A Twist on the Five Times Challenge

So, about six weeks ago, I posted about training schedules. In an effort to drill less and have more fun with my training, I decided to do something I called the “Five Times Challenge,” where I would train five times a day for 60 to 120 seconds. I did that for a few weeks, and then found that I really hated trying to keep track of it. It’s easy to do, but I tend to get a bit rigid about things like that. If I only did four sessions and not five, I felt like I’d failed for the day, which is patently silly, but even so, it created more stress than it was worth. So I quit doing it.

Which means I needed a new training plan. Now, as much as I get stuck when I create plans, I also need plans to keep me on track. The trick is creating a plan that helps keep me on task while allowing me the flexibility necessary so training remains fun.

I started by taking a look at my 2010 goals. I thought about the things I’m doing, and the things I’m not doing. Then I made a list of what I needed to be doing in order to meet those goals.

It looked like this:


I’ve been wanting to include more pictures in my entries because it’s supposed to be more interesting to readers. I’m not sure this actually qualifies.

Which is when I realized… a lot of the specific exercises I needed to work on could be done anywhere. My living room, my back yard… and… on walks?

YES! On walks! We’re already out and working together. I need to practice with distractions anyway. And I can use treats and environmental rewards!

And so I started something new. Every few blocks, I do an obedience exercise. I try to switch it up so I’m doing different things. Sometimes I repeat an exercise, sometimes I don’t do one at all. But at frequently during the walk (I’m not counting, because that makes me crazy, but really, it’s gotta be more than five times), I stop and have Maisy auto-sit, or do a moving down or a moving stand, or practice sit and down stays, or come front, or do finishes, or do about turns or pivots or change pace, or… well, pretty much anything you might see in rally or obedience except jumping or food bowls. (Those we do outside in my backyard on the weekends.)

It’s amazing. I’m getting so much more focus, and I swear, today I felt ready to tackle that CD-H, or maybe even a U-CD! For now, anyway, this variant of the five times challenge is working wonderfully!

The Five Times Challenge: Week 1 Update

It’s been just over a week since I started the Five Times Challenge. I still really like it; my biggest difficulty has been tracking the sessions. I don’t have the best memory, and though I’ve been trying to make a hash mark on my training board when I complete a session, I’ve forgotten to do this a lot. The upside of this is that Maisy has probably gotten more than five sessions on several days.

There have also been days where we haven’t been home much, either because we’ve been at a friend’s house, or because we’ve been at training class. On these days, I’ve tried to work in sessions, either while waiting for my husband to run an errand, or while in the waiting room at the vet’s, or even while waiting for pizza to be delivered! So, on those days, we may get fewer sessions in, but we get the added bonus of a new environment.

This is the beauty of the Five Times Challenge: since it’s so quick, it’s easy to sneak in some practice in other environments. I’m taking advantage of those natural times in life where you have to wait for something. There isn’t time for a full 20 minute session, but a few steps of heeling? No problem!

The progress Maisy has made has been amazing. I’m getting some very nice attentive heeling, and my instructor even commented last night that Maisy’s heeling looked really nice.

But, my favorite moment happened on Monday night. My husband needed to run to the credit union, and we tagged along. It was beautiful out, so instead of waiting in the car, we hung out on a busy street corner in downtown St. Paul. Since we’d been in a hurry to leave, I’d forgotten to bring treats (bad trainer), but luckily there was a ball in the car. Normally, I don’t train with the ball; Maisy is borderline OCD about balls, and when she sees them, it’s like her brain falls out of her head.

So here we are, on a busy street corner at rush hour, in a location Maisy has never been before, outside a credit union, which means people are coming and going, and I’m holding a ball. An exciting, enticing ball. And my Maisy was able to take one whole step of attention heeling.

I know that doesn’t sound like a lot- one step? That’s it?- but trust me, for a fearful dog with reactivity and a lot of difficulty with focus on concentration, it was absolutely beautiful.

Training Schedules

What’s your training schedule like? How often do you train? How long do you train? How many exercises do you work on at once?

I have always treated training like homework- you sit down, do what you need to do, and then go to the next task. So, I’ve always trained in one daily chunk, generally about 15 to 30 minutes. And in that daily chunk, I’ve worked on an average of four to six items. This has always worked well for us, although sometimes it's hard to get my lazy butt off the couch.

Then, my dog training “crush,” Patricia McConnell, posted in her blog about a book about people who had strokes, and how they made more physical progress when they were immersed in their therapy than when they did the more traditional daily chunks. Learning by immersion has long been considered the best way to learn foreign languages, and based on the science, it makes sense: you can form new neural pathways better if you’re immersed in what you’re doing. And why wouldn’t this been true of our dogs, too? After all, their brains are very similar to ours. Trisha decided to set a learning immersion goal for her and her dog: she would work with her dog five times a day.

Call me a hanger-on, but I decided to try it, too. I thought it would be really difficult at first. How do you find the time to train your dog five times throughout the day? At 30 minutes a pop, well, you don’t. Plus, Maisy hates drilling, so I decided to do very short sessions: two minutes.

I’ve done this a couple of days now, and I’m surprised by how much easier this is! Before, it was a struggle to find 15 minutes all at once. But two minutes? That’s the length of a commercial break. It’s easy to fit in while cooking or doing the laundry. It only adds marginally to a bathroom break between chapters in the book you’re reading. Before you know it, you’ve done five sessions!

And the learning seems to be faster, too. Maisy and I have been working on heeling. We spend one minute on attention heeling, and then one minute on right-side heeling. I throw a few right finishes in there, too, to help her understand the difference between a right finish and a right “get in heel” command (which I desperately need a cue for- any suggestions?). In only a matter of a few days, Maisy has almost mastered the “get in heel” on the right side- my body movements are less extreme, and she’s almost sitting straight every time now. Her attention, on both sides, is much better! And she seems to get the difference in my hand signals for right heel and right finish.

Maisy seems to be enjoying this new schedule, too. She loves training, and now she gets to do it five times a day instead of just once! Could life get any better? She still needs to entertain herself between sessions, but stretching it out like this seems to be more stimulating, even if we’re spending the same amount of time (or less!) actually training. Plus, it’s so much easier to keep her attention the entire time and end on a good note when the sessions are so short!

I’ll report back in a couple of weeks, but I think we’ll keep working like this. It will be easy to add in fronts, moving downs and back up in heel. Of course, the more I add in, the less time we can work on each skill, but I think I could easily increase the session length to three minutes while simultaneously reducing the amount of time on each skill to 30 seconds or so. After all, 30 seconds is really quite a long time.

So… what’s your training schedule like? Are you ready to take the Five Times Challenge?