How many things do you train at once?

[Kalyxa]

I was just thinking today about how I'm working on completely different things with my two dogs, and the process I use, when I started to think about if I had ever worked on two different things at the same time. I don't mean in the same training session, but rather working on different things at different sessions. Since I know I'm not making much sense, here's an example:

While training Chewy to "Bow," she also learned to "Search." The signals, commands and behaviors are so completely unrelated that I figured it couldn't hurt. Maybe for the first two sessions she'd work on "Bow" and then for the next we'd "Search." She didn't catch on to either any faster or slower as a result, but I thought it was nice to break up the monotony. I never worked on more than two though, and only ever with Chewy, who is an exceptionally bright and easily bored dog.

Alternatively, when I'm working on something new I'll have them do some things they already know really well at the beginning and at the end of the sessions, just to make it fun and make them feel good about all that they already know. If it's a trick or behavior that builds off of something they already know, I'll work on just that foundation behavior intermittently throughout the session.

So, good ideas? Bad ideas? I'm curious about whether anyone thinks this has any adverse or positive effects, or does it themselves.

 

[corgipower]

I work on multiple behaviors in one session. My dogs don't do well with repetition, they do best if I train a behavior once or twice and then change to something else.

Sometimes I do mini sessions where it's just a couple reps of one behavior and end the session, especially if we're having difficulty with that behavior, but when I do any training for longer than a few seconds they do best with variety.

 

[doberkim]

i always work on multiple things at once - the way i train, often in the small session (3-5 minutes) i will only ask for one behavior since many times im shaping or capturing, so i dont want confusion since my dogs are WAY too quick to offer alternates - but at any given moment we can be working on 12+ different behaviors!

 

[lizzybeth727]

The service dogs I train have to learn 80 (more or less) cues, and have to be able to perform them in any environment with any distraction and any handler. And we have to train them from scratch in 9-12 months. So yeah, we work on more than one behavior at a time.

If I'm really pushing it, I've been able to work 5 different behaviors in the same 30-minute training session. And then I might come back in the afternoon and work on 5 MORE different behaviors. And that's with dogs that have only been training for 4 or 5 weeks.

 

[Dekka]

With puppies I start with one behaviour per session. As they get the hang of it it I up the number of things we will work on in a session. If I am working on something really tricky (ie something the dog finds hard to grasp) then I might just do a warm up of things I know the dog can do will, then do the tricky thing, and end right when the dog is doing well.

When working on agility I can be working on a large number of things in a session.