Should I start over?

My pup almost (6 months) his sit and down are pretty good when we are alone. Unfortunately, I took things a little to fast. The more I study the podcast on this site I realize that I may have gotten ahead of myself. I believe, I named the comands too early. I was using a verbal sit and down command within a day. This was several months ago. My pup will follow the commands 99% of the time during our back yard training sessions. When there are distractions involved (guests), he follows commands on his own terms (Sit 80%, down 50%). Is this a normal part of the training process were more training needs to be done around distractions? Or are these sings of a poor foundation?

I feel like he understands the command when I say sit. I am a little concerned about "down". He will nail the down when I use a hand signal (in training sessions), but will get it 60% of the time when only a verbal down is used (no hand signal).

Should I start from scratch? Will starting over confuse my dog? I would hate to loose the progress that we have achieved. But I am willing to start over if neccessary.

Thanks in advance for all of your input.

remember this . . . the physical cue overrides the verbal .

so you've substituted your physical cues with verbal cues before he knows them as verbal commands , and you're trying it in a environment with distractions .

issue the verbal simultaneously at first then start delaying the time between the verbal and the physical . eventually you will be using the verbal only , but take your time .

as has been said before , you can only add one difficulty factor at a time , and only when the work necessary to move on has been done .

you are doing the right thing by evaluating the things you are doing and the things you need to alter .

Ian

Thank you for your input. That is exactly what I needed.

The distraction difficulty speaks to adding distractions (including venue changes, duration, and definitely guests!) too fast.

All of these distractions are added one little bit at a time, and you don't go forward until the dog is solid on each addition.

So, for example, moving from the living room to the kitchen is a venue change (a low-level distraction), and then to the outdoors is a big one.

Different people around? BIG distraction, and one that is preceded by lots of proofing of every step up to that.


You don't lose anything by starting over. You solidify your foundation.



A billboard post from Ian, especially:

" ... as has been said before , you can only add one difficulty factor at a time , and only when the work necessary to move on has been done . ... "

I'd also like to add that puppies tend to "forget" things pretty easily and I often find that I need to go back to basics with my dogs when they're young pretty often. It never hurts to back up and start at an easier level with a puppy, particularly if they've hit a growth spurt or one of those stubborn "teenage" stages.

I do find that once I've backed up and gone back to basics, they tend to "remember" their commands a bit quicker than the first time I taught. I kind of expect this back and forth for a while until they mature more and I think that it just makes things more solid when their brains finally come together.

"Going back to basics" is ALWAYS a good idea for everyone to practice. It's the foundation all your training is built on.
Not doing so would be like a baseball player never taking batting practice or a swimmer only going off the starting block in a race.
To put it in perspective with dog training, too many teach the dog heeling and stop rewarding that first, or tenth, or third step in heeling.
Without those basics, the dog learns that no reward will come until they get out to the 50th or whatever step, so why stay in place.