If your dog's looking at your hand for food before deciding to follow your command or deciding whether they want to listen to your command, you're not training them. You're bribing them. And you probably don't have an obedient dog. You have a dog that's negotiating with you. And today we're going to develop a training progression. I'm going to give you our training progression that we use at our Dorchester Training Academy to help you in that negotiation so that you and your dog can both be on the same page. This is Pac-Talk Podcast, episode 161, and we're going to go through our 12-step training progression as efficiently as possible to help you get to where you need to be with your dog. Now, with that being said, every dog's a little bit different, so you need to take into account you may have to slightly modify this training progression for your particular dog. But the first thing we're starting off with is step number one, which is going to be establishing your verbal markers. There's basically three words that you're going to need to teach your dog what they mean. One is the word yes. This is your terminal release marker. When you say yes, your dog's behavior is done. The reward is following every time that you're on a continuous reinforcement schedule. So you say yes, you start backing up, you take a piece of food out of your bait bag into your hand, you take your hand about your dog's shoulder level, your dog can come to take the food out of your hand. Now, why do you take your hand to your dog's shoulder level? The reason why we do that is to promote your dog keeping all four paws on the ground. Because if you're holding the food up high, you could accidentally subconsciously be promoting your dog to be jumping when they're coming to get that reward, which we don't want that, right? We want our dogs all four paws on the ground. The second word is going to be good. That's your duration marker. This is telling your dog that, hey, you're doing the right thing, keep doing what you're doing. So, for example, you say good, you don't back up and let your dog chase you. You just keep standing where you're at. You grab a piece of food out of your bait bag and you just deliver it to your dog's face, right at about their shoulder to head level. Again, not promoting any jumping. We want our dog to understand to keep doing what you're doing. Now, the reason why these are verbal markers is because they're just words to us. We know the English language. Remember that your dog is a nonverbal being, so they don't understand English. We're just associating these words with an action, which is gonna be for the yes and good, it's gonna be rewarding them. And so, you know, this association as time goes on, as you change your reinforcement schedules, your dog's gonna understand that they're doing the right thing and they're gonna feel like they got a reward from that. The marker, the verbal marker, the word yes or good is just pinpointing a moment in time to your dog so they know when they're doing something right. But what if they're doing something wrong? We have a verbal marker for that as well. That's gonna be the word no. When you say no, first of all, you want to be uh in a neutral, flat tone. Say only the word and never repeat it and not raise your voice. Same thing with the words yes and good. You just want to use a neutral tone, yes, good, right? And try to use that tone as much as possible, as similar as possible every time. Don't get too loud, don't get too excitable, keep it neutral. Now, with that being said, the word no is gonna be your accountability marker. That means that your dog has done something incorrectly. And so at first, when you're teaching this, you're just simply gonna not deliver any food. You're gonna, if you had a piece of food in your hand, you're just gonna put it behind your back to give your dog a neutral signal, not an emotional signal. Then once your dog does what it's supposed to be doing or something that's acceptable, then you could say good and take that food out from behind your back and give it to your dog. So one thing you pay attention to uh as you're doing these verbal markers is although this is the first step, a lot of times they can be consolidated and combined with steps two and three that we're gonna go into right now. So the second thing you want to teach your dog, step number two is gonna be engagement and focus. Engagement is building up sustained eye contact on you from your dog. You want to do this without giving your dog a command, without luring your dog, you want your dog to volunteer eye contact. And when your dog volunteers eye contact, you want to capture that immediately. And what you're gonna do when they do that is you're gonna say yes, back up, drop your hand with the food in it down to your dog's shoulder level, let them come to your hand with food in it. So between repetitions, all you're gonna do is just stand there with your dog. Your dog should be on a leash because you're not off-leash trained. You're gonna stand there once your dog looks at your face, you say yes, you back up. As you're backing up, you grab a piece of food out of your bait bag, put it in your hand, bring it down to your dog's shoulder level, allow your dog to come to your hand and get the food. The key thing about engagement and focus is to understand that if your dog won't look at you, they won't learn from you. We want our dog to want to look at us, right? We don't want to be saying their name to demand attention. We don't want to be trying to entice them to pay attention to us. We want them to want to pay attention to us, and that's what this process does. Now, if your dog is struggling to pay attention to you, one thing you can do is take their mealtime food and feed it out of your hand. So instead of feeding them in a bowl for breakfast and dinner or for their AM and PM meals, you just put that food in your bait bag and you use that food to train with for your engagement training. Now you can also use the word good in your engagement training. If your dog looks at you, you can say good, give them a piece of food. If you're using the word good, remember that's a duration marker. So once you say good and give them a piece of food, then you need to initiate taking a few steps to the left, a few steps to the right, a few steps forward, or a few steps backward. That way you're just changing up the context very slightly. Your dog should be following you, paying attention to you. They maintain that eye contact. You say good reward again, then you take a couple steps again. That's how you're gonna do that. All right. Rolling right into step number three. Remember, steps one, two, and three can be combined. So you can do your verbal marker work, you can do your engagement, your eye contact, your focus, and step number three, leash pressure, all at the same time. Now, with your leash pressure training, what you're doing is you're teaching your dog how to move with the leash. You're teaching your dog to move with the leash, not against the leash. All right. You should do this with a collar, and I prefer a fur saver training collar. You could use a martingale, you could use whatever collar you want, you could use a slip lead. Just don't use a harness for this because a harness is not going to deliver the leash pressure the correct way. And what you're gonna do, you're gonna take the leash, hold it right about your dog's shoulder level again to promote keeping all four paws on the ground, and you're just gonna gently put some pressure into the leash, gently pull on the leash. What your dog's gonna do when they feel that pressure is probably pull against it. So all you do is you keep that tension, just you know, uh you don't add tension, you don't take away tension, you just keep it there. Your dog's pulling against it, then all of a sudden they move forward with the pressure. One step, two steps, just moving their head. You say good, you reward. You say yes, you reward, you obviously release the pressure from the leash. You're gonna do this uh consistently until when you put a little bit of pressure on that dog uh on the collar, on the leash, that they're immediately moving with the leash and not against the leash. So once the verbal markers are solid, your dog is checking in voluntarily via your engagement and eye contact, and they're moving with the leash, not fighting against it. The phase one of your training is done. Now, phase two is where 90% of owners destroy their own training, and here's exactly how we're gonna combat that. Phase two is the mechanics of training, with step number four being the shaping of muscle memory. Remember, this is where 90% of owners break their own training. So, what we want to focus on is we're just teaching our dog the muscle memory they need to know for the obedience that we're teaching them. You don't need to throw in words yet, all right? So I'm gonna say don't say any words to your dog other than your verbal markers. You're gonna use your food lures, piece of food in your hand, you're gonna show your dog how to move into different obedience positions. I like to teach them the heel, the sit, the down, the stay, come command, and place command. Go through these commands. Show your dog how to move into these different positions. When your dog is going into a position as you lure them into it, you say good, you deliver a reward. You say yes, you let them chase your hand for a reward. If your dog is not moving into a position very easily, for example, if you're doing a down with your dog and your dog can't or won't or doesn't know how to lay all the way down, don't get frustrated. Lure a little bit. If your dog shows a little bit of movement into a down, good and reward. That's called successive approximation, rewarding your dog for baby steps of a total behavior. So if the down is what we want, but our dog can only go halfway down because they don't understand how to do a down or what a down is, that's okay. Good and reward for going halfway down, slowly increasing criteria for going all the way down as time goes on. Remember, your dog doesn't know English. That's why we're not saying any commands yet. We're just showing them with the lure what we want them to do. Your place is an elevated pet cot. That's my preference. You could also use a dog bed or something else, but an elevated pet cot is what I call place. Now, one thing to be aware of is that your dog doesn't know what place is. So we need to make a good association to the pet cot by rewarding our dog close to it, rewarding them for stepping on it, rewarding for getting on it, and then rewarding for laying down on it, which means we have to teach it down away from the pet cot first. So I like the pet cots because there's no gray area to them. It's a black and white boundary, they know when they're on versus off the cot, but make sure you take your time during the shaping of the muscle memory for the pet cot and uh uh uh as well. All right. Now, like I was saying earlier, successive approximation. A lot of people think that if their dog's not laying down all the way, that their dog's being stubborn. That's most likely not the case. The case is your dog doesn't understand what you want. So you're gonna need to move your hand in different ways. Sometimes you take your hand, show it to their nose with the you have your food in your hand, show it to their nose, move slowly down toward the ground. Sometimes you have to angle your hand back toward the dog's body as you go down toward the ground. Sometimes you have to angle the hand away from the dog's body as you go down. But like I said, if the dog's going halfway down, go ahead reward. They go three-quarters of the way down, go ahead reward them. Successive approximation until you complete the complete down. All right. Don't go to the next step in the training progression, step number five. Don't go to step number five until your dog can very easily move into all these positions. Heel, sit, down, stay, come, and place commands. If you need help with the mechanics of these positions, hop over to my YouTube channel, which is going to be in the link in the description below, for a bunch of videos where I show you how to do these individual behaviors. But now that the behaviors flow without a lure, once the dog is anticipating the movement before you can even finish, you start to do a movement and the dog's boom, smashing into the behavior very quickly. They're very comfortable with the behavior. That's your signal to press on to the next step in the training progression. And this is where we're gonna actually attach a command, a cue. We're gonna assign language to that movement pattern. So I'm gonna give you the exact sequence on how to do that. Step number five, assigning verbal commands. The formula for this, when you're doing it with your dog, remember how you just did all your lures to shape the muscle memory? Now you're just doing one thing before you lure. You're gonna say the command. So the formula is command, pause, lure, pause, the behavior is done, pause, mark, pause, reward. That's your formula. So for the sit, for example, we would say sit, we would take out our lure, we would lure the dog into a sit. The dog sits, we say good, we reward. That's basically all you're gonna do for all your commands, and you're gonna have to do this repetitiously over the course of a couple sessions, a couple days, until you can say that command and your dog's already moving into the behavior. Once you achieve that, now you're ready to go to the next step. But the problem is a lot of trainers, they're gonna stop right there and call the dog trained. A lot of owners are gonna get confused and they're gonna think that this is where they stop in their training. And that's why their dog falls apart the second that a distraction is present. So this is where we're taking our training to the next level by going into step number six. Step number six is gonna be a two-part system. It's gonna be number one, we're starting to reduce our reward schedule. So instead of rewarding our dog very often for the behaviors, we're gonna start rewarding more on a random schedule, which means if our dog does the behavior, sometimes we're going to reward them. Sometimes we're not going to reward them, right? We've done a bunch of rewarding up to this point. Now it's time to start reducing the food rewards. But the other thing we're doing in step number six is we're adding in leash corrections. We've taken all this time to teach our dog how to sit, how to down, how to do this, how to do that, right? Through our lures and our assigning verbal commands. We've taken time to do that. We've been fair. Our entire training progress process and progression is completely fair to the dog. But now we have to make sure our dog understands that when we ask you to do something, we do need you to do that. And that could be for the dog's safety, right? So, how do you do a leash correction? All you're gonna do is just do a quick pop and release of your leash. You don't need to exaggerate it, you don't need to do too much or too little, you do just enough to get your dog's attention, right? You have to make sure that the dog acknowledges the little pop and release on the leash, the leash correction, and they redirect and do what they're supposed to do. So, for example, if you ask your dog to sit and they don't sit, you say no, pop and release on the leash, your dog's like, oh, okay. And then they sit and you say good, and then you reward randomly, right? Remember, we're shifting to that random reward schedule. Now, this step I want you to take some time. Several sessions, several days, maybe a week or so. You need to make sure that in a bunch of different situations around your house, on your daily walks, in your yard, that your dog understands if you ask them to do something and they don't do it, they are going to be held accountable for that, right? And then you are also going to randomly reward them even after the correction for doing the right thing. This helps your dog understand how to process that correction and that the leash is just another line of communication. They don't really see it as a correction, they see it as a reminder, right? This is why we never correct a dog for behavior that hasn't been taught, right? We have to complete steps one through five before we can move on to the accountability phase and the leash correction phase. But now the dog has been taught. Now they understand the rules. Now we have to extend the communication beyond the leash because everybody wants their dog to be free and have the freedom to be a dog. But I need you to listen very closely for step number seven, because when you get step number seven wrong, this is where you could create an adverse association that you're trying to avoid through this whole process. So, step number seven is going to be remote collar conditioning, teaching your dog how to respond to an e-collar the same way that they respond to a leash, right? You want to make sure you get the association the correct way. So, first of all, when you're choosing an e-collar, you need to make sure that you're choosing an e-collar manufacturer that is a high quality uh system of the best technology and e-collars that's available today. That's why I use Dogtra myself. I only use Dogtra. Um, right now I've got my dog personally on the 280 X Pro, but they have a bunch of different models for different dogs. But dogtra models are e-collars, they work like a TENS unit, right? It's a sensation that your dog is going to feel. They've never felt that sensation before. So you're going to teach your dog how to interpret that sensation and how to respond to it properly. So I consider the e-collar an invisible leash. It's my way of communicating with the dog at a distance, right? Or, you know, in different situations. With that being said, the first thing I'm doing for e-collar conditioning is finding the lowest level that my dog can detect. So my dog's on a leash. I'm in my training area. I'm starting off on level one on the e-collar. I turn it to level one. I hit the uh the nick button, right? Or the momentary button. And I just go up one level at a time until I can tell my dog feels something and they're a little bit confused. Their ear might flick, their head might turn, they might pause real quick, look down to the ground, look, look around, like something confused them. When I see that, I know that my dog can feel it. They're confused by the sensation. They've never felt that before. Now I'm going to teach them how to respond to that sensation and interpret it and that it equals the leash in their brain, thus creating the invisible leash. Now there's a four-step sequence that I want you to follow when you're teaching the e-collar. And I always start off with the come command first, the recall command. And the reason I do that is because I want their default response to the e-collar to be to return to me. So the first thing I do is I hit the nick button, just a single push and release on the nick button. As soon as I do that, pause, then I say come. After I've done that several times and my dog seems to be understanding it properly, now I'm going to do the multiple nick right. Push the nick two, you know, two to three times. As soon as I'm done with that sequence, I pause, I say come. That way my dog's getting used to a little bit more sensation than they were with the regular nick, and they're still returning to me. And of course, when they return to me, I'm going to reward them. And I'm going to go back to a continuous reinforcement schedule for this in particular because I want a high rate of reinforcement while I'm teaching my dog about this new sensation. The next thing I'm going to be teaching them about is the continuous bump, which is a push and release of the continuous button. So I push and release the continuous button, pause, say come, looking for my dog to immediately turn and come to me. The difference between the nick and the bump is that the bump is a little bit longer duration, uh sensation of that button, right? Of that collar than the nick was. Right. So it's just a little bit more duration of the sensation, but I'm doing the same thing. Bump, pause, come, my dog turns, good reward, right? Now the final sequence is going to be pushing and holding the continuous button. So I'm waiting for my dog to be facing away from me. They're still on leash. As soon as they're facing away from me, I push and hold continuous. I say come while I'm holding it. My dog turns around, starts moving to me. The moment that they turn and are moving to me, I let go of the continuous good. Let them come to me, reward. That sequence, those four steps are very important to help your dog understand the sensation. Sometimes it takes one session, sometimes it takes multiple sessions, right? But what you're going to do once you've done that is then you're going to go through the phase where we call it leash or e-collar application, remote collar application, where what you're going to do is over the next couple of sessions, the next couple of days, is you're going to slowly associate the remote collar, the e-collar sensation to your leash. So let's say you go for a walk, you say heel, now your dog's walking next to you on your left side. If your dog goes out of position and needs a correction, what you're going to do is you're going to say no, bump on your e-collar, then tug on your leash every time in that order. And what that does is it over time is going to classically condition, it's going to teach your dog that the e-collar equals the leash. So you say no, pause, bump on the e collar, pause, tug on the leash. And the reason why there's a pause between each step in that sequence is because that pause between the uh parts of that sequence is needed to enable that association to take form and the current. Way. So now that the conditioning sequence is built, your dog is conditioned to the remote collar. The accountability loop is in place. Now we're going to bridge the gap to achieve full off-leash freedom. And this is a part that a lot of people skip. They think when they're done with the e-collar conditioning, they're ready to go off-leash, but you're not yet. We have to go through a couple things real quick. And that's step number eight, long line and light line work. So this is when you're going to take a longer leash, 15 feet, 30 feet. You can get some that are even longer, right? 60 uh 60 feet, right? And what you're going to do is you're going to get your dog used to the fact that they're going to be moving further away from you, and you're going to require the same behavior as when they were closer to you on the smaller leash. That's what a long line is. A light line is a leash, a light line. I put a very light carabiner on the end of it. That way I can attach it to my dog's leash, but it's not weighing down the leash at all. And I run my dog through obedience on leash and off-leash. I like to go to an area like a park, let my dog wander away from me and randomly call them back to me. If they don't come back, I follow the sequence. No, bump, tug on the leash. Follow that sequence until when I do that, I can bump on the collar and I don't need to leash tug because they're already returning and doing what they're supposed to do when I bump that collar. When your dog executes a flawless recall on the weightless paracord line with the collar bump, you have built a reliable invisible leash. Now we are ready to take that system into the real world. And we have a few more steps to wrap this up, which is going to be integration into daily life. So, first of all, step number nine: home and vehicle protocols. Never let a dog rehearse a behavior that you don't want long term. Every rehearsal strengthens that behavior. So you need to get your dog used to not rushing out of doors, right? Not countersurfing, not being chaotic in the car, not jumping. So again, for any of these behaviors, what you're going to do is say no, bump on the collar. Make sure your dog is responding appropriately. If your dog's making good decisions, good choices, or responding to corrections properly, good random reward. You're getting your home under control. You're getting your car under control. What I do in the car is an automatic downstay. So every time my dog gets in the car, I have just have them do a downstay. What I do at the house, I don't let dogs rush out of doors. I have them wait at the door until they're asked to come out or asked to come in. I make sure they can go to their place from different areas in the house. So you run through all these drills with your dog for your home and vehicle protocols. When the home and vehicle are under control, now there's a few more things that a lot of people are getting wrong as soon as they go outside of the home and outside of the vehicle. We want to make sure we have good socialization and resocialization. This is step 10 of our training progression. Socialization is giving our dog positive experiences and close proximity to new people, places, and things. We're not forcing interactions. So we want to make sure that we can take our dog out to the farmer's market and they're being neutral to everything around them. If my dog does something they should not be doing, I say no, I bump on the collar. If my dog does something they should be doing, or something that is a good thing to be doing, or they're giving me eye contact, I say good and I randomly reward them. So this is something that we're going to be consistently doing, especially at this phase in training. Environmental neutrality is the goal. The dog is calm and public. Now we're proofing it. And this is the step that separates a dog from a dog who knows a command to the dog that's just actually performing it. Now we're going to be doing distraction proofing in step number 11. And a lot of times, step numbers 10, 10 is the socialization and resocialization, and 11, which is your distraction proofing, can be combined. So you're going to start off your distraction training in low distraction environments, like a park, right? That's going to be your ideal low distraction environment. And all you're doing is you're going there and you're making sure that your dog can still perform the behaviors that you've taught it. The heel, the sit, the down, the stay, the come, all those behaviors. You're making sure your dog can do it at different places. So you go to the low-key park. Once the park is too easy, then you're going to go to a moderate distraction area. That could be a busy park, that could be a hardware store, something like that. Once the moderate distraction areas are too easy, you're going to push to the heavy distraction area. That could be the farmer's market. That could be a busier store, right? These kind of things. You're going to add distance to triggers. If you're finding something that your dog is triggered by, whether it's a dog park, a certain person, uh, a bike, for example, you're going to work your threshold to those triggers to make sure that your dog can get as close as possible without having any adverse behaviors. Following all the protocols we've talked about, which mainly foundationally your protocols at this point in your training are if your dog's doing the right thing, say good and randomly reward them. If your dog's doing the wrong thing or something they shouldn't be doing, you say no and provide an effective correction on your remote collar. Right? Now, once you've done all of this, your distraction proofing is done. Your dog can hold behavior, makes good decisions in the real world. Now, the last question, the final step, how do you maintain all of this? How do you keep this? And that's the final step, step number 12, integration and maintenance. What you practice stays sharp. What you neglect will degrade. So at this point, you're just transitioning your training to something that you can practice every day, right? You're not graduating from training, you graduate into maintenance. And maintenance of training is just training that fits into your daily life. So, what does that look like for you? You can let me know in the comments below. For me and a lot of the people that I work with, the easiest things that we can do to help us maintain training are doing training on our walks, incorporating training in our daily lives. When I come into the house with my dog, send them to place. Let them go hang on on place for a little bit. If I have somebody coming over to the house, when people are coming over, have my dog on place for a little bit. If I'm on a walk, have my dog heal. Randomly ask them to down, randomly ask them to stay, walk away from my dog, call them to me. Sometimes go out to an area where I can let my dog be a dog, be off-leash, run around, sniff around, randomly call them to me. So you're just incorporating your training drills to maintain all the behaviors you've worked so hard to achieve in your daily life as easy as possible. So let me know what you guys think about that. Let me know if it helps you. We do have a free six-step training guide. What I did is I took all 12 of these steps and I consolidated them into six steps for a quick training guide reference that you can use at home. That's for free. You can get it in the link in the description down below. You can also get my book, The Ultimate Lease Training Manual, down in the link in the description below. And if you want our help, Canon Revolution Dog Training, we can help you with leash reactivity, threshold rushing, household chaos, behavior modification, off lease training, whatever you need. We can help you with virtual training, board and train, private lessons. You can just let us know in the link below what we can help you with. And until next time, this is Pack Dog Podcast out.