203. The Walk You've Been Avoiding Is Actually Your Best Training Session

Twenty tidy retrieves on the same patch of field, and on the twenty-first your dog picks the dummy up, gives it a shake and takes the scenic route home. Before you decide they've gone backwards, ask yourself a slightly uncomfortable question. Are you boring them? LWDG Group Expert Claire Denyer and LWDG Founder Jo Perrott get into the difference between reps that proof a behaviour and reps you keep doing because they feel safe. Claire shares how her older dog Rose started treating their big, varied training fields like a second back garden, and what happened when Rose worked somewhere new an hour down the road. You'll hear how to vary the reward for a stop whistle so your dog can't guess what's coming, how to stop a dog deciding three retrieves is their limit, and how to change things by ten or twenty percent without ripping up your routine. Claire trains gundogs and their handlers for a living and sees this pattern in her clients all the time. If training feels like Groundhog Day for either of you, listen before your next session.

Your dog is flat out at home for about ten minutes a day. The rest of the time they're on your heels, bringing you a toy or sighing at the back door, and the minute you take them somewhere new they behave like they've never left the house. LWDG Group Expert Claire Denyer and I get into the art of doing nothing, and why the dog who can switch off at home is the dog who switches on for you when the lead comes out. You'll hear why an obedience stay at the pub isn't the same as a settle, the mistake almost everyone makes the second their dog finally lies down, and the advice my uncle gave me that involved a park, a pack of sandwiches and no training at all. Claire lives with a house full of Labradors aged two to twelve, and every one of them settles every single day. If your dog treats every new place like the best day ever, start here.

So there's a thing I see all the time with our members, (and if I'm honest, I do it myself) , which is you look at your dog and see the bit that's not quite working, and you just go and do training that is working instead. Foundation certificate, there's a wobble in something and the answer is "we'll go to novice anyway," and the wobble's still there; it never went anywhere, you just stopped looking at it.

Half past nine at night and it is still too warm to take them out. The ground is baked solid, the tarmac has been a hot plate all day, and every group you are in is telling you something different about water, about heat, and about whether you should be training at all right now. LWDG Group Expert Abi Reed has spent this whole summer working around exactly that, getting up at twenty five to five to beat the sun and moving everything else indoors. She walks through what heat is actually doing to your dogs, why the car is the part almost everybody forgets, what water really does and does not fix, and how much genuine training fits inside the one metre of space around you. If you have cancelled walks this summer and felt like a bad owner for it, this one will settle that. Hot weather does not mean no training. It means different training.

Every plan you had for your dogs this summer is probably still sitting where you left it, underneath thirty degrees of heat nobody could train through. That is not a lost season. It is a pause, and LWDG Group Expert Claire Denyer has a lot to say about how you pick it back up. Stay for the heat conversation too, because if our summers keep doing this, getting our dogs ready for warm weather stops being optional. And Bark to School kicks off Sunday. Free, all of us, four days. Come and get your rhythm back.