How to Train Any Dog Using This Proven Formula

You know, there's this really simple formula that will help you understand modern balanced dog training, and today I'm going to teach it to you. But before we can do that, we first have to confront the elephant in the room, and that's to understand that dog training is a practical endeavor. It's as much about art as it is about science, and that art part, well, it can't be rushed. You have to get your hands on lots of dogs. You have to actually do the practical work. But before you do that, you've got to understand what that practical work is. You've understand the science. Now what we see in our industry is there's lots of different ways people come to understand that, right? Some is not at all, and they just get their hands on dogs, they put the cart before the horse, and the dog suffers because of it. Other ways is to sit in a boring, boring, boring classroom in front of a PowerPoint presentation and just read references and hear someone cite studies. I'm not going to do either of those things because like I said, there's this formula to modern balanced dog training, and if you understand that when you can apply that, when you can think about that stuff in the moment, well, dog training actually then becomes really simple. If this is our first time meeting, hello, my name is Pat Stewart and I'm a dog trainer. I've been at this for about a decade since I left the army, which actually was the only job that I've really had as an adult. I work within a pretty broad spectrum of the industry. I do everything from in-home behavior modification of people's pets all the way up to training and supplying special forces military working dogs and lots of slices of that pie in between. The thing I love to do the most overwhelmingly what I enjoy is training people. I'm really fucking good at passing on the information that I have hard fought for over the last 10 years to other people. And the thing that I love to train the most is sport dogs. I love the idea of regular everyday people doing really cool things with their dog. Okay, now our introductions are out of the way, let me run you through the formula I promised you I'd tell you all about. So we need to first motivate, then we have to communicate, and then we have to coach our dogs. Why is motivation so important. Motivation is the reason that your dog will buy in on the session. And we know that dogs move towards pleasant things, things that they like, and they move away from pain and discomfort. That's the binary function of motivation. We can get more fancy with motivation and we can start to call it operant conditioning. And with operant conditioning, it's how we control behaviours. We can, via reinforcement, both of our Rs here, we can increase the frequency and likelihood of a behaviour. It's paying the dog for having done the thing. Via punishment, we can say to Hey, don't do that again. And we can decrease the frequency and likelihood of a behaviour. When we are giving these inputs to the dog, whether it's a towards or an away motivation, there is direct and indirect reinforcers. Direct reinforcers are where the dog is just following the thing. If you're luring the dog, that's what you're doing. And when the dog finally gets to the thing, it finds itself in the behaviour. An indirect reward or reinforcer is where we say to the dog like, hey man, I need you to do something for this payment that's over here. Disengage from this, go do the thing. When we do this, that gives us different outcomes in the dog's mind. The dog will think differently about the behavior depending on how the reinforcer relates to the behavior that we're trying to teach the dog. The other thing that comes into this category is reward delivery and placement. The way that you give the dog the reinforcer will set it up for the next rep and make it think about the way it's going to do that same behavior next time. That's motivation. We have to understand that. Next thing we want to do is now that we have a properly motivated dog that we know how we can manipulate the behaviours of, we have to begin to communicate with that dog. And understanding classical conditioning is the key to doing that. Classical conditioning is the pairing of signals where a dog goes, "Oh, this leads to that, leads to that. I can start to predict things and learn." There's a hierarchy of signals. We have to be careful about the way that we pair things together. How do we move our body as we use our voice, as we provide touch and stimulus to the dog? All of those those things a dog thinks about slightly differently than us. And so we have to do that from the dog's perspective. We need to remember the power of jackpotting. Sometimes that one rep where you give the full payment, that can be worth its weight in gold. And we also need to remember that in order to get a behaviour to go away, extinction is not just for dinosaurs. Behaviours that go unreinforced go extinct. When we understand those things, we are into communication, and then we can use this motivation to tell the dog when they're doing the right thing. The way that we can tell a dog that it's doing the right thing is via the learning pyramid of positive reinforcement, where we reinforce with every rep, then we go intermittent, and our goal is to get rid of having to use any form of reinforcer at all. We have another form of reinforcement, negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is a discomfort that compels you to action, and we can teach dogs to do the same thing via a, a constant discomfort that compels them to action initially,, and then we can go to a variable schedule of that and ultimately get rid of it altogether. Finally, what we have when we're under communication is we can turn what was punishment here, where we talked about in terms of motivation, we can now communicate with punishment just as we can communicate with reinforcement. And we can tell the dog, hey, I like that. I like what you're doing, keep going. Or, hey, I don't like that. Don't do that again. That's not in your interest. When we really understand motivation, when we really have a way of communicating with the dog, we fuse those two things together and we go onto our heading of how we actually coach. This is the final stage of the formula. Deep practice is how we train dogs to do things via successful repetitions that pay attention to errors. They fix them and they move on. That's what deep practice is. And of course, why would we restrict ourselves to nothing but positive reinforcement? Why would we restrict ourselves to nothing but negative reinforcement? We're gonna fuse those whole things together and we're gonna understand how to play in both of those spaces to maximally motivate the dog. But sometimes dogs dogs get things wrong. There's lots of ways that we can fix those things that dogs get wrong, the way that we can communicate to them that they've done the wrong thing. And we have to have an intelligent way of doing that, of mixing up between whether we use negative reinforcement or punishment and deciding on which one of those is going to create the level of understanding that we want the dog to have whilst also aligning with our ethics and how we actually want to treat the dog. As ridiculous as it seems, and to rush through it that quick probably is a bit ridiculous, that actually is the formula to modern balanced dog training. If you understand each one of those things with the right level of detail necessary, you understand modern balanced training. And I don't care which trainer you want to talk about. It could be the world champion of whatever sport you like, or it could be just the local guy in your area. If they are successful, they are working within that formula because there is no other way to do it. Now, the tricky part is understanding and actioning all of that. You've got the formula, you've got the headings, The next step is to really understand the detail that goes under each one of those headings. How you gonna do that? The good news is it's actually gonna be really easy because all you gotta do is click the link in the description of this video. There's just one link and it's gonna take you to a page on my website where you can make a completely free account and get access to a 1-hour video called The Overview. And The Overview is that formula I just explained in much more detail. And within the free section of my website, you'll see tons of content heaps of information, practical demonstrations, and it's the stuff that I just can't bring myself to charge anyone for. It's the stuff that I think that everybody who places their hands on dogs should know. So jump into the description of this video, click that link, make a completely free account, and get started on your measured, calculated, and successful dog training journey today.