Puppies are capable of learning simple commands from a very young age. Don’t try to give your puppy a meaningful training session if he is highly excited, occupied with exploring, or tired. You need his complete attention. Otherwise you’re wasting both your time and his. You can build up to training sessions in more distracting environments once your puppy is reliably responding to your commands when at home.

When it comes to home training, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand the concept, what goes in must come out. If you feed your puppy a quality, nutritious and balanced dog food and stick to regular meal times (3 times a day for young puppies, dropping down to twice a day for older dogs), then your puppy is more likely to have regular potty habits which means you’ll have a much better idea of what time to take him out. If, on the other hand, your constantly offering your puppy with treats and tidbits and feed him at random times of the day, you can expect your puppy to need to potty at any time of day too.

If you’re expectations are too high of your puppy to master all of your commands in the first couple of weeks, you are sadly mistaken and will be disappointed. Young puppies, in particular, have a lot of information to take in the first few weeks as they get settled into their new home away from their mom and siblings. Try to start off with two or three commands at the most sit. “Come” and “down” should be of top priority. Don’t move on to new commands until you are confident enough that your pup has mastered the basics.

Like an adolescent child, puppies have short attention spans and get tired very quickly. Remember, when training your puppy, keep sessions short. 5 to 10 minutes should be sufficient enough time. Two or three short training sessions every day is ideal. You can build in the command “come” throughout the day such as when you want to feed your puppy or take him outside.

A pup will learn much faster and affectively through the association of an action with a positive reward. However, our attention can also be very rewarding to a puppy. This can also include negative attention such as yelling, scolding, or punishment.