Introduction
In my last post, I talked a bit about the different methods available to us when we’re training tricks. I wanted to emphasise the importance of breaking down complex behaviours into their component pieces, so that each element can be trained separately and then “chained” together. I hope you enjoyed it!
In this installment I want to discuss what happens when your training doesn’t go quite to plan. Sometimes we make up step-by-step training plans only to get stuck halfway through. Or, we reach the end of the plan and the outcome just isn’t quite right. Hopefully I can shed some light on how to break through these barriers to achieve the results that you wanted.
Choosing and changing your training plan
When we’re training complex tricks, we need to have a step-by-step training plan to move through. You may think up the plan for yourself, find a guide online or through a trainer. It doesn’t really matter, but the first point I want to make is that there are usually multiple ways to train the same thing. For example, if you’re teaching “jump through my arms” the training plan might look like this:
1. Lure the dog with a treat in your left hand to walk over your right arm resting on the floor.
2. Fade the food lure, such that your dog walks over your right arm on a hand-cue
3. Install a verbal cue, so that you don’t need your left hand at all.
4. Slowly add your left arm into the picture over several iterations, so that your dog walks over your right arm, and underneath your left.
5. Make a hoop with your left and right arms, so that your dog is now walking through.
6. Move your arm-hoop higher, so that your dog now has to jump through instead of stepping through.
Or, it could look like this:
1. Lure the dog to walk through a hula hoop.
2. Fade the lure, so that your dog walks through the hula hoop on a hand-cue
3. Install a verbal cue, so that you don’t need your hand cue.
4. Raise the hula hoop higher, so that your dog has to jump through instead of stepping through
5. Encircle the hula hoop with your arms, so that the dog is now jumping through circled arms.
6. Sneakily remove the hula hoop and use the verbal cue with circled arms only.
Percy demonstrating the Arm Hoop Jump trick
In theory both of these training plans should work, but in practice this may not be the case. A dog who is afraid of the rattling hula-hoop may respond better to the first plan, and a dog who knows “paws up on my arm” may mistake the initial arm-cue in the first plan for the wrong trick and get stuck there. Furthermore, you can change the plans slightly to fix specific issues – sometimes dogs find this whole exercise easier if they get to jump right away, whereas others may excel if jumping is introduced later. If you can find an alternative plan that works better than the one you have, use it! This is my first tip for breaking any training plateaus – ask yourself if there is another “way in” to generate the behaviour. If you’re using a lure, could you try capturing? If you’re shaping, could you try using a target? Don’t be afraid to re-assess the plan and make changes if you think it’s not playing to your dogs strengths!
Setting the Bar
Before we can raise the bar, we should probably discuss how to set it. Structuring your training sessions is very important - each time you train your dog, you should have a clear idea of what you want to achieve in the training session, and how you want to achieve it.
In any giving training session, I will break the exercise into repetitions and sets. Just like at the gym, a set is comprised of a number of repetitions. Usually I do somewhere between 5 and 10 reps per set, and I will take short breaks between sets to consult my training plan, re-assess and adjust where necessary, and re-supply myself with treats! It’s good practice to “station” your dog between sets in a bed, crate or on a mat and supply them with water between sets.
Trainers will talk about setting criteria often in relation to dog training. Criteria are a specific set of conditions your dog must meet in order to earn a reward. You can think of criteria as little sub-steps in the training plan, which accurately describe the intermediate behaviours between each step of the plan. In the hula hoop jumping example, the criteria for step 4 might be: Dog must jump (not step) completely through hula hoop on verbal cue, whilst hoop is raised by 1 foot, in a mildly distracting environment to earn a reward. This might sound overly specific and unnecessarily detailed, but if you want to raise the bar you need a keen awareness of where it actually is to begin with. As you practice training, setting specific criteria will become second-nature!
Not only are criteria important for dogs, but setting criteria for yourself is an essential part of self-study and self-improvement. Criteria for humans is not as widely discussed in the trainer world as criteria for dogs, but I think setting our own bars is just as important as setting bars for our dogs. The criteria I set for myself are usually things like:
“In this session, I will describe 10 body language cues my dog is giving me”
“During the next set, I will click at exactly the right moment 80% of the time”
“During the next set, I will focus on cue separation and pause for 2 seconds between the new cue and the old cue”
“Between sessions, I will think of 3 ways I could teach this exercise differently”
“After this session, I will think of 3 ways I could use this trick to teach a more complex trick”
The reward for meeting our own training criteria is getting better at dog training! Of course, you’re welcome to click and treat yourself as well!
Raising the Bar
Now for the meat of this blog post series - how do you raise the bar when training your dog?
In each training session, it’s likely that you’ll be working through more than one set of criteria. If your dog isn’t meeting the criteria you set initially, you will need to make it easier. Likewise, if they are succeeding over and over again you will need to move on to the next set of criteria. You may even find yourself fluctuating between easier and more difficult criteria quite often – this is normal! A lot of the time, training is two steps forward and one step back. This process is called progression and regression.
Progress isn’t always linear, so don’t worry if you have to drop the criteria and build it back up!
Jean Donaldson, one of the top force free trainers out there right now, set out a fantastic guideline to help structure your sessions. She advises us to perform 5 repetitions of the behaviour using the current criteria; if the dog gets a treat 4-5 times then push on to the next set of criteria, if the dog gets a treat 3 times then stick at the current level, and if the dog earns less than 3 treats drop the criteria to the last level where the dog was earning at least 3 treats out of 5 repetitions. This is known as the Push, Drop, Stick rule and whilst it isn’t the be-all and end-all of criteria setting, it’s a great place to start!
If you find that your dog is meeting the old criteria almost all of the time, but they are struggling with the harder set of criteria, then you have hit on a problem called “Lumping”. Lumping occurs when we ask our dogs to make a much harder jump in the difficulty of the task than they were ready for. We call this lumping because you can think of it as skipping several stages of criteria, going from Step 1 to Step 5 instead of to Step 2. Sometimes lumping works and it saves time to skip steps but more often than not it just results in frustration for our dogs. The solution to lumping is splitting, which is the art of breaking up a task into more steps. Your training plan may say “Step 1, Step 2” but your dog may be saying “Step 1, Step ??!?!”. If you can split the steps between 1 and 2 into 1 a, 1 b, 1 c and then 2, then you should be able to more easily guide your dog to success.
To give an example of splitting, let’s take the arm jumping example from earlier. Step 2 and step 3 involve fading food and hand cues in favour of a verbal cue. This may be quite difficult for some dogs, and an example of splitting may look like this:
2. Fade the food lure, such that your dog walks over your right arm on a hand-cue
a. Use a hand cue which is exactly the same as the food lure, but without the food
b. Use a hand cue which is slightly shorter than the previous hand cue
c. Use a hand cue which is slightly shorter still
d. Use a stationary hand cue
e. Say the verbal cue, pause, then use the stationary hand cue
3. Install a verbal cue, so that you don’t need your left hand at all.
You’ll notice that in the training plan I gave, I assumed that the reader would know how to install a verbal cue, but I only elaborated this process in the splitting steps. I did this because I wanted to give an example to the reader of how a “lumped” training plan may lead to the handler/dog team getting stuck on the lumped step! A good training plan should be sufficiently split as to be easily followed but often, you will need to do some splitting of your own!
The six dimensions of training
Sometimes, we train a behaviour but the final step of our plan doesn’t actually give us the finished behaviour we wanted. There are six dimensions to training, and these can be split into the three Ds (Duration, Distance, Distraction) and PLS (Precision, Latency, Speed).
When I’m trying to make a behaviour better, I usually think about the three D’s first. Duration refers to how long your dog can do a behaviour for: A 5-second stay may be improved to a 5-minute stay through focusing on Duration. Distance refers to how far away from you your dog can perform the behaviour: You can recall your dog from 40 ft away, but how about 200 ft? Distraction refers to the level of environmental distractions your dog can tolerate, and still perform: leg weaves may be easy in the living room alone, but what about when you have all your friends over and you’d like to show off?
The three D’s … Distance, Duration and Distraction! Work on each one separately and gradually before combining them. This image was created (by me!) using images from Vecteezy.com.
When working on the three D’s pick one dimension and set specific criteria for improvement. This could be second by second, adding distance step by step, or adding distractions one new person present at a time. Whatever you’re working on, remember to push, drop or stick.
PLS is usually used when you’re getting very nerdy about exactly how you want the trick to be performed. Precision is how accurate your dog is: did they sit directly on top of their mat, or did they are they off centre? Latency refers to the time between giving the cue and your dog performing the behaviour, usually a low latency is desired so that your dog performs the behaviour as quickly after your cue as possible. Speed is how fast your dog completes the behaviour, whether it’s running an agility course or spinning in fast circles rather than slow ones. Usually we like to train fast behaviours, but sometimes there is an advantage in going slower! When picking one of these dimensions of training I use a different rule for setting criteria. I will ask my dog to do a set of 10 repetitions and note the average performance in terms of P, L or S (again, focus on one at a time). In the set that follows, I will then reward my dog for any repetitions which meets or exceeds the average performance of the last set. You should notice that the average performance gets better and better as you begin to reward only the good repetitions and not the mediocre ones. This process can be a little frustrating for your dog, so stay tuned for the next installment of my blog where I will discuss frustration management during training.
Sometimes, if you get stuck during training, it is because you have “lumped” more than one dimension together. Try to split your training plan so that you are focusing on one dimension at a time, and only combining dimensions when they are second-nature to your dog independently. I may also temporarily relax my criteria when I first combine dimensions. If I have trained a 2-minute stay and a stay where I walk 12 ft away from my dog, I may ask for a 1-minute stay at a distance of 6 ft and build it back up to a 2-minute stay at 12 ft away. At that point, I may work on alternating distance and duration, 2 minutes at 12 ft, 2 minutes at 14 ft, 3 minutes at 12 ft, 2.5 minutes at 14 ft. And so on.
Summary
In this blog post I really wanted to explain the concept of criteria, and emphasise the role of planning in a good training session. As you practice good planning, you should find that it gets easier and quicker to adjust your criteria and split up training steps. Eventually, it will become intuitive, but at the beginning planning may take up more of your time than the actual training does!
To summarise, each time you enter a training session:
- Have a clear idea of the task you are about to ask your dog to perform, either work through a step-by-step training plan or improve an existing behaviour through focusing on DDD or PLS.
- Set specific criteria for success both for your dog, and for yourself
- Train in short sessions consisting of repetitions and sets. Taking regular breaks between sets to re-assess the level of difficulty and change your criteria if necessary
- If you get stuck: try using a different method or tweaking the one you have, think of ways to split up the step you are stuck on, and only work on one dimension of training at a time.
One final note to wrap up this post: when setting criteria for yourself, try to practice the same principles as for your dog. If you are failing often, drop your criteria. If you succeed often, try challenging yourself! Many trainers often push themselves very hard, which can result in feeling frustrated or losing some of the joy that training brings. Much of what I have described is quite tedious and I wouldn’t expect you to take all of this on board immediately! Focus on one aspect at a time, and enjoy the process. Perfection is often the enemy of progress – be kind to yourselves, and remember to have fun!
