Feeling stuck in your training routine or frustrated with your dog’s behavior or level of training? One of my favorite exercises to encourage dog owners to consider doing is to plan a 30-day training challenge. This can be a fun way to encourage pet parents to make time in their busy schedules to train and work on new skills with their dogs. A 30-day training challenge with your dog can focus on any skill or behavior with your dog that will be useful or fun or improve your life together. For example, you might select a specific behavior challenge you’re dealing with, like leash pulling, barking at squirrels out the window, or trying out a new dog sport or activity together.
What is a 30-day training challenge:
A 30-day training challenge is an opportunity to jumpstart training with your dog. Starting a 30-day challenge doesn’t mean taking a month off work and refusing to see your friends or family for four weeks. Rather, a 30-day challenge is committing to intuitional training with your dog daily for a month. That intentional training can involve signing up for a training class and committing to practice skills being learned daily. Or, a 30-day training challenge can look like devoting 5-10 minutes a day to training with your dog.
Building habits
The primary benefit of starting a 30-day training challenge is to develop the habit of making time in your daily life to train your dog. Whether you have a puppy or an adult dog, it can be hard to find enough time to train your dog in your schedule and routine.
But as a pet parent, you should remember that even if your life is busy, it’s important to find the time to focus on training your dog. Without you putting in that effort, there is no way to expect your dog to learn new things or change their behavior. A 30-day training challenge is an easy way to build consistency in your training routine with your dog. By training daily, your dog is building new habits through the skills you’re working on, and you are also building new habits that involve spending intentional time training with your dog. When training becomes a daily habit, you’ll likely continue regular training with your dog after the 30-day training challenge ends.
Benefits of routines
Dogs thrive on routines and knowing what to expect. By building training into your daily routine for 30 days with this challenge, don’t be surprised if your dog seems less stressed, more attentive, and more connected to you. Dogs love knowing what to expect; building training into your dog’s day through a 30-day training commitment can help prevent boredom by providing your dog with daily mental and physical enrichment. Any kind of training, regardless of how physically strenuous, is a great source of mental exercise for your dog and can provide the kind of stimulation your dog needs to feel fulfilled. Whether you’re working on loose leash walking, basic obedience, or a more advanced skill, your dog will gain confidence, learn new behaviors, and increase the bond you and your dog share.
Chart your progress:
When setting a 30-day training goal, deciding how you want to chart your training progress with your dog over the month is a good idea. This will allow you to document what you are working on with your dog and allow you to track and make sure you haven’t missed any days in your challenge. You can chart this progress by making a note on your phone, or it can be helpful to use a physical calendar to mark off what days you successfully make time to train.
Depending on what calendar option you pick and if there is space, you can document what skills you and your dog worked on that day and note how the training session went. As the month goes on, it can be very satisfying and motivating to see how consistent you’ve been with training and how the training sessions have been going. Printing a free monthly calendar page online is an easy way to do this. You can then keep that page visible, like your fridge, where it can remind you to train daily.
