks away. We don't want our dogs to give up. So success within dog training for the dog builds success. So if our dogs are constantly winning, they're going to be more willing to try more. So think about it the concept of increasing difficulty. You want to make the training as easy as possible initially for your dog. So you want to make sure they win. If you've ever played video games, you'll know a lot of video games, they start off very easy and they gradually get more difficult as you become a better player. This is the same thing for our dogs. They're new players in the very beginning. So, we want to give them those instant gratification, that instant win quite easily in the beginning. We don't want to make it too difficult. But as our dogs get better, then we start making it more and more challenging to keep the training interesting. If it gets to a point where it's too easy, just like in a video game, then you become bored and you don't want to play it anymore. So, we have to make sure that the challenges increase according to the ability of our dog. So, again, super simple exercise. We guide them off, give them the treat, guide them back on, try not to drop it, give them the treat. If you like the way this looks and you want to add the command, as I said before, we say the command off, then we present the cue and give the dog the reward. climb. Then we would present the Q and give the dog the reward. Now climb, this is a stay. So remember what I said earlier, if we give the dog the verbal command, the stay is implied. So now the only way she can get off of here is if I release her with her termination or terminal marker, I give her a new command or I use the release word like break. And then break, she can get off and do whatever she wants. But break doesn't guarantee a reward as free guarantees a reward. So she went back on. She's like, I want I want a reward. So, that's how we're going to release them. But if I tell the dog off, it's there's not really an off stay. Unless you're trying to have your dog off the sofa, then of course, if the dog jumps back up, you would reinforce that. But if I tell her off, she could jump off. I don't have to use a termination marker after I tell her off. This would be the same thing as like a spin. You're not going to do a spin stay. You're not Your dog's not going to keep spinning until you tell them to stop. So commands that don't have a duration position like off or spin, you don't have to worry about releasing them or giving them a new command. So I hope that makes sense. All right, this is the climb and the off the physical cue for the movement and we're going to start adding more complexity as we move forward. Now that we're getting ready to have our dogs perform certain behaviors, we want to think about what I like to call the reinforcement event. If you remember earlier, we have the reward event. It starts when we're going to reward our dog and it ends when the dog gets the reward. The reinforcement event is anytime we're trying to get our dogs to perform an action. So, I have two subcategories for the reinforcement event. Number one is a command. If I'm trying to get my dog to perform an exercise like a sit, down, come, heel, that's a reinforcement event. And then I have what I like to call a teachable moment. So, a teachable moment I use for boundaries and I use for the stay command. So, if I'm working a climb stay, the bed, and the dog's on that position, the moment they step off, it's going to be a reinforcement event because I want the dog to go back to the platform. I want the dog to perform an action. Therefore, it's a reinforcement event. Now, I can use a marker that predicts negative reinforcement. So negative reinforcement an easy way to think about those four quadrants of opera conditioning is negative means taking away positive means adding. Reinforcement means encouraging the repeat of the behavior. Punishment means preventing the repeat of the behavior. So positive adding reinforcement repeat behavior. Anything we give to the dog that adds adds value. Food, toy, affection. Positive punishment. We're trying to prevent the repeat of the behavior. So we add something that the dog doesn't like. That would be a leash pop on a training collar, a stem on a remote collar. If you were to yell at your dog, I don't recommend that, but those are all examples of positive punishment. And then we have negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is when we turn pressure on and the dog complies, we turn it off. A great analogy that a lot of dog trainers use is the seat belt analogy. When you get into your car, if you have a modern car, if you don't put your seatelt on, the car will start to beep. Beep beep beep beep beep. You put your seatelt on, the beeping goes away. That's negative reinforcement. It's reinforcing the behavior of you buckling your seatelt. It's not giving you anything. You didn't get a treat for doing it. It just removed that annoying beeping sound. So, that's negative reinforcement. I have a marker. Remember what I said? A marker predicts any one of those quadrants. So, I have a marker that lets the dog know I'm going to use negative reinforcement. This is going to be our leash pressure training. So, if my dog was to break the stay, I would say wrong. I take the leash. wrong as my marker for negative reinforcement and I put him back on the stay. Now, we can also repeat the command if we wanted to. The dog breaks the climb stay. I could say climb and take the dog back. A lot of times I prefer to use the word wrong, which you'll see when we start doing stays because in the moment, a teachable moment is reactive. We are being reactive to the dog. Whereas a command, we're being proactive. We're saying, "Okay, I want the dog to sit. I'm going to tell the dog to sit, etc." The dog breaks the stay, violates a boundary, we're reacting to the dog. And if we're not ready for it, we might end up saying the wrong command. So the dog breaks the climb stay. And if I'm not ready, I might go down. I mean sit, I mean climb. So instead of doing that, I just say wrong. It makes it much easier. But for example, if I'm doing loose leash walking and I know that's all I'm working on, then when the dog breaks the position, it's very easy to say heel and guide the dog back instead of saying wrong. So either option works. It's basically telling the dog, go back to the previous position. So that's a reinforcement event. The point that I'm trying to make is a reinforcement event starts the moment we want our dogs to perform an action. And it ends the moment they complete that action. Not when we give up, not when they resist and we don't make them do it. No, when they do the behavior. And it doesn't matter how long the reinforcement event is. It could be 10 minutes. If you tell a dog to come to you and it's in the yard and you start walking towards your dog and your dog's running around, you just keep walking towards your dog until eventually you get to your dog. Yay, good puppy. And you take him inside. Then the dog goes, "Oh, when you call me, it doesn't matter. I'm going to have to come to you." And you're going to get that reliability. It's very important. So reinforcement event starts the moment we want our dogs to perform a behavior, and it ends the moment the dog performs that behavior. Now, we're going to be teaching our dogs the around command. I like to use this for a few different reasons. One, you're going to hear me say this a lot, but it increases the dog's excitement, motivation when we get them moving, but it also helps with teaching certain exercises like the recall. When we teach a dog a recall, we don't want to start calling our dog from a distance early on by keeping them in a stay. Common thing that people will do is they'll put their dog in a stay. They'll walk away. They'll call their dog to them and they're working on the recall and oh, we're working on the stay, too. But the problem with that, if I always put the dog in a stay and I leave them, and then I call them to me, and I do that a lot, then our dogs end up anticipating that and they're going to be more likely to break the stay command. When we first start teaching our dogs to stay, what I like to tell my students is if you can't touch your pup, and she's looking for treats. If you can't touch your pup, don't free them up. You want to be close enough to where you can touch them before you release them. And that's for the foundation because then the dog will learn the foundation that if I'm going to be released, my human has to come back to me and they're going to be way less likely to release themselves from a distance. Now, after you've been doing a stay for a while, you can start doing that. You can put your dog in a stay and you can call them to you, but I wouldn't do it all the time. This is going to help with this. So, we have the dog go around the cone and then we reward the dog on the other side. So, I can tell her to go around the cone and then I can have her come do a recall. I can have her go around the cone and come running into the center position. I could have her go around the cone and jump into the heel position. So, this is a really great tool to use and it's a great way to exercise your dog. So, as I said earlier, you don't need the pole, but all this is, if you're curious, it's just a pole attached to a board. That's it. And then I have the cone on top. So, I like to use this again because it's easy to move. And what I'm going to do, and she's not even in a state, she just went there on her own. We're going to hold our hand around and we're going to guide our dog to it. So, often if you want to build a little bit of frustration, good girl. Good. Good job. And then have them go around. You see how I'm holding the collar? That's because I want her to want to pull. I want Oh, and she slipped out. I want to build that frustration. Sit. So, I hold the food. Come on, Gary. Come on. Good. And again, the more frustration we can build, this is a great way to do recall exercises as well. If you have someone to hold your dog, because then you're not messing up a stay. Someone's holding your dog, building that frustration. And then we release them and they can go around. And we can do the opposite direction as well. So, we just hold our hand around and guide the dog around. Then, we can start racing our dog to it and have him go around. Now, once your dog is starting to understand this, I want to move this climb bed out of the way. Once your dog is starting to understand it, you want to start increasing the distance to have them go around the cone. And you want to make it a race. Very nice. Good job. Oh, she tried going center. Good. Oh, and I dropped the piece. I see it. Okay. And you can see it almost gives them no choice but to go around. And if we wanted to do the opposite side, we could do that as well. Now, you can dictate which way your dog goes by having two different commands. If you have one command, so like if you tell your dog around That was that was the wrong answer. And you only have one command, then they'll choose the direction they want to go. Or you can have two commands. Now, I always had one command for her, but I recently started adding a new command for the opposite direction, which I call circle. And of course, she went the wrong way. Good job. Circle. Oh, there we go. Good job. Not going as smooth as I'd hoped. So, because we had some mistakes there and she wanted to go the opposite way, I'm going to do a few without adding the command. So, I'm going to run this way because I want her to know if I'm facing the cone this way that she's going to go around. Excellent. So, she's going clockwise. Very good. Now that I have it for you, circle Good. I'm going to do another without the command. She's getting crazy. Good job. Very nice. So, I'm going to start a little closer, too. Good girl. Good. Excellent. Nice work, Ari. And again, this is because I've always had her go the other direction. So, you're you're actually seeing a little bit of a learning phase right now for her because I haven't done this direction as much. Good job. Good. And this is pattern training right now. I'm doing the same thing over and over again. Circle. There we go. So, we're starting to get it. It might have been a little bit of pairing there. Remember what I talked about pairing. Circle. There we go. Now, we're getting it. Circle. Free. Okay. So, you can see she's already picking it up now. Circle. Free. Excellent. Now, she's a very smart dog. She's high drive. You can see how she gets excited as she moves. But one of the thing that's really cool about dog training is the more things you teach your dog, the easier it is to teach them new things because they start to understand the process. Because the process for everything that we teach our dogs is pretty much always the same. We get them to perform it. We reward them. We add the verbal command and we do a lot of reps. And a lot of times it's the reps that we need to do. Often people don't do enough reps for their dogs to learn, but this is a really cool thing. So the more your dog learns, the faster they end up learning. So this is the around command. And again, you can start building more and more distance. I'm actually out of treats. Well, she's getting some water, so I'm gonna grab a couple treats real quick. And we're going to do some distance stuff. Now, she gets pretty excited. So, build the distance based on how good your dog is performing. If she starts getting confused, then I'm going to close that gap a little bit. And I'm just going to do the around because that's the one she knows very well. Around. I'm gonna help her out. She went to the wrong one. Good job. Very nice. Around. If your dog gets confused, just help him. Good. So, we see that she is getting a little bit confused. So, I'm just going to start closer. Now, I didn't ask her to do that when she offered that one up around. Good girl. And she barks because as a puppy I rewarded her a lot for barking. That's an enthusiastic bark around. Good girl. Which is not always the best thing because it tires them out, but she's been doing it so long that it is what it is. I'm not going to try to correct it because I don't want to dampen her enthusiasm. Around. Very nice. Around center. Good. And we can transfer it into different positions if we want. So around is excellent. Around or we do recall. Come. Come. Free. And then I reward her through my legs. So the around command super valuable. Definitely recommend teaching it. It's pretty easy. Do a couple reps each day and before you know it, your dog will be running around it. And then you could transfer that to different things. You could have your dog run around a tree, run around a barrel, whatever it is that you want them to run around. And you can use that within your obedience to use it to teach other exercises like the recall or the center or flipping into the heel position. And it's a great way to tire your dog out, give them a good exercise. Now, we're going to be introducing our dogs to the spin command. Charlie, come here, buddy. So spin command is really excellent for getting our dogs to understand how their body works. So if I have my dog in front of me and I want my dog to flip into the heel position, that's just a half spin. If I want him to flip around to the other side, that's also a spin. If I want him to flip into the center, guess what? It's another spin. So these are all spins that we're having our dog do. So we want to teach them how to do the spin. Remember what I talked about before? we have that different um assisted shaping. So assisted shaping is we reward the dog even before they completed the behavior. Not every dog is going to do a full spin. So he was trying to go into the center. Not every dog is going to do a full spin right away. You might go to do this and what's very common is the dog will start to turn. You move too fast and the dog cuts back the other way. Very, very common. With those dogs, I reward the effort until I eventually get the full spin. So I might reward the dog here and then I reward the dog there and then eventually I reward the dog here and then once the dog fully commits then I reward the dog to the front. Also we can increase the motivation for the spin if when we start to spin we run away and reward the dog. So we have the dog starting the spin and then we run away and give them the treat. So that's going to increase that enthusiasm. But this is it. That's the spin. Very easy. We want to teach them to spin in both directions. Once you get your dog doing the spin, you want to practice having them spin with both hands. So, get good at just your right hand. Do a spin, see if you can get two, and then reward your dog. Then you're going to do the same thing with your left hand. Get a spin, see if you can get a couple, and then give your dog the reward. Nice job, Charlie. And I'm giving him the reward when he completes the behavior. That's all I'm doing. So, he does the spin, I give him the treat. I don't have to mark this because he's getting the primary at the exact moment he does the behavior. So there's no need for a marker. Now we're going to do the opposite direction. So we just did counterclockwise. So now we're going to do clockwise. So same thing. We want to get it good with both hands. So there's one. Let's see if we can get a couple. Very nice. And I'm going to follow it up with a few rewards there. Good job, buddy. Good. Let's see if I can get a couple. Nice. Once you start getting this to where your dog's able to spin, you want to start fading the physical cue. So, fading is another very common technique within the dog training world. All it is is we're taking something that's very noticeable. So, you might have to do this the first time to get your dog to do the spin. That's a big movement that we're doing. Oh, we're going all the way around the dog. Especially if you have a very big dog, you're like to try to do the spin. Well, you don't want to have to do that every time. You want to start to make it a little less and then a little less and a little less. So, you're able to get your dog to do it without a big physical cue. So, that's going to be the next step. Then, what you want to do is you want to do the spin as you walk backwards. So, this is really cool because if our dog just spins in one spot, that's not going to help them as much with flipping into heel position. We want to be able to get them to spin into the heel position. And because of that, they have to be able to move their spin. They have to be able to move while they're spinning is what I'm trying to say. So, we're going to walk backwards. So, kind of like that backwards follow exercise, but we're going to be adding some spins. Again, keep this very short. Maybe a minute or two. You don't want to be doing too many spins. Uh, so we're going to walk backwards. We're going to do a spin and then another spin. Very good. And then reward the dog. Then we're going to do the opposite direction. So I'm going to spin this way. Good boy. Very nice. And then I'm going to reward him. This skill set is going to transfer into a lot of that positional work that we're going to be doing here very soon. So simple exercise, key point to remember. Your dog may not do it right away. So use that concept of assisted shaping where we reward steps towards the final pitcher. Once your dog is doing it well, start to gradually fade out that physical cue so it's not as noticeable and then work on getting your dog to do the spin while moving towards you as if we're incorporating it into the backwards follow exercise. This one's fun and most dogs enjoy spinning for whatever reason. So enjoy. Now, we're going to introduce the easiest of all our commands that we're going to be doing with our dog. At least one of the easiest, which is the sit command. So, remember what I said earlier. Wherever the nose goes, the butt does the opposite. This is why a lot of people when they tell their dog to sit. You've probably done it before. You've seen people do it. They go like this. Sit. Right? They're lifting their hand up. The dog's like, "Oh." And then they sit. Or another one people tell me all the time, "Oh, my dog knows how to do a sit." And I go, "Oh, show me." And so they have the dog and they go, "FT, Phto, sit. Phto, phto, sit. Phto, sit, sit." And then finally phto sits. But not because phto knew the sit command, but because phto is looking up because they were making a bunch of noise. Oh, what's all this noise? And then their butt naturally goes down. Try to get on all fours and look up without wanting to put your butt down. It's going to naturally go down. So we use that as the physical cue. Now, we're going to incorporate this into guess what? An exercise we did earlier, which is going to be the backwards follow. We're going to walk backwards. We're going to lift. Once our dog sits, the moment their butt hits the ground, that's when we're going to mark the behavior. So, we walk, we lift, free, and then we reward. Walk and lift, free, and then reward. Switch hands. Walk and lift free. And move back. Good. Give them a couple rewards. Very nice. Lift free. Reward sideways. change the way we're rewarding to keep it interesting. So that's going to be one. That is the sit front position. We just have them sit directly in front of us. Now you remember those lateral movements that we did. We're going to do the same thing here. We're going to lure to the side. Then we're going to lift free and let the dog jump and grab it. If you don't want your dog to jump and grab I like letting my dogs jump and grab it. Adjust the training. Whatever suits your fancy. So if you don't want your dog to jump up at your hand, say free. Don't let him get it. Bring it back down and have him take it on the ground. So there, I just prevented him from grabbing it after I marked. I still gave it to him. Free. I just gave it to him down here. Watch. We could probably stop him jumping right now. Just so you can see if you don't like that jumping. Free. And I'm just closing my hand when he jumps for it. So this is negative punishment. I'm not giving him the reward. Free. See, he thought about it that time. Free. Good. Free. I'm actually not going to do too many. I don't want them to get full. We got more training. But that's the first one. We're going to do that sideways lure. We're going to lift free and then we're going to reward. Now, what we can do to increase the dog's speed is we can push on their back end as we lure them into the sit. This is a little bit more difficult for some people, but as you're luring your dog, you're going to lift and push down simultaneously. Free and have your dog get the reward. So, lift and push, then reward. And you can also lift and just give the dog the treat. You don't even have to mark. So, if you don't want to mark, again, you don't have to because we're able to get the primary to the dog the moment they do the behavior. Good. Very nice. So, this is going to help create that really nice sharp sit. We're guiding the dog towards us when we do the spin. So, I always like to guide the dog towards me. You see how I'm not doing that? You can, but the reason why I don't like to do that, same thing when I'm guiding the dog in heel. I don't do that. One, I don't want the dog's butt to swing into me, but two, this is the opposite of the flip finish where we want them to actually flip into the heel position. So again, now we're going to the side and we're pushing down. So that's going to be the sit. Now, when we start getting our dog into the other positions, that's going to be the foundation. So, when I show you how to get your dog into heel position, the foundation is going to be the sit, excuse me, whether it's the left or right heel position. Same thing with the center position. The foundation is always the sit. And then we can ask different things from the dog like a down or a stand or even if we have the dog in heel, we can even throw a spin in there. But the sit is the foundation. So, it's very easy. If we have our dog in the heel position, all we're doing is lifting up. And you can see I can even control his head. And I like their head to be straight up like this where you can see their entire neck because that's the foundation for a focused heel, right? So, we want that pitcher if you care about a focused heel and that's where I'm rewarding them and they're naturally going to sit. If your dog's performing it the way that you want, just like I said before, you can add the command. So, keep that in mind throughout all these exercises. Another common thing that people run into with the sit is the dog will be in front of them and the dog's already sitting and they're like, "Oh, the dog's already sitting. Oh, no. What do I do?" Easy. We make the dog walk forward. You know how to do that now. And then we have the dog sit. And if even if the dog's directly in front of me, I can walk backwards. That's going to get him to stand up. And then I can cue him back into the sit. Now, remember what I said? If we're teaching a command, the verbal has to come before the physical. So, if I'm moving my hand, let's say on the timeline, this is where I give the dog the sit command, and then this is where I lift my hand. So, I'm moving it, my dog's following me. Sit, then I lift. So, it wouldn't be sit, it wouldn't be on that same line. It would be sit, then lift. Remember, the verbal has to come before the physical. So, I'd walk back, sit, and then lift. Free. Good. I can give them couple. Sit, then lift. Free. Very nice. Sit, then lift free. Good. Sit, then lift, free. Very nice. So, we can start incorporating that command. Now, you're going to pair. Remember what I said, pairing, that's what I call it. Technical terminology is overshadowing. So, if you look up overshadowing in dog training, that's when two things are presented to a dog at the exact same time. Whatever is most relevant to the dog is what they are going to focus on, and they are going to completely ignore the other element. So, we have to make sure the word comes first. But you're going to pair. Everybody pairs. The best dog trainers in the world, number one champions, 10 time world champ, they pair. You're going to pair. Don't let it stress you out. It's going to happen. But as long as you're aware of it, you want to constantly increase the percentage of the times that you don't pair because that's when your dog's going to be learning the verbal command the most. But it doesn't mean they're not still having a good time if you pair. It doesn't mean that they're not still getting better at performing those physical movements if you pair, but just try your best not to. And if you do, if you go sit, just give them the reward or move on to the next exercise. I've had so many students do this where they go sit. Ah, oh, I paired it. It's like, it's fine. Not a big deal. Mark the behavior. Release the dog. I actually let him break two sit stays right there. So, don't do that. But this is a sit and we're going to start transferring this into a lot of different positions. But now I'm going to show you how to get your dog to do all those cool movements that we were doing. So stay tuned. Now we're going to be taking our dog from the sit front into the heel position. This is a very common movement or exercise in a lot of competitive obedience where you'll call your dog, you'll do a recall, they'll tell you to finish, and then you have to get your dog to get to the heel position. There's two very popular or common ways of doing this. One is that flip finish. You've already been doing a lot of the foundational work by doing those spins that we've talked about. The other one is also very simple. It's well, the flip finish is considered difficult. And then the other one is called the around finish, also known as the by finish. This is where the dog's going to go around us into the heel position. So, we have a flip into the left, a flip into the right, we have around the right leg to the heel position, and we have around the left leg to the heel position. Because we teach our dog to go around our leg into the center, when you do this, you want to make sure there's not a big gap between your legs because if you do, as your dog goes around, so this is the concept known as chaining. So chaining is when we take multiple things and we put them in order. And we often will keep them in the same order for a good amount of time. And what happens is the dog learns that the conclusion of one movement is what leads on to the next movement. So they see something and it's a visual reminder. Oh, I'm doing this. And then they finish that and they see that new visual reminder and that's what gets them to go through the chain. So, we end up seeing something similar to that with this exercise because as the dog starts to go around the leg, their brain goes, "Oh, I know this movement." And if there's a gap, boom, the dog's going to go right into the center and they're going to look at you and be like, "I did it." And you're like, "No, that's not what I wanted." So, when we do the flip finish, the first start is just like the other movements, we have that big step. So, if I want the dog to go into my left heel position, I'm going to step back with my left leg, guiding my dog back. Now, remember that hand has to cut back quickly to catch my dog. Now, if you remember those movements that we did before where we did this and we we rewarded the dog as we're stepping back, that is part of the foundational work to this exercise. The value that we get from that is when we step back and we reward our dog here, we think about that reward placement. It gives the dog a reason to move back to get the food from that hand. If I always cut back, every single time, the dog starts to recognize that pattern and dogs will stop following the hand. They'll go, "There's no reason to follow it because they're going to cut back." So, by doing those other exercises that we did in the food handling skills portion of the course, it's going to help with this. So, if you notice you're stepping back and your dog's not committing to it, then go back to rewarding your dog with this exercise. Get more of those reps in. So, once we're about right here, we're going to cut back, catch our dog snout, bring them forward right into the heel position. Now, if I bring the dog into the heel position and the dog's not straight, I could try to use some of that manipulation with my luring hand to get the dog perfectly straight. If the dog's crooked or maybe lagging, I can also walk forward and get the dog back into the position that I want, but I don't want to adjust to the dog. Meaning, I don't want to show the movement. My dog's crooked and then I adjust to my dog. If you adjust to your dog, your dog will never adjust to you because you're adjusting to them. So, that's what we're going to be doing on this exercise. And we're going to do it on the right side as well. Now, once the dog gets good at that as we did the fading and the other exercises before, we're going to start to fade this. The step is not going to be as big. In the beginning, it's pretty big because we want to give the dogs the space to get back into that heel position, especially for your larger dogs. If you got smaller dogs, you might not have to step back as far or if you're working with a puppy. Then as we start to fade out our leg stepping back and that lure when we go from the final transition, if you notice in the beginning, my hand is going directly to the side. But we don't want that at the end. In the end, what we want is we want to do that half circle. So the dog's going to be here. We're going to do a 180 circle and the dog is going to end up there. So the final transition is instead of going this way, we wrap around this way to bring the dog in the heel. But those initial steps are going to make this much easier. So, I'm going to show you what it looks like with Charlie. Come here, my boy. We're going to bring him into the sitfront position. I'm going to step back and then right there. Oh, he was a little bit fast. So, we're going to bring him back into the sit front. I'm going to step back. Cut that very quickly. Right there into heel position. If he was crooked, I could just walk forward and adjust. That's what I meant by walking forward to adjust. And then we're going to make the step a little smaller. and a little smaller. And then eventually, now you're going to notice, watch how instead of going this way to get him to spin, I'm going to go that way. So basically like we're doing a spin. So I'm doing a spin, right? But instead of doing the full spin, and he already knows what I'm trying to do, I'm going to spin him into that heel position. And that's how we're going to start to get that really nice flip finish. And this works even with big dogs. So, uh, my German Shepherd, Maverick, I was told before that German Shepherds can't do this movement very well, but I've seen lots of German Shepherds do it well. And Maverick, even only being about seven months of age, does it like a stud. He's really great. And so now on the right side, same thing. We're going to step back nice and big, cut the dog back, reward them once they're in position. And then we're going to make that smaller and smaller until eventually we can have our dog. And this could take weeks to do this. It might take you white weeks. It might take you a couple days depending on how good your handling skills are and how good your dog is. So you can see now I'm going off to his right instead of guiding him. So you see I'm cutting to his right and that's what's causing him to flip around. And then this becomes to where we can start transferring our dog to all kinds of different positions because of the foundation and these exercises that we've done. So key point to remember, we have our dog in the sit front. You don't have to have your dog in the perfect sit front. If you want, what you can do, like let's say I want to start the exercise, I might just walk back for a moment and then go right into that exercise. So I don't have to have the dog stop and sit directly in front of me. So I could be doing the backwards follow and then I can cut right into that movement. And that's going to lead to another exercise I'm going to show you a little bit later on, which I call finding the heel position, which is incredibly valuable when we start doing loose leash walking. So, you start with the big step, you slowly make the step less and less. If your dog starts to lose motivation to follow that hand, do some of those exercises where we walk back and we reward the dog. Once you get your dog understanding that, make sure you've been practicing the spin so your dog understands that movement so they can do that 180 spin. And then you're going to guide your dog and flip them right into the position. And if you've done the steps correctly, you should have that very nice, very pretty flip finish on either side. Once your dog's in position, if you want their head up, reward with their head up. Think about that reward placement. It's very important. Boom. Reward. Release them from the position. And once your dog's before your dog's tired, end the session. Remember, we want to end when they're still enthusiastic and happy and having fun. Now we're going to be doing the around finish or the by finish. So for this one, we want food in both hands. So I'm going to have one piece. And right now what I've been training with today, I've been using kibble and then I'm also using freeze-dried or not freeze-dried, I'm sorry, frozen raw dog food. So if you do that, it's great because they're usually very motivated and enthusiastic about training with raw, but you have to make sure you're careful and you wash your hands. So, what we're going to do, if I want him to go around into the left heel position, I'm going to drop my right hand. Now, in the beginning, if you want to step back, you can. So, a lot of people will step back to guide the dog. Now, the reason why we do this is because it gives the dog enough clearance to come in nice and straight. Some dogs really struggle. If you just do this, they won't come in straight. their back end, they'll they'll end up doing something more like what he just did right there before he jumped out. They'll end up being more like this, and it's hard for them to get straight. So, in order to combat that, what we do is we we can step back with our leg, catch them on the opposite side, and bring him into the heel position. And we're going to do that on both sides. So, I can step back, catch him on my right hand, and bring him into the sit front, or not the sit front, the heel. Now, if he's a little crooked or slanted, remember we can walk forward or if you have good power steering, that's what I like to call that, power steering. I didn't come up with that terminology. I believe uh Forest and Mickey did or maybe someone that trained with him. But anyways, power steering is where we can easily manipulate the dog because we developed that very strong lure. So, if you're good with that, you can just manipulate your dog's position and then reward them once they're nice and straight and then release them. So, just like with all the exercises, we might have to step back really big in the beginning, but eventually we want to fade that out and we want to get it to the point where we can send the dog from one hand to the next. Now, um I'm out of treats, but I'm still going to do a little Q. So, you see how instead brick instead of having to guide him, I just kind of did a little swish movement with my hand, and that's enough to get him to go around, catch him in the opposite side, reward him once he's in the heel position. And again, you're going to do that on both sides. So, very easy exercise. We just covered going from the sit front to the heel with the flip finish and the around finish. Now, we're going to be taking our dog from the sit front position into the center position. So, there's four ways that I like to teach a dog to do this. And I have now this one I do like to dictate which one I want my dog to do. So I do have a different command for each one unlike the heel to heel where I only use the heel command. And so my dog usually will pick which oneever one they prefer. So I have what I call through. So this where the dog runs through my legs, turns around and comes back to the center. I have another one where I tell the dog flip and the dog will flip. Basically they're doing a 180. So they're spinning halfway into the center position. Then I have it where the dog goes around my right leg to the center and around my left leg to the center. So I have through, flip, center, and middle. Those are the commands that I use. So we're going to start with our dog running through our legs. I'm going to have food in both hands. Now, at first when we start this, I will guide the dog with the left hand and I will catch them with the right. Then I'll turn them around and I'll catch them again with the left hand. And this is surprisingly very difficult for a lot of people. When your dog's going through, you really have to stretch. I'm actually going to put her on a climb. So, uh, I don't want her to get tired waiting. All right, climb. So, as we are guiding them through, we have to really reach back pretty far. Now, the way that I'm doing is I cut the dog in towards you. So, towards the same side as my arm. that I'm guiding them. So, that's the way I cut them back and then I catch them with the other hand. So, I have food in both hands. If you're fast, you can just drop down here and catch your dog. And you don't have to do the initial. A lot of times, especially with new dogs in the beginning, I will use that left hand as I guide them through. You could also do this with the right hand. Same exact movement. So, if you can catch them quickly, that works great. You bring them around and then you catch them again with the left hand, putting them into that center sit position and then you give them the reward at the end. Now, we talked about assisted shaping. Some dogs are a little hesitant going through the legs. So, I might reward the dog right here. I'm giving the dog a reward for putting in the effort. Once your dog knows the full movement, we reward at the end for that completed behavior if you're rewarding that repetition. So, I'm going to show you how we're going to do this with Ari. I'm gonna show you the two different versions where I use my left hand to guide the dog in the beginning and then we'll do the other one where I just drop my right hand behind my leg. You can also just drop your left hand behind your leg, but I always bring the dog back and recatch them with that initial hand break. So, I'm going to guide her into the sit front position. I'm going to drop my left hand, catch her with the right, swing her back right into that center position. Good girl. And oops. And then I'm going to bring her back into the sit front. That was a little sloppy. That's okay. So now we're just going to drop our right hand and then right there. And she wanted the raw. So I had raw in my right. So that's that movement. Let me show you one more time. Comeari. So we have them in the sit front. We drop. We catch. We turn. And we reward. Try not to drop food like I did right there. Bring them back into the center position. or the sit front rather. Boom. Guide them through and right there in the center. And if you want because again sometimes these static positions can be a little boring for our dogs and we want to keep it exciting. All we have to do is add a little bit of movement. So I can guide her through, bring her back and then walk for a minute and then give her the treat. Not a minute, but a few seconds. Guide her through and then walk. Yay. Very nice. So then we're not worried about having to place them into a sit. We can just guide them through. Walk. give a couple rewards and release them. Most of the time when I give a dog a reward, they're released from that exercise. It doesn't mean they're released from training, but they're released from that exercise and then we can start something new, whether it's the same thing or something different. So, this is going to be version one of getting our dogs from the sit front position into the center position. Now, we're going to be taking our dog and just having them flip into the center position. And this is one of my most favorite versions. I like to do this one during movement, but if we have our dog directly in front of us, all we're doing is the spin. So, we remember that spin movement, that's exactly what we're doing, but we're spinning them into the center. So, if you can get your dog to spin, then you should be able to do this exercise. If you stop doing spins, so a lot of times people will do some spinning in the beginning, but they don't do it as often. I incorporate spin all the time because it's fun. the dogs enjoy it, increases the energy. But if I start to notice that I'm trying to flip my dog into heel position and my dog's not quite spinning all the way around the way that I want, then that could be fixed just by doing some more spin. So, I was working with a student yesterday and her dog was was stopping about right there. Instead of going all the way into the heel, the dog would stop on an angle. And so what we did to fix that was we just walked backwards and we did a bunch of these. Good. Nice job. And got the dog spinning and moving back. So that got the dog into that mindset of spinning while moving, which we talked about before. And then we just incorporate that into the position that we want. So now I'm doing the circle as if I'm doing a spin, but instead of doing a full 360, we're just doing a 180. And it's very easy. Now, as I said, I like to do this one during movement. So, I might toss a piece of food, run backwards, and now I'm getting ready to catch her as she comes to me. Woo! Right there in the center. And now I can move with the center. I can toss a treat again. Now she comes running back. And again, we do that half spin. Woo! Nice. There we go. Easy, right? This one's super easy, really fun, very convenient. I use this all the time because a lot of my foundational work for my focus heel and for teaching the dog that rear end awareness, body awareness, spatial awareness, their position relative to us. A lot of that foundational work comes from the center position. And that's just the easiest one to get the dog to the center in my opinion. Once you get it down, it's it's very easy. It's very convenient. It's very fast. So, that's version two of getting our dog from the front position into the center position. Now, we're going to be doing the next version of getting our dog to go from the sit front to the center. Now, version three and version four are basically identical. It's just opposite directions. So, whichever side you choose, the process is exactly the same. So, when I have my dog directly in front of me, if my dog's going to go around my right leg, then I step out with my left leg. If I'm gonna have my dog go around my left leg, I step out with my right leg. So, that's the first thing. So, I'm having her go around the right. I step out with my my left. I guide her with my right hand. I have food in both hands, but they don't get the food in the hand for the initial lure. As I guide her around, I catch her nose with my left hand. I pull away my right, and then I give her the reward once she gets into the center. And if we're doing the left, then I'm gonna guide her with my left hand. I step out with my right. Once she gets to the other hand, I transfer her over to the right hand and then I reward her in the end. And again, you can do this exercise with movement to increase the motivation. Movement adds motivation, whereas duration or static positions can often destroy that motivation. So, we have her in front, step out with the right, guide her around, catch her with the left. Very easy. Guide her back into the front position. Now, I'm going to step out with my right, guide her with the left. Oh no. And then catch her with the right hand and reward her in the center. And my Oh no, that doesn't mean anything. That was just me making noise. So we'll do it one more time. Step off to the right, guide with the left, catch with the right hand, and then we can walk forward if we want a little bit. Now, when we're rewarding our dog in the center, we want to reward our dog with their head up. So a common thing that I see a lot of people do is they'll drop their hand down like a bull to reward the dog. That can cause them to pop their back end up. But if we think about that reward placement that we talked about before, if I always reward that way, her head is going to drop down. I like my dogs looking up like this. So I reward as high up as possible. In fact, you can sometimes even step back a little bit as you go to reward. So I can step back this way. So she has to lean back even further, reinforcing that head being up and straight. So this was how we're going to take our dog from the sit front position to the center. Version one, dog runs through the legs, turns around, comes back into the center. Version two, the dog flips, does that 180 right into the center. And then version three and four is going around either the right leg or the left leg into that center position. Now, with this exercise, we're going to be taking our dog from the heel position to the sit front position. Now, we have one way of doing this, and it's the same whether your dog's on the left heel or the right heel. When we first start this, remember what we talked about before, the concept of fading. You're going to hear a lot of the same stuff over and over again. The physical cue in the very beginning is pretty big. So, we're going to have our dog in the heel position, and I want the dog to come to the sit front. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to step forward with my leg that's next to the dog. Then we can have food in both hands if you need to help with the other hand. I'm going to guide my dog around my leg and then back to the sit front position. Now I want my dog to come to the sitfront position as if I didn't move my legs. What I mean by that is when I'm bringing him to this position, notice my starting position and my ending position is in the same spot. We don't want to do this where and and a lot of people do this so try your best not to do this where we start to move them and then we're like I don't even know how they do it but they'll end up way out of position. And this is important because there has to be that reference point. We want our dog to get used to going from here to here. Not here to here. That's not the same movement. So we want the dog to be able to get there. So, the first step, and again, it doesn't matter if the dog's on the right side either. We step forward with the leg that's next to our dog. We guide our dog around the leg, and then we bring them back into the sit front position. Now, if your dog's not as close as you want, you can My hand's all kind nasty, so I don't want to be touching him too much, but you can apply a little bit of pressure on the back of the head to get them to come forward, and you can walk backwards like this to get them. Now, he's a little crooked. Or you can do the backwards follow. But we want to try to get it to where we don't have to do all that. We can do it if we need to. Meaning, if I bring my dog around and he's not as close as I want, he's a little crooked, then I can step back a little bit, get him exactly where I want where he's not pawing my foot either. Then I can go ahead and reward him. Once you have that down and you're starting to feel more confident in your queue, you want to gradually make it less. So, we're not going to step as far forward. Big step in the beginning, but not so much as you progress. Then the step's going to be a little smaller, then a little smaller. Right? So, now we're doing a little tiny step, and we're getting the dog to move around, trying to get them back into that straight position. Good job, buddy. Very nice. And then eventually what we want to be able to do is we want to be able to just spin them into the front where we don't move our legs so they can go back and forth. Oops, that was a little sloppy. Good job, buddy. And then we reward him in position. And notice again, I'm not using any commands. When we first do an exercise, we don't want to do the command. So I'm having to back up. So, with him, I might actually have to do a couple more of these. Now, again, he's also getting a little bit tired. So, I might have to get the other dog out. But that's the concept of this exercise. First, we start where we step forward. We make that big step. Then, eventually, we want to start fading that. We make it less and less to where we're able to just guide our dog around. Yeah, he's getting a little lazy. And guiding them around into the front position. So, that's going to be the way we take our dog from the heel to the sit front. Key things to keep in mind. You step forward with the leg on the side that your dog is. If my dog's on the right, I step forward with my right leg. I want him to go around my leg. If I'm doing on the left, I step forward with my left leg. That's going to be the same as bringing the dog into the heel position. We step back on the side that we want the dog to move. And the next step is we make that step slightly smaller each time, guiding our dog around, trying to end up in the same position. If your dog's not perfectly straight, you can take another step back and reward your dog till eventually you can flip your dog to the front without having to do that step. And that's going to be how we take our dog from the heel to the sit front. Now, I'm going to be teaching you how we're going to take our dog from the heel position to the center position. There's three different ways that I like to do this. I'm going to show you each one so you can pick which method or technique you want to do with your dog. So, the first one is going to be what I like to call the flip technique. It's very simple. Not super simple, but what we're going to do is we're going to have our dog in the heel position. Either one, left or right heel position. And what's going to happen is they're going to flip around into the center position. So, if the dog's on the right, they're going to flip into the center. And the reason why I'm stepping back with my leg here because that's the initial step. So if I'm having my dog come over to my right from my left side, I'm going to step back with my right leg. This is going to give my dog space to flip and then I'm going to step back into the position so they're in the center. If my dog's on the right, we're going to step back with the left, flip the dog around. So I have the dog following my hand as it goes around. This is, believe it or not, pretty difficult for a lot of people when they're first starting. So, as your dog's going this way, what I'm doing with my hand, cuz I can't keep turning my hand like this, right? So, as my dog's following it, once my dog's about right here, I cut it very quickly and I catch the dog's face. I'll show you what I mean. So, as I'm going this way, I cut it very quick and I catch his face. And I do that on the other side. is I cut it quickly and I catch the dog's face. That's what's happening when I'm doing that movement. So, the dog's going to start in the position. I'm going to step back with my right leg and you're going to see how we're going to guide him into the center position. So, first we have to have our dog in the heel position. So, again, I'm going to step back with my right leg and then I'm going to step over. And again, I call this the flip. You can call it whatever you like. So, one more time, I have food in my right hand, but I actually have food in my in both hands just in case I need it. But we can do almost the entire thing with the opposite hand. So I did the whole thing with the right hand there. So now we're going to have him in the right heel position. And same thing, I'm going to step back with my left Hey, I'm going to step back with my left leg guiding him around and then back to the center. And just like with all the exercises, we want to start fading the physical queue. So eventually we want to just barely move our leg, but we're still going to be helping guide them into the position. We do have to move our leg depending on the size of the dog, or else their leg's going to hit your leg. So, or their back end's going to hit your leg. So, that's going to be the first technique of taking our dog from the heel position to the center position. Now, I'm going to show you the second version of getting our dog from the heel position to the center. Now, with this one, you're going to have to make sure your dog knows how to walk backwards. So, you can reference that in this course. So, we have to have that physical cue because what we're going to be doing is we're going to guide our dog backwards. So, I have food in both hands. I'm going to guide him back and then I'm going to catch him in the middle. And that's the movement. So, again, we have food in both hands. We use the technique from getting our dog to walk backwards by curling my wrist, tucking it towards his chest. Once he steps back, I transfer him to my opposite hand to put him into the center position. So, we can do this on both sides. Now, I don't do this one very often because I like the fancy flip. Close my fingers, curl my wrist, get him to walk backwards, catch him in the middle, bring him into that center position. One last time. So again, close my fingers, curl the wrist, get him to walk back, catch him in the center for version two of getting our dog from the heel position to the center position. Now for the last style or version of getting our dog to go from the heel position to the center. This one I'm going to have my dog go around my leg. This one is by far the easiest one. So, if you want it the easiest route to go from the heel to the center, this is the one I would recommend. Now, I'm gonna have food in both hands. I have the dog on the left heel position. I step out with my right leg. I guide the dog with my right hand around my right leg and then I catch them in the center. And that's going to be how we move them from the heel position to the center. Version three. So, again, I step out, I guide the dog around, I catch them in the center, and then I can reward them once they're in the center position. And it's the exact same thing on the opposite side. We have food in both hands. Step out with the left leg, guide my dog around, catch him in the middle, and then reward him once he's in position. So again, very, very easy. If you wanted the easiest route, I would choose that one. Now, we're going to be taking our dog from one heel position to the other heel position. There's three different ways that I like to do this. One is more so kind of fancy for fun, not really practical, but I'm going to show you how to do it anyways. One is going to be where the dog flips in front of us into the heel position. The next one is going to be the dog's going to go behind us into the opposite heel position. That one's really great if you take your dog on lots of walks and you want your dog to be able to quickly switch from one side to the other without getting in front of you. A lot of my service dog clients tend to teach this because they can walk and they can tell the dog to switch to the opposite side and the dog is able to do it and they can continue their forward movement. The other one is or the last one rather. So one the dog flips in front, two, the dog goes behind us and three the dog weaves between our legs to go into position. And there's a fourth as well where the dog goes around into the heel position. So, we actually have four different ways. I almost forgot the fourth one. So, the weave in between the legs, that one's more of the silly one. Not super practical, but I just use the weave command. So, if you like to have your dog weave in and out of your legs, I tell the dog, "Weave," and they weave over to the other side. So, kind of cool. Looks fancy, not super practical, but anyways, not all dog training is supposed to be practical. A lot of it's supposed to be fun. So, we're going to take her, we're going to bring her into the heel position. So, the first one, big physical cue. Step back with that right leg. Guide the dog around and into the heel position. Try to get that chest lined up with your leg. So, she was a little forging there. That's a little better. Not per There we go. That looks good. So, now to the left side. I'm going to step back with my left leg. Remember that quick cut. Bring the dog back into the heel position. Step back with the right leg. So, you can do this a bunch of times. And once your dog starts to understand it, make that step slightly smaller. slightly smaller till eventually you can have your dog do it without having to move your leg. So now we're able to get her to swing from one position to the next. So that is version one of getting our dog to go from one heel position to the next heel position. Now I'm going to show you the second version. This is the one that I said is really great if you take your dog on lots of walks and you might want to switch your dog from one side to the next. Maybe someone else is walking with their dog and you want your dog to be on the opposite side. We're going to use that physical cue of getting them to walk backwards. Remember, we close our hand, curl our wrists, get them to go back. We're going to catch them on the opposite side. And then we're going to reward them once they're in position. So again, we close the food in our hand, curl our wrist towards their chest, get them to walk back, transfer them to the other hand, and right into perfect heel position. Well, that wasn't perfect. She was a little forging. I'll do one more. So again, put the food in our hand, curl my wrist, and bring it down to her chest, catch her on the other side, reward her once she's in the heel position, and that's going to be version two of getting our dog to go from one heel to the next heel. Now, this is the third example. Remember, this is the one that I said is not very practical, but it is fun. Does look kind of cool, and it's just the weave movement. So, we have food in both hands. We make sure our legs are spread apart enough so our dog can go in and out. If you need to the first time, you can step forward and guide your dog through right to the other side. So, this is basically, as I said, it's the weave exercise. So, we have our dog weave from one side to the next. When you can have that, or at least your dog's able to perform that well, then what you're going to do is you step out and make sure your dog has room. Now, you can guide your dog with the left hand. So, I have food in both hands, but she's not going to get the food in my left hand initially. I guide her around. Then, I catch her here. See, I still have the food. And then I bring her over and then I reward her in position. If you're quick with it, you can do it with just the one hand. So, I have only this hand. I bring it through and I guide her around. Either option works well. And since we're not doing any commands, there is Oops, I dropped a piece. There's not a stay. So, she doesn't have to maintain the position. Very nice. So, that's going to be version three of getting our dog to go from one heel position to the next heel position. Now, this is the last one. This is another pretty easy one. Probably the easiest out of the four. Uh, it's not one that I do very often. My personal favorite is the dog flipping in the front. I just think it looks really cool. But for this one, what we're going to do is we're going to guide our dog on the outside. Right. So, they're going to go outside this way and then we're going to catch them on the opposite side, bringing them into the heel position. So, again, the dog does a spin outwards. We catch them on the opposite side and then we reward them. You can see I don't do this one very often with her, so she got slightly confused. So, I have to make the physical cue a little bit more noticeable. So, we're going to go wide, catch, reward. And again, the food that I have in my initial hand, I'm not rewarding her. So, the food in my right hand, she's not going to get. I'm going to guide her around. Oops. And she actually tried doing an orbit. So, let's try that again. So, orbit is where they go around you in reverse. And that's what happens when you drop pieces. So, I'm going to go out. There we go. Good girl. And then catch her on the opposite side. Very nice. So, we're going to go out. Oh, that's the orbit. It's almost like doing a spin. Because when we do the spin in the heel position, that's what we're doing. But instead, we can now catch them with the spin. So, we can do that and then catch them and bring them to the opposite side. So, this is adding a little bit more movement or a little bit more energy into the movement rather. So, and I'm bumping with my knee. So, I'm bumping and then catching. Good girl. Again, I'm bumping, catching. Very nice. And the little bump with the knee gives them some more energy for the movement. Bump and catch. And that's going to be version four of getting our dog to go from one heel to the next. So we have one where the dog flips in front of us. Number two, the dog goes behind us to the other position. Number three, the dog weaves through our leg to get to the opposite heel position. And the last one, the dog goes around into the heel position. If you want your dog to be able to do all four and you want to be able to dictate which one your dog does, then you have to have a separate command for each one. If you have one command that tells your dog to go from one heel to the next. So, let's say I have my dog on the right side and the only command to get to the left is is heel. If I go heel, she's going to do the movement that she prefers or whichever one I've done the most reps. Break. So because of that, if I wanted her to know when to weave, when to go behind, and when to go outwards, we have to have a separate command for each one. So keep that in mind. If you want to be able to tell your dog which one you want them to do verbally, you have to come up with a verbal command for each different exercise. Now, we're going to be taking our dog from the center position to the sit front position. So, the way that I like to do this, when the dog's in the center, I'm going to step forward again in the beginning. It doesn't matter which leg. It could be the left leg or the right leg, whichever one you're more comfortable with. We're going to step forward. That's going to give us enough space to get our dog to flip around. And then we're going to guide him right back into the sit front position. We want to get to the point where we step forward and we step back, our static leg stays in that same position. But just like with all the other exercises, if you get your dog directly in front of you and it's not exactly where you want, just step back, readjust. If your dog's still not straight, step back, readjust. Once your dog's where you want, boom, then you can go ahead and offer up the reward. So, I'll show you how this looks. And then, as your dog understands it, you start to step less and less. So, I'm going to step out nice and far. Bring the dog back. And to be honest, a lot of times when I do this exercise, I step forward even even now because there's no competitive obedience routine where you have to call your dog from the center to the sit front. So really, it's just about the convenience of doing it. And then as your dog gets better, you can make that step a little bit less and then reward your dog. See why I like that? That half spin into the center. And then eventually you can just fling your dog around, get them into the sit front position, and then reward them. Remember, when we reward, that is almost always a release. We're releasing our dog from the position once we give them the treat. So again, very easy to recap. We start by stepping forward nice and far to give the dog that distance that they need to come back into the center position. Now, when you bring your dog back to the front, so I'm going to do a couple spins with him. There we go. To bring your dog back to the front. When you do this, you could either hold your hand this way if that works better for you. That doesn't work well for me with him. Or you can hold it the way that we were doing for that backwards follow exercise. So, whichever way works better for you to get your dog in the position that you want. It doesn't have to be a certain way. And remember, you get to decide your personal preference on where your dog finishes the position. If this is good, great. You can reach out and reward your dog there. If you want your dog closer, reward your dog closer. Where you reward your dog is going to end up being the position that your dog finds when you call them into the sit front. So, just be aware of that. And again, once we reward, we can release them from the position. And that can conclude that exercise. And you can throw this in whenever you want when you're doing your training, your obedience, doesn't matter. However you're transitioning your dog from one position to the next, just throw it in and have fun with it. Now, we're going to be taking our dog from the center position to the heel position. This is easily one of my favorite movements. I really enjoy this. The dogs really like it. And this is a spin. That's all it is. It's a full spin, full 360 from the dog being in the center position into the heel position. The only difference is instead instead of spinning in one static position, they're spinning around into the heel position. That's what we're doing. Now, when we start this, it's the same way we start heel to heel. So, if you remember taking the dog, or if you haven't watched it yet, when we take the dog from the heel position to the heel position first time, we step back with the leg of the side we want the dog to go. And then once the dog's in position, we reward them. That's the same thing with this movement. So, we have our dog in the center position. I want him to go on the left side. So, I'm going to step back with my left leg, guide them around right into the center position. Very, very easy to do. And as we start to fade it, then we just step back a little bit less each time till eventually. And if you're doing this, you can guide your dog into the position and then you could just step back over. So we step back. Boom. All right. Cool. We're doing that. That's looking great. I'm making the step a little smaller. Very good. That looks nice. And then a little bit smaller. Now, if you also notice, I'm bumping him with my knee. And then finally, we bump and we do the movement to get the dog into the center or into the heel position. Now, for the right side, it's going to be the exact same thing. So, key points for this is you start with a big step, get the dog used to doing that movement, gradually make the step smaller and smaller, use your knee to bump the dog, and once they get into position, that's when you're going to reward them. If you want to make it more difficult, so this is a little bit of a bonus material. If you want to make it more difficult, you can start doing a quarter turn or a half turn. And what I mean by that, when we guide the dog over, instead of staying here, what we do is we step out with our opposite leg and we turn. So now the dog has to flip 360. You get what I'm saying? So the dog has to do a full flip plus a little bit more. I couldn't find the words for it, but you meant what I know. Anyways, we have the dog there. I'll show you what it looks like. And we flip the dog. And so that it becomes way more complex and more difficult. But that's a good stepping stone to take when this becomes easy for your dog or easy for yourself. If it starts to become easy, remember we have to gradually make it more and more difficult in order to keep it interesting to our dogs. And if you really want to take it another step, we can continue that turn. So I can keep going all the way to a full additional turn. So now he's really having to move. He's really having to be aware of his back end and he has to be aware of that reverse movement, which if you haven't watched those videos yet, watch the ones on how to get your dog to walk backwards because that's a big part of that quarter turn and full turn to get them to do that movement. So you're going to do the same thing on both sides. And just like with everything, you can start to fade that physical cue where it's not as noticeable. So, it's less of a movement, but it's still getting the dog into that final position. This one takes a while. So, just like with all the training, be patient. Don't have don't don't start the habit of where you come out for a training session, you go, "My dog's going to do this in this session." You're going to be setting yourself up for failure. Just train your dog and have fun. And as your dog progresses, your dog progresses. If you ever notice that you've progressed through the training too quickly and your dog's having issues, go back a step in the training. Like you saw before, he wasn't doing the full spin. So, what did I do? I did some more spins. Loosen him up, get him to understand the movement, and then transition forward to the exercise that got him to spin directly into that center position or from the center to the heel. So, have fun with the exercises. Train each day, and eventually your dog's going to be able to do these exercises, but don't expect it to happen overnight. Now, we're taking our dog from the center position to the heel position, but we're doing a different route. It's not going to be as direct as flipping. This one is going to be going around our legs. So, this is very similar to a lot of the other exercises that we've done. And you can see, as I said before earlier in the course, each skill, not only yours as the handler, but even your dog skills start to transfer from one exercise to the next. So, we have our dog in the center. We have food in both hands. And what we're going to do is we're going to guide our dog around our leg, catch them on the other side, and bring them into the heel. This is the exact same movement as the dog being in the sit front and going around. So, same thing when your dogs's in the center. If you want to start, you can step back, catch your dog on the other side to give your dog that clearance to bring them into the heel position. Now, if you've done a lot of those exercises, you may not have to do that. Your dog already knows the movement, so you can just guide your dog around right into the heel position. And then we can do the opposite side if we want our dog to go to the right heel. I do recommend working both heel positions. Not only does it make it more fun for your dog, but it gives them more awareness of their body and how to move relative to you. So, we're going to take our dog. We're going to put them back in that center position. And I'm going to step back, guide them around, catch them on the other side, and bring them into the heel. We're going to do the same thing. We're just going to step a little bit less. Good. And then we're going to catch them. can step right back over into the center position. So, we don't have to worry about always making him flip into the center. And then as he starts to understand it more, we're going to do the knee bump, catch him on the opposite side, and bring him right there into that left heel position. And again, if we're doing the opposite side, we could bump, catch, and there we go, right there in the heel position. So key things to think about for this one, it's very similar to the sit front position going into the heel position. They're just starting from the center. When you initially start, you can step back with the leg on the side the dog is going around opposite of the final heel position. As your dog gets better, make that step less and less. And also, just like everything else, you want to start to fade that physical cue. So, you want to rely on it less and less to where you're not having to use it as much, but you're still getting that position that you want from your dog. If your dog ends up in the position and they're not completely straight, use that power steering to get them into the perfect position or walk forward, adjust, and reward. Now, we're going to be introducing the down command. So, when we first start teaching our dog the down command, some of you might be able to just simply drop your hand down and your dog's going to go into the position. That's not going to be the case with everyone. Some dogs will keep their back end up, so you might try to bring your hand down and your dog's butt stays up in the air. Or some dogs won't even want to lower their paws. So, we want to make sure that our dog's elbows are down and their back end is down. So, this is that nice sphinx position. But that doesn't always happen right away. When I'm first teaching this, the way that I'm holding the food in my hand is I have the food cupped, but I'm bringing it down like this. So, this is the ground. And this is how my hand is. So, the dog has to go underneath to get to the treat. And by doing that, it's going to bring their back end down because they're going underneath this little cave that I'm creating. So, an upside down bowl. Instead of a bowl being this way, we're doing this. the dog goes under, which will naturally bring their back end down. Now, some dogs, they still won't go down right away. And so, a technique that I like to do for that is I'll bring the dog down, and let's say he's not down all the way, but I'll have my supply hand and my reward hand. And what I'm doing is I have a really nice supply and I'm feeding treats into the hand constantly while the dog is taking the food. And eventually, when we're doing that, the dog's back end will go down. And once the back end goes down, boom, we give them the entire handful. And then we do that again. So the dog's getting rewards. Remember we talked about perseverance. If I have a dog and I'm trying to get him to go into the down and the dog's not going into the down and I'm not rewarding him because he's not going into the down, a lot of dogs will give up. They'll just go forget it and they'll walk away. So we have to reward them for putting in the effort. So again, you want to have your supply hand full of treats or their kibble. I have his raw right now, so I don't want to have a full hand of that, but I would have a full hand of the kibble. And then I would be feeding one piece in at a at a time as I'm giving him the food. So those food handling skills that we worked on earlier on should really help with this. And again, it's going to be uncomfortable with your wrist, but you really want to turn that wrist to bring it down to create the val or the the cave for your dog to put their muzzle in in order to get the treat. Now, there's another technique that I like to do. I call it the petting down. So some dogs they might still have their back end up and so what I do so imagine his back end is up. I will pet him and with each pet I apply more pressure till eventually he lays down. Now it's important that we're petting and we start at their shoulders and we work our way down. We don't want to push directly on them. If we push directly on the dog and we're not petting, this will have this will create that classical opposition reflex. will go to push and they're going to resist more. So, it's gonna have the opposite effect of what we actually want. So, again, we curl our hand, we bring it straight down. If they're back into still up, we can pet them until they lay down. Once they lay down, we give them the treat. Or if the dog's not laying down right away, we have a handful of food and we keep resupplying that reward hand, giving them treat, treat, treat, treat, treat till eventually he lays down, and we give him the whole handful. He just licked my face. Nasty. got all that raw food and that's going to get our dog into the down position. And once they're in the down position, you don't have to mark because again, we can give him the reward the exact moment he gets into the position. So, we're going to work the down in multiple different ways to help get our dog generalized. So, you remember those lateral movements. We're going to start there. As we go to bring our dog, we're going to push on their shoulder blades as we assist them down. Of course, you have to first get your dog to understand how to go down. If your dog is resisting the pressure on the shoulder, what we're going to do for that is we'll apply pressure first and then we'll lure the dog. And that's going to teach the dog that the pressure leads to the lure. The lure leads to the position, the position leads to the reward. So then when we go to apply the pressure, our dog will just lay down. That's how we get them to do that. So we're going to move, push them down, and reward. Switch to the other side. Boom. Reward. Make sure you can. And this one I'm getting a new treat each time because I don't want to be pushing him down with a bunch of treats in my hand. So again, so you see how this lateral movement exercise is the same as the sit. So now if you want, you can incorporate the sit into the down and then of course back up into the stand once you know how to do that. So I can do the sit into the down, back up into the stand. And so now we're getting him to do the down in the front during the lateral exercises. Now we remember the backwards follow exercise. We're going to incorporate that as well. So we're going to walk backwards and then we're going to drop our hand, give the dog the reward. Drop our hand, give the dog the reward. And we want to make sure we can switch our hands, too. So as I'm walking back, I'm going to switch to the opposite side. And so now I'm getting him to go down in the sit front position. And so we did one, two, three different versions of the down. Now you know how to get your dog into all the different positions. The heel position, the center position, the sit front. So now we're going to bring him into the heel. And same thing, we're going to drop him into the down. We can walk and then drop into the down. Once he gets into the position, that's when we're going to release the food. And you want to do this on both sides. Drop, reward. So since he knows it now, what I'm doing is I'm kind of pushing down on his head. And that's getting him to go down while keeping his head up and just making sure that his elbows are touching each time. If you need to go back to the fundamentals, go back to working with it the left and uh right lateral movements. There you go. Get that stuff and then work the sit front and then bring it back into the heel position. Now, we're going to take this over to the climb platform and we're going to work the down there and we're going to work down from a distance. So, we'll go do that. Okay. So, now we're going to be doing the down on the climb platform. This is going to help us with getting the dog to understand commands from a distance. So, you can add commands if you want, but you don't have to. We're going to get him on the climb platform. We're going to drop our hand down and we're going to reward. He can pop right back up. We're going to drop our hand and reward. Also, our dogs will match our speed. So, if you want your dog to be fast first, you start slow. You get them to understand the concept of that movement. Then you increase the speed each time and your dog should get faster and faster because they're matching your speed. I'll even drop all my body weight to get the dog to drop down rather quickly. And that's what I want. I want him to do it fast. So to do commands from a distance, you also have to have a stay, which I haven't worked a stay with him in maybe two months, and I've only worked it once. So, with that being said, if he does break the position, I'm going to tell him wrong. That's his marker for negative reinforcement and I'll simply guide him back to the platform. But when we're doing commands from a distance, what we want to do is we give the command and then we walk towards the dog and we provide the physical cue. So, I would start right here and I would tell him down. Then I lure free and I reward him. So I actually released him. So if he breaks the position, instead of saying wrong, I'm going to use climb. I take a step back. And now I can give him the next command down. I walk towards him. I lure him into the position. And then I give him the reward. Free. And I'm using his release. So technically he's not on a climb stay, but a lot of times your dogs will just stay. And if he does step off, I'll just walk towards him to queue him back. And now I add a little bit more distance down. So I give the command and then I walk towards him and then I reward. I increase the distance. And since he's still in a down, I'm going to use sit. Then I walk towards him. He broke the position. So I bring him back. Make sure he's doing the sit free. Then I give him the reward. Now I'm going to increase the distance a little bit more. If he breaks the position, I'm just going to reinforce it down. After I give the command, I walk towards him. Now, he's new to this. Free. So, I'll also show you with my other dog how it'll look once they start to understand it. Wrong. So, I said wrong even though I said I wasn't. But remember, wrong is a teachable moment. When I say wrong, it's not a punishment to the dog. It's just letting them know I'm going to take them back into the position they were previously in. And we keep adding distance. Now, this is plenty far for now. So, the way that this works is we give the dog the command. We pause for that half second to prevent overshadowing. Wrong. And then we start walking towards the dog. And then we cue the dog into the position. So after enough of those, the dog starts to learn, oh, when you give me the command, you're going to walk towards me and you're going to make me go into the position. Remember how we talked about the reinforcement event? The reinforcement event starts that half second after I give the down command and it ends the moment he does it. Once he does it, then we transition into a reward event. So it looks like this. So I give the command down. Now I'm in the reinforcement event. Oh, he was about to do it. So, you see learning is occurring. Free. Now, we're in a reward event. So, now we're going to try it again. I'm going to bring him back up into the There we go. That's good. So, I'm going wrong. Good. And so, he responded nicely to that. So, watch. If he goes into the position before I get to him, I'm going to use my terminal marker and reward him. Down. Free. And you can see he's thinking about it. He just doesn't quite know the answer yet down. And he almost had it. This is great. I'm glad we're able to see this on the video here because we can see that he is starting to think about it. And as I said a moment ago, learning is occurring. That's what we want. We can see it's processing in his mind and he's starting to understand the concept. He's not quite there yet, but we're getting there. Down. Free. Good. Now, I can also use the leash cue. So, you're going to learn about leash pressure here shortly, but I can use this to cue him into the position as well. So, if you need to know how to teach the leash pressure, you could jump to that portion of the course. So, I'm going to give him the command down. I'm going to start walking towards him. Now I'm going to use the leash. Free. And so I was just waiting for his elbows to touch. Wrong. Good. And once he went back to the platform, I told him to go. So this is the last one because this is his last treat. Down. And I'm just stepping on the leash a little bit here. Free. Nice job. So we can start getting our dog to perform the commands from a distance as well. This is really going to help them get generalized. So just to recap, we do the down in the front. We do the down in the lateral movements left and right. We get the dog into the left and right heel position to do the down. And we do the down in the center position. So we guide the dog in the center. And we do the same thing where we bring them into the center. And I gave him a ghost cookie is what I call that. I'm out of treats. but we guide him into the position in the center as well. So this is really going to help your dog become generalized. So you have one, two, three, four, five, six different positions relative to you. Seven if you count the uh climb command as well as the different positions within the environment. This is going to help your dog become generalized to the down command, which is going to make it more reliable as you start to progress through those different environments or different levels of difficulty based on the environment. And then what I'm going to have her do, this is what I like to call the petting down. What I mean by that is we're going to apply a little bit of pressure, but if we just push straight down on a dog, often they'll resist. But if we pet them with a little bit of extra pressure, they're more likely to lay down. So if you don't mind, while I'm trying to get her to lay down, just pet down her back and gradually apply more pressure as you're petting her. No, her whole back. Yeah. Just pet straight down. Yeah. So like, but don't push like that. Just pet with more pressure each time. As you pet, apply a little bit more. The idea is to get her to relax and to lay down. But if we just straight push, yes, then often they'll resist more. But for some reason, when we do the petting, they're more likely to go with it. Now, what I should have done initially was I should have made sure I could get her to lay down with the food lure. That's step number one before you start to try to do the leash pressure for the down. So, she got a couple freebies over there. So, now I'm going to try to get her to lay down just with the food. That's what I should have done first. And she has pretty good perseverance. So, you see she's working for it. You want to come do the petting again? Once they know what to do, then that can go away. But again, the petting is it's just a technique to get the dog to relax. Now, often you can try to get the dog to sit first. That will often help as well. Yes. Very nice. So, let me try a couple more. Come here, sweetie. So, you can do the sit. Now, once they really understand it, I don't like to make them sit each time. just it's much better just to have them go straight into the down, but this is a good way to get started. So, she's following it very nicely. Now, now we're going to be introducing the stand command. So, with the stand command, if we're thinking about the butt does the opposite of where the nose goes, all we have to do is take the dog's nose and bring it towards their chest. This is going to cause most dogs to pop up their back end. It doesn't always happen perfectly. if you're trying to bring it towards your dog's chest. So again, we're bringing it to the chest and we're curling our fingers up because we want the dog to think about going over the fingers. And if they do that, look how my elbow comes up. That's the same thing with the dog's back end. But if it's like this, it's not going to bring that back end up. We want to curl our fingers to cause that back end to pop up. If your dog's back end isn't popping up right away, what you can do is you can bring the food forward a little bit, just enough to get them to stand because they're going to be thinking forward movement. But start with the queue towards the chest. Remember, they're very good at recognizing patterns. So, we want to bring it to their chest first and then if we need to forward slightly to get them to pop up. So, boom. There we go. And so, you see that one, she popped up really nice. And I like them to pop their back end up and keep their front paws more in place. Once they start to understand that cue, they're just going to pop up like that. No problem. So again, we're going to curl it down towards the chest. See, I'm curling my wrist to get her to go over my fingers to get to the reward. I'll do it again. So I'm curling my fingers and that's causing her back end to pop up. Now let's assume her back end wasn't popping out, but I'm trying to get it. All I had to do is move forward a little bit just enough to get her to think that she's going to walk forward. your dog pops their back end up and that's when you deliver the reward. So, you're looking for that back end to move up. So, again, bringing it towards their chest. If it doesn't pop up right away, bring it forward a little bit. You might have to kind of work it to get them to pop that back end up. And then once they do, boom, give them the reward. And that's how we're going to start getting our dog to perform the stand off of the physical queue. Keep in mind, it's bringing that nose to that chest. Get your dog's nose to go towards your chest. That's what I'm looking at. Can I bring that down to her chest? That's going to get her back end to pop up. So, boom, down towards that chest. And then what we're going to do is we're going to transfer this into other positions. Now, when we break when we have our dog in front of us, you remember those lateral movements. Come here, Ari. Ari, good girl. So, if I have her sitting or down, what I'm going to do is I'm going to either bring my hand in the front as I lift to give her a little bit of an additional cue, or I can do it closer to my body. So, instead of bringing it around her like I did initially, I could just tuck my hand up underneath to help her pop up into position. So, now you can do the sit, the down, and the stand in those lateral movements. And often I like to combine them. So, I might do the sit, get the down, pop back up in the stand, give my dog the reward. Or maybe we can do a few of those. I might do the sit down, pop back up, back into the sit, back into the down, back into the stand, and then I give her the reward. And remember, we also want to work the opposite direction. So, we can do the sit right into the down, pop back up into the stand. And we want our dog to be able to go from each position into the next. So, if you notice each time here, I dropped a couple pieces. All right. Each time I did it from the down, but we also want to do it from the the sit. So, you can see I'm just using these cues that we've been working on to get my dog to do the different positions. So, you want to work that directly in front as well. So, that's the lateral movements that we've been doing as well as doing the sit front. So, we have the dog directly in front of us, but we can pop them to do the stand as well. So, we can walk backwards, pop them up, boom, give that reward. I can do the sit back into the stand, into the down, back into the stand, and then once I feel like she's done enough based on how good she is, then I can give her the reward. So, a new dog, I'm not going to have them do as many before I reward them. I'm going to reward them after each position until they get good at it. When your dog really knows the physical cues, you can ask for more before you give them the reward. Now what we want to do is we want to do the same thing in the left heel, right heel and center position. So we want to get them to stand from the sit and we also want to get them try not dropping food. Poor food handling skills. And then we also want to get them to go into the stand from the down. So this is why we need to know how to do each position. And just like I did it on the left, now we can practice flipping the dog in the opposite heel position. Same thing. I want to practice getting her to do the sit down in the stand from the right heel position. I can also reach over and use this hand. And this is going to be a similar cue that what we did with the dog directly in front of us. So, there's a lot going on here, but all the skills that we've been working on throughout this course should transfer over into these exercises. So, now I'm going to get her to go into the center. And same thing from here. We want to get her to stand from the sit. And then we also want to get them to stand from the down. And so, you can start cycling through these and reward your dog once your dog is in the position. And if you're introducing something new, reward every single correct repetition. That's known as continual reinforcement. As your dog understands the queue, you can ask for more before you give your dog the reward. So, we've done the sit down and stand really in the left heel position, right heel position, center. We did the lateral movements, had her do the stand in each one of those, and we also did it on the climb. Now, we can start working it at a distance as well. So, I'm going to bring Ari over here. Ari, she's taking a break in the shade. Ari, climb. Here she comes. And she's getting a little tired. Now, I'm having all these dogs do a lot of work. Remember what I said earlier on in the course. Just a reminder, you want to keep the sessions short. You don't want to be working when they are getting tired like this. But I want to make sure you guys get the information. So, I'm going to make some sacrifices for you. So now, just like we were working the down from a distance, it's the same thing. And once your dog starts to know all the physical cues, I want you to start doing each one from each position. So I have her directly in front of me. I'm going to put my arms down to the side. I'm going to give her the command down. Free. And so she did it. So you remember what I said, the reinforcement event starts the moment we give the command. It ends the moment the dog does the behavior. So, I'm going to use the French version of down so I can show you the process of the command followed by the physical Q. Cushe free. Good. Hands down by the side. AI free. And she doesn't know French. She's just going into a position because she knows that she has to do something. Again, hands down. I give the command. I pause. I walk towards her to present the physical queue. The moment I start to walk towards her, that is part of the physical cue. It's not just the actual luring movement into the position. So, I'm in the reinforcement event the moment I start to walk towards her. That event ends the moment she lays down. Cushe free. And now we're going to do the stand. So, we're going to use the French command for Stan Du free. So, that one she did. And again, she doesn't know. She just she's guessing basically at this point. We build more distance. Cushe free. Daboo free. Very nice. So that one she got. So she has about a 33% chance of being right. I see. Free. Very nice. And I said free. That's her release plus reward. Climb. Good girl. And we will do another. Actually, I'm going to tell her down so I can do the uh stand down. And she heard me say the command. She's so smart. Doo free. Very nice. So once your dog starts to recognize that pattern, then they're going to perform it before you get to them. So think about when the reinforcement event ends. It ends when the dog does the behavior. That's when we mark. So, there was a couple times where she did the behavior right after I gave the command. But there's also going to be a time where you're walking towards your dog and your dog is processing the information and they go, "Oh, I'm going to do the behavior." So, if I'm halfway towards the dog and the dog does the behavior, that's still the moment that concludes the reinforcement event. So, now I'm going to mark that behavior and I'm going to enter the reward event. So, we want to be ready to mark the moment the dog completes the behavior. The closer we are to marking upon completion of the behavior, the better it's going to link up in their mind that it's the behavior that's getting the reward. Because if we wait even a few seconds, they might think it's the duration in the position that's getting the reward and not the act of going into the position. So, one last time, we'll do uh down, but I'm going to bring her back up into the stand. Daboo. free. So again, she guessed right and I would reward her. Now again, let's say I'm walking towards her and I want you to pretend. Use your imagination. Imagine I give the command right here. I'm walking towards her. Sit. And of course, she didn't do it. Free. And then she does it. So let me try doing a pretend version again. So I'm trying to give her the command as if I'm walking towards her, but as if I wasn't saying it. So I would give the command here. I'm in the event. pretend I'm not saying anything. Down, free. And so she laid down there. So that's where I would reward. I wouldn't wait till I get back. So as you're walking towards your dog to cue them into the position, you need to be thinking about marking the behavior the moment that they do it because there is a good chance that they do it in the middle of you walking towards them because that's all part of the physical cue to get the dog to do the behavior. Now, with these, I'm showing you how to do these exercises if you're training solo. But if you have a training partner, you can have a training partner standing next to your dog providing the physical cue. It's especially easy to do when you're using the leash. So you could tell the dog down and your training partner will cue your dog into the down using the leash cue that we're going to work on here shortly. And then you're getting your dog to understand commands from a distance. Even well, because the other person's there, that still adds to the pitcher. So you have to fade that out as well. But it does help with the process of getting them to understand that they have to perform commands from a distance. Because what you find if we always teach our dog commands directly in front of us, then you give your dog a command and what does your dog do? Your dog runs to you, sits and looks up at you, almost like you're asking them to do a recall. So this gets them to understand, and it's also part of that generalization that they have to perform the behavior regardless of where they are relative to you. Now, we're going to be introducing the lure for the recall command. Now, we've already done a good amount of it. Remember, I said a lot of the foundational stuff of the recall command is going to be that backwards follow exercise where we're walking back because that's the position we want the dog to get to. So, we want to start getting our dog to understand how to get there from a distance. Now, in the beginning, we start with our dog directly in front of us. We can even do the backwards follow where we walk backwards. we can start fading that physical cue where the dog's walking in front of us to get the reward, but we want to start increasing that distance so the dog knows how to run back towards us. So, there's a couple ways of doing this. One, we can use the around command that we used before. So, when your dog starts to understand around, come and then you can guide your dog into that position, break, reward him, and then release him. I could have just used her termination marker, terminal marker. I could have just said free. So, that's one way to start working on the recall where we can build distance. Now, remember what I said about the stay command. If we're introducing the stay command, we don't want to do the stay and the recall at the same time because the recall could damage the stay. So, this is a great way to do that. The other option is the treat toss technique. So, this is where we take a piece of food, we show it to our dog, we toss it. After our dog eats it, come. We can add that command and we can guide our dog free back into that sit front position. So, two really useful techniques. Going around the cone, calling them back to the sitfront position, throwing the treat, calling them back to the sitfront position. Now, this is also part of that reinforcement event. We can, if we want, terminate a reinforcement event for a reward event. And we've been doing this already throughout the course. This is that assisted shaping that we talked about. So remember where we're rewarding the dog before they complete the behavior. So that means we're interrupting that reinforcement event for the reward event. We can also do it to speed up commands, specifically the recall. So, I can send my dog away and when I call my dog to me, the moment she makes the decision to start running in my direction, I can use my terminal marker and then throw the food behind me. Or if you're using a toy, you can throw the toy. What a lot of trainers will do is they'll throw the toy between their legs. So, the dog comes flying through their legs. I can do that with the food. So, now I'm interrupting or I'm canceling out the reinforcement event for the reward event to increase my dog's speed and motivation. Now, we don't want to do this all the time because what it could do is it could turn our recall into the dog flying past us. So, there's a balance for everything. But, I'm going to demonstrate that real quick. Ari, come here, cutie. Come here, Ari. And the food's getting a little soft. So, I'm going to toss it. Once she eats it, you want to wait till your dog has consumed it or they're done looking for it. Because if you call them while they're like right now, she thinks there's another piece. If I call her, I don't have a way to reinforce it because she doesn't have a leash on. So, I don't want to set myself up for failure. So, she looks done about now. All right, come free. So, I mark the behavior and then toss the treat through my leg. And I can do that again. Come free. Very nice. She's been training all day, so her motivation's going down a little bit. It's also way faster usually with a toy if your dog has high toy drive. We'll do one more. Ari, come free. So, you notice I'm saying the marker as she's running towards me. So, I'm terminating the exercise in the middle of the exercise. And that's letting her know, great job, you started to do the behavior that I want. I want you to go get access to your reward. So now we're going to progress to the next stage. So we know to do that backwards follow exercise. How do we start fading the physical cue for the recall? The way that I like to do that is I help the dog when I notice the dog needs the help. So let's say this is me and this is the dog, right? I call the dog to me or I send the dog to go around the cone. The dog's coming towards me. Everything's perfect. there's no issues. Right about here, the dog starts to veer off. The moment I see the dog get off of track, that's when I assist them and help them to the perfect sit front. But if the dog's running towards me and there's no issues, I'm going to stay in that position until I notice the dog needs help. So, I'm going to show you what that looks like right now. Ari. And I'm going to keep my hands down by my side. So, she went around the cone even though I didn't tell her to. Come here, Ari. And that's an informal recall. Around. Come free. So you see she started to go a little bit off to the side. So I helped her out. Now if you've done a lot of stay and your dog does have a really good stay, you can start doing recalls from a stay. Now she's been doing stays for years. So I can tell her climb. So now she's on the climb stay. And I'm going to show you what it looks like when we want to start showing the dog that final picture of standing down. Now I do have treats in my hand in case I need to help. so we can see everything nicely. Good. So, I have her in front of me. Now, you'll see if she starts to veer off at all, that's when I'm going to help. And sometimes in the beginning, it even helps to put your hands behind your back because with our hands down on the side, that will sometimes cause the dog to want to go towards our hand. So, this is a good stepping stone as well. So, I tell her, "Come free." And so that one I backed up a little bit because she wasn't as close as I wanted her to be. So I wanted her to be closer. So I backed up to get her a little bit closer. Let's try one more time. Ari climb. Very nice. Come free. And then I'm rewarding her through my legs. So she's thinking forward movement. So that one she came into a nice position. So, for the recall, let's recap. We do a plenty of that backwards follow exercise. We get the dog to understand the sit front position. When we start adding the command, we add the command close to our dog. So, our dogs directly in front of us, come and then we go right into that backwards follow exercise. We gradually increase the distance as the dog gets better. And to prevent damaging the stay, if we're just starting the stay, we can use the around command or the treat toss technique where we toss the treat. If you're training in a field or in grass, make sure it's big enough for the dog to easily find. Once they get that piece, then we can do the recall and we help them when they need it so we can start fading out that physical cue. So eventually you can stand straight, call your dog to you, and your dog will come in nice and fast. If you need to increase the speed, you can use toys just like I demonstrated with the food, but instead of tossing a piece of food behind yourself, you would toss a toy. and that's going to help increase the speed. So, this is going to be the foundational work of doing our recall to the sit front. And one more thing to keep in mind, the further away from your dog is, from my experience, usually the faster the dog will come running. So, if your dog is really far away from you, usually they're going to run much faster. Now, we're going to be doing a fun exercise that I like to do with every single dog that I train for loose leash walking. So when I train my dogs, I like to teach them a focus heel, a contact heel, loose leash walking, and then a very casual walk. So to define the difference, the contact heel, the dog focuses on a source, so like food or toy or decoy, and they maintain contact to know where the position is. Focus heel, the dog looks up, often at our face, or some trainers will have the dog look straight up. Then we have our loose leash walking. That's where the dog walks next to us. They can look wherever they want, but they still have to maintain that position. And we get to determine how strict that position is, whether they can move around quite a bit or they have to stay in a smaller section relative to us as we walk. And then the very casual one, I allow the dog to walk wherever they want around me as long as they're not pulling on the leash. So, I like to start with the focused heel, contact heel, then the loose leash walking, and then finally the very casual one. Now, most of you are probably just going to be doing the casual and the loose leash walking. So, with the loose leash walking, we want to teach the dog how to find the heel position. Now, we've already done a lot of that with the static movement, but this exercise is specifically directed towards loose leash walking because when you're walking, I like to look at loose leash walking as a mobile stay command. So, that means if my dog is here, they must maintain that position even if I walk. So relative to me, it's a mobile stay. If I stop, the dog has to stop. Well, what happens? The dog might go behind us. The dog might go in front of us. The dog might try to cut off to the right side. So, we want to show how the dog needs to get back to the heel position if they lose that position. So, what I'm going to do, I'm going to demonstrate with Ari. She's hanging out off to the side. Come here, Ari. And she's been training a lot today. So, we're going to walk and then I'm going to reward her with the food. And I'm going to move back. Once she comes back, I'm going to guide her back into the position. And then I'm going to reward her again. So, you can see she's kind of running low on enthusiasm. She might actually be getting pretty full. Sorry, she had a piece of food on her head. All right. You ready? Are you ready, Arie? Here we go. So, I'm going to guide her. Very nice. Give her the food. Excellent. Move back. Guide her back. So, I want her to know how to refine this heel position each time. And we're gonna do it on the opposite side as well. So, I'm not asking her to stay in the position. I'm just walking. I'm turning and I'm giving her the reward. Very nice. So, it's that same cue that we did earlier. Now, sometimes when I have her walk, I'm going to reward her there, and then I'm going to reward her back this way. Then, I'm going to reward her there, and reward her back this way. And so this is a good exercise to get your dog to understand that concept because when your dog goes ahead of you in the walk, you want to be able to guide them back into the heel position to go back on the walk or the path that you're going. So this exercise, it's very simple to do. Key points is you're showing the same movement that you did before. Once your dog's next to you, you're going to give them the food, disengage, back up, guide the dog back into the heel position, and then do it again. Release, come back. We can switch sides, left and right side, so they know how to do each one. And then the last one is we're giving the dog the reward as they're coming back to increase the enthusiasm for coming back to us and then giving the reward here. So, this goes back with that food handling skills. I have to be able to adjust and reward quite quickly. And that one I dropped. Good job. So, those are the key points for this one. Let's guide them into the heel position. This is also going to transfer where we're going to do this with the leash. We're going to do the left and right side. We're going to reward them, release them, disengage, have them come back, repeat the exercise, and sometimes we're going to reward them as they're walking towards the food. This should be pretty easy for you based on the skills that you have developed so far. Now, we're going to be working on getting our dog into the different positions and having them move. So, instead of staying stationary, we're going to move with our dog in the center position, left heel position, and right heel position. Now, the foundation is always going to start from the center. The reason why is we can use our legs to control our dog's position. Whereas, if our dog is on the outside, we don't have as much control because we don't have those two barriers on the left and right side. So, we're going to start here getting our dog to walk forward, backwards, pivot in position, and then we're going to transfer that over to the left and right side. So, this is going to be the luring movement portion of this course. Now, we want to teach our dog how to walk backwards. The foundation of this is very similar to when we taught our dogs to stand. So, the first time I do this, I like to show my dog this picture where I take my hands, I curl in my fingers and my wrist. So, almost like you're working your forearms. Your forearms you should feel as you curl your wrist in. Then, I'm going to bring it down to my dog's chest. But instead of just having our dog pop up, we're going to move towards them, applying a little bit of pressure towards their chest. This should get them to take a step back. The first time your dog takes a step back, make sure you reward that. We want them to know it's the act of stepping back is what we want from them. One of the most common mistakes that people make when they're teaching this is they want to get more steps early on before the dog's ready. So, they're having the dog back up and the dog is doing it, but then the dog becomes discouraged because they're not sure if that's what they want because they're not getting the reward. So, remember, we have to give the dog more rewards in the beginning until they're able to do it without any issues and then we can ask for more speed as well as more distance. So, first step, that's when we're going to uh mark. Now, another thing that happens when it comes to teaching our dog to walk backwards is as we move into them, a lot of dogs are going to try to sit down. Very normal. If your dog sits down, just walk backwards to get them to stand back up and then bring the food back down towards their chest to get them to walk backwards. This is going to be the first step of teaching our dog to walk backwards. So, I'm going to demonstrate with Ari. So, I have her directly in front of me. We have the food in both hands. We take our fingers. We curl our wrist. We bring it to our dog's chest. And we walk towards them. Yes. Once they take that step back, we're going to mark and reward. Yes. Oh, yeah. And we're going to use free, even though she is conditioned to Yes. as well. Free. Good. And I don't want her turning a lot either. So, if she starts to turn, I straighten her back out and then I ask for another step in the right direction. Yes. Good. Sorry, I should be using free. Free. Good. So, she's starting to turn. So, I'm going to straighten her out. Free. Good. And again, she gets really excited with the training. So, this is going to be the first step. Now, one of the things that we can do, I'm going to grab the climb bed over here. Ari is I like to have a target for the dog as well. Now, the lower the target is, the easier it is for the dog to find it. But this is great. So, this is from a company called Pet Cot. I really like their beds. They're very sturdy and they're low to the ground, so it's pretty easy for most dogs to be able to walk backwards onto this. But one of the things that you will see if you're trying to get your dog to step back on a platform this elevated even though it's pretty low, the back of their paws are going to hit the side of the bed and a lot of them will try to sit down. You just have to walk them forward again and attempt to get them to stand on it again. If this is too difficult, you can literally just pick up a board and put the board on the ground. So now it's only an inch or two inches depending on the thickness of that board, and that's going to be easier for your dog to walk back on. This is going to help them with their rear end awareness, so they're more aware of what's going on on that back end, but it's also going to give them a direction to go to, which is going to help make that line nice and straight. So I'm going to show you what that looks like, and we're going to use the same cue. So curl those fingers. Free. And you can see she's reaching back with her legs. Free. Very nice. Now, of course, this isn't how it looks the very first time. It takes a little bit to get our dogs to this point where they start walking back and reaching for it. Free. And you can also see that she's waiting for that queue. So, I have her here. If my hands are open, she's going to come towards me. Curling close. Free. And then she's going to walk backwards to get the reward. and get to that platform. So, now we're working on a little bit of direction. The next step to this is getting our dogs to walk backwards while looking up at us. There's a few different ways to do this. One common technique is you slowly start to increase the height of the physical cue to get the dog to do the behavior. So, initially, we're bringing it down to our dog's chest. So, what we want to start to do is if I'm guiding it towards the dog's chest, now I want to bring it a little bit higher, a little higher, a little higher, a little higher, till eventually the dog's walking backwards while looking up because we changed the position of our lure. Even though typical lures get the dog to walk forward, this one is designed to get them to walk backwards. So, now I'm not going to bring it down as far. It's a little bit higher, but you can see free, we're still getting the same result of having the dog walk backwards. Then, we would bring it up a little higher. Now she's going a little sideways. Free. Very nice. And then of course we're going to bring it a little higher. And she missed. Free. And so you can see now of course this is happening very fast. The way a common question that's often asked is how do I know when to progress within my training? When your dog is doing it, that's when you progress. So, if your dog is starting to walk backwards using the technique and you're able to raise that lure, then you can continue to raise it. If you raise it and now all of a sudden your dog sitting, okay, we may have gone too fast and we go back a step. So, now the other technique, and this one's really nice, too. Remember, our dogs are very, very good at pattern recognition. So, if I show my dog this picture up high and then I lower it and walk towards them, then what's going to end up happening is this is going to predict this. You see how she starts to walk back already? So, they start to figure that out and they'll respond to the first queue before needing the second queue. So, then I'm going to curl up and I'm just going to walk towards her. So, now she's looking up as she's walking backwards. And this is ideal. This is what we want. Free. And as our dog gets better, we could even drop our hands, walk towards them, and they're going to know to move backwards. And now she cheated and turned a little bit. Come here, Ari. And now I'm going to walk towards her. And that was what I like to call an informal command where I said, "Come here, Ari." It wasn't a come when called. It was just informal, which is something I recommend if you don't want to enforce the command that you're giving your dog. So now we can see she's starting to move back directly in front of us. Now, here's a really great technique to get the dog to walk back without needing any barriers. So, often people will put like a wall or they'll put a gate or something like that, which is fine. It works really well and it helps keep the dog straight, but we can't always have that. Now, a lot of times I will use a wall or I will use a barrier if I need to get faster results and the dog is struggling. So, that is a very excellent technique, but again, we don't always have that. So, technique we can do if my dog starts to turn to the right as I'm walking towards them, then what I'm going to do is I'm going to make bigger steps with my right foot as I come towards them. And that's going to help keep them more straight. If my dog starts to curve to the left, then I'm going to do the opposite. I'm going to take bigger steps with my left foot, and that's going to get the dog to go straight as well. So, we can adjust the way we're walking towards our dog depending on how our dog is moving. And this is going to get them to walk straight back. So, I'm going to show you how it looks with Ari. Come here, Arie. And I'm going to walk on an angle this way. So now I can start walking towards her. And there she's starting to turn. Now I go this way. Good. So we can see just how I step free is going to determine how she's going to start moving. So she started to veer a little bit to the left. So I adjusted my footing and that fixed her movement. So that's going to be the next thing you want to do. You want to start getting your dog to move. Ari, come here. She's going on her own little adventure. Ari, now I'm gonna show you the next step where we have our dog in the heel position. So, this is like a back slide. Now, the first time you do that to get your dog to move, just start with the same queue as before. Show your dog the hand. So, this is one hand instead of two. Curl your fingers in and walk backwards. Very similar to the stand. So, it's identical. We're just adding more steps. And again, reward the first few steps. gradually ask for more as your dog gets better. So now we have our dog here and we want to start getting them to move back without having to drop our hand down. So same process that we did before. Gradually increase where you start the lure to get your dog to walk back. Another one I like to do is a little butt slide. And so that looks like this where we're getting our dog to slide back while keeping their butt down. And she's starting to lift it a little bit. Good. So, I'm just doing this to help her keep that butt down. Very nice. We're going to bring the dog back. All right, go climb. When I do this movement, what I'm doing is before I have my dog slide back. I'm stepping with the opposite leg. Now, traditionally, a lot of times we're taught to step with the leg on the side of the dog, but for this sliding movement, we like to step with the opposite leg. So, I'm going to step back with my right, and then I pop my hand forward. So, you can see my wrist pops forward. And then, as I slide my leg back, simultaneously, I'm going to move my hand back. So, it looks like this. And you can practice that without the dog, which I recommend doing. When I first learned this technique, I had to practice this without the dog. A lot of the things that we do, we want to practice without the dog. So, it's that pop and then slide. Pop, slide, pop, slide. Okay. So, I'm going to show you how that looks, Ari. So, we have our dog in the position, step back, and then there's there's the slide. And she's not sliding as much as I want. She's starting to stand up a little bit there. There, that one looked better. Very nice. And they're going to stand up a little bit and that's fine. I just don't want them standing up all the way. It's a little bit of a slide. And I'll show you this with Maverick as well. Maverick does it really nice. Each dog is going to do it slightly different. Good girl. So, that's going to be the exercise to get our dog to walk backwards, which this is important because Ari, if you want to be able to do exercises like this where you spin them around and you do that quarter turn, you're going to have to make sure your dog knows how to walk backwards. And these are the foundational steps to get to that point. Now, we're going to bring our dog into the center position, and we're going to start walking forward. Remember how we talked about reward placement? I like my dogs to look up. So, when I reward, I keep my hand up against my body. I want my dog reaching back to get the reward. If my dog thinks that they have to go back to get the reward, they're less likely to drop their head, but some dogs are still going to drop their head. Now, there is an additional technique you can do to keep their head up, and that's bringing your hand underneath their chin. Ari, so what I mean by that is we can bring our hand under here as a reminder that we want our dog to keep their head up. as we start to walk. And that's going to help a little bit if your dog is dropping their head. If you don't care about your dog's head being up, then you could just walk forward and keep your hand wherever you want. But keep in mind where you keep your hand is going to affect how your dog looks. So again, I like to keep it center and high so my dog is looking up as they walk. When we first start, just like with all our luring exercises, we're gonna praise our dog as we're walking and then we're going to give the reward at the end. So, good girl. Very nice. And then I give the reward and I disengage. She comes back. I can flip her in and do another one. Very good. And then give her the treat. I dropped one. So, that goes back to that food handling. Ari, good girl. And you might also notice she has a remote collar on. That's because we're not in a fenced in area and if we're going to be safe with our dogs, we want to have a way to always control them. So, this is going to be the first step of getting our dog to walk forward. Now, with everything, we want to get to the point where we start spacing out the reward. And the way that we do that or fading out rather, fading out the physical cue, the way we do that with the center position is in the beginning, Ari, we have the food pretty much directly above their face. so they feel like they can get it the entire time. But then what we want to start doing is we want to start lifting it. Now some dogs are going to try to jump. If your dog jumps up, then make sure you don't give them the treat when they are jumping. We're using in a sense negative punishment where we're not giving them the reward. That's what people would consider negative punishment. And then once all four paws are back on the ground, then we can go ahead and reward. And we also want a reward based on how the dog is performing. So if you want to prance by holding it high, a lot of times in order to get that neck stretched up to get the reward, our dogs begin to prance. But what a lot of dogs will do, most dogs in fact, they'll do a bounce where they're bouncing with their paws. Maverick, my German Shepherd, will do that sometimes. If they're bouncing, we don't want to reward that. We reward once they start doing the prance. When we get that prance with that good rhythm, then we can reward if that's something that you're interested in getting with your dog. All right. So, as we start to space out the reward, too, we want to bring our hands outside of the picture. Once they're outside, see how she's she's looking to the right. Free. So, I'm going to reward to the left and not the right because that's the way she was looking. I want her to stay center. Also, speed. Good girl. Free will often increase the dog's motivation. Now, if you notice, I stopped there and then I said free. You can also continue your forward movement and mark. So, don't stop at all. Just keep moving. Your dog looks nice. Then you can use that marker. So, I can go like this, bring my hands back, see, and then I can say the marker, and she could jump out of the position and get the reward. Even though her head placement wasn't as nice as I would have liked it to be, she's getting a little lazier in her older age. Good girl. Free. Good. Very nice. So, that's going to be how we start getting our dog to walk forward in the center position. Key things to remember, get your dog to get to the center position. We have those different techniques to do that that we learned from earlier in this course. When you first start walking forward, we're going to have the reward directly above their nose. getting them to walk in the way that we want them to. And we're going to praise them as we're walking. Once we give them the reward, we disengage. We get our dog to come back to us, bring them back into the center position. The reason why we disengage, too, is so the dog feels more like they're activating us. They feel more invested because they feel like they're in the control or they're in the seat that manages the control of the situation. That's going to make them more excited about the training. Then we want to start fading out the physical cue. This could take a long time. I'm talking weeks to months. So, you can start bringing your hand up. If your dog hops up, don't give them the reward. Once they're walking on the ground, then you can drop down that reward pretty quickly or you can use your terminal marker and then let them get access to the reward. And then eventually, we start to bring our hands out part of that fading process. You can even bring your hands behind your back. And as you're walking, if your dog's looking up and you see that picture that you want, go ahead and use your terminal marker and reward them. And this is going to help when we transfer the dog to the left and right heel position as well. Now, we want to start teaching our dog how to turn in the center position. As I said before, what's nice about the center is we have the left and right barriers because of our legs. So, what we're going to do, this is a little cool technique where it's going to look it almost looks like you're kicking your dog, but you're not kicking your dog. You're you're as you're stepping, what you're doing is you're bringing your back leg and you're lifting your dog up and pushing them to the side. What happens is the dog starts to anticipate this movement and they will start to move their hips to the side as you start to turn. So, you see what I'm doing here as I'm bringing my leg over and moving him to the side. And he's already starting to anticipate that a little bit and shifting his hips before I'm doing it for him. So, we step, we move with the leg, step, move, step, move. And that's going to help as you start doing those turns with your dog. Now, one of the techniques that I like to do with all the dogs is what I like to call the circle pattern or a circle technique. And this is where we're going to walk our dog in a circle in the center position. We also do this on the left and right heel position. Good boy. Good. And as we go, we make that circle smaller and smaller until we're pivoting in place. And then we reward the dog. Of course, you don't want to do too many, especially if you get dizzy easily like I do. Like that was enough. I don't want to do more than that. I'm going to go in the other direction, though. So, now we're going to take our dog and we're going to go the other way. We're holding that lure. Good boy. And we make that circle smaller and smaller until we're pivoting in place. And then we can give our dog the reward. So, those are the two techniques that I like to do to start teaching my dog how to take those turns in the center position. So, again, we're going to take the food. You can praise while you're doing this. If you're starting to get away from that praise, that's fine as well. You're going to take that back leg as you step. So, we're going to step on an angle and then we're going to hook our dog to the side. Step on an angle. Hook our dog using that food still. Good boy. And I gave him a couple pieces there just to keep them motivated. Good. We're going to get them used to turning. And like I said, what this does is it gets our dog to anticipate that. So they're thinking, "Oh, this leg is gonna assist me and push me off to the side." And most dogs would rather just move to the side on their own. So as we start to step and turn, the dog notices that physical change in our body, and so they adjust accordingly. So then we have our dog pivoting and moving nicely within the center position. Then same thing, that circle pattern is going to teach our dog how to pivot in place. So, this is a great way to start building that foundation that you need to get your dog to turn left or turn right while in the heel or center position. Okay. Now, we want to get our dogs to walk backwards in the center position just like doing it in the other positions, the front or the heel. We take our hand, we curl it down, and we get our dog to walk backwards. Very nice. And then we can go ahead and reward. Start with a couple steps just like before. Ask for more steps as your dog gets better. If you've been doing that back slide technique where we slide back, we can do that in the center position as well. So you can see how he's starting to walk back and when they know they need to maintain the position, we can start asking for more steps. So if you watch the section with the leash pressure, we can keep our hand there with the leash and start walking back. Very good. And again, our legs can help provide that barrier to make sure our dog doesn't start to go too far left or too far right. As your dog gets better, you can start asking for more steps. Now, one of the techniques that a lot of trainers like to do is they will bring the dog in the center position, reverse, and do the same thing. So, now we can watch our dog's back end, and we can start asking for more paces. Good. And then reward as they get better. I don't do that too often. I don't need my dog to run backwards in the center position, but it is something that could be fun to do cuz this could be a little bit harder sometimes because you're worried about if you're going to step on the dog or not. And he's starting to turn. So, we want to straighten him out. Very nice. And then we're going to reward. So, the movement, the process for getting them to do it in the center is the same process that we do with the dog in the front. Same process that we do with the dog on the left. And like I said, I was going to show you with Maverick that back slide because he does it really well. So again, we pop forward and slide our hand back. So you see that little slide with his butt. Very nice. As I slide my hand and I can ask for a few steps and then I can go ahead and reward him. So that's going to be the foundation or at least the process in which I like to teach my dogs how to walk backwards and maintain that center position during backwards movement. Now, we're going to take what we've taught our dog in the center position, and we're going to transfer that over to the left and right heel position. This isn't something you have to rush. You can keep your dog in the center position for a long time before you make your dog transfer over to the left or right heel. It's good because if your dog can understand that very well, it makes the transition significantly easier. What we're going to do, we're going to have our dog in the heel position, moving forward, and the process is the same as the center. I like to start by first praising the dog as I'm moving. And then once I give them the reward, I disengage. I have them come back and reactivate. Now, in the beginning, I do like to praise as we're moving. But we can start removing that praise as the dog understands it more. No command. We're just going to walk. Very good. He's getting that prance. I give him the treat and I go back. Very nice. And I guide him back into the position. I'm looking for that prance. Very good. One. Oh, he's bouncing. One, two. One, two. Good. Reward. Go back. Now we can transfer the dog to the opposite side and do the same thing. We start getting the walk. I'm looking for that prance. There we go. Very nice. And reward. Disengage. And the better your dog gets, the more paces you're going to ask for. Come here, buddy. Good. And we start walking. There's that prince. Beautiful. And reward. And leaning back. getting my dog's head to come back in order to get that reward, which again, that's thinking about that reward placement so we keep our dog's head up. Maverick, now with the heel position, there's different techniques that we can do to start removing or fading out that physical cue. So, one technique is where we bring our hand behind our back, we have our dog looking up, free, we mark, and we bring the food up. Another technique that people will do is they'll bring their hand behind their dog's head and then they'll bring it up to give the reward. We can also start bringing our hand out to the side. I'm going to transfer the treats so there's no treats. We bring it over and then when he keeps it up in the center and we can help with this hand, but it's going to still add part free. It's still a cue that you're going to have to fade. And I haven't done the fading process with him yet. Free. Very nice. And again, rewarding nice and high. Now, as I said before with the center position, if we're walking, we can tap the dog's chin a little bit to keep their head up. We can do the same thing when our dog's in the heel position. So, this is a common technique. And a lot of people will use a healing stick. I know some trainers that will use a brush like you'd use to brush your hair. But, we're just going to walk and then just a little bit of a touch on his chin to keep it up. It's kind of like a reminder for them. We're not holding the dog's chin up, but we're using it to remind the dog to keep their chin up. Maverick, come here, buddy. Good boy. Maverick, come here. Good. Guide him back into the center. Oh, actually, we're doing the heel, so we're going to bring them over to the heel. Good. Start walking. Look for that prance. Excellent. Very nice. and then reward back. So, he's leaning back to get that reward. And again, this is going to be the way that we're going to start train trans transferring our dog from the center position to the heel position while getting them to walk forward. Key things to remember, start by praising as you're walking. Once you give your dog the reward, disengage, have your dog come back to activate you so they feel more invested in the training. You can switch sides. You can go back and forth. You should know how to do that based on the previous lessons in this course. And we want to start spacing out or eventually removing that um that lure. We're going to start fading it, but you don't have to rush it. So, I take my time with it. Like I said, I haven't even really started that fading process with him, and he's about 7 months. I know he looks big, but he's still a baby. And it's not something I rush because with my own dogs, I'm going to be training them throughout their entire life. Not because they necessarily need it in order to perform the way that I want, but because training is ideal for their mental development and their mental health. If we have a dog that's very intelligent, especially a working line breed, and we're not giving them that daily mental stimulation, it could have a negative impact on their overall psyche. But we want to be able to do that throughout the dog's life. And it's something that I do with all my dogs. I always spend time training them because if we teach them that it's a game and it's fun, they're going to love it and they're going to want to do it for the rest of their life. So, it's not a rush. Have fun with the training. And again, the sessions are very short. Anywhere from 1 to 15 minutes if you're doing some really extreme stuff, but the sessions are pretty short. So, now we're going to take our dog, we're going to bring them into the heel position, and we're going to start doing circles. So, what we're doing when we're doing these circles is we're gradually making them smaller and smaller. So, by starting with a bigger circle, it's easier for our dog. It's almost the same as going in a straight line. We're just slightly curving. And then, so like, think about a spiral. We start to bring that spiral in until we're well pivoting in place. And we're going to want to go both directions on both sides. So, the side that tends to be the easier easier side is when the dog is on the outside. So, if my dog's on the left and I'm going this way, that's going to be easier than if I'm going this way. So, the inside position for the dog tends to be a little bit harder. Remember, we like to keep things easy and then we gradually make it more difficult as the dog gets better. So, then we're going to take the dog on the right side. So, we do the left side, dog on the outside, right side, dog on the outside, left side, dog on the inside, right side, dog on the inside. and you get to a point where you're pivoting in place and your dog is still able to maintain that heel position. So, this spiral helps with that transition. And this is going to help with our left and right turns. So, I'm going to bring my lab Charlie over here. He's on the other side of the field hanging out. Charlie. And here he comes. Good boy. So, we're going to take him, bring him on the left heel position, and we're going to do that circle that I was telling you about. So, it's a nice big circle. And you want to be able to heal your dog for a little bit because we don't I mean, we could technically give them a reward and then go right back into it if your dog likes to maintain that position, but then we're going to get to a point where we're boom pivoting in place and I'm having my dog focus on the source. So, the source is the food and that's what he's focusing on right now. We're going to bring them back, but it's al it's getting him to understand the mechanics. So now I'm doing the right side. And we make it smaller. And I'm doing it fast because he already knows that I don't need to do as big of a circle. There we go. And we can walk and give him the treat or we can stop and give him the treat. However you want to do it. Once you have that down and just like having the dog walk forward in the center or walking in a straight line in the left and right heel position, you can use those techniques to start spacing out that lure to get them to do it without having to need so much help. And so then when we have the dog on the inside, this tends to be much more difficult. As we're walking in that circle, they have to really start to pivot to maintain that position. Whoa. Got a little dizzy. And then we can give them the treat. Release them from the position. And you're going to do the same thing on the other side. Now, I'm doing all these in a row. You don't have to do it that way. You can do you can work on the left heel position, doing the right circle for a little bit. Get that really nice. And then you could do the right side. And this could be a progressive process through multiple days or even multiple weeks. Okay. Come here, Charlie. So, we're going to bring him into the right heel position. And now, we're going to walk on the right side as we bring him around and we pivot in place. Now, also, uh, keep in mind this is more for precision style obedience. You may not want precision style obedience, and that's fine. Then you can skip these steps, and you can focus on the exercise when we start doing the loose leash walking. And that teaches the dog how to maintain the position without having to look up at us or maintain contact. And it's very easy to do. A lot of these exercises for me is adding more joy and fun to the training that I do with my dogs. So, I do recommend doing it even if you're not doing a focused heel because it's also going to give them more of an understanding of their position relative to you during movements. Now, we're going to be taking our dog, since we've been doing those circling exercises or the spiral exercise, now we're going to focus on getting our dog to understand how to do turns. So, when I start teaching a dog how to turn, if you really want to get into details, you can focus on your footwork. But for the right about turn when the dog's in the left heel position and the left about turn when your dog's in the right position is easier than the turn where the dog's on the inside. Same thing that we are dealing with with the spiral exercise. So when we first start doing these turns, I like to do partial turns. I don't need to do an entire 90° turn. I can make it smaller to make it easier for the dog. Now, when we're looking at the footwork, as I'm going to turn, I like to take the last step with the foot in the direction that I'm going. So, if I'm going to my left, I take the left. That's my last big one. Then, I pivot, step, and turn. That gives my dog enough time to do the movement. And some people will start with the leg opposite. Turn and step. That just tends to be a little bit faster. So, if we look at the difference, if I'm going to my left and my last big step is my right leg, you can do that or you can do the left. Really, what works better for you and the timing for the dog. So, that's how I like to do it. You see how there's a few paces where I'm going left, right, left, right? That gives my dog more time to make the turn. And a lot of trainers do it that way as well. Same thing with the right side. Right is my last big one and then I turn. That makes it easier for me to remember to. And I like doing it that way because again it gives the dog a little bit more time to make the adjustment that they need in order to do that turn. And this is if you are thinking about doing anything within the competitive world so you can have it more precise. Now with having my dog go to the right if they're on the left or the left if they're on the right. What I like to do initially I will do a full about turn. This is a little bit different than when we're looking at the left. And this is an about turn. So, an about turn is where we're turning in position and we're staying on the straight line. So, we're going to get to that as well. But with the right, what we're going to do is we're going to do that same movement, but I like to start with the full right about turn for the right because it makes it easier when we do the short one. So, you see it's a little bit different, at least the way that I like to do it on each side. So, when I'm working on getting my dog to go to the right, so let's say my dog's on the left side and I'm doing a right about turn. I'm going to take this step nice and big. I'm gonna guide the dog around and then I'm gonna bring them to the opposite side and I'm going to turn. The reason why I do this, I bring the dog around quickly because I want them to think about staying nice and tight as we do that turn. It increases the speed that they turn, which keeps them in the correct position. This is important because when we do a right turn, the dog has to speed up in order to maintain the heel position. What happens to a lot of dogs is we go to make that turn and they'll start to lag. So, this is going to help prevent that. And I'm going to show you what that looks like first with Charlie. So, come here, my boy. So, as we're walking forward again, I take a step, I guide my dog around the leg, I transfer to the other hand, I take a step back, and I turn. And that's the movement that we're going to work on. Now, depending on how you want to handle the food, this works well for me because it's a little bit more difficult for me to reach my hand all the way across, but what a lot of people will do, so it's really again dependent on what's more comfortable for you. As we step, we can guide them around with the one hand and then turn. And this movement looks easy, but a lot of people struggle the first few times they do that. Uh, so same thing if we're doing the right side. So, if I'm doing the right side, I'm going to step again. I like to guide him over to my opposite hand. Take a step back, turn, and then I'm switching back to the original hand. Charlie, climb. So, what that looks like with the food is I'm guiding him around this way. I transfer him to this hand. I take a step back, then I transfer him back to this hand, and that's when he gets the treat. So, it's a lot of back and forth with the hand movement to get the dog in the position that we want. Let me show you again with Charlie. So, we're going to go nice and slow. So, I'm stepping forward. He has the food. Boom. I guide him to the other one. I still have the treat here. I take that step back. Twist around. I still got this one. And now I give him the treat. So, he didn't get the one in the right hand through that whole process. He's taking little bites out of it, which that's why some of these freeze-dried nuggets could be really great for training. That's what I'm using right now. So, again, I bring him around this way. Boom. I catch him on this hand. I turn him back. Now, he's on this hand. And that's where I can reward him. And that's going to help him take a really nice sharp turn. As we go to turn for the right, he's going to stay much closer because of those exercises that we did. And that's what we're going for. So that's going to be how we start to work our right turn as well as our right about turn. So this is the foundation for both of those. So then if I'm going to do a right turn, because of how I did it, he stays in a really nice position. So, by working on the full about turn, which is more difficult, the dog does the right turn better. Now, it's different on the left side or the inside when we're turning the dog. I like to make it a little bit easier initially as I'm walking. Again, big step on the last one, little turn, and then I can make that turn. And you can see all the other work that we've done helps him maintain the position. It becomes very easy for the dog. So, again, last step is with the left leg. Then I do a small turn. And there we go. and he's able to adjust. Once the dog is doing that successfully, we just increase the amount that we're turning. So, we're gradually making the turn bigger and bigger. So, now if I'm doing a left turn, because of this foundational work, I can do this nicely and he's going to maintain the position. Now, he didn't do it perfect, but it was still pretty good. And this also transitions into the left turn. As I'm walking now, I'm doing the full turn and my dog's able to maintain the position. It's not always going to be that easy when you start doing this. The left about turn can become very difficult and this is why we do a lot of that power steering that we talked about before. So, power steering is when we can get our dog to maintain the position. I'll show you another quick little technique in this video that I like to do to get dogs to understand the concept of power steering. I take my hand with the food. I lock it up against my body and I'm just going to pivot in place. My hand's not going to rotate. It's going to well, it's going to move because it's attached and I'm moving, but I'm not doing this is what I'm trying to get at. So, when I have my hand down and I turn, when my dog takes a step in that direction, see, I turn and he maintains that straight position, I'm rewarding that. And this helps with power steering because my body also gives him a little bit of guidance to direct him which way he needs to go. If we're first starting and we're just turning the hand, a lot of dogs won't turn like he is, but he does that because of that simple pivoting exercise. Another thing that we want to do if we're having a hard time now, we're going to be introducing the leash as well. Also, if you haven't gotten to the leash pressure training exercises, we can use a leash for this, which I will show you with the leash once we get to that portion of the course. But another thing that I do when I'm doing this is in the beginning, I'll start very slow. I'll just try to get them to make the turn one bit at a time using that power steering that we've established through some of these previous exercises. It's slow, but it's teaching the dog the mechanics. A lot of times people want to go in and they want to do a really fast turn right away and your dog's just not going to be capable of doing it. Back when I was an instructor at a school for professional dog trainers where we would train trainers, it used to frustrate me when I would see a student and they'd have their leash on their dog and as they were going to do this turn, the leash is here and they're turning and they're popping the dog with the leash. And I'd say, "What are you doing?" They say, "Well, the dog's not maintaining the position." and I'm correcting them for not maintaining the position. I said, "How many repetitions have you done? Have you done at least a few thousand?" "No." "Well, then do more reps. Give your dog an opportunity to learn it because this movement is very challenging." Charlie, go climb. So, as the dog, what they're doing for a left about turn is significantly harder than what we're doing. So, if I'm the dog and here's the human, when they go to turn, I have to recognize that and I have to be able to shift backwards and rotate around to maintain position and then walk forward. That's a physically challenging move to do even when you know exactly what you need to do. So, this is one where you really want to put in a lot of reps in order to get your dog to understand this. So key points to remember for these exercises for the right about for the right turn we're going to start with the right about turn because that's going to teach the dog the speed to come around and it's really not that challenging because you're just guiding the dog around your leg which is very similar to a lot of the other exercises that we've done within this course. the left when the dog's on the left side or the right when the dog's on the right side, when they're on the inside of the turn, it does become a little bit more difficult. And we want to start with those smaller steps to give them the time to learn that adjustment gradually making it bigger and bigger. So then when we do the full left about turn, our dog's going to be able to do that. And then if we are just using the food lure, we can use that power steering just to show the dog how that movement's going to be. get enough repetitions when they get good increase speed over time due to how well they are performing and then you're going to have those really nice right turns, left turns, and about turns regardless of what position your dog is in. Eddie here is going to be learning the concept of leash pressure. Now, I haven't worked with Eddie before, but he is a lab. He's very food motivated, which makes it much easier. As I said before in the beginning of this course, all dogs are food motivated. So you can increase how much drive they have to get the food by making them play for all their food. But he already has it, so it's going to be very easy. So what I'm just going to do right now is I want to make sure I can get him to sit with the food. You see he's jumping. Once he sits now, I'm going to give him the reward. And I want to make sure I can get him to lay down. He has had some training though, so he's not like completely brand new with following a food lure. That's why he's able to do it pretty easily. And if we talked about that power steering before, he even has a little bit of that where I can catch him in my hand and turn. But you see how he's not really turning his body like Charlie did. He's starting to turn his head, but then he brings his head to the outside. That's very normal because he hasn't had a high level of power steering training. See, again, when I'm bringing my hand Oh, there he goes. Now he is starting to do it, which I should have rewarded that. But you see how he he transitions to the outside. He thinks he's going to get it by going to the outside when the only way to get it is by following the hand. So, I gave him a treat right there. And that's part of that assisted shaping. Even though this isn't needed for teaching the leash pressure, it's just a good representation of how a dog looks before they're taught the concept of the power steering. And he's a dog that's going to learn it very fast because of his high motivation or high perseverance. High high drive for the food. So, high food drive and then high perseverance because he really wants that food. So, with leash pressure, the whole concept is getting the dog to follow the tension on the leash or to follow the leash before it gets tight. This is negative reinforcement. Now, remember reinforcement encouraging the repeat of the behavior. Negative, removing something from the equation. So, each dog has a classical opposition reflex. We have it as well. If I came up to you and I pushed into your shoulder, you would lean back into it or you might move out of the way, but you would lean back into it if you're using that classical opposition reflex. So, dogs have that. That's why if we pull on a leash, often your dog will resist that pressure or if we push into them, they'll push back into you. Very natural. So, we want to teach them to go with the pressure. Now, the way that we do this is we present a problem to the dog. So, two things must take place when we're teaching a dog leash pressure. Number one, once the pressure is turned on, it cannot be turned off until the dog complies. Number two, the moment the dog complies, the pressure must instantly be turned off. And that's one of the things that a lot of people struggle with. I can't tell you how many sessions I've been in where I'm helping someone with leash pressure. The dog complies and does the behavior, but the leash stays tight. And I'm sitting there going, "Turn the pressure off. Turn the pressure off. Turn the pressure off. Turn the pressure off. Turn the pressure off." until they finally turn it off. You have to be very aware of the tension that you're providing with the leash if you're using this as a tool to communicate with your dog. So, since the dog has to comply in order for the pressure to be turned off, we are presenting a problem to the dog. We're saying, "Here's a problem. Can you figure out the solution?" Now, the way that this was traditionally taught was you would just apply the pressure and you would wait till the dog figures it out. The problem with that is it can become mildly to highly stressful dependent on how the dog perceives it. So instead of waiting for the dog to figure it out, we're gonna give the dog the answer. And the way that we do that is we apply the pressure that puts the dog in the situation. After the pressure has been applied, then we bring out the food lure and we lure the dog into the position. Once the dog goes into the position, we turn off the pressure from the leash and we give the dog the reward. That starts to show the dog, oh, when you turn on the pressure, you put me in the sit, that makes the pressure go away, I get the reward. So then we go to apply the pressure, boom, the dog does the behavior that we wanted without the leash even having to become tight. I like to start with sit. I used to start with forward, which you can do. So, he's already kind of following that. If I pull, sit is really, really nice because it's super convenient and you can use it all the time. So, I'm going to go take a piece of food, put it behind my back, and I'm going to lift the leash. There's the pressure. Free. And now he did sit down. So I'm going to reward that. Sometimes you're going to luck out and the dog's just going to do it like that. So there's the pressure. There's the food. Turn off the pressure. Give him the reward. You don't have to use a marker, but you can if you want. Now, when I take the dog into the down position, I like to be at the dog's level. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring or actually we can just walk over to the climb bed. So I'm going to bring the dog, place him on the climb bed. Now, when you're doing this, of course, if it's not your dog, make sure it's a friendly dog that's not going to bite at your face, and he's super friendly, well socialized, so we're not going to have any issues. So, I gave him that piece right there. I'm going to take another piece, bring it behind my back. Now, I'm going to pull down on the leash. If you notice, my hand is very close to the clip. So, there's the pressure. Now, I'm gonna take my hand. I'm gonna lure him down, release the pressure, give him the food. If he pops back up like he just did, then we're going to do another down. So, there's the pressure. There's the lure. Turn off the pressure. Give him the food. And I'm not applying a lot of pressure. It's a consistent amount of pressure. I don't pull harder and harder. Now, when the dog knows leash pressure and they're being defiant and they're resisting, you can use force. But in the beginning, we're teaching them that it's a cue. So, there's the pressure. There's the lure. Release the pressure. Deliver the reward. Resupply. There's the pressure. There's the lure. Release. Reward. Pressure. Lure. Release. Reward. And it's hard to see, but once he's in position, I'm releasing any tension that's on the leash. Your dog has to know that it's the act of going into the position. It's the act of complying that's getting him the reward. That's also what's getting that pressure to turn off. So, there's the pressure. There's the lure. Release the pressure. Give him the treat. And this is how it looks when I'm normally training a dog. Good boy. Very nice. You don't have to say there's a pressure, there's a release. Uh, I do point that out even though it may sound silly, but because when I'm demonstrating, I'm saying what I'm demonstrating. Sometimes people don't know what they need to say when they're communicating with their dog. So, when I'm working with a dog, I'm just applying the pressure. I'm not saying anything. I'm luring him into the position. He lays down. I release and I go, "Good boy. Nice job." Now, here, his elbow wasn't all the way down either. Here's something that is also really cool. So, let's say you've been training your dog for a while, uh, but you haven't used leash pressure before and you want to introduce this into the training. If your dog already knows a verbal command down, you can use that to teach the leash pressure. So, you can apply the pressure and instead of using the lure, you can tell your dog down. And if your dog lays down, then you would release and reward. So, you're replacing the food lure with the verbal command your dog already knows. And that's a really great way to teach the dog the concept of leash pressure. So again, one more time, we're going to apply the pressure. We're going to lure, release the pressure, reward, and we'll bring him back up, too. So, we're going to do the pressure, lure, release, reward. Oh, and I dropped it. Here you go, big guy. Once I'm able to get my dog to do it comfortably from that position, then I'm going to start doing it from the standing as well. I like to show the dog. I like to telegraph. So, if you've ever studied any sort of martial arts like boxing or anything like that, they always tell you not to telegraph. So, telegraphing a punch is where you make it really noticeable that you're about to throw the punch. That's telegraphing. We want to telegraph our physical cue with the leash pressure. So, what I like to do, I'll put food in the hand that has a leash. I take my extra hand and I slide it down the leash. So, I do it slow enough for the dog to see. They're going to investigate it. They're going to be like, "What's going on here?" Then I apply the pressure. Then I lure. Then I release the reward and release the pressure. So, the reason why I go down like that is because this will eventually become the cue. Your dog will see this. And I'll show you with my other dog. And they'll instantly go into the position. So you don't even have to apply the pressure. So now there's the pressure. There's the lure. And I'm going to switch hands because he seems to follow my right hand a little bit better. Release the pressure. Deliver the reward. Same thing when I'm doing the sit. I put the food and I'm going to switch hands. So I put the food in the hand that has the leash. And when I'm queuing him into the sit, instead of going down the leash like I'm doing with the down good. Instead of going down the leash, and he keeps popping up. And I'm going to show you what the queue looks like. I go up the leash just like this. So again, same hand goes down, that goes up. So as I start to lift up, the dog goes, "Hey, what's going on there?" They sit. I release that tension and then I follow it up with the reward. And if you don't have the reward ready, you can use your marker to capture that moment that your dog just performed in order to solidify it in their mind. So again, I'm lifting up this way. Yes, I can mark that. And then I can follow it up with the treat. And then same thing with the down. We're going to go down nice and slow so he can see what's going on. There's the pressure. And then I can follow it up with the lure. Typical lab. So excited they'll eat your hand off. And then he gets the reward and the pressure is released. Again, we're going to lift up. Boom. He does the behavior. That Q is immediately turned off even though there is no tension yet. And then I can follow it up with the reward. And then the last thing I I like to do is I like to use my foot to queue the dog into the down. Don't think that we are taking the leash and we're just stepping on it and forcing the dog to the ground. This is a cue to perform a behavior. That's why I really prefer to call it a leash cue. So, when I do this part of the exercise, you have to have good balance. If you don't have good balance, it's not going to work well because we're not taking the leash and stepping on it and stepping on the ground because that's not going to do anything. What we are doing, I mean, that's that's a great technique if you're preventing your dog from like jumping up or something like that, but we're using this as a cue to get him into the position. So, I bring my foot up. I want him to see it. I step on the leash. same amount of pressure that I was using with my hands. Then I lure him down into the position. Release the tension. Give him the reward. So again, leg comes up. There's the cube. Whoa. See, I'm losing my balance. So I'm going to reset myself. Bring the leg up. I want him to see it. There's the pressure. Not hard enough that I'm pulling him down. I have to use this hand to keep the tension as it goes down. And then I can release and reward. Now, we do this until the dog responds to the leash before it becomes tight. And I'm gonna show you what this looks like with my other dogs. Now, I want to show you what this looks like when your dog understands the concept of following the leash, doing those exercises that I demonstrated to you earlier with Eddie, the Labrador Retriever. So, I have again the reward in my hand. With the leash, I take my additional hand and I'm going to slide down. Now, you're going to notice once I start to slide down, she's going to drop right into position. Free. And then I can mark that and reward. Now, I can also use the Q to bring it back up. Now, remember, the leash is held in the hand that's not moving. The secondary hand is the one that goes down or up. So, now I'm going to cue her into the sit by bringing my hand up first. I want to take her there. There we go. And then, now you can see how she's bouncing up. Very good, Ari. into each position simply by how I move the leash free. I can also do the technique that I was showing you with my leg. You're going to notice when I go to lift up my leg, she's going to go into position free. I don't have to step on the leash. These are just additional cues to get our dogs to perform behaviors, which as I said earlier in the course, it helps with a few things. It gives us the ability to remove the visual of the reward free and it gives us the ability to make commands mandatory. So if I tell a dog down and I go to lure the dog, especially important. So for you dog trainers out there, you're training a client's dog, you can't go, the dog didn't want to do it, or else you're not going to be a very good dog trainer. So, if I go to lure a dog into the down position, and let's say the dog's more interested in the environment, and this has happened on many occasions, I can get the dog, let's say, to do all the food lures inside the house, in the garage, in the backyard beautifully, but then we take the dog on a walk, and the dog goes, "No, there's a bird right there, and there's somebody walking to the mailbox over there, and then there's somebody over there on a skateboard. I'm going to focus on these things and not what you're doing." So, you go to lure, and the dog goes, "Nope." So then what we do is we take the leash and we apply the pressure to cue the dog into the position because this removes the option of choice. That's what's so nice about adding negative reinforcement into the training. It's not a punishment, but it gets the dog to do what we want them to do. It says, "Yes, you have to do this behavior." So this is the added value that we're going to have from doing these exercises. And this is the foundational work that I do when it comes to leash pressure training. In some of the other videos, I'm going to show you a couple more advanced things that you can do to enhance your training at a higher level, but you want to start here. So, now we want to introduce our dog to the concept of following the leash for recall. Often, you probably have heard this or maybe you even feel this way yourself. A lot of people will recommend or advise against the use of a retractable or a flexi leash, but a retractable and a flexi leash really has some great uses in the right context of what you're doing. And what I mean by that is I will often use a retractable leash when I'm doing recalls. It works really well if you're doing it with the dog on a stay, if you've already built the foundation and you've been doing stays for a while. And remember, we don't want to do it all the time because we don't want to damage the stay. Or if you're walking around with your dog and your dog gets to a certain point, you can use the flexi, call them, and then the flexi will provide the pressure to guide them back into the sitfront position. So flexis could be really good for that. But I always start with my 4-foot leash. And we can have treats to help with this. But the cue is the same that we do when we have food. It's very similar. I'm going to in a sense guide the leash guiding her directly into the sitfront position while I back up. So these are things that your dogs has your dog has already seen before and they're just connecting the pieces. So I have one piece and you're going to see how I'm going to guide her by using the leash bringing her right into the sit front position free. And then I can mark and reward. So I'm doing the exact same movement that I did before. It's just now I have the leash in the picture. Free and then I can follow up with the reward. All right, climb. One second. Let me resupply. So, I'm just going to demonstrate a couple more times. When your dog starts to get better at it, we can increase the distance, but we're not going beyond this 4ft leash. And again, I'm going to walk. So, now I don't have the food in my hands, but in the beginning, I do like to start with the food. So now when I do this too, by the way, so if you're if you are the dog, this is what it looks like. And I also do this when I'm using the food. I do a bowing presentation. So it's like, "Oh, thank you for watching these instructional videos." I'm doing that bowing presentation and then I'm walking back and I'm guiding the dog exactly where I want them. If I'm just using food, they're following the food hand. With this, they're following the leash. But this physical movement, this presentation of the queue gets them to understand what it is that we want. And remember, dog training is all about how clearly can we communicate our desires to the dog. So that's why I do this bowing motion. So I bow and free. And once she's in the position, then I can go ahead and look at how she's so focused on the reward. I don't have to rush to get it to her. She knows that when she hears that sound, the reward is coming. And that's break. And that's also important to know. You're you have to make sure that you follow it up with the reward. So this you want to keep this in mind. People often call it charging the marker. So we're using these words ar free. So free means she's going to get the reward, right? It's known as charging. So if you think about a battery, the more you use it, the greater the charge is. So if every time I say free, if every time I say that I give her the reward, it's going to be charged 100%. Also, the way we say it matters. I know I pointed that out earlier. If I start to say the marker and I don't give my dog the reward, that charge starts to go down until eventually it's useless. So, you want to make sure if you mark the behavior, you deliver the reward. But there is a circumstance where or a situation rather where we may not reward the dog. And this is a great opportunity to explain that as well. And we're going to get into this too when we're doing the stay. If I'm using what's known as a continuation marker, so you don't need a continuation marker. We're working just with the terminal marker, which means release plus reward climb. A continuation marker just lets the dog know they're going to get a reward, but it doesn't change their circumstances. So, in this course, when we're working the stay, we're just going to tell the dog, "Yeah, good boy." or "Good girl, nice job, and we're going to give them the reward." A lot of times, we might use the continuation marker. So, we would tell the dog, "Yes," and then we would walk up and give the reward. It has the same effect that the praise version has. I was only doing one marker in this course to simplify it. You guys can add more if you want. But let's say, remember, if I'm going to reward a dog, that's the reward event. If I say yes, I've entered the reward event. The moment the dog gets the reward, that concludes the event. So, if I tell the dog yes and I'm walking towards the dog, I'm in the event, I'm going to give the dog the treat, but the dog breaks the position. Uh-uh. Now, you don't get the reward and I have to put them back on the stay. So, they lose that reward. And that's the only time where I will not give a dog the reward after I've marked the behavior. But pretty much any other time if you mark a behavior, if you say yes or free or whatever your marker sound is, you want to make sure you follow it up and give your dog that reward. This is very important. So again, with the common call, start with the bow, use the food, transition to where you can do it just with the leash, and then follow it up with the reward. Now, we're going to take this and we're going to move into our lateral movements that we've done before. If you have two climb beds, that's really great. You can have one here, one here. That gives your dog a target to go to. And I'm going to show you how I like to handle the leash. Now, you can do it two ways. The way that I prefer, and this goes back to the leash pressure training that we're doing, and remember in the beginning, we're doing continual reinforcement. So, we reward every single correct repetition. So, I'm just going to cue her into the sit. See how I'm doing the pressure and she's ignoring it. If that happens, I can correct this by saying, "No." Oh, she she beat it. So, I could correct that resistance to the pressure. Just because a dog knows something doesn't mean they're always going to do it. So, when I guide my dog using the leash, what I like to do is just like I guide them doing this, I keep the end of the leash in one hand and I use my secondary hand to guide the dog in the direction that I want them to go. Free. And then I can go ahead and reward that. If you have two beds, again, you can guide your dog back and forth between the beds. But this is basically those lateral movement exercises. Another way a lot of trainers, handlers, people with pet dogs do is they hold it with their hand opposite of the side where the dog is in the direction they want the dog to go. So, they could have their hand here. And another thing that you can do to help out with the process is you could place the treat in the hand that you're using with the lure. That gives a little bit more incentive because she's focused on my right hand right now. So, I'm going to get her this way and she's barking because of excitement. Now, I could just ignore that using some of that negative punishment, also known as differential reinforcement, which means we ignore certain behaviors that we don't want. And what's going to happen if I don't reward, she's either going to get frustrated and keep barking or she's going to stop because it's not delivering the reward. So, I'm actually going to do that right now so you can see >> >> So now I'll show you I'll show you what a little correction for this looks like. No light little leash pop. No. Yes. So you can see she got a little more quiet and those were little corrections to let her know that's not what I wanted right now. Yes. She did a little noise right there. No. Yes. Good girl. Very nice. Yes. Excellent. Yes. Very good. So, we were able to distinguish or extinguish rather that barking pretty quickly. And she'll probably bark again. Yes. Actually, maybe not. So, she's doing really well. This is what clear communication Yes. is all about. And a lot of times because I'm training by myself, I'm not recording, I'm just having fun. I don't worry too much about the barking. So I often let her bark. And that's why the correction also was pretty light. So now she's focused more on the movement and less on the barking. And we're getting better performance from her. Yes. Very nice. Good job, Ari. So now that we have her doing that, then we can start transferring this over to other exercises. But this is a really great way to get your dog to move. Again, this is what I like to call my lateral movement exercises where I can guide my dog one direction to the other. And if you want, you can use the just the single hand instead of doing it the way that I do using my secondary hand. You can just guide with your primary hand free, whatever works best for you. But the goal of this exercise is to get your dog to go back and forth while following the leash. And this is what I like to call my lateral movements while implementing leash pressure. Now, we want to show our dog how to walk backward with the leash or backwards rather. Ari. So, this helps when we have our dog in the heel position. We can bring the leash behind our back. And this could help guide the dog in the direction that we want when doing different exercises. It acts as an additional way to communicate what we want. The way that I like to do this is one, we want when we're applying the pressure, we want the leash to be straight as possible. If we apply the pressure on an angle, there's a good chance that our dog's going to think that we want them to sit. So, we're going to be sending them mixed signals. So, we want to make it as straight as possible. The way that I like to teach this, because we want the dog to stand. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to cue her to stand. My hand's going to stop moving. She's going to be standing trying to get to the treat. Then I'm going to apply the leash pressure. Then I'm going to move my hand into her. So there's a sequence to it. So hand gets her in position, pressure starts to cue, then I move towards her. So I get her in position. There's the pressure. Then I walk towards her. Release the pressure. Reward. And this should be easy if you've done all the other exercises. See, now she's already starting to walk back cuz she goes, "Oh, I know what we're doing here." So this is how I like to start this exercise. Again, we get the dog in position and see now she's walking back before I bring the food towards her. So, this is getting her to understand that concept of, okay, when the pressure is pulling me back, that means you want me to walk backwards. Then, I also do this with the dog in the heel position. It's a little bit different. So, I apply the pressure and then I start to walk. Because my dog already knows how to start to walk backwards while I have them in heel position, this helps. So, pressure and then move. And she's starting to turn a little bit. Now, if they are turning and the downside with this is it is going to be a little bit on an angle. So, now we're going to apply the pressure and walk back. No. So, again, there's that barking. We're going to crack that. No. Good. Good. Very nice. Free. And then we can follow it up with the reward. This looks easy and it is it's going to be somewhat difficult, but all the stuff that you've done before throughout this course should help you teach this. So, one more time, we like to do it with the dog directly in front. We we get them in position, we close our hands, we apply that pressure, and then we move the hand towards them, and then we can open it up and reward. And then we start taking the dog and we transfer them into different positions. The center is another great way to start this. So, we bring the leash through our legs. We get our dog straighten out. We apply the pressure. Then, we start to walk towards them. Free. And you can see she's focused on the source. That's what I want her to focus on right now. And then once we get that down, if I move the source away, she's naturally going to look up at my face because she goes, "There's no more source, so I need to look up at you." So using the source helps them understand the movement because our dogs want to sit often when they're looking up. So I want to get her to stand. I'm going to apply that pressure and start walking back. And then once we start to get that, we're going to remove our hand and we're going to keep walking back, adding pressure when needed. And because our dog already has at least a foundational understanding of walking backwards in these positions from those luring movements that we did, this becomes significantly easier. If you're struggling with your dog turning, you can also place them up against a wall. So, I said sometimes we can use a wall or some kind of barrier to prevent them from moving their back end out, which is very normal. It happens often. This can also happen depending on how you're holding the food. So, if we're bringing the food in a lot, their back end's going to go out. If we're bringing our hand out, their butt's going to go in. And by keeping our hand in the right spot is going to help them become straight. But sometimes dogs will still just turn. Often turning out is the most common because they want to look up at our face. So that's why using a wall or some kind of barrier on the side could help with this exercise. But this is what we're going to do to get our dog that to understand that concept of moving backwards when we apply leash pressure backwards. And we can get them to walk back nicely like this. Easy peasy. This exercise is what I like to call follow the leash exercise. It's very, very simple. All we're doing is we're gonna show the dog all the same movements that we've done before. At least as much as you can do without the dog getting tangled up in your legs, and you're going to put your food in your hand that has the leash. So, I'll show you. He's a little distracted right now with the leash. So, I want him to get used to following the leash with the food. I'm going to let him know that he that I have the food. I'm going to close my fingers around it, and then I'm going to start doing the movements that we've done before with the leash or with the food, rather. So now he's doing the same thing. He knows I have food, so he's basically following the food lure, but he's getting used to the visual of the leash being in that picture. And that's going to help create a strong positive association. And it's going to make it much easier later on to get our dog to follow the leash when we want them to do it, even if we don't have treats in our hand. So again, we're going to place the treat in our hand. We're going to show our dog. There it is. Close our hand. And then we're going to start doing some of those exercises that we did before. So we can do the sit. We can guide them around into the sit front. We can switch hands. Guide them onto the right side. So you can see I'm just doing the exercises that we did before with that leash in the picture. And then we can reward them once we're done. So this really is an easy exercise if you've done all the exercises in the course up to this point. because the dog already knows how to follow the lure. We're showing him the same picture, but we're doing it with the leash. So then when we get to a point where, and I haven't done this very much with him, so let's see how he does without the treat. So I'm going to get him back in the zone. He's very distracted today. Good boy. Very nice. Free. So, there we go. I was able to get him to do all those movements. That was the first time I've done that with him without the treat. And because he understands the concept of the exercise, he was still able to perform it even without the food being present and the leash wasn't getting tight. So, this is a really great simple exercise to do. you shouldn't have any issues with it at all and it's going to enhance the communication that you have with your dog. In this exercise, this is going to be identical to the exercise that we did before where we're guiding the dog into the heel position to prep them for loose leash walking. If you remember from before, quick little reminder. Come here, Maverick. We have our dog in heel. We walk forward, we release them, and then we move away. Okay, our dog comes back if they're not distracted by smelling the grass and we get them in the position. Very nice. We release and we move back again once they consume the treat. And then we're going to guide them back. Good boy. And we're going to do it again. Very nice, buddy. And remember, you want to do both sides. Excellent. Once we have that down, now we do the same thing with the leash. The way that I like to do it is I hold the leash in the opposite side of the the position I want the dog to be in and then I use the hand on the same side to guide the dog around. So, I'm going to guide him around this way. Good boy. And then once he's in position, I give him the reward. Walk back. Guide him around. Yeah, nice job. Give him the reward. So again, nothing in this hand. He's distracted by something. And get him out of there. Very good. Get my reward. Boom. And then reward him. So, this is something that's very helpful because when you're doing loose leash walking, that's the movement you're going to have to do because you're going to be walking with your dog. Your dog's going to end up leaving the heel position, which I'll show you. When the dog leaves the heel position, we have to be able to guide the dog back to where we want them to be in order to continue the walk. A common mistake a lot of people make when they're trying to do this because they didn't practice this exercise to get this down nicely to make it easy is when the dog goes in front of them, they'll go to apply the pressure and then they'll stand still and they're like, "Oh, this is hard to do and then they'll try to go back into the walk." What we want to do is we want to keep moving backwards and that's going to make it much easier for the dog to find the clearance to get into the position. So, this exercise is key to making that process much easier. So, things to remember, you can get your dog warmed up by using the food lure. You have that down. Nice. If you want to help them out, you can. I actually didn't show this, but you could figure it out even if I didn't. You can get them into the the exercise, but I can keep this in my hand when I'm guiding them around. So, I can use another thing that's going to help my dog understand what I want by using that. We can slow this down a little bit. I'm stepping back. I'm guiding him around, bringing him up. And now, he's following that nicely. We can get him into position. And then, of course, we want to be able to do that without having the food there. We can reward if our dog is doing well. We can ask for a couple repetitions if they've progressed to that point within the training. This will transfer when we start doing loose leash walking. Now, we're going to teach our dogs to walk nicely around us, not in the heel position. So, remember I told you I like to teach a few different healing or loose leash styles. Uh, I like to do the focus heel with my dogs, the contact heel, then the casual loose leash walking, and then the walk wherever you want. And that's what we're doing right now, even though I said the other one was casual. So, we have the loose leash walk, which we're going to work on, and that's where our dog is walking next to us, and they can look wherever they want, but they have to maintain that position. This one, the dog can walk wherever they want around us, as long as the leash is not getting tight. This is an incredibly simple exercise. Let me grab the leash from Maverick so I can show you what we're doing. Now, remember, I said how dogs learn through patterns. So, your dog's going to get to a point where the leash is going to get tight. Once the leash gets tight, what I do is I count in my head. I go one Mississippi. After that one Mississippi, I do almost like a little yank. So, I'm not doing a pop. So, if the leash is tight and I was doing a pop, I would have to make the leash loose, pop, and then back into the tension. So, it's not a pull because I'm not just pulling him. It's more like a little little yank kind of. I'm just twisting my wrist a little bit and it brings the dog back to where I want them where the leash is loose. The reason why I count one Mississippi in my head is because the leash becoming tight lets the dog know that the leash is about to provide that minor correction to keep them in the position that we want. So they go, "Oh, leash is tight. Oh, I know what's going to happen." And they go back before we do that. So at first, and Maverick hasn't done it, so this is going to be great for you to see with Maverick. So, it's going to get tight in my head. One Mississippi. I do that little yank. Once it's loose, we go back into the walk. And we do not want to move forward if the leash is tight with our dog. That's a common mistake a lot of people make. Especially if your dog is going to go say hi to someone. I can't tell you how many times I've seen it where I go to do a lesson and I show up and the dog wants to come say hi and the leash is tight and what's the owner doing? Falling all the way to me while the dog's pulling. So now the dog is learning, oh, I can pull on the leash as long as I'm pulling towards somebody that I want to say hi to. So you have to be aware of what you're doing. And this is why if I do want a dog to pull on a leash, I put them on a harness. So then it's very different for the dogs. ALL RIGHT, MAVERICK. COME HERE, MY BOY. GOOD JOB, BUDDY. Another informal recall. I'm going to take the leash, hook it up, and I like to say let's go or with me as my cue for this type of walk. So, I'm going to say, "Let's go." Or with me is fine, too. And as long as he stays next to me. So, this walk, I'm not giving him treats. I don't want him to be in that heel position. I want him to kind of do what he wants. Walk around, sniff, and as long as this leash doesn't get tight, he's perfectly fine. Now, I I will have to transfer my hand around so it doesn't get tangled up, but he is free to go wherever he wants. And this is a really nice way. So, some people will also tether the dog to them and that's where you hook the leash and you can talk on the phone, do whatever you want and your dog can do whatever they want as long as the leash isn't getting tight. So, still hasn't gotten tight yet. He's very aware of where I'm at. It got tight, but he fixed it. There's the tension. Good boy. And he was about to fix it anyways. Now, once I do adjust the dog, then I provide verbal praise. I go, "Good boy. Nice job." And we might take him out of this ring area because he's he's maintaining the position better than I was expecting. I was I was hoping I was going to be able to provide more adjustments. So, what we're going to do because this is easy for him, we're going to take him in an area where he hasn't been. It's going to be a little bit more difficult. So, hopefully he will provide some tension and you can see the adjustment. So, we're going to do that right now. Since he wasn't that distracted in the ring, we've taken him on the outside and hopefully we can see him make some mistakes so you can see how to properly adjust and correct for it. So again, I can just say with me or let's go. Really doesn't matter. And then we walk very casual, very natural, and let our dog do whatever they want as long as the leash doesn't get tight. So there's the leash tight. I yank him back. Good boy. And then I praise him. Nice job. They shouldn't really see it as a punishment, meaning they shouldn't get nervous or worried about it. So, there is tight, there's the pull. Good. And then once he walks where I want him, then I praise him. And again, I've never done this exercise with him. I've done a lot of training with him, but not this exercise specifically. And I like this because I don't always want my dog in perfect heel position. I want them to be dogs. Like, that's why we have dogs, right? So, they could be dogs. So, a lot of times I do enjoy letting my dog walk around and do whatever they want. And you can see he has a remote collar on. It's kind of hard to see because it's also the same color as his coat, but the remote collar gives us off leash freedom. And we're going to be talking about that a little bit as well. So, we're going to keep going this direction. We have a bunch of trees, so this might provide some more distractions for him. We'll see how he does. We still good? All right. And he's just doing the normal dog thing. He's smelling the grass. checking out his environment. He's He knows he's not in a strict position. The leash is still loose and I'm walking at a normal pace. Now, I'm also not slowing down for him. That's another thing that a lot of people will do. They'll slow down for their dog. And because they're slowing down, they're not giving their dog the opportunity to learn how to stay pace with them. And I'm not communicating too much with him. when I do that little yank or that little correction, that is when I communicate because once he's not pulling on the leash, then I'm praising him for making the right choice. I'm saying, "Good job." So, that's why once I do that yank, I praise him. Let's see if we can get another one. And if you want to make it difficult, you can do a lot of direction changing. And he's he's doing a great job. This works so incredibly well. If you've already done leash pressure training with your dog, if you've done the luring exercises, this becomes very, very easy. Remember what I said earlier on in the course. The more things you teach your dog to do, the easier it becomes to teach them new things. I've even done this with dogs that I didn't do any training with. So, I might be watching, let's say, a friend's dog, a family's dog. I'm not doing any training for the dog because it's not in a stay and train program and I'm not going to just train the dog for fun because I have my dogs I'd rather spend time with. But I still take the dog out on walks and I'll have it doing a loose leash walk in a matter of a few minutes this style where the dog can walk wherever they want. There's a little bit of tent. Oh, he fixed it. And again, you can see he's fixing it each time already. There we go. Good. And so that one I was able to get a little bit. And I did it a little faster because I felt like he was going to fix it. And I just want you to see more of what it looks like when we apply that tension. Good job. Good boy. Excellent. So, you can see he's already figuring out this casual walk. This is an exercise that I do recommend doing with your dog because anytime we take our dog out on a walk, yes, we do want to have those occasions where we keep the dog right next to us, if we're walking through an area where there's a lot of traffic, but we also want our dogs to be dogs. And this is a great way to let them walk around, sniff their environment, pee on things, be a dog, and have a good time. Now, we've done all the foundational work and we're ready to start adding commands. We talked about this earlier in the course. When we add a command, we want to make sure that we can get the dog to do the behavior the exact way we want every single time with the physical Q. Once you're doing that, then we add the command. The command must come before the physical Q. So, we give the command, sit. Then, we provide the physical cue, whether we're doing a food lure, a leash queue. Once a dog does the behavior, that's when we deliver the reward. When the dogs, let's say the this is the dog's butt hitting hitting the ground. If I want the dog to know that it's the act of sitting is what they're being rewarded for, then the moment their butt hits the ground, I have approximately 1 second, give or take, depending on the dog, to let that dog know that that's the behavior that I wanted them to do when we're teaching them. So, I could either A give the dog the reward within that first second or B I can mark it free or yes, whatever our marker is within that first second and then I can follow it up with the reward. And again, this is when we are teaching them the behavior. If I'm teaching the dog the verbal command, so when we first teach the dog the physical cue, we reward every single time until they understand it. Then we can start spacing out the rewards. When we first introduce the command, we reward it right away because we're teaching them something new. They start to understand it. We can start spacing it out. Now, when we give a command, we are triggering what I like to call a reinforcement event. We've talked about that a little bit already in this course. A reinforcement event is when we are trying to get our dogs to perform an action. And the moment they do that behavior, that concludes the event. So, one of the rules that we want to keep in mind with a reinforcement event. Now, if we remember, we can interrupt a reinforcement event with a reward event, and that's part of that assisted shaping. If you remember, if I'm trying to get a dog to do a spin and they're not quite there yet, I could reward them before they complete the spin. So, I cancel out or I interrupt the reinforcement event for the reward event. We can also interrupt a reinforcement event for a correction event. So if I tell a dog to sit and let's assume the dog is already 80 80% proficient on that command in that environment. So let's say training out here every time I tell my dog sit my dog sits. Okay. Now if I give my dog the sit command and my dog goes I'm not doing it. The moment I notice that I can tell the dog no give them a correction. After the correction I could recommand what I want them to do and then I could help them into the position. And then once they're in the position, good job. And we can go from there. So, we're able to interrupt a reinforcement event for a reward event or a correction event. But we don't want to interrupt a reinforcement event with a reinforcement event. Meaning, if you tell your dog down, you don't want to say down again. We don't want to go down, down, down, because then the command is going to become down, down, down. Same thing. A huge common mistake that people make, I'm guilty of making this mistake myself. They hear me use the word wrong in my instructional videos and so they go, "Oh, okay." I tell the dog wrong when they're being wrong. So, they give the dog a command like down. The dog doesn't do it. They say wrong. And then they make the dog do it. The problem with that is both down and wrong trigger reinforcement events. So, if I tell the dog down wrong, then I'm teaching the dog that the command is down wrong and not down. So, when we give a command, we should already know if either A, we're going to follow through with the reinforcement event to make sure the dog does it, or B, we're going to correct the dog for non-compliancy. And that's going to be the path that we're going to take. So, when you're teaching your dog something new, you're going to be helping them with that physical cue. And the moment they do it, we reward them. And this is why we also have to make sure we have that separation between the command and the the event, the physical cue that we're using to get the dog to do the behavior. So remember it would be and I'm going to demonstrate. I'm going to do a few really quickly. So I would give the command come and then the Q heel and you see he's already beating me to it and I dropped the piece then the Q climb then I would do the Q center then the Q come then the Q f then the Q free and then I can reward. So remember, it's command, motivate, mark, reward. And that's how we're going to start teaching our dog to perform on the verbal command. And that's how we add that into the training. And the last note that we want to keep in mind, remember, we're not using the stay command, we are doing the implied stay. So, when we first start adding the command, either A, we want to reward and release the dog right away when they complete it, or B, we want to quickly transition to a new command, or C, we want to release the dog without the reward. So, we want to do that very quickly once the dog does the behavior because we're not going to be working on the stay yet. Now, we are adding commands to the training. I'm going to demonstrate with Charlie. Now, for the demonstration purposes, because I want you to see the separation of the command from the physical queue. I can't stress enough how important that is. Now, remember that's overshadowing. And as I mentioned before in this course, you are going to pair. The absolute best dog trainers in the world pair. They say the command at the exact same time as the physical queue. Sometimes, not all the time. So, the better you are or the greater you can increase the percentage of the times that you don't pair, the better you're going to be. But, you are going to pair. So, don't get too worried about that. I'm going to demonstrate this process. When we are teaching the command, just like when we're teaching the markers, we want to say the marker, pause for a brief second, half second, then deliver the reward. We're going to say the command, then we're going to present the physical cue. When I first start adding a command within a dog's training routine, I reward every single behavior. And that's what I'm going to demonstrate right now. So, for the instructional purposes, I'm not going to use his actual commands because he will start jumping into the position. So, I'm just going to say numbers. I'm just going to count one through whatever. So, one will be the first command, two will be the next command, three will be the next command, because I want you to see the separation of the two without him responding to it. And when you train this way, eventually you're going to give the command. And because you give that pause before you present the physical cue, your dog's going to do the behavior without you having to help. So, it's like down, I do the Q, free reward. Down, I do the Q, free reward. Down. Ha, look it. He just did it. Now, we know that he knows it on the verbal. And then of course we do more repetitions in order to get them to solidify that behavior. Also, every time you go to a new environment, until your dog is fully generalized, go back to the very beginning. When I'm first working with a dog and I'm taking them to new environments, I take them to the new environment. I do some engagement training. I do some luring. I do the leash stuff. So, I go through the sequence. The good thing is every single new environment, you can get through the sequence faster and faster until eventually your dog is performing like a rockstar everywhere you go. All right. All right. So, I'm going to demonstrate with little Charlie here. And I got a handful of treats. So, I have my supply hand and my reward hand. We're going to do one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Let's do 10. 10 commands, 10 rewards. And little Charlie's excited. One, three. Two. Three. Three. Four. Free. Five. Free. Six. 3. 7. 3. 8. 3. 9. 3. 10. 3. Good job, buddy. So, you can see I did 10 different movements and after each one I marked and I gave him a reward. So, that's going to be the first step that you want to do and you want to be creative. You want to make it interesting. You want to make it different. Another common mistake that a lot of people make is they want to teach their dog something. And so, they get down at their dog's level and they go down and they do the down. Good boy. Sit. They do the sit. Good boy. Down. And they do the down. Good boy. And hey, you ready for a nap? Super boring. We want to make it fun. That's why after you've practiced all these different skills, when you start adding commands, be creative. Come up with different sequences. Guide your dog into the heel. Do a little spin. Have them flip back into the center. Run through your legs. Go to the climb. Come to the recall. Make it exciting. And your dog's going to have way more fun. So this is going to be the first step when we add commands. We give the command, we mark the behavior, we give the reward for each exercise. Now, something that I really like to do, and I've talked about this a little bit before, is when we increase distance, it also increases or will increase our dog's motivation to do the exercise. So this is kind of like a recall, but when we create distance, we can have our dog flip and jump into either the heel position or even the center position. And one of my favorite ones that I like to do with Charlie is that flip into the center. So when he's in his down when he's in his position, I'm going to say the command and he's going to run and I'm going to assist him to flip into the center. Flip. And he was anticipating it there. So let's try that again. Down. Flip. There we go. Very nice heel. And I paired that some some of the things we talked about before break. So you can see the enthusiasm as he comes running to me because I'm increasing a little bit of distance down. Remember what I said, you want to make sure you've done a good amount of stays before you start introducing this flip. Very nice. And the speed break gives him that momentum to come flying around into position. We'll do it one more time just for fun because we enjoy training, right, Charlie? Dump. Training should be fun. flip. Nice job, buddy. Break. So, a little thing you can think about, and this is something, excuse me, my nose itches. This is something you can also incorporate using that cone where you have the dog go around, they come flying back, they flip into position, they flip into heel, they do a spin, really increasing their enthusiasm and of course giving them a great workout. Now that you have your dog understanding this process, you're getting better at it. You're able to separate the command from the physical cue. You're not overshadowing as much. Sometimes you are because it happens, but you're getting better and better. Now, we want to start asking our dog for more behaviors before we give them a reward. So, this is how I like to do it. I like to think about it the same way as how I would pay somebody. So, if I hire someone for a job and they work for one day, I pay them for that whole day. If they work for one hour, I pay them for that one hour. If they work for a week, then they get paid for the week. So, I'm not going to have them work for a week and go, "Oh, I'm only paying you once, so I'm going to pay you the same amount that I paid you for the one hour." They're not going to want to work. So now, if I'm asking for a chain, I'm going to have a handful of food. And after the dog completes the chain, I give them the whole hand food. So I'm the whole handful. So I'm adding more value for the work that the dog's putting in. So the dog's working more, but I'm giving them a bigger reward. So there's more excitement and interest to continue going. Because if I had the dog do a bunch of stuff and then I give them one kibble, sure, your Labrador retrievers like Charlie are going to go, "That's awesome. Thank you so much." But there's other dogs, your huskys, that are going to go, "Really? One piece? That's it? No, I'm not. I'm not going to do any more for you." So again, we want them to have fun and we want them to get value from doing this because our options if we want our dogs to perform for us, they either have to think that there's something valuable and also when we make our dogs play for food, that's another really great thing about this process is the dog ends up loving the training. So not only are they doing it for the possibility of getting the reward, but they're also doing it because they love it. So there's a lot of value to this. And then the last option is we make them do it through force or corrections. And this is always the more ideal way of doing it. So I'm going to demonstrate a chain. So again, I'm going to do numbers just like I did before. One 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 3 And there you go, my buddy. Nice job, Klein. So, now he got to do a bunch of different exercises, but he still got a big valuable return for his investment at the end. And that's how I like to do it. If I'm asking the dog to do a lot, I'm going to pay them more for it. And that's going to keep their excitement and interest invested into the training. Now that we've done all our foundational work, we're adding commands. We want to start doing the stay. I know we've talked about it a little bit already, but we're going to get into more detail right now during this exercise. When I start teaching the stay, I know we were doing loose leash walking earlier and or if you haven't gotten to that yet, it is good to start here. So, with the stay, remember how we talked about we want to gradually make the training more and more challenging for our dog. So, when we start the stay, we want to make it as easy as possible. All my stays, I teach them all the exact same way. We give our dog a command. They go to the position. Once they're in the position, they must maintain that position until I give them a new command. I use my termin termination marker or I release them by using a release word like the word B r a k and then they can get up and they can be released. So that is the same whether I'm doing a climb stay, a down stay, a sit stay, a stand stay, a heel stay, it's all the same. If the dog breaks the position, we either A recommend the position that the dog broke and we take them back or B, we use our marker that predicts negative reinforcement. And that's the one that I usually lean towards. Remember, this is what I like to define as a teachable moment because we're being reactive to the dog and we're showing them the preferred behavior that we want them to do when they make the mistake. We're teaching them the process of what we prefer when they do something that we don't want. And this is going to be the same exact thing that we do for our boundaries. So, it's identical, which makes it very easy to transfer this information over to different situations. So, let's say you don't want your dog to enter the kitchen, or you don't want your dog enter the office or the baby's room. You don't want your dog jumping up on the sofa or walking out of the front door if it's left open, or the back door, or you don't want your dog jumping up on somebody. These are all boundaries, and I do the exact same thing for each one. So, the dog steps into the kitchen. We could say exit if we want, or we can say wrong. And again, I like to use wrong because it's easier for me to respond with that word than it is for me to think about the command I want the dog to do. Because when the dog makes the mistake, we have one second to let the dog know they made the mistake. Then we get to follow up with the reinforcement event. So the dog walks into the kitchen, we say, "Wrong." What do we want the dog to do? We want them to leave the kitchen. Once the dog leaves the kitchen, that concludes that reinforcement event. The dog jumps up on the sofa. Wrong. What do we want the dog to do? We want the dog off of the sofa. So once the dog's off the sofa, that concludes that reinforcement event. And it's the same for all these different situations. So the climb is by far, in my opinion, the easiest state to teach. The dog breaks it, we say wrong. What do we want the dog to do? We want them back on the platform. Or again, you can recommand climb if you want it or place, whatever word you're using for this command. And then once the dog's in the position, good dog. So there's three things that we want to think about when we're doing stays. And it's known as the 3Ds. Distance, duration, distraction. So, we do duration before distance. We do distance and duration before distraction. That's the sequence that I like to do. When our dog starts to get better and we've been thinking about these 3Ds, this is going to establish reliability. But, we can start adding distractions. What is a distraction? It's a it's a motivational factor that's pulling our dog's attention and focus away from what we want. So, if I take a piece of food and I toss this food, that's a distraction. You see how he wanted to go for it. It distracted him from doing what I want, which is to maintain the stay. I can do it again. Oh, look it. Now, he stayed because I communicated with him that I didn't want him jumping off to get the reward. Once he maintains the position, I'm going to pick these up and I'm going to bring it back and reward him. So now he's starting to understand that he can still get access to the reward that I've thrown even without getting off and getting it himself. He learns the process to get what he wants. And that's what we want. We want them to learn how to get what they want because that teaches them how to do what we want them to do. So when we first place the dog on the stay, we work on duration. So we're going to walk around the platform. We're going to make movements, but we're going to stay close. If our dog is holding the position, we're going to go, "Good boy. Nice job." If you want to use that other continuation marker, which just means a reward but not a release, that's his yes, you can say yes and come back and reward him. So again, we're walking around. We're saying we're we're staying pretty close. GOOD JOB, CHARLIE. And then we come and reward. Remember what I said earlier. If I tell my dog yes, and I come to him and he breaks the position, he doesn't get the treat. And I kind of cued him to break the position there. So you can see, but that cancels out the reward event. I'm not going to reward the dog if they break the position when I'm coming to reward them because then I'm teaching them the exact opposite of what I want. But after they hold it for a few more moments, I usually like to count about 5 seconds in my head. Yes, now I can come back and reward him for maintaining the position. So great, now I'm able to run past him. I'm able to toss treats. I'm able to clap and squat and do all these things and he maintains the position. Great. Now we start building distance. So now I start to walk away. As I'm walking away, I'm watching him. the whole time. A huge mistake that a lot of people make when they're teaching the stay is they walk away and they're like, "Hey." And they're not even watching their dog. And then they look down, they're like, "Oh, hi Photo." Well, now you lost the opportunity to reinforce it. If Charlie breaks the position and he comes next to me and that's when I notice him, I can't I can't fix him for breaking the stay. The best thing I can do is Good boy, you came to me instead of running off. Now I'm going to put you back in restart. So, when you're first doing this, make sure you can see your dog. Even if it's only out of your peripheral, you have to be able to see your dog. Then, when your dog's doing well, you can praise, good boy, or you can say yes or whatever marker you want to use. As long as you're not using a terminal termination marker, then you can just praise or mark and come back. So, now we're giving them feedback for maintaining the position. We're saying, "Hey buddy, I'm going to deliver room service as long as you stay there." Then what I like to do after I've done this for a while, we got the distance, we have the duration, we have distractions, then I'm going to take the same climb platform and I'm going to move it to other environments. So I'm going to work the stay here. I'm going to work it in the field. I'm going to work it in the front of the property. I'm going to work it I could take this climb bed anywhere I can anywhere I can go. I can take it down to a very busy location. Like if I was still living in California, I can go to Santa Monica, which is incredibly busy. Put that bed there. Now there's some reference points that's easy for him to go, "Oh, I recognize the bed. I recognize you." These are all constant. They're invariables. Him, me, the bed, the treats. Now, I'm training him in new locations, and I'm getting him very good at understanding this concept of stay. Great. Now, this looks good. Now, what I want to do is I want to start working positions on the bed. So, now I want to do something like a down stay. So, I tell Charlie down. So, now he's in a down stay. So now I'm watching him. Now if he breaks the position, I have to reinforce the down stay. What's good about this is if he breaks that position, you know intuitively that you have to take them back to that bed and put them back into that down on that same location facing the same direction. If we start teaching it down somewhere like right here, just on the ground, if he breaks that position, a lot of times people will put the dog back down wherever they get them. And what that does is it starts to teach the dog that they can low crawl and do other things. which is essentially breaking that position. So, anytime our dog breaks, we want to take them back to the exact same spot that they just broke. And this makes it very easy and clear for not only the dog, but also you, the handler. So, then we're going to do the same thing here. We're going to add first duration, then we're going to add distraction. Wrong. So, he broke the position. I take my time. This is the reinforcement event. He lays down. Now, that concludes that reinforcement event. Now I'm going to work on distractions. So I'm going to toss a treat. Notice the leash is loose, but it's not so loose. Wrong. It's not so loose that if he goes for it, I'm not going to be able to stop him. It's loose enough that if he goes for it, I can stop him. Good job, buddy. Now I'm giving him some feedback. Wrong. And I said wrong because his elbows came up a little bit. And remember, wrong is not a punishment. So your dog shouldn't get upset about it. Very good. So he's doing a great job. I'm going to keep him into that position. I'm going to walk over. I'm going to pick up rung. So, he's shifting a little bit. I I readjust him at least the best that I could and I give him the reward. I don't I don't want my dog to start doing like a common thing with dogs in the sit stay is they'll start shifting their butt around. I want him to maintain the position. So, I'm going to bring him the reward back over here. So, he's shifted a little bit, but not too much. And then we start adding distance. So, we start walking away. We do the same thing. You can see how this is very repetitive. Making sure I can see him. If you want to take it up a level, you can bust out your phone and you can put on the camera and you can watch him as you walk away so he sees the back of your head instead of you looking at them because our dogs are not stupid. They know when we're watching. In fact, if I want a dog to have a really reliable stay without me in the environment, I have to practice that. And the way that I like to do that is often I'll use someone else's phone, whether it's your spouse, a friend, you get their phone, you set it up, you FaceTime it, if you don't already have a camera that you can connect to your phone, and then you walk out and you watch your dog and you wait and the moment your dog breaks the position, you mark the behavior, you come back, and you put the dog back where you want them to be. So now the dog goes, "Man, this person's watching me everywhere at all times. I better maintain the position." And then you can leave for a long time. In fact, I used to also do this with um I'd want my dogs to be on their bed when I slept on my bed. So, I'd put all my dogs on their climb beds. I would go on my bed and I would pretend like I'm sleeping. I'd close my eyes, but I'd be watching the dogs. And then if they broke wrong, I'd get up and I'd reinforce and they're like, "Man, this guy's watching me no matter what." And then I'd have a dog doing a down stay all night while I'm sleeping. So, they're on their beds, I'm on my bed. Once your dog is doing very well and you're ready to release them, remember we get close to them when we're first teaching the stay free. And then we can release them. Keep that saying in your head. If you can't touch your pup, don't free them up. Then we're going to do the same thing with the sit. We tell our dog to sit. Good boy, buddy. And now we're going to work duration, distance, distraction, distance, and we're going to get the dog to understand this. Then we're going to do the same thing with the climb platform in different environments. Working the the downstay, working the sit stay, and working the climb stay. Once we get all that down, I almost corrected him. Brick. Once we get that down, then what we want to do, and this is how I like to do it. If I've worked a stay a lot in one area, so I'm going to move this off to the side. If I've worked it a lot in one area, simply moving the climb bed and then doing the stay again in that same location is going to make it easier for the dog. So, I'm going to bring him over here down. So, now this looks very similar. The only difference is he's not on the climb bed. And now we go through the same sequence. We can toss food and make sure the dog can't get it. That is another mistake. Toss and the dog grabs it when they break the position. And now it defeats the whole purpose. And we walk around. Good dog. Nice job. Way to go. Also, if you're marking the behavior, if you're saying yes and you're coming back to reward your dog, a common mistake that a lot of people make is they're ready to reward their dog, but they turn and then they go good dog or yes or whatever. So, they're marking as they're walking towards their dog. What ends up happening is like imagine you're the dog. I walk and every time I go good dog. Well, what's cuing that is actually me turning and not marking. So, what we want, think about changing lanes. When you're driving a car, you're driving the the way you should do it. You signal, okay, now I change lanes. And that's what we're doing here. We're saying yes. Then we turn and we deliver the reward to our dog. And he kind of popped up a little bit, but it's fine. All right. So, that's the process of teaching a stay. Now, I'm going to come back up to him. Break. Good boy. And release him from the position. So, very, very clear what we want our dog to do. We don't have to walk away from them going stay. That's just weird. Really, the dog's looking at us like, "Why are you doing that? Why are you acting all weird?" We want to act natural. We want to be normal with our movements because if you want your dog to have a nice stay, let's say you're going to a barbecue or something, you want to be able and especially if you bring your dog's bed, you toss it down, climb, you walk away. People are like, "You don't have to tell your dog stay." No, the climb is the stay. And now you have a really nice command that's reliable that you can have in any sort of position. And I love the climb, too, because it's very uh transitional, meaning, or what I mean by that is you can take that and you can place it in other areas. So, let me give you an example. If we look back over here, we can see we have a little porch. Now, imagine if this fence wasn't here, right? And I'm over at my friend's house and we're going to be having a barbecue. We got the barbecue out here. We got kids running around and playing. I could tell my dog to go climb up on here. It's an elevated platform. That's a climb. So now my dog can hang out on there. And now my dog's not running or bumping into the kids or trying to grab the volleyball or anything else. It gives them a very clear place to be. And like I said, it's very transferable. We can take it to all kinds of different areas. Climb up on the park bench, climb up on this big boulder, climb up on here, climb up on there. And that is really great because it gives us additional control of our dog in multiple environments. So that's the way that I like to start and teach all my stays including the heel stay, center stay, any mobile stay. The process is the same. Now we are going to introduce our dog to loose leash walking. This is where our dog walks next to us. They don't have to look at us, but they have to maintain that heel position. Now remember, I like to call this a stay command because the dog has to maintain a position relative to us. So it's a mobile stay. So what we want to do is we want to get our dog place him into the position. And before we start, I like to give the dog the command heel and then I step or whatever command you're using. And then we will step for this one on the leg that's next to the dog for the loose leash walking. We want to give the command because that's telling the dog that they have to maintain the position. If the dog leaves the position, they have broken the heel command. We have two options that I like to do. Either A, we can repeat the heel command, use our physical cue that we've established earlier, and go right back into the walk, or we can use our marker that predicts negative reinforcement. We can tell the dog wrong, bring them back into the position that we want, and make the leash loose. Either option is fine. It is identical for your dog. It doesn't matter if you say wrong or if you want to repeat the command. The experience that your dog has is the same. You're using negative reinforcement. We also want to keep in mind when the dog does come back into the position. We don't give them a treat. That's a common mistake because when the dog leaves the heel position, we are reacting to something the dog just did and we're bringing them back into the heel and then we're giving them a reward and the dog goes, "Oh, I know how to get more rewards." or the dog goes, "Oh, you want me to walk forward and then come back to get a treat." So, we don't want our dog to think that they need to break the position to get back to the position to get a reward. That's why we don't reward when we reinforce the position that we want the dog to be in after they've broken it. But we will give them a reward if they're holding the position nicely. I like to reward dogs if they look up at me. So, if they're giving me focus, they're giving me attention, I'll pay them for that. So, I'm going to show you how this is going to look. We're going to bring our dog. We're going to place him into the heel position. And then we're going to say, uh, well, I am already using heel for the focus heel. So, I'm just going to say left and right. So, left for my left side, right from my right side. Left. And then I step. So now, as long as he maintains the position, then I'm just going to Great job. But see how he's lagging? Wrong. Then I'm going to bring him up. And I'm actually going to try to remember to stick to heel or I'm sorry, left. Good boy. Very nice. Good job, buddy. Yes. And if he looks up, I can mark and reward. Or if you're not using the continuation marker, you can tell your dog, "Good boy. Very nice." And then you can follow it up with the reward. And he is lagging a little bit after I give him the treat, but that's fine. That's going to happen. This is why there are a lot of trainers that advise not even giving a dog a reward while they're in a commanded position. But I do for loose leash walking just because it's not a super strict position. I mean, as far as they don't have to have their head up and maintain a focus heel. Now, it is common for dogs to lag a little bit. Usually, I'm fine with this for a loose leash walk. It's all personal preference. If I want the dog to catch up to me, I'm going to take the leash. I'm going to lock it up on my hip and I'm going to run forward. Good boy. Very nice. And that will usually fix their position to where they stay, they're not lagging as much. They get where we want them to be. A common mistake people make is they slow down because the dog is slowing down. But we don't want to do that. If my dog starts to slow down, I run forward. Good. And then the dog goes, "Oh, I better stay up or you might take off." And the reason why I lock it on my hip is because a common mistake people make is they'll run forward and they'll do this. So now the dog's not getting any any kind of correction. Or they'll run forward and they'll do this where they'll pop the leash. I like the dog to have the chance to get up to where I want them to be without having to receive a correction if they keep up. But if they fail, then they will get the correction. So now we're going to go back the other way. And now I'm going to have him on my right side. So I'm going to use right for this. I'm going to adjust the treats because I'm running low. So I like to get them in position. I could just go right into the walk. That's fine. Right. And I'm introducing the right command. literally calling it right. So, he's lagging. I'm run forward. Very good. Nice job, buddy. And my left side is my strong side because most people that Sorry, not most people. Come here, buddy. Uh, most of the time, for at least the first 10 years I trained dogs, I always kept them on the left and never the right because competition is always on the left. But more recently, I've been adding both sides, and I really like it. If they leave the position, we just bring them back. Good boy. So, he's lagging again. We're going to run forward. Good. Good job. Very good. Excellent. Bring them back. Good. And when they go behind me, sometimes I may not have a chance to recommand. I'll just bring them over and then I make the leash loose. Bring them over, make it loose. Good job. And I just have a martingale collar on. Very nice. And then I provide praise when they're doing it correctly. Excellent. So he's trying to cross over again. Good. Very good. After he holds the position for a few moments, then I can follow it up with the reward. So he got a little distracted. We're going to bring him back. Good job. And again, this is the first time I've done this type of walking with him. Excellent. So now he's holding it nicely. So I'm going to give him a reward. We think about that reward placement. We want him to be nice and forward. So, I'm going to give him a couple because I want him to know where I want him to be. And then we're going to turn back and go back the other direction with him on the left side. Very good. So, we'll swing him around. Very nice. And his left side is better because my left side is better. Good boy. Excellent. Nice job, buddy. We can provide that feedback. Yes. And he's looking up at me. He's holding the position. Follow it up. Give him a reward. Good. And now we're starting to get that walk that we want. And this happens very quickly. It doesn't take very long if you've done all the other training. Now, if you try to do this day one, it's going to take much longer. So, he's lagging again. I'm going to run forward. I'm going to bring him back to this side. He has to be on the side I want, not the side he chooses. Good job. There we go. Good boy. Very good. And we're also going to introduce the automatic sit when halted. So, there's a couple ways we can do this. Every time we stop, we can tell the dog to sit or every time we stop, we simply lure the dog into the sit. We give them the reward. Left. And then we start the exercise again. We want to stop, we slow down, we lift, we give them the reward. And my freeze-dried treats are almost dust at this point. Left. Then we walk. Remember, command must come before the physical queue. So when I go to step, I have to say left, then step. We don't want to say it at the same time. Remember, that's overshadowing. We want to make sure that the command comes first. And since I'm out of treats, I'm going to use the next version, which is the pressure. So we come to a stop. Come on, buddy. He's lagging a little bit. Once we come to a stop, we can help with the leash. Very good. Provide petting left. Then we're going to step. Excellent. Good job. And then we're going to guide him into the sit using the leash and then lift. And then we're going to step. And after you do this enough, they learn the pattern. And every time you stop, they're going to go to that automatic sit. And now we have a dog walking on a loose leash. Still not perfect. So he's distracted by some of the other dogs. It's still not perfect, but we're This is very common with German Shepherds. So we're going to correct this. And I have his remote collar on. So I'm actually going to use the remote collar. I'm going to start at a low level and I'm going to apply tension. Now I'm going to correct. Good. Apply tension. Good. And then stop. Tension. Correction. Stop. So you can see he moved a little bit. I have the collar at a really low level. This is basically using the remote collar as negative reinforcement. I turned pressure on. When he started to react, I release the tension and I was pairing it with the remote. So there's the tension. All right. So he's adjusting. We're going to bring him back to the side. Very good. So now we're out of treats, but I am going to hold the remote in case he reacts to the dogs again. Good boy. Come on, buddy. So, now he's avoiding it. Good job. And that's that was great. I'm glad that happened that way. And the dogs are still out over on the side. If you want, you could even show them that we have the dogs out looking. And so, that's what he was reacting to. He was barking at them. He doesn't know them. >> So, he's starting to do it again. So, I'm going to apply the tension. Good. And he responded that time. There was no stem from the collar. Bring him back over. Good boy. Very good. And this environment is slightly difficult because we have some of those distractions that we were talking about before. And right there, I was just making quick little adjustments. Quick little adjustments. I'm not going to let him walk behind my back. Good boy. Very nice. We're going to come to that stop. Cue him into the sit and then break. All done. And release him. So, that's going to be how you want to introduce loose leash walking. We also use the remote collar and we started to do the automatic sit when halted. Sorry, I think I got some dog food on my face. When you're doing this, again, key things to remember before you step, say the command, then step. Don't make the common mistake of saying heel as you step. Because if you say the command when you step, you're going to be teaching your dog to step when you step and not to step when you say the command. And that could be a problem because later you have your dog in a sitst stay, you try to step away, your dog breaks the position and then you correct them. Now that's an unfair correction because your dog was trained to step at the same time you step and not when you say heel. So again, we want to say heel, then we step. If our dog is in the position, especially in the beginning, lots of praise. Good job. Good boy. If you have treats, you can give them treats when they look up. When they leave the position, you're going to say heel or wrong. guide them back and then right back into the walk. You don't have to stop and make them sit. So if they leave, we say wrong or heel, we guide them back. For me, it would be left. Good job. Left. And when we say our command or when we say wrong, just like everything else, we have to say it wrong or left. Then we cue the dog back into the position. And then we go right back into the walk. We don't have to bring the dog to a halt. A lot of times when people first try this, they'll tell their dog left. They'll bring their dog back and then they make their dog sit. But we weren't in a sit. We were walking. So we have the dog go right back into the walk. And he's starting to get tired. So left, then we apply the tension. We bring them back and loose. And another thing I like to do, especially with new dogs doing this, I like to make it a game. meaning I get points if I'm able to leave his heel position and he gets points if he's able to maintain the position. This is better done when we have treats. So, I'm actually going to grab some treats and I'm going to show you this game. This is a great game to play with your dog. So, let me get some treats and show you how it looks. Okay, so the way that this game works is, as I said, we're going to try to leave our dog's heel position. So, this is more interactive. After you do the first portion, then you can play this game because the first portion at least gives our dog an understanding of the concept of this game. So my goal is to leave the heel position every time he's not looking at me. And then his goal is to maintain the position. And if I try to leave the position and he catches me, I have to reward him. If I leave the heel position and he doesn't catch me, I reinforce it with the leash pressure. Now, this is the first step. Once it gets to the point where and just moving forward, just so it's more transferable for everybody, I'm just going to use the word wrong when he leaves the position instead of saying the command because it doesn't matter what command you're using, you can use your marker that predicts negative reinforcement. Once the dog starts responding to wrong, so if he goes ahead of me and I say wrong and before I use the tension on the leash to get him back into the heel, he jumps back on his own, that's my cue to transition to a correction event. So instead of doing a reinforcement event, because when he goes ahead of me and I say wrong and I bring him back, that's a reinforcement event. It's no different than any other event that we use to get our dog to do a behavior free. It's just reinforcing the behavior that we want. A correction event is different. The dog is getting a correction. So then when he goes ahead of me, instead of saying wrong, I'm going to say no. Pop the leash. Or if I was using a remote collar, I could stem the remote collar. So then he's getting a correction. So that's when we start getting the high level of reliability. But this is going to be the foundation. This is the game that I like to play. And it's a lot of fun. So we tell our dog left and then we start walking. Very good. And if he's maintaining nicely and looking at me like that, I'm going to give him treats. I'm going to pay him for that. Now he's going to lose the position a little bit. He's going to catch back up. Now I'm going to see if I can cut back. He's watching me too. Good. Good job. So, he won that one. So, that was excellent on his part. Good. So, I'm going to see if I can get him to look away. Maybe he's going to look down or something. I'm going to slow down. All right. So, he's doing really great. He's making it difficult. Oh, so he looked away. So, that was an opportunity. Wrong. All right. So, there I got one. So, one for me, one for him so far. Ah, I thought I had him there. Oh, I thought I he got me. And this is what we It's so much better to make dog training a game. Left. Good. He's doing really great. He's maintaining the position. He's looking away every now and then and I'm I'm not quick enough to get it. His focus is so good. So again, reward placement. I want to keep it nice and high. Now, he tends to do better on the left side. So, we're going to go back this way. down him. Put him on the right side and we'll see how he does just on the way back. We're going to see if I can get any more winds. So, right and then step. So, that's going to be the command for this. Good. So, I got one there. And he's a little wider than I would like him to be, but it's fine. Wrong. Ah, he's he's doing great. Good job. Good. And he was able to beat that as well, so the leash didn't get tight. Good. He got me there, too. Very nice. So, I'm going to pay him. He's kicking my butt in this game right now. You see, once I turned it into a game, he's doing way, way better than before. Wrong. Good. So, I got one there. Ha. He beat me again. Nice job, buddy. You're crushing it. Good. And the cool thing about this game is the more you play it wrong. Oh, he beat me again. The more you play it, the better your dog's going to get at it. And you're going to have a dog that works walks perfectly on a loose leash. So, I missed it there. So, by the way, when I run forward, I'm not saying anything. I'm just running forward quickly. I get a point when I run forward if the leash gets tight. So, if I run forward and it gets tight, I get a point. If it doesn't, he gets a point. Now I got to pay him again. Good job. So I'm going to see if I can do it. If he lags or if he's not paying attention. Oh, he looked away. And he got me again. So if if I'm not able to say wrong, if the leash isn't able to get tight, then he's winning. He's he's doing very well. Good job, buddy. Good. And he beat me again. Excellent. Very nice. And if we want to incorporate some of our turns, we can do that. We can bring them around and do some of those turns that we did before. We can incorporate that flip into it. We can go right back into some more walking. Very nice. Excellent. All done, buddy. So, you can see first time I did this type of walking with them. And that's why it is really good to start with the ones that are more difficult when it comes to loose leash walking or focused heel. again, focus heel, then I do the contact heel, then I do this type of walking, and then the casual walk. We're gonna come this way. We have some cars, and that makes this much easier. But this game is incredibly fun. The dogs love it, and because they like it, they end up doing it very well. I highly recommend giving this a shot. You'll enjoy the training with your dog. If you're a professional dog trainer, try this with the dogs that you're training for your clients. It's really fun. They enjoy it. And then when people see it as a game that they're playing with their dog, they no longer get frustrated when their dog doesn't do it perfectly. Because when their dog doesn't do it well, them as the handler, they're the ones getting the points and they're winning the game. And then eventually every dog ends up dominating the game. And when they dominate the game, then you have that dog that walks beautifully on a loose leash. If you want 100% reliability within your training or if you want to have that off leash freedom with your dog, you have to understand how to use corrections. So, I'm going to explain the process that I like to use when it comes to adding corrections. We want to think about the main problems that we have when it comes to working with our dogs. We have obedience issues and we have behavioral issues. Obedience issues, we have two subcategories. We have a dog not doing something we want them to do and we have a dog not staying in a stay. That's going to be our main obedience issues. And then for behavioral issues, we have dangerous behaviors, destructive behaviors, behaviors based on fear, behaviors based on aggression, and behaviors we just don't want our dogs to do, like breaking the climb. All right, climb. So, those are the main things that we have to think about. Now, if we know how to approach these, it makes the whole process much easier. Of course, there could be something that your dog is doing that falls under multip multiple categories. A good example could be loose leash walking. You're walking with your dog, your dog breaks the position to start barking at another dog. So now that's could be defined as a behavioral issue as well as an obedience issue. If we know what it is, we can approach it though. So the ones that we're not going to cover in this course is fear-based behaviors or behaviors based on aggression. If you are dealing with fear-based behaviors or behaviors based on aggression, the approach that I like to take is counter conditioning combined with desensitization. There's other approaches like behavioral adjustment training, flooding, habituation. These things are usually directed towards that, but we're not going to get into that because that'll take another three hours. But what we are going to talk about is dangerous, destructive behaviors we don't want our dogs to perform and obedience. So dangerous and destructive behaviors. If you had a list of behaviors that you can tell your dog this is dangerous, this is destructive. Don't do it. If they are doing those behaviors and that's not being triggered by fear or aggression, then we can correct it. I correct it right away. Meaning, I add positive punishment to the situation right away to remove the behavior. A few examples: chasing cars, digging, getting into the trash, drinking out of the toilet bowl, chewing on furniture. These are all dangerous or destructive behaviors. The easiest way to deal with those is with a remote collar. You have a remote training collar. So, let me show you the one I like to use. A lot of trainers use this. This is e-collar technology. I really like them. They are my go-to when it comes to using a remote training collar. So, let's say I'm working with my dog and my dog has a tendency to dig. So, I go, okay, I send my dog in the yard and I watch my dog from inside the house. And this is the first thing that I will actually correct with a the first thing I will correct using a remote collar when it comes to working with my dog. And that's dangerous or destructive behaviors. It's the very first thing. So, I have my dog in the yard. My dog starts to dig. Boom. I press the button at the exact moment my dog is digging. My dog goes, "Whoa, what was that?" And then we get to be the good guy. We go, "What happened? Did that dirt bite you?" And our dog stops digging. And they don't associate us to the correction. They associate the act of digging. And that's why it's the first thing that I correct because I don't want the dog to think that I'm involved with that situation. I want them to think that it's just something that happens when they dig and then they never dig again. But if we teach a dog how to be directional, meaning they understand the corrections coming from us. So, like with my dog Ari, she's in a stay right now. She has the remote collar on. If I correct her, she knows it's me. I've taught her that the correction is coming from me. And I do that after I fix my behavioral issues. And we have to make sure if the dog is performing one of these behavioral issues that we don't like, that it's not being triggered by fear. If a dog is doing something based on fear, let's say your dog is trying to dig to get away from something it's afraid of, and we correct it. We only make the fear worse. So, we never use positive punishment to correct a fear-based behavior as it'll only make the fear-based behavior worse because we're solidifying the fact that the dog should be afraid. So, dog digs, I press the button. The dog gets into the trash can. I'll put some food right at the top. I'll close the lid, maybe a little piece of meat sticking out to entice the dog. Dog goes over, tries to take it. I press the button. I go, "What happened?" And if my dog works to like this remote collar that I'm using, it goes to zero to 100. So we can really pinpoint fine details within our training the level of the correction that we need to make for that dog. Some dogs might need a level 40, some might need a level 60, some might need a level 10. It's going to change depending on the dog. So if I have the dog go to get into the trash can, if the dog Well, usually I start at the lower end because that's what I'm correcting first. So I'll usually correct between a 20 and a 40 because most dogs that I train will train between a 15 and a 25 for obedience. So, usually I'll go a little higher than that to stop a behavioral issue, but I don't want to go right up to the max level because that could be what's known as an avoidance level correction. An avoidance level correction is where the correction so high the dog avoids even they might even avoid the location. So, if you think about if somebody has one of those invisible fences for their dog and they don't do the proper training, the dog gets a high level correction, the dog may not even want to go into the yard because they're like, "Oh, there's landmines out there. I don't know where I can go and where I can't go, so I'm just going to avoid the yard. So, we keep it at a lower level, but slightly higher than we think that they're going to need for obedience. We correct them the exact moment they do it. So, that's dangerous and destructive. But, let's say you don't have a remote collar. You can use a leash and a collar. Now, for dogs that have lower correction levels, I like to uh compare this to your bank account. So, everyone has their bank account. Dogs have a bank account as well. The dog's bank account, they're either very wealthy or very poor. If I have a dog that's very poor, the correction level is going to be very low. If I have a very rich dog, the correction level is going to have to be higher. And um what's interesting is golden retrievers that I've trained, they often tend to be what we like to call the Elon Musks of the dog world. They need higher correct because they're so happy golucky. You correct them, they're like, "What was that?" Right? So, we have to adjust the correction to the dog that we're working with, but we do escalation of force. So, we start at a lower level and we gradually increase. So now what we're going to do is we're going to practice our leash pops on something like this, like a fence or a chair or if you have a partner that can put it on their wrist because you want to practice the motion that you're going to be using when you're correcting your dog. If I have a sensitive dog, I'm going to correct with something like this, a martingale collar. The reason why I like this is if I pull on it, it will tighten, but it won't continue to tight like a choke chain would. There's a stopping point, so it's not going to choke our dog. This chain is going to give a little bit more of a snap when we give the dog the correction. If the dog needs a higher level correction, let's say you're using this, you're correcting your dog, but they continue to do the behavior, then that just means you need to up the level of the correction. You might have to go to something like a prong collar. But if I'm using a prong collar or a pinch collar, the process is going to be the same. So, these are the ways that I like to practice my leash pops. So, if I have the dog in front of me, when we're popping the leash, it's not a grab and pull. We're not cracking a whip. This isn't going to be it. So, it's not a whip crack. The starting position and the stopping position is almost the same spot. So, this is the way that I'm going to correct most dogs. So, I want to practice this way. I want to practice this way. And I want to practice with the opposite hand doing the correction. Another thing is I like to correct upward if I'm correcting a dog for breaking a sit. So this is how I practice that. I pull down and I snap. So there's a little snap to it. So you want to practice this to where it feels pretty natural. Once you can do that and it feels really comfortable, then you want to add the marker. Just like everything else, the marker must precede the physical cue. I like to use the word no. So if I was using a remote collar, I would say no. Then I press the button. For this, it's no then pop. No, then pop. In fact, a lot of people find it to be much easier to do this if they say pop when they pop the leash. So, if that helps you, give it a shot. Say no pop. No pop. No pop. No pop. No pop. That's going to help you with your timing and that's what's going to get the dog conditioned. So then when your dog does a behavior you don't like and you're unable to correct them the exact moment that they do it, you can say no. And your dog goes, "Oh, okay. You don't want me to do that behavior." You've made it very clear. And you can follow it up with the correction in order to get that reliability. So this is what we want to practice. Now, if you are using a remote collar, I'm not going to get into all the features. There's a lot. If you pick up one of these e-collar technology, it has a manual. There's plenty of videos that you can find, but they have different corrections. You can lock it. You can have a tone or a vibrate. There's a light. There's all kinds of different features. Again, we're not going to get into that now. They have a manual or you can watch plenty of videos that are already available on YouTube for free how to use this as far as the functions. Now, I'm going to tell you how I use it when working with my dog and when we start adding corrections. So, dangerous and destructive behaviors, we correct those right away. We've already established that. We're not correcting fear or aggression. That'll often make it worse. And that's a very complicated issue. Behaviors we don't want a dog to perform. So that's going to be our boundaries. So jumping up on people, jumping up on furniture. This is the process that I follow when it comes to correcting that. And that's the second thing that I start to correct when I'm using a remote collar. So remember, if we're using a remote collar, the very first thing that we are going to correct is dangerous and destructive behaviors. But before we do that, we want to create a positive association to the collar. And you might be asking yourself, well, how do we create a strong positive association? Very easy. We take the collar out. We put the collar on our dog. We do a fun activity. We finish that activity. We take the collar off. So then the dog learns that the collar is the precursor to the fun activity. If you've ever played a sport or anything like that, you get your gear, you get your vest. I train jiu-jitsu, so I put on my rash guard or I put on my ghee. That's I have a very strong positive association to that because I love jiu-jitsu. If your dog loves playing fetch, loves going on walks, loves eating, whatever it is, training, you put the collar on, you do the activity, you take it off. Eventually, you're going to pull out the collar and your dog's GOING TO GO, "OH, AWESOME. WE'RE GOING TO BE DOING SOME TRAINING. We're going to be playing fetch, whatever." Now, we've created that strong positive association. And that could take a week or two, maybe even three. Then we correct dangerous and destructive behaviors. Then the next thing we correct is boundaries or breaking the stay. Because we are being reactive, that's why we correct these. It's more clear to the dog. We're correcting an action that the dog just did. When we start correcting non-compliancy to a command, we're correcting an inaction. We're correcting the dog for not doing something that we want, which is harder for a dog to understand. So that's why we start with first correcting the actions. It makes it more clear in the dog's mind. So now I've been working my boundaries. When do I know to go to corrections? Easy. When the dog starts to respond to my marker that predicts negative reinforcement. So, my dog enters the kitchen. Wrong. My dog leaves the kitchen. Ah, next time you enter the kitchen, it's not going to be a reinforcement event. I'm not going to say wrong. It's going to be a correction event. Dog jumps up on the sofa. Wrong. Dog jumps off. Ah, next time you jump up on the sofa, it's not going to be a reinforcement event. It's going to be a correction event. Dog breaks the stay. Wrong. dog goes back into the stay. Now, I'm saying this each time I say the dog goes back or they fix themselves on their own. I don't have to show them. We're on a walk. Dog goes ahead of me. Wrong. Dog jumps back on their own. Once I see that for each separate behavior in each separate environment, then I transition to a correction. And I like to start with the stay because I can set it up to make it more difficult to where I can correct the dog. So now I have the dog on a stay. So, let's swing over here where Ari is wrong. And I said wrong there just because I said her name and I use a dog's name as informal come when called. So, now I'm working the dog and I'm going to have it on her correction level. So, her correction level is 20. And this is exactly how I would do it to a brand new dog. Assuming the dog has a positive association to the collar and assuming that we've already corrected dangerous and destructive behaviors, I'm going to try to get the dog to break. The moment she breaks, I'm going to say no. And then I'm going to press the button on the collar. Now, I have my hands behind my back. And this is what I usually do with other dogs as well. Or I have my hand in my pocket because I don't want the remote to be a big visual for the dog. I don't want to take the remote and go, "You better listen to me. I got that remote. We don't want to do that. And people will often brag about that. They go, "Oh, the moment I pull out the remote, then my dog listens." It's like, "Okay, now the dog's responding to the remote and not the obedience that you taught them to perform." I don't want them to see the remote as part of the visual. But your smarter dogs, they will become aware. So, I'm going to try to get her to break. The moment she breaks the position, I'm going to say one no. I'm going to press the button on the collar. If she goes back on her own, I'm going to tell her, "Good girl." In fact, break. I'm gonna move this over so we can adjust the visual for you guys. Make it more open. All right, Clyde. So, the moment she breaks, I'm gonna say no. Now, this is also something we want to keep in mind. Just like our dogs have a change of behavior when they're classically conditioned to a word that predicts a reward, we have a change of behavior for a dog that's classically conditioned to a word that predicts a correction. The most common that I've seen, and this is important to know, number one is what I call instant compliancy. And this is by far the most common. If you're using this training system, instant compliancy means the dog breaks the position. If we're using this as an example, we say no and the dog instantly goes back. That's instant compliancy. Number two is what I call evasion. The dog breaks the position, we say no, the dog goes, I'm out of here. You're not correcting me. Number three is what I call freeze in place. The dog breaks the position. You say no, the dog goes, "Oh, I messed up." And then number four, the dog runs to the human. and you say no, the dog runs to you and goes, "Oh, I'm sorry." Those are the most common. It doesn't matter which one your dog does, they still receive the correction. This is the correction event. The correction event starts the moment the dog does the behavior that we don't want, and it ends the moment the dog receives the correction. And we don't yell at our dogs. And this isn't about being elf for dominance. One of the best analogies that I can associate to this sort of training and the concept, the way that I like to look at it is the same as jiu-jitsu. You can never be a good jiu-jitsu practitioner if you never do live rolls. If you never spar with people and if you spar with people, you're going to be placed in an arm bar. I can't tell you how many times I've been armbarred. You're going to get choked. You're going to have your leg put in a leg lock. There's things that's going to happen. But every time that happens, you become a better practitioner. If my sparring partner gets me an arm bar, okay, now I know how to defend it better, which means next time he puts me an arm bar, he had to navigate through that defense. So, his armbar tactic has improved. And because that has improved, my defense is going to improve, etc., etc. And that's how we get better and better. I'm not mad at him for putting me in an arm bar because he's not mad at me. We're training together. Now, if I look at it on the other side and let's say uh so I train with one of the greatest grapplers in the world, Lucas Barbosa. super nice guy. He can whoop anybody. When I spar with him, he's able to beat me obviously, but it's super nice. It's a friendly roll. He gets me an arm bar or submission. We slap hands and we go back to rolling and it's a really good time. But if I walked into his dojo and he came at me aggressively and he was mad and he wanted to prove he was the alpha and he slammed me down and put me in the armbar, totally different experience. Now I don't want to be around him. I'm going to avoid him. I'm going to be nervous in his presence. completely different feeling and experience, same actions. And this is how it is with our dogs. We're not dominating them. We're not alpha rolling them. We're not holding. We're not yelling at them. It's a consequence to the game that we're playing. And when they get the correction, they shouldn't see it as, "Oh no, this horrible thing." They go, "Okay, in order to get better, I'm going to avoid doing that." And then we reward them for the correct thing. So correction event ends when the dog receives the correction. Now, what's also important to this and what's interesting is the greater your percentage is is of correcting the dog, the more reliable your obedience is going to be and the less you're going to have to correct your dog. So, if every time you say no, you follow through with the correction, you will correct your dog less and you will have a higher trained or a more reliable dog when it comes to obedience. So, if when I'm working with her, if she breaks the position wrong, and I said wrong again, I wasn't ready. If she breaks the position and I say no and she goes back, she still gets the correction, but once she's back in the position, I'm going to praise her. If she breaks the position, I say no and I correct her and she's not back on the platform because maybe she freed in freezed in place, then I'm going to have to initiate a new reinforcement event. So once she gets the correction, remember each event can end based on what's going on. If she breaks the position, I say no, it's a correction event. Once she gets the correction, that concludes the correction event. Now, I have to give her a new reinforcement event to get her back into the stay. If she were to try to take off, same thing. I follow through with the correction. This is the same if you're using a leash. So, if I'm walking around and she breaks the position, I say no. And I walk over, I have to get to her, give her the correction with the leash pop, climb, take her back to the platform. So, think about it. It's no followed by the correction. If the dog's already back on the platform because they did instant compliancy, we praise them. If they're not, we recommand the position that they just broke. And if needed, we assist them. And what I mean by that is if my dog breaks and I say no and I correct her and I say climb and she's like, "Ah, I don't know what you mean." I'm going to help her do it. I'm not going to tell her climb, she doesn't do it. No correct correction. Because we have to assume when we start adding corrections, our dog's going to become mildly stressed. Some dogs are going to be very stressed if they're more sensitive. So, we have to be sensitive to them being sensitive and we have to make sure they're successful and they win. All right. So, now I'm going to demonstrate with the remote collar. And another thing that happens because this is a muscle stimulator. I've talked to people before and maybe they read an article that was titled the shocking truth to shock collars. Oh no, if the dog wears the shock collar, they're going to look sad and they're going to look worried and they're going to be fearful. That's just the poor use of corrections. If a dog doesn't know when they're going to get corrected, what's going to cause the correction, they don't know how to prevent the correction, they don't know how to stop the correction when it happens, of course, your dog's going to be fearful and worried and stressed. But if they know how to prevent it, they know what causes it, they know how to stop it, then you're not going to have any of that associated stress that you might read about, and this is the only way to have true off leash reliability. If you walk around your dog off leash without a remote collar, in my opinion, it's a little irresponsible. I'm guilty. I've done it before. But it is a little irresponsible because if I had her without a remote collar and we were out in public somewhere and she saw something because I can't simulate all the thousands of different possible situations that might occur and she takes off and THEN I'M JUST GOING and yelling at her. I don't have the reliability because that thing that's causing her to go away from me is a higher level of motivation for her to do that behavior. So, if we want off leash, be responsible. Have a remote collar. All right. So, I have it in my hand. I have the button. So, I'm ready. And now I'm going to see if I can get her to break the position. Good girl. No. So there she went back. So she got the correction. Good girl. Very good. So on that one, she broke the position. I said no. She got the correction and she did which one? Instant compliancy. So that's an example or that is how it looks when they do instant compliancy. They go back after the correction. If she didn't go back, remember I would have recommanded climb. I would have helped her if needed. Good girl. The rules that I follow when it comes to teachable moments or correction events, remember teachable moment is a reinforcement event. That's when they break and we say wrong and we help them go back. I don't give them a treat. So, she breaks a position, I say wrong, and she goes back. No treat. If she breaks the position, no correction. She goes back, no treat. Once she's holding the position, now I can go, "Good girl. Oh, nice job. And I can follow it up with a few rewards, but I don't want to reward them right away after they break. Now, we're going to do the same process with the sit stay, the down stay, the exact same process that we did before. We're just replacing the reinforcement event when we say wrong, the teachable moment, with the correction event. And remember, your dog is probably going to do one of those four responses once they're classically conditioned to the word no. Eventually, you're going to get to a point where you can't even get your dog to break the position. And just like our loose leash walking game, it's the same thing. We're playing a game. Can I get any points? Can I make her break? Can I toss treats? Can I roll a ball? Can I bring other dogs out and get her to break? Oh, she's winning the game. Now, if I want, I can tell her, "Get it." And she can go and get the treats. And now she's won the game. So, she can take a moment, sniff around, get the rewards. So, that's how we're going to start correcting the stay. So, now we've covered how to correct dangerous and destructive behaviors, how to correct the stay or the dog violating boundaries. Exact same process. Now, how do we correct commands? The way that I correct commands, this is the criteria that I want. I want the dog to be 80% proficient on the command, meaning they're responding to the verbal command if that's what I'm going to correct, or they're 80% proficient on the physical cue, so I can correct non-compliancy to that as well. Once they're at 80% proficiency in that environment, then I can correct for non-compliancy. The way that I do that, if I tell So, let's see. If I tell her down, okay, she did it. Sit, heel, center, down, heel, free. Okay, she did it all. But if she didn't do it, if she went, I'm not going to do it. The moment I see that, so I say down. So, imagine you're training me and I'm the dog. You say down. And the moment you notice I'm going, "F you. I'm not doing it." That's the moment you say no. If you're using a leash pop, you're going to pop the leash. If you're using a remote collar, you're going to stim the collar. Remember, when you say no, you're going to have one of those responses. Instant compliancy, evasion, freeze in place, come to the human. Doesn't matter what they do, they get the correction. If they go back into the position or they do the position, meaning you tell them down and then you say no when they lay down, that would be an example of instant compliancy. Break. And that's also another good thing you should practice randomly giving your dog commands. Down. Break. Just at any random point, sit. Break. And I'm just saying break. I get it. I'll I'll let her get a treat. Uh but that makes them more aware because you're throwing in those random commands. But if I give a command and I say no and they comply, they still get the correction. And then after the correction, good dog. Now, if they don't do it, we repeat the command and we assist them. So again, I wouldn't tell a dog down, they don't do it. No correction. Down, no correction. Down, no corre No, we're not going to do that. Down, the dog doesn't do it. No correction. Down, the dog still doesn't do it. We help them. We use a lure. We use a leash cue. We make sure they're successful. We don't want to correct them multiple times for the same thing. So now if we're using the leash, we're going to swing back this way. So let's say the dog's at a distance from me. This is why we get the dog conditioned to the no. Now the easiest way to get a dog conditioned to know is by taking them on a walk. We Ari, we're not exploring over there. We take them on a walk. And that's the easiest for most dogs to start teaching them that no means of correction. No, pop the leash. No, pop the leash. So now if my dog's at a distance and my dog breaks the position, I'm gonna say no. And then I'm GONNA RUN AS FAST AS I CAN. NO, we're not going to go running at the dog. When I first started learning dog training, I was taught TO GO NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO. WELL, if the dog's conditioned to no being a marker now, every time we say no, we're releasing cortisol. We're causing stress. WE SAY NO. AH, NO. AH, NO. AH, THIS IS WRONG. This is wrong. So, it's a marker. It pinpoints a moment in time when the dog is right or wrong. So the dog makes a mistake. I go, "No." I calmly walk towards the dog. Then I tell the dog what I want. Down. Let's say I help them. Good dog. Follow it up with the reward. So it's a very predictable sequence. We don't have to run. If I say no, the moment I start walking towards the dog, that is the correction event. when they receive the correction, whether it's a leash pop or a stem on the collar, that concludes the event. The correction is over. Now, last thing with the remote collar, this is this course is not about corrections, but I wanted you to have understanding of the process that I go through when I'm using corrections. If I'm using a remote collar on a dog and I've gotten to the point where I'm adding corrections for the dog breaking the stay, there is a chance that the dog breaks the stay and we stem the collar and the dog looks confused or they're like, "What the heck was that?" Most of the time that doesn't happen. If the dog's already conditioned to the word no because they hear no, they're expecting a correction. Great. But if they look confused, then what I do is I take the leash. I attach the leash to the dog. I'm gonna turn this off because I'm going to simulate like I'm using and I don't want to correct my dog. So now it's off. This is the way I hold it. If I'm pairing it with the leash, I take the leash, I put my middle finger through it, and I loop it around. That's going to keep the leash in place while I hold the remote. I'll take the dog on a walk and when they break the position, I'm going to say no. And at the exact moment I pop the leash, boop, I stem the collar. So, pop and stem. Pop and stem. Pop and stem. That's going to help the dog become directional. Same thing if I'm doing just a normal stay, not loose leash walking. The dog breaks the position, the exact moment I pop the leash, boop, that's when I stem. So, you video gamers, this is going to be super easy. You're pairing the leash pop with the stem. That's going to provide direction for the dog. What's going to give them a clear understanding that the corrections coming from you and it's not some sort of magical mystery force that's doing that to them. Also, what's important to know, and you should try this on yourself, if you put the leash, you take it off, and you put it on yourself, and then you take the remote collar, and by the way, if you're going to use a remote collar on yourself, you you must shock yourself at the highest level that the remote collar can provide on continuous. You don't have to, but I do it because I want to know what the dog's going to feel, and I want to feel it at the highest level. So, when I correct them at a 10 or a 15, it's really nothing. It's very light. So, if you've been thinking about a remote collar, like I said, I'm an advocate of them. I think they're great. It gives you off leash freedom. It's better for the dog to have that freedom as long as we teach it correctly. So, when we go to do the pop p, especially if you're using a prong collar, pop and shock on yourself. If you do the leash pop too hard, then what's going to happen is the sensation from the popping of the leash is going to override the sensation of the remote collar. When I am using the leash to correct the dog, the leash and the collar is providing the correction. If I'm using the leash to provide only direction and the correction is coming from the remote collar, then the leash pop must be very, very light. It's a very light pop. It shouldn't be hard enough to override the stem from the remote collar, or else you're not going to be teaching your dog how to be directional. So then I'm going to pair it with the leash for a little while and I'm going to attempt to do it again without the leash. If I correct my dog and they no longer look confused, great. My dog's directional. If I correct my dog without the leash and the dog still does one of these, which they do sometimes, then I know the dog's not directional. I got to put the collar and the leash back on and I have to do more reps with that. So, with using corrections, we cover dangerous, destructive behaviors we don't want the dog to perform, the stay as well as how to correct non-compliancy for commands. If you follow this structure, I promise you're going to have a really well-trained dog as long as you never make any of the corrections personal ever. meaning you never yell at your dog, you never get angry. It needs to be part of the game, just like my sparring analogy with jiu-jitsu. And if you do that, you're going to have that off leash trained dog that you've always wanted. I want to thank each and every one of you that have trusted me with your dog training endeavors. I hope this course has lived up to your expectations and you are able to understand the process of training your dogs. you've created a stronger relationship with your dog and it's built a new desire and passion for the art of dog training. If you do have further questions about this, I'm on YouTube. I'm on social media. Reach out. I love talking dog training and providing any information that I can to make your success my goal. So, thank you again. It really means the world to me. The day you come into my life, someone might say you've won the lottery. And maybe they'll be right. But what they won't see is how much I'll need you, too. >> You'll arrive with nothing but trust. No reason to believe in me. Yet you'll do it anyway. >> And that's not something I'll ever take. You'll learn my voice and I'll learn yours. Not through words, but through a thousand moments. I look across the room, a shift in my shoulders. The start of a game before either of us even moves. And little by little, we'll build a language that belongs only to us. >> So this is my promise to you. You won't spend your life watching through a window. We'll chase sunsets, take the long way home. Find trails we haven't walked >> and stories we haven't lived. >> You'll be part of the adventure. >> Part of the family, >> part of every chapter I can share. >> And when people see us together, I hope they see what is possible. When trust is met with trust, there'll be days filled with laughter. >> Games only we understand. >> Moments that make no sense to anyone else, >> but mean everything to us. You'll teach me patience. I'll teach you confidence. >> And somewhere along the way, neither of us will remember who is teaching who. Because the best teams >> don't pull against each other. >> They move together. So this is my promise to you. You won't spend your life on the sideline. >> We'll go see the world. The lakes, >> the trails, >> the playgrounds, >> the places waiting for us. >> We'll learn together, grow together, and build something worth remembering. >> And if I do this right, >> you never have to wonder >> whether we're on the same team. I've got work. I've got dreams, friends, plans, >> and places I still want to go. >> A thousand things competing for my attention. >> A thousand reasons to hurry through the day. >> But to you, I am the walk. >> I am the adventure. >> I am the game. >> I am the comfort. >> I am. >> You may be part of my life, but I am all of yours. And I never want to forget that. So this is my promise. >> Not that every day will be perfect, >> but that every day will matter. >> We'll play, we'll learn, >> we'll explore. >> We'll keep finding new reasons to be excited about tomorrow. >> And years from now, >> I hope if another dog asks about your life, >> you can smile and say, >> "We played all the time. >> We were always going somewhere. Showed me the world. We were a team and I couldn't have asked for a better life. And if one day someone says that you won the lottery, >> I hope they're right. >> But the truth is >> I think I did >> because of all the things >> either of us could have become. >> The thing I'm proudest of >> won't be what I taught you. It'll be this. You understood me and I unerstood you. All right, we got an audio test. Audio test with Ari. Ari, can you lay down? Thank you so much. And can you give me a sit? That was a bark. Let's Let's try Let's try a sit. A sit. There you go. Sit. There you go. Come on now. Go climb. Go climb. Go climb. down. Good. >> Wow. Oh god, it's so funny. Fearless. Fearless girl. Wow. >> Yeah, that's Ari. >> Ari. Yeah. >> Cy.