January is National Train Your Dog Month, sponsored by the Association of Pet Dog Trainers. If you have any room left on your resolutions list, perhaps you can add one more: train your dog for five minutes a day. Believe it or not, mere minutes a day can make a huge difference in your dog’s education and responsiveness.
So how can five minutes help? Well to start with, if you are not doing any daily training, five minutes is already MORE than you were doing! And five minutes is easy to commit to.
The cool thing about positive reinforcement training is that it does a lot more than simply teach the dog a behavior. When you work positively with your dog, you do two other really important things.
- You strengthen the relationship between you and your dog, and
- You create a communication system between you and your dog
Relationship and communication are the pillars of effective, long-lasting dog training. It’s actually pretty easy to teach your dog to sit. Getting them to sit around distractions and when you need them to? Not so easy.
Here are two tips for integrating this valuable practice into your days:
Tip #1: A handful will do
You’re already going to feed your dog once, or more likely, twice a day. At mealtime, take one handful of food out of your dog’s bowl. Before feeding, ask for a few sits and downs or fun tricks that your dog already knows. When you’ve fed out that handful of kibble, your training session is complete. Voila! It’s really that simple.
Keep this up for a week and you may be shocked at how much training progress you can make with just a few handfuls of kibble. (Now, of course, when you get into the habit of training for just a few minutes, you might even be inspired to train a little longer on some days. And hey, that’s cool too!)
Tip #2: Using Real Life Rewards
Another easy way to sneak some training into your busy life is to use real life rewards, which are every day you already do things for your dog. You let them out, you let them in. You take them for walks, you feed them and you give them treats. Those things that your dog wants? Those are natural reinforcers that are built right into your day. You can ask for simple (or complicated!) behaviors, and then reinforce your dog’s good behavior by offering that activity you were going to do anyway.
Examples:
- Before going out the front or back door: ask for a sit
- Before coming out of the crate: ask for lie down
- Before jumping out of the car: ask for a stay
- Before feeding dinner: ask for a stay
- Before any of these: ask for a cute trick like paw or spin — can your dog focus enough in the moment to do one of their tricks?
When you make use of your existing routines, it takes virtually no additional time to throw some training into the mix. It DOES require some extra brain power, so you do need to plan ahead. Think about it right now: what is ONE time during your normal routine that you could add a bit of extra training?
Using real-life rewards is also helpful because you are doing the training and the rehearsal right during the situations where you’d like to your dog to perform. Plus, during the course of the day, you can end up asking your dog to “practice” behaviors 10 or 15 times and the result is a really polite dog.
So this January, steal a tiny bit of time from your day to train your dog. Can you really see a difference in your dog’s behavior when you train for only a few minutes a day? I truly mean it when I say that you will be amazed.
Originally published by ArlNow.com, January 2016. Updated November 2025.
