Emergency Session 91: Sit Part Three - Sit and Stay Progression

While you're all stuck at home, hopefully you've all stayed safe - and hopefully you've been working on parts one and two of the "sit" command with your dog! In today's episode we'll work on sit by moving toward the "stay" progression; and I'd highly encourage you to go back and listen to the previous two episodes if you haven't already before jumping into this lesson! Here are the links;

• Episode 89: The Sit Challenge Part One
• Episode 90: The Sit Command Part Two: Say and Show Method

So we'll start with a competency check of sorts - a very important part before progressing to "stay".

Emails from previous Sit Lessons

Margie in Toronto, Canada

Margie asks about the sit command, but asks about the age appropriateness for this command as it applies to her two dogs (but a bit more specific to my video training series version of this lesson). I'll talk about the age differences and I also have a brief edited version of the video clip from my dog training series to give you a bit of a visual idea of the sit lesson!

Direct link to the video clip on YouTube (new window)

Direct link to the video training series (new window)

Tim, Chicago, Illinois

Tim asks about recalling that Sean would teach the "puppy version" of some of these emergency sessions. I'll go over what version of the exercises apply to his age of puppy.  

Phase One

In the first you were in the "luring" phase one - while you were down on a knee and weaned your way off of needing to be there and you knew you were out of phase one when you knew you could do the following;

1. Stand up say "sit" command;
2. Your puppy understood the command and would perform a sit 80-90% of the time;
3. Your puppy would hold that for at least 5 seconds at a time;
4. Say the "release" command and your puppy knew that they were done.

Phase Two

You started to challenge your puppy with the "two treat" method by working on two parts of the process;

1. Increasing the amount of time your puppy would hold;
2. Performing those instructions with an increased amount of distraction elements during that time.

Older Dogs (phases one and two)

For those with older/adult dogs that had difficulty doing the command without treats as a motivator, you would have gone through the "say and show" method I taught where you used 50-75 repetitions, and you increased the amount of time, and the number of distraction objects that they could do the "sit" around in phase two.

Quote on Resilience

"Our greatest glory is NOT in never falling; but in rising every time we fall." - Confucius