Sit

Teaching your dog to sit is a must-know trick for good behavior. Here's how we teach our dogs to sit.

Grab some treats and find a quiet place where your dog can focus. Less noise, more learning! Before you start make sure you've got their attention. Hold a treat close to their nose then slowly raise the treat above and over their head, towards their back. If your luring practice had been going well they should follow the treat. The hand coming up and over helps to life your dogs head, which usually helps to drop their rear. As your dogs bottom hits the ground use your standard marker and give the food. At this stage you should not be giving any verbal cue! 

Once your dog can do this 5 times in a row successfully then you can start to introduce the verbal cue. As you can see your dogs rear dropping you can give your verbal cue “sit” nice and clearly! 

Slowly start to phase out the lure into a physical cue. A gentle lift of the hand towards your body with the verbal cue should be your next step. Eventually you should be able to ask for the sit with your hands behind your back! 

Keep going with the training, but keep it short and sweet. 30-60s of sit practice is plenty when they are starting out, after all this is a bit of a workout! Imagine if someone suddenly asked you to start doing squats after you hadn’t ever don’t them before, hard work right?!