Mistakes You Don’t Have To Make When Training Your Dog

#2 Expecting Too Much, Too Soon

You cannot train a dog in a week, or even a month. Dog training requires hours of practice which is why it’s so important that you and your dog enjoy the journey, and celebrate the milestones you pass along the way, rather than focusing on the destination. 

It’s important that you don’t get despondent if you don’t make much progress in a particular training session or on a particular day. Instead try to step back and look on this as long-term project. 

If you really need an estimate of how long it will take you to go from an untrained (or poorly trained) dog to a fully trained dog, then you need to think in terms of months, or seasons. Rather than days or weeks. 

#3 Delaying Or Even Forgetting Reinforcement

I was watching a homesteading youtuber interact with their dog the other day and it struck me how little reinforcement they gave their dog for anything. And of course the dog was slow to respond and quick to wander off. 

You can see this all around you. Many people fail to reinforce their dogs effectively. And yet reinforcement is essential for learning to take place

We all need reinforcement. You probably know why and understand the principles that underpin successful dog training. But it’s very easy to let reinforcement slip. If your dog comes when you call them, that’s great, why bother with treats or toys?

Well you do need to bother, because trained responses are not fixed, they degrade over time unless regularly reinforced. And it’s always better to reinforce too much than too little. 

#4 Too Many Breaks In Training

We’re all busy, and life gets in the way. It’s fine to miss a day’s training because you don’t feel well, or have something more important to do. 

It’s also fine to miss two or three days occasionally. But if you find your non-training days are starting to outnumber your training days, then you need to take action. You may need to go back to an easier stage in training, and start over. 

This mistake is more likely to creep in if you’ve been spending too long on your training sessions. Or pressed on to a new level when you haven’t really mastered the previous one. We’ll look at those mistakes next!

#5 Spending Too Long On Training Sessions

Long training sessions are necessary sometimes when you get on to advanced training. But in early training they can be very demotivating. 

It’s much harder to end a long session on a high. The tendency is to stop when you’re not making much headway, whereas you should be stopping while you are still having fun and making progress. 

If your five minute sessions have been getting longer for a while, and especially if you are training for twenty minutes or more at a time. It’s time to revise your plan and look at dividing your goals into smaller steps

#6 Moving On Before You Are Ready

It’s important to make sure you get your foundations right before you build on them. That usually means spending a lot more time on the very early stages of training than you might want to do. 

The urge to press on to more fun activities is very understandable. But skipping ahead too quickly can lead to holes in your training that are difficult to patch up later. 

The answer is to go back a step. Spend a couple of sessions with your dog practicing easy skills that you know they will be able to succeed with. Then review your plan and move forwards again a bit more carefully. 

#7 Being Unwilling To Backtrack

This is a common mistake. Going back to an earlier stage in training can be a tough decision to make and I understand why you don’t want to do this! But I want you to give it a go.

Breaking your training exercises down into short games makes backtracking so much easier. 

It also makes it easier to see how far back you need to go. 

When you do go back a step or two, you will almost always make rapid progress and find that doing so revives your flagging motivation. 

It’s easy to underestimate just how demotivating failure is, and how a small success can turn things around. Never be afraid to backtrack, it always improves your training sessions. 

#8 Being Unwilling To Move On

This is the opposite side of the same coin. This is where you get stuck at a particular stage and can’t quite convince yourself that you and your dog are ready to move on. 

I find people tend to divide quite evenly between the ‘sticking at one thing for too long’ camp, and the ‘pressing on too quickly’ camp. I definitely have a tendency to fall into the former group and sometimes need to give myself a push to move forwards

A good rule of thumb is that if your dog is succeeding on 9 out of 10 repetitions, and has done so in more than one session and on at least two consecutive days, then you’re done. And it’s time to move on. 

# 9 Putting Obedience Before Social Skills

It’s impressive to watch a little puppy ‘sit’ and ‘lie down’ on cue. But if that same puppy cannot cope with being left alone, is scared of traffic, and hates meeting visitors, you are focusing on the wrong things. 

A dog needs to be equipped to function without fear in our human world, and especially with puppies, spending time on social skills should always take precedence. 

Obedience training can wait, and in any case, the lack of social skills will interfere with obedience training in a big way as you get further down the line. 

#10 Not Reinforcing Frequently Enough

This is a really common mistake when adding duration or distance to a previously taught cue. 

You’ll see people reinforce their dog perfectly when teaching the heel position initially.  Then all but abandon reinforcements as they start walking the dog around on a leash. 

One treat every ten or twenty steps for a dog that has only just learned the heel cue is a passport to leash pulling. 

Keep those rewards coming fast and furiously until your dog can hold the heel position for a few steps over and over again, without thinking or contemplating moving in front of you. 

And be very careful to reduce the frequency of reinforcement very gradually

#11 Reinforcing The Wrong Behavior

This is a very easy mistake to make. I did this recently when working with my husband’s terrier Polly. 

I was trying to reinforce her for holding onto a toy, marking and treating for tiny increases in that duration. 

But she didn’t understand that I wanted more duration. She thought I wanted her to hold the toy higher and higher. And within a few repetitions she was throwing the toy into the air instead of holding it in her mouth. 

The cause of this issue is usually inaccurate marking. And if it happens to you, then you need to back up a step and reinforce the behavior you had before the error occurred (in Polly’s case picking up the toy and dropping it on cue, instead of throwing it in the air). Then move forwards again taking care to only reinforce the behavior you want.  

You’ll be able to read more about Polly’s adventures with retrieving when our FitFetch course is launched in 2025

#12 Inaccurate Marking

In modern training you get what you mark. If you mark a dog as it lets go of a toy, then you’ll get more releases of that toy. Even if you were trying to mark a hold. 

The answer to this problem is usually to mark early. And to do this a lot, because training is a numbers game and you need the times you mark accurately (enabling the dog to win) to outnumber the number of times you mark inaccurately (thus causing the dog to fail)

#13 Training When You Are Upset Or Overtired

Training requires good observation and concentration to minimize inaccurate marking and other mistakes that are inevitable when your concentration lapses. 

For that reason you may find that training doesn’t go so well for you, if you are overtired or upset. 

This isn’t set in stone, and for some people, training is actually a good way to ‘unwind’ but you do need to be mindful of the risk of making a lot of mistakes. 

If you are feeling a bit stressed, it’s probably a good idea to choose games or training exercises that are familiar and easy to get right. And leave the more challenging stuff for when you are more rested. 

#14 Having Too Many Different Goals

I often meet pet parents that are getting into difficulties because they are trying to teach puppies and young dogs too many different things at once. 

I understand that you don’t want to neglect your dog’s recall while you work on sit-stay, but it’s important that you don’t overwhelm yourself in the process. 

If you want to train different skills concurrently, break them down and divide them into individual games.  Don’t switch to another skill until you have thoroughly mastered a simple game in the skill you are training today. 

Our core skills course shows you how to combine training several skills concurrently, but you need to focus on a single goal in each session, before moving on to the next goal. 

#15 Using Low Value Rewards

Reinforcements are anything that increase the likelihood of a behavior happening again. If the rewards that you are using in your training sessions are not sufficiently valuable to your dog then the behavior you want to reinforce will not increase. 

It’s important to remember that we don’t get to decide what is reinforcing to our dogs. They do. 

If your dog doesn’t find your dry old dog biscuits exciting, those biscuits will not help you train your dog. 

It’s also important to break out the big guns when tasks are more challenging. High value rewards are more motivating and motivation is important when you are learning something new!

#16 Adding Duration Too Fast

Increasing duration too quickly is a common mistake in early stay training and heelwork. Think in terms of percentages, not in units of time. 

If your dog will reliably sit in their basket for ten minutes, then a one minute (ten percent) increase is not unreasonable, and has a good chance of success. 

But if your dog has only learned to sit in their basket for thirty seconds then a one minute increase is almost certainly doomed to failure. Instead, think in terms of ten percent, or in this case, three seconds. 

#17 Failing To Establish A Routine

There are so many reasons ‘not to train’ your dog today. So many important demands on your time. This makes your precious dog training slot vulnerable. 

A great way to resist all those interruptions and demands is to establish a regular daily routine and commit to it. 

That way family members will learn to respect your training slot, and you’ll find it easier to say ‘I’ll help you when I am done training’

Unless you make training a priority and a habit, it’s all too easy to put it aside for today. And again tomorrow. And before you know it, a week has gone by without spending time training your dog.

#18 Punishing Your Dog

We tend to think of punishment as something that is painful, or very frightening. But in dog training there are many ways to accidentally punish behavior that we actually want to increase. 

In the same way that reinforcement increases behavior, punishment is anything that decreases behavior. 

For example, maybe you ask your dog to sit before you put their collar on. But if your dog doesn’t like the smell of the brand new collar you just bought for them, then you are effectively (albeit accidentally) punishing the sit. 

Another very common example is the pet parent that only calls their dog at the end of a walk when they want to attach a leash and take them home. Going home is a punishment for the dog because they’d rather stay out doors and chase butterflies. And so their recall gets worse and worse. 

The solution is to practice many times when success is assured, and to make sure the wins outweigh the fails. 

#19 Rehearsing Mistakes

Rehearsing mistakes often comes from using a cue, when the chance of the dog giving the correct response is low. 

If you call your dog once and they don’t come, that is one mistake. But if you keep calling, maybe five or ten times, that is five or ten mistakes. And it’s going to take a lot more than five or ten successes to outweigh the effect of those mistakes. 

Instead, it’s important to rehearse successes. So to spend more time practicing with cues that you know your dog will respond correctly to, and less time challenging your dog with cues in situations where they may fail. 

It’s especially important not to rehearse mistakes when you cannot prevent accidental reinforcement

#20 Failing To Prevent Accidental Reinforcement

Accidental reinforcement happens when a dog helps themselves to a reward that you had not planned for them. It is especially damaging when it happens after the dog has given an incorrect response to your cue

Using recall as an example again, if you give your recall cue in your hallway where there are no toys or food or anything pleasant that the dog can use to reinforce themselves, then the chances of them giving the wrong response (moving away from you for example) are low. And if they do give the wrong response, there will be no benefit to the dog. So the wrong response won’t be reinforced. 

Outdoors in the big wide world it’s a very different matter, and giving the wrong response to a recall cue often results in reinforcement for the dog. Whether that reinforcement is chasing squirrels or simply sniffing a leaf, it is still very harmful to your recall. 

This is one reason why modern dog trainers often use a long line when training outdoors to begin with. This enables them to prevent the dog self-reinforcing if they give the incorrect response to a cue. 

#21 Adding Cues Too Soon

In modern dog training we add a cue when a dog is repeatedly offering a behavior in a training context. So if your dog will throw themselves into a ‘down’ to earn a click and a treat, every time you get out your treats and clicker, its time to give that ‘down’ a name. 

In that sense a cue is a label that we attach to a behavior so that the dog understands what the behavior is called. And when we have attached that label enough times, the dog will offer the behavior when it hears the label. At that point the label has become a cue. 

If we add the cue too soon we risk labelling the wrong behavior, or an incomplete behavior. So if you add a ‘sit’ cue for example, before adding some duration to your ‘sit’, the dog with think that the label ‘sit’ means ‘touch your butt briefly to the ground and then race around waiting for a treat. 

The solution is to establish a behavior thoroughly before adding a cue. Make sure your dog will offer a ‘sit’ or a ‘down’ or whatever else you are teaching, repeatedly, and maintain that position for a few seconds until they hear your release cue, before you give it a name. 

#22 Failing To Use A Release Cue

This is probably the most common mistake I see people make when I am out and about. If you tell your dog to sit, and don’t tell them when they can get up again, then you are teaching them to disobey you. 

There are a number of cues where duration is implicit in that cue.  Positions such as ‘sit’ and ‘down’ are examples. These cues have duration therefore they have both a beginning, and an end. So is ‘heel’ which is also a position, albeit a moving one. 

To avoid this mistake simply teach your dog a release cue. In early training a clicker doubles up as a marker and a release. Later when you no longer need the clicker, you need to teach your dog a different release cue, and make sure you use it, every time.

#23 Not Engaging The Dog Before Giving Cues

You wouldn’t try to engage a friend in a serious conversation while they are watching their favorite movie, and you wouldn’t try to teach your five year old to read while they are playing hopscotch with the kid next door.  Yet we do this with dogs all the time. It’s important that you don’t attempt to initiate a training session when the dog’s attention is elsewhere. 

Instead, you need to ‘engage’ your dog first. Sometimes just assembling your training gear, getting out your treat pot and clicker for example, will be sufficient. But as distractions are added, it becomes increasingly important to specifically spend a minute or two engaging your dog before you try to teach them something new.

To do this you can start to feed a short stream of tiny treats, then introduce gaps into the stream where you ask for something simple that you know the dog can achieve. That might be a hand touch, or simply some eye contact. 

Once you have your dog’s full attention, then its time to begin working on your new skill!

#24 Taking Bad Advice

We’ve all done this at times, and that’s because it’s very difficult to make a judgement on the value of advice when you are not very experienced yourself. 

The solution is usually to stick to advice from trusted sources, and that means knowing who to listen to. 

I think you’ll find this article: What Matters Most When Choosing A Dog Trainer, helpful here. The information in that article applies to any dog training information source, not just to professional dog trainers that offer classes in your local area. 

#25 Trying To Train A Dog That Is Over The Threshold

When we describe a dog as ‘over the threshold’ we are talking about a dog that is so emotionally aroused they are not capable of learning. In many cases they are not capable of hearing, eating, or any activity other than focusing all their attention on the source of their arousal. 

I’m using the word arousal rather than excitement because although many over the threshold dogs are in a state of extreme excitement, it doesn’t accurately describe all dogs. A common  type of over threshold arousal in dogs with hunting or chasing instincts is a state of hyper focused prey drive. 

A dog in this state may be trembling with a rigid body posture as they fix their gaze on the object of their attention. Some dogs get like this around small pets.

Another source of extreme arousal can be fear. A reactive dog may be far too fearful to process any information other than that there is something approaching that they fear. 

Trying to train a dog in this state of hyper arousal is pointless. They cannot hear you or learn anything from you. The answer is to first bring their level of arousal down by moving further from the source. 

#26 Expecting The Same Standard In A New Location

Changing locations has a far more dramatic effect on a dog’s ability to discriminate between cues and respond to them, than most people realise. Even moving from one room in your home to another room will have an impact. And of course, moving outdoors will have a much bigger impact on your dog’s ability to learn

The way we deal with this reality is to simplify what we are asking the dog to do, until they have adjusted and are responding well to their new environment. 

So when you move your dog closer to any source of distraction, whether that’s a different room in your home, or children playing outdoors, make sure you simplify. Ask the dog for something really easy that you know they can achieve. Make the duration of tasks much shorter. And get them responding to easy cues reliably before attempting to raise the bar. 

#27 Bribing Instead Of Reinforcing

Showing a big piece of chicken to a dog and begging them to come back is bribing, not reinforcing. It can occasionally be a way to ‘manage’ a dog but it isn’t a way to train them. 

Make sure you only use food for reinforcement, not as a bribe, because bribes only work until something more attractive shows up. And your piece of chicken is worthless when there are squirrels to chase. 

Reinforcement on the other hand changes behavior and creates trained responses that can be strengthened through proofing until they work anywhere. 

The only exception would be when we use food as a lure, to manipulate the dog’s position or movement pattern so that we can mark and reinforce that. 

#27 Getting Stuck On A Lure

A lure can be a useful way of manoeuvring a dog into a position or getting them to turn in a circle. But don’t make the common mistake of getting stuck on a lure by using it too often. If you use a lure repeatedly, you can get end up with a dog that  wont carry out the manoevre unless they can see the lure. 

The solution is to use the lure two or three times then attempt the movement without it a few times. Revert to the lure briefly and attempt without it again frequently until the dog figures it out. 

#28 Letting The Dog Fail Too Often

Dogs that fail too often, give up trying. How many times is too often depends on the dog’s temperament and previous training experience.

Some dogs are incredibly persistent and can be allowed to fail ten or more times in a row without giving up. Most are less resilient to failure. A good rule of thumb is to ensure the dog succeeds four times out of every five attempts.

If your dog if failing more often than this then you need to make the task easier for them

#29 Not Letting The Dog Fail

Never failing is not an option. Your dog is going to fail sometimes and they need to be able to deal with this. In addition, when we shape new behaviors failure is essential at times so that we can encourage the dog to try something new. 

Worrying too much about trying to keep the dog from failing will lead to you getting stuck on simple tasks and not making much progress. Which is boring for you and boring for your dog. So don’t be afraid to let your dog fail occasionally. Just make sure that the successes outnumber the failures

#30 Poisoning Your Cue

Repeatedly using a cue without ensuring that the correct response follows that cue, will make it very hard to progress in your training.

And if you repeatedly enable your dog to be reinforced after giving an incorrect response to a cue, that cue will eventually become poisoned. In other words it will not work as a cue, will be largely ignored by the dog, and will be extremely resistant to re-training. 

This happens all the time with recall, where people call their dogs when there is no chance of the dog responding correctly and a high chance of the dog being reinforced for doing something else. From chasing other dogs, to simply ignoring you. 

Often, the simplest way to deal with a poisoned cue is to teach the response you want the dog to make, using a new and completely different cue. So if Rover no longer comes to ‘Rover Come!’ You are probably better off teaching Rover to recall to a whistle, than trying to retrain Rover’s recall with the same old cue.

Focus On The Successes

Recognizing our errors is important, so that we can prevent them happening again. But try not to dwell on mistakes, we all make them. Just put the solution into place and move on.

If any of these mistakes resonate with you, I hope you find the solutions helpful. I do add to this list from time to time, so check back soon. And let me know in the comments below if you think I’ve missed something out!