When it comes to keeping your puppy’s attention, sometimes it can be challenging. Want your puppy to focus on you?
Here’s a simple way to leash train a puppy that builds good attention while keeping it fun for our puppy to learn.
Watch me or look is a good command to use. These are the two most popular that a lot of dog trainers use.
This is a training exercise people love to learn.
How To Leash Train a German Shepherd Puppy:
Today, I’m going to teach you how to train your puppy to heel on a leash. How to build your puppy’s attention with this simple training exercise. You’re going to watch me teach a new student how to build attention with her German Shepherd puppy.
German Shepherd Puppy Training Video:
How to train a 7-month-old female German Shepherd Puppy:
This is the owner’s first lesson with her new puppy. This is one of the most powerful commands to teach your dog if you want perfect attention.
We are teaching our puppy not to leave the left leg.
This is one of the hardest commands for most professional dog trainers to teach. They all think they know, but after seeing so many German Shepherd dog owners who contact me for training.
Most of them have already been training with other dog trainers and still got it wrong. Their German Shepherds are still breaking away from them on a leash.
Why, because of not teaching their puppy to follow the left leg.
“Puppies learn body language and commands fast”
How to get started: If you are trying to train your puppy this way, that’s amazing. Now you’ll have the training skills you need to move forward with your puppy.
1. You first start off with your left leg when giving the heel command. We want our puppy to learn how to follow our left leg every time we give them the command.
2. The only time your puppy leaves your left leg, is when you give them a release command.
Most trainers use words like,
- yes
- ok
- break
- free dog.
Whatever you decide, be consistent with your command.
There are other training methods for teaching this exercise, but for the video, I just wanted to keep it simple and easy to learn.
When you begin training, we will teach our puppy to sit every time we stop when giving them a treat.
Every day we go out and practice multiple repetitions, you will see your puppy start to learn how to sit and stay automatically without you telling them.
You need to understand, we are dealing with an intelligent animal. I hope you would agree. Haha!!
Your puppy will learn how to control himself without you telling them to sit/or stay, every time you turn in different directions.
You’ll see your puppy start to sit every time you stop. Praise them for doing the exercise correctly.
We are teaching pure concentration and focus with our puppy. Your puppy will learn the automatic sit command on its own fast.
You see this style of training done in competition training.
Watch this video with a trained dog:
The Girl in this video has done an awesome job training her German Shepherd. Watch how her dog does the automatic sit when she stops.
This is part one of her obedience exercise for her IPO 1 title.
I loved this video so much, I had to share it with you. I hope you enjoy it too.
Week one: Important when training.
We only want to spend 4 to minutes training exercises when you first start teaching this to your puppy. Puppies have a short attention span. To get the best results with your puppy, you only need to practice a few times a day.
Week Two: Two training seasons: Two 15-minute training exercises a day. If you want to train more, then make them 10 minutes each, and that’s okay too.
Conclusion: There is a lot of dog training information online. You may have read somewhere else how to train this, and that’s awesome news. I have noticed that different dog trainers make it harder than it needs to be for someone just learning.
I’ve been teaching dog owners for over 25 years. The biggest problem they all share with me is there is so much information out there online, that they are overwhelmed with everything they read.
I hope this article and video have given you a better understanding of how to teach a puppy the heel command, and how to build strong attention.
Just keep it simple and stay consistent in your training.
You can start teaching this with puppies at 13 to 18 weeks old.
PS: Watch me train the owner with her German Shepherd puppy Nora a 3-month-old puppy.
This is her first leash training exercise. Attention and focus.
Let me know in the comments if you have any questions.
Best of luck with your training. Dennis.