Product Description

This is the first training video in our Michael Ellis series of dog training. It’s also the the foundation of the training program Michael and Leerburg promote.

We begin by brining up an old wives tail, which is “dog trainers should never use food rewards because there will come a time when the trainer will not have food to reward the dog, then what will you do?”.

As with most old wives tails, nothing could be further from the truth. People who make this statement lack dog training experience.

There following are just a few of the major concepts that Michael Ellis will cover in the video:

You will learn how to select your dog’s “high value food reward”. This varies from dog to dog.

Michael explains what size rewards to use in training and how he develops food drive is a dog that doesn’t start out with a ton of food drive.

He will show you how a new trainer can deliver food rewards without getting their fingers pinched by the dog.

In our video Michael will teach the basics of marker training and how to use food rewards to engage your dog during training sessions. Marker training is a communication system that every dog can learn. It is very similar to operant conditioning. While it is a simple concept it can be difficult for many to master. Michael breaks marker training down so everyone can understand the concepts.

Michael spends a considerable amount of time explaining how to get engagement with our dogs. Engagement simply means the dog is 100% focuses on you and it wants what you have (and what you have is either a high value food reward or a high value toy reward).

In our video you will learn how to put engagement on cue. Once thats accomplished you can tell your dog when you are going to start a training session. You will also learn how to tell your dog when the session is over.

Michael explains that there are two kinds of training sessions. There are training sessions where our goal is to reduce or eliminate environmental stressors, and there are training session where our goal is to teach our dogs behavioral exercises. If your dog will perform an exercise at home but will not follow the same command down at the mall, your dog needs work on environmental training. This video will give you some ideas on who to work with these issues.

One of the most important concepts new trainers must master (if they want to become to a good dog trainer) is “RATE OF REINFORCEMENT”. To often new trainers have a difficult time keeping their dog’s engaged because their rate of reinforcement is too low. Michale covers this concept in detail.

In this video you will also learn how to use movement and animation to keep your dog engaged. Michael teaches his students how to turn a reward delivery into an event. When that happens you will have a dog that loves his training session.

We all want our dogs to have the frame of mind where they are thinking “I love these training sessions - whats next”. When we see a dog with this attitude, that dog is ready to learn behaviors. In fact teaching behaviors to that dog in is easy.

At the end of the video Michael explains how to wean our dog’s off of food rewards, he also explains when to start using toy rewards in your training program.

There are no age limits on when this training can start. It can work for 8 week old puppies or adult rescue dogs and everything else in between.