AJ Vargas argues that consistency is the single most important factor in dog training. He explains that trainers must read behavior, adjust plans, and mark small improvements rather than abandoning a program when difficulties arise. Experience lets you know when a change is justified.
Chapters
All right, I'm giving this to you guys. This is that nugget. And what I mean by nugget, that gold piece that you can keep in your hand or your pocket and spend it whenever you get into a bind, right? That's your savings account. I want to give you this little golden nugget, and this is the number one thing we do here to get the results that we get. All right, let you think about that for a moment. What's the number one thing? Come on, someone tell me. See, I want you guys just thinking, right? Because training is much more than just doing. It's most about thinking. It's thinking when you do things, it's thinking when you're in the midst of training, or when I'm reading the behavior and I gotta adjust my training plan or what I thought was my training plan. But the number one thing we do here that reaps the results that we achieve. And now this crosses all the lines. This crosses civilian training. This crosses the lines of handler training, trainer training. I mean, you name it, all the courses we have. There's the number one thing we do to achieve the results that we get. Any guesses? Put them in the comments. You can Tell me later if you got it, whatever you want to do. So I'm sure I'll see you around somewhere, right? But the number one thing we do— and take it, it's that golden nugget— is consistency. Simple, right? We can come up with all these miraculous things that we can do and all these little key terms that we want to give them, all these little training techniques that we want to do, but Remember this, training— I mean, behavior modification hasn't changed for over a century. I say this often, I didn't invent anything. I'm just BASF, right? I just made what people do better. But what I figured out throughout this time was it's just about consistency. We don't abandon our training plans when a student's having problems. We don't just abandon everything. Now, we may take smaller steps and shorter leaps, but at the end of the day, we keep taking steps forward. And as long as we're seeing progress by one step, no matter how big that step is, we're still gaining progress. That's what we lose, right? Because people want to chase this shiny object and that shiny object and this shiny object But at the end of the day, we stay consistent. Once you start building consistency in, in a behavior or in a routine for a dog, they learn and their head clears up and they're able to then begin to process, even if they're having turmoil. And I say turmoil in the sense of their head is all over the place, they don't know what to do or how to react to a certain stimuli. At the end of the day, we just Condense all that, take away all the traffic, give them something to focus on, something very small, and get them a win and continue to build on that win with consistency. Just because the dog has a little bit of adversity to something or student has a little bit of adversity to something, we don't abandon the ship. We stay the course. I think that's really where experience comes in. A lot of new trainers may go, oh, this is not working. But what they fail to do is they fail to mark the small improvements. And again, as long as you're making improvements, you're making progress. And so stay consistent with what you're doing, whether it's at home with your pet, whether it's a handler working through a problem, whether it's a trainer working through a problem. Don't be so quick to abandon ship. Experience And the more experience you have will begin to then tailor those responses on when you should try something new. But always have a factual reason on why you're going to try something new. Just don't try something. And that's the problem with the internet. And I'm like, if anybody knows me, they'll know that I was very against releasing things like this because I don't want anybody to take these things as the end-all be-all. This is what I do with every single dog, because you have to get the experience in order to recognize certain behaviors and certain traits and certain things that the dog is telling you through their behavior that I read, that tells me through my experience on when I need to change or when something's not working. But most importantly, this little nugget I gave you earlier is stay consistent. Consistency wins. If you consistently let your dog disobey you, they will consistently disobey you. If you consistently don't manipulate the environment and hold the dog true to teach them, it's no different than teaching a kid how to tie their shoes, right? We make it very simple, put them in the parameters to do it, and we don't let them deviate. Once they learn it, then we can start loosening up the reins a little bit. It's the same thing with a dog. Stay consistent. Stay consistent.
