Motivate Your Dog with Life Rewards
As you can imagine, rewards are a very important part of reward training!
Use potent rewards and be sure you give them to your dog at the right time.
To find rewards that are really powerful you want to look beyond food, to the realm of life rewards.
You, as your dog's owner, have ultimate control over your dog's access to most everything your dog loves. You decide when and where and how much fun your dog has, how much freedom, how much food, how many sniffs, how many squirrels, how many games of tug...
These activities are the most powerful rewards in training.
Food is a great place to start, and for some dogs, it will remain a potent motivator for the dog's entire life. But for many dogs, as they get older, they find that there are plenty of other things out there that are much more exciting than a piece of kibble.
So, you need to take those exciting things that all too often become distractions to training and use them as rewards to mega-motivate your dog during training.
It's easy. Make a list of all the things your dog enjoys. Praise, petting, getting on the couch, going for a walk, sniffing, playing with other dogs, playing tug or fetch or chase, acting goofy and so on. Anything your dog enjoys may be used as a reward in training. Simply ask your dog to sit or lie down, stay for a bit, maybe walk on-leash or follow you off-leash and if your dog does a good job, say, "Good dog, fetch”, “Good dog, go sniff", or “Good dog, go play.” After they've had a little fun, interrupt the activity for another brief training session and then, when they do a good job, say, "good dog" and let them resume their fun activity.
Integrate numerous very short training interludes during every enjoyable activity, especially walks, couch-time, or cuddle sessions. In this way, you can use a single enjoyable activity as a reward many times over, simply by resuming the activity.
One of the best skills to practice with your dog is Sit. Before every enjoyable activity, you should, at the very least, have your dog sit, stay and focus on you. So, before offering a chew toy: sit. Before a couch-invitation: sit. Before opening doors: sit. Before playing tug of war: sit. And so on and so forth. You want to pepper these little sit-stays and short training sessions all throughout your dog's day, dozens of them, so that training becomes thoroughly integrated with all of your dog’s favorite activities.
Your dog shouldn’t be able to tell the difference between training time and play time. By making training fun, and by making training a part of your dog’s favorite activities, your dog will learn to love training and they will want to comply with your instructions, which is, of course, the ultimate goal of training.