Be Better Balanced: When Fast Is Good - a podcast by Ty Brown

In this post, I’d like to talk about the speed with which you train your dog. This morning I was working with a client whose dog is learning some service dog work in public. The dog is young—only about seven months—so she isn't fully ready to take on her job just yet. She’s been coming in for about a month, and today her owners saw her working for the first time since she started training. Their comment? “I can’t believe how different she is in just a month!”

For an exercise, we took the dog went into a giant, very busy thrift store that was full of all sorts of distractions: tons of people, weird smells, slippery floors. It was one of the dog’s first times being handled by her new owner. All these things (young dog, new handler, distracting setting) would typically converge against you in your efforts to have a well-trained and obedient dog, but she did phenomenally well! There were areas that could be improved, of course, but the owner thought she was great.

This incident reminded me that balanced or stabilized training is faster—and that faster can often mean good. If you juxtapose balanced training—a type of training which uses positive motivation combined with proper correction—to the new school of “pure positivity” training, you’ll see that balanced training moves faster. That’s because when all you’re doing is offering your dog treats, you need to work at a very long threshold from distractions. For example, if you’re using treats without corrections to get your dog to go into a store, it might take you many months to get there.

Here’s how a “positive training” situation might work: you take the dog a hundred feet from the entrance to the store. Your dog sees people and is super excited, but you need to try to keep his interest. He’s not excited about treats when he’s that close to so many people! So you have to go back to a hundred and ten feet. Then you get down to a hundred, then ninety. If you’re trying to fix your dog’s behavior at the door, you might need to do tons of repetitions far away from the doorbell, gradually get closer, and eventually reach a point where your dog is comfortable with knocking. If your dog is aggressive when he sees something two hundred feet away, then you have to start at two hundred and five feet and slowly work your way down.

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