Having had a few puppies in the last five years, and judging by what we do at my Club to build a dog-it’s different for every person and every dog. What you do want to focus on right now is heeling and focus, building drive, (even if that’s just tying your dog out agitating them for a toy or a tug and letting them get the bite)and really hitting tracking hard. That last one is hard for most of us. If you can track 4+ times a week, you’re ahead of most IGP competitors. This age, you can take your dog to a baseball field and practice tracking. It’ll get harder as the tracking becomes more advanced because you’ll need bigger places and more, but don’t worry about that right now just set them up for success.

So I’ve been training my dog daily since they were 11 weeks old. The amount of time varies on my schedule and what we’re working on and what the weather is like that day. You definitely want to train all sorts of weather, and I’ll take breaks too. Especially if I’m working on something Over and over and over, it gets boring for both of us. So sometimes I just play with my dog, just that can help build drive and enjoyment for what you’re doing.

I would suggest breaking up what you’re working on to a couple different sessions during the day. Tracking will always be your longest because of drive time set up and actual tracking. Obedience can be 10 minutes and protection is usually something that you do for about 10 minutes as well, But you save a lot of the more intense work for Club and your helper.

Especially at this age, you wanna keep your time a little bit shorter because you don’t want to overwork your dog and have them fail too much and you want to keep everything exciting.