Hi everyone and welcome to the lesson on the benefits of trick training. Other than just looking really cool and earning titles, there are lots of benefits to trick training with your dog. Going over some of these benefits will also give you an idea of where you can structure them in everyday life. 

One top reason for training tricks is that it is great for building confidence with dogs and their owners. Trick training is excellent for puppies and shy or fearful dogs as well. 

A lot of tricks may involve props or objects. Dogs that have done a lot of shaping, especially as puppies with objects or novel items tend to be much more confident when presented with new items or in new situations. With my youngest puppy Zap, when I first brought her home, I made a point to introduce her to a new object every single day and have her play shaping games with it where she would offer new behaviors when that object was present. She became very confident with any new object I would present to her. Shaping different tricks with props is great to build confidence for puppies and helps them see new things as reinforcement opportunities rather than things to be worried about. I see lots of dogs that want to learn skills such as heeling, for example, and if I put a pivot disc on the ground, those dogs will do everything in their power to not even touch the disc because it’s a new object. If the owners had done a lot of shaping with objects work when they were puppies, the dogs would have gravitated towards the disc almost immediately. 

Trick training is also great if you have a shy, timid or fearful dog for the same reason as puppies. It can help to build their confidence in the world around the and start to see novelty as reinforcement opportunities. A shy or fearful dog may take longer initially to get comfortable with the process and with interacting with objects, but with patience and careful training, those dogs really start to come out of their shell and the growing confidence definitely becomes visible. 

Trick training builds confidence in learning with all dogs. When you have started teaching a variety of tricks with your dog and you are being successful in it, your dog will feel more confident in their ability to problem solve and figure out how to read you better in order to earn reinforcement. Owners that have taught their dogs a variety of skills have a much easier time in training because the dogs feel confident in the learning process and learning how to earn reinforcement. At the same time, the dog feels confident in learning how to work with you when training. That teamwork will grow with the more skills you have under your belt. In a class setting, it is usually very easy to spot the owners that have worked on a lot of skills with their dogs and ones that haven’t and the confidence you can see in the teams that have is very evident. 

Your confidence in your ability to train your dog will also grow. The more skills you have taught, especially using a variety of methods for getting behavior, the more comfortable you will feel working with your dog and training new and challenging skills. If I have an owner with an issue such as lunging or barking at dogs, owners that are completely new to training and have taught very little are always more hesitant and take a little longer to feel comfortable working with their dogs and getting results; the owners that have a lot of skills under their belt feel comfortable working with their dogs almost instantly and get results far quicker. Trick training will build your skills as a trainer and you will feel more confident working with your dog as a result. 

Your relationship and communication skills with your dog will grow as you teach tricks with your dog. Trick training is just plain fun and when you and your dog are doing something fun together, that relationship grows. Your dog learns it is fun to do things with you, to learn with you, and to try new things with you. 

Trick training also takes some of the pressure off of “normal” training. When owners take a “manners” class, they put so much pressure on the dog absolutely needing to learn something and learn it quickly. That pressure can make training less fun for the owners, but it also can cause the dog to not want to work with you with all that added pressure. With trick training, it’s all meant to be just fun, so that pressure naturally goes away. If your goal is to earn titles with your dog, remember that it is meant to be fun and to not have all of that added pressure; you have a lifetime to earn those titles with your dog. This class has well over the amount of tricks you will need to teach to earn those titles as well, so if a trick isn’t as fun for you or your dog, you can just move on and come back to it later if you want. 

Your communication skills with that dog in front of you are also going to get better. Your dog will learn how to read you and work with you a lot better the more training time you have put in and the more reinforcement history they have gained from training with you. Your communication skills will also grow because you will learn how to read your dog better, how to observe if they are struggling or ready for more criteria, and how to effectively work with the specific dog in front of you.

Tricks are great mental enrichment and mental exercise for our dogs. At the end of a training session with my dogs, my dogs are visibly more tired and much calmer afterward because they just did lots of brain work (and physical work). A lot of my dog’s meals get used for training and that includes trick training. On days where the weather is especially unideal for going out hiking, walking, or playing I will ramp up the trick training to get more mental exercise for the dogs, but it also will help their physical exercise as well. 

Tricks can be physically demanding on dogs. They utilize a variety of muscles. Trick training is a great way to build muscle and get dogs in shape. If you were to look at a canine fitness trainer, a lot of the exercises they have dogs doing looks a whole lot like trick training: play bows, sit, down, stand, foot targeting, just to name a few. But if you can imagine all the different muscle groups getting used when a dog demonstrates a trick like a bow, a sit pretty, a spin, a jump, even a paws up or four feet on, which requires balance, you can see that this can physically be a good way to get some of your dog’s energy out as well. Even teaching a trick like “shake” means the dog needs to balance their body a little bit differently when they lift up that paw and if you teach it with both paws, then that can work both sides. Even a trick that seems as small like “paws up” can be tiring as the object gets taller and the dog has to stretch more. 

Trick training can also help a lot with proprioception, which is basically your dog understanding where their body is in space and how they move it. When you teach a variety of tricks, you are causing your dog to learn how they move their body in order to perform that trick. For example, if you teach your dog to target a cone with their nose, they have to think about what their head is doing. If you teach a dog to walk on a balance beam, they have to think about what all of their legs are doing, not just the front legs. If you teach a dog to “shake”, they need to think about that specific foot. If you teach them to “spin” they have to think about how to move their whole body. Tricks can be very valuable overall for how your dog learns to work their body to earn reinforcement. 

Again, there are so many benefits to trick training and the more you do, the more you will start to notice all of these little benefits coming together. And if you like to earn titles along the way, that’s just an extra little benefit you can add to the mix.

So, let’s get ready to have some fun trick training!!!!!