Puppy training begins the moment your puppy sets its paws on your floor. It is learning all the time, whether you train deliberately or not, and the first months shape how it later handles noise, guests, the leash, alone time and everything else that daily life brings. That is why good puppy training is less about commands and more about building a puppy that wants to cooperate with you.

When can you start puppy training?

You can begin from day one, just at a pace that suits a puppy of eight to twelve weeks. In practice this means short sessions of two to five minutes, ideally several times a day, rather than one long training session. A puppy holds its concentration only for a very short time, and if you finish while it is still eager, it will remember the training as something worth repeating.

Start indoors in familiar surroundings where nothing exciting is happening. The name, a gentle contact call and following you across the floor is plenty of ambition for the first week. Once that is in place, you move the same exercise out into the garden, then to the pavement, and finally to the park with its scents, bicycles and other dogs. Every new backdrop is really a new exercise for the puppy.

Reward, timing and treats that work

Timing decides everything. The reward must come within a second or two of the behaviour you want to see again, otherwise the puppy links it to something completely different. Many people use a marker word such as "yes" or a clicker to hit the moment precisely, and then the treat follows. It sounds trivial, but it is the single detail that most often separates a frustrating training session from one that flows.

Pay attention to how much goes into the puppy over a training day. Treats are part of the daily intake, and an effective solution is to use a portion of the puppy's usual meals as a reward during training. That way you keep both the motivation and the overall feeding in balance. For the longer breaks, when the puppy needs to settle down after an active morning, a chewing experience such as MARROW BONE DELIGHTS is a good way to give the jaws something meaningful to do.

House training, recall and leash training in practice

House training is not training in the classic sense, but routine. Out after sleep, after play and after meals, and always to the same spot in the garden, so the scent reminds the puppy of what is supposed to happen. Praise calmly while it is going, not afterwards inside the living room. Accidents indoors are wiped up without comment, because reprimands only teach the puppy to hide when it needs to go.

You build the recall by always making it the best news of the day. Only call when you are reasonably sure the puppy will come, and pay well every single time. Never use the recall to end something fun, such as putting the leash on after a run in the woods. Leash training, on the other hand, starts at home in the hallway, where the harness simply hangs on the puppy while you do something pleasant, so the equipment becomes boring and safe long before you go out on the street.

Rest and meals are part of the training

A puppy needs a lot of sleep, and an overtired puppy bites harder, jumps more and listens less well. If the training suddenly falls apart, the answer is usually not more repetitions, but a break in a basket or a crate that has been established as a calm place. Many find that half of the so-called behavioural problems disappear once the rest schedule is tightened up.

Nutrition plays a part in the same way. A stable foundation of nourishment throughout the day gives a more even energy level and a puppy that is easier to reach. At ESSENTIAL FOODS the puppy meals in the BEGINNING range are prepared from fresh produce and human-grade ingredients in Our finest British Heritage Kitchens, with carefully selected local and regional delicacies and completely without grain and unnecessary fillers. Large breeds grow at a different pace than the small ones, which is why the meals come both as BEGINNING LARGE BREED and BEGINNING SMALL BREED. The thinking behind Behaviour Optimizing Food is precisely about the connection between nutrition, behaviour and wellbeing in everyday life.

The typical mistakes in puppy training

The most common mistake is training for too long at a time and too rarely in new surroundings. The second most common is repeating a command four times until the puppy happens to do the right thing, which teaches it that words only apply on the fourth attempt. Say it once, help the puppy succeed, and reward. The third is impatience around the biting play, which is completely normal puppy behaviour and diminishes when play with teeth is consistently interrupted and replaced with something it is allowed to bite.

If you have a puppy of a larger breed, it is worth keeping an eye on the pace of growth while the training is going on, and THE BEGINNING LARGE BREED is composed with exactly that development in mind. If you are unsure about amounts, transitions between meals or how treats fit into the daily feeding, ESSENTIAL FOODS' nutrition advisers are ready on phone, chat and email and know the meals inside out. You can also delve into the Puppy universe, a well-thought-out universe where the advice comes directly from ESSENTIAL FOODS and follows the puppy from its first days at home until it is an adult.

Train in small chunks, keep your mood light, and accept that some days go backwards. The puppy that is met with clarity and patience becomes the adult dog that looks up at you when the world gets confusing, and that is exactly where all puppy training is really aiming.