Researchers studying dogs’ learning abilities came to a curious conclusion.

🐶If you want to form a strong skill that will last for a long time, then 5 days of training a week (so, giving the dog his/her own weekend) are much more effective than daily training.

In the case of training with breaks, dogs make mistakes much more rarely and memorize the skill for much longer.

In addition, there’s such a thing as overtraining, when the dog repeats one and the same exercise so many times in a row that he/she loses all motivation to do it.

That’s why a desire to do everything as quickly and as well as possible often leads to unfortunate results – the four-legged student stops following the command altogether!

Or, alternatively, he/she follows it unwillingly, just to get done with it. However, if you give your dog a break for 3-4 days, he/she will work with much more interest and precision.

So, in training, more is not always better.

On the other hand, if you train your dog once a week or even more seldom, this won’t bring a good result either. Such breaks from training are already too long.
And if the break between training sessions lasts for a month or more, the skill might get completely lost in the end.

But that’s not always the case.
What your dog memorizes and for how long depends on his/her personal characteristics (including temperament), as well as the training methods you use. For example, the dog that learns skills through shaping will remember them better than the dog that is taught using luring.

And the dog taught with luring methods will remember everything he/she learnt better than the dog taught using mechanical training methods.

But always remember: even 10-15 minutes of training a day is much better than no training at all 😊