Basic Commands to Teach Your Puppy

Sessions of three to five minutes, several times a day, beat one long session by a wide margin — and that single fact matters more than which commands you pick. Puppy attention spans are genuinely short: two minutes at eight weeks, four or five by four months. Push past that and a puppy stops learning and starts enduring, then begins leaving the room when the treat pouch appears. Everything below is built around that constraint. Seven cues, taught in small doses, in an order that makes each one easier than the last. Keep an eye on physical development alongside the training with the puppy weight calculator.

Which Commands Actually Matter?

Seven, in this order. Everything else is decoration.

Stay is not on the list separately because it is duration added to sit or down rather than a cue of its own. Build it by counting seconds, not by teaching a new word.

Tricks are worth doing anyway. Spin, paw and roll over teach a puppy how to learn and burn mental energy usefully. They are simply not urgent.

The name comes first for a reason — the method is in how to teach a puppy its name, and every other cue trains faster once attention is on demand.

How Do You Teach Sit and Down?

By luring, then removing the lure quickly before it becomes part of the cue.

Sit, step by step: hold a treat at the puppy's nose, move your hand slowly back over its head, and the bottom drops as the head lifts. Mark the moment it lands, pay immediately.

Fade the food from your hand within about ten repetitions. Do the same motion with an empty hand and pay from the other hand or a pocket. Puppies that are lured for a two weeks learn "sit when there is food in the hand", which is not what you wanted.

Add the word once the behavior is happening, not before. Say it just as the puppy begins to sit, then gradually earlier until it precedes the movement.

Down from a sit: treat at the nose, lower it straight to the floor between the front paws, then draw it slowly forward. The elbows follow. On carpet is much easier than on a slippery floor.

Do not push a puppy into position. Physical placement teaches nothing useful and makes some puppies wary of hands.

Five to ten repetitions, then stop. Two minutes at eight weeks. Stopping while the puppy still wants more is what makes it eager next time.

How Do You Teach Come?

Carefully, because recall is the one cue where mistakes are expensive and slow to undo.

Start indoors with two people. Take turns calling the puppy between you across a room, paying generously every time. Ten seconds per repetition, a couple of minutes total.

Make the payment worth it. Recall is the cue that competes with squirrels, other dogs and interesting smells. Cheese, chicken or liver, not kibble, and several pieces rather than one.

Use one word and never waste it. Calling a puppy that is not going to come teaches it that the word is optional. If you are not confident, do not call.

Never call a puppy for something it dislikes — bath, nail clip, going in the crate at the end of a game, or the end of a walk. Go and collect the puppy for those instead. A recall that predicts the fun stopping decays quickly.

Move to a long line outdoors, ten to fifteen meters of light line, before you ever try an open field. It guarantees the outcome so the word never gets ignored.

Expect adolescence to wreck it. Somewhere between seven and ten months, most puppies stop responding. This is normal and temporary — go straight back to the long line rather than repeating a cue that is being ignored, and rebuild over a couple of months. The whole arc is mapped on the puppy training checklist by age.

How Do You Teach Leave It and Drop?

By trading, not by taking. This is the cue that prevents resource guarding rather than causing it.

Leave it, from the beginning: treat in a closed fist, let the puppy sniff and paw at it, say nothing. The moment it backs off or looks away, mark and pay from the other hand. The lesson is that ignoring the thing produces the thing.

Progress to an open hand, then the floor, then a covered item on the floor. Add the word once the behavior is reliable.

Drop or swap: offer something better than what the puppy has. Puppy opens its mouth, you mark, pay, and — importantly — often give the original item back.

Giving it back is the whole trick. A puppy that learns "hand approaching means I lose things" starts to guard, swallow, or run away with items. A puppy that learns "hand approaching means an upgrade" brings you things.

Never prise a puppy's mouth open or chase it round the room. Both create guarding, and both make the genuinely dangerous mouthful — a chicken bone, a cooked skewer, a battery — far harder to retrieve.

If a puppy already stiffens, freezes or growls over food or items, stop the home training and get a qualified behaviorist involved. Growling is information, and punishing it removes the warning without changing the feeling. Costs for professional help are set out in how much does dog training cost.

What Is a Settle, and Why Is It the Most Useful Cue?

Because it is the one you use every evening for the rest of the dog's life.

A settle is lying calmly on a mat or bed, relaxed rather than poised, for a stretch of time, while life goes on around it.

Teach it by capturing, not luring. Put a mat down, and every time the puppy lies on it, drop a treat between its paws without saying anything. Repeat for a few days and the puppy will start choosing the mat.

Pay for calm, not for compliance. Reward the relaxed hip-rolled position and the sighs, not the alert sphinx pose. What you feed is what you get more of.

Build duration slowly and boringly. A treat every five seconds, then every ten, then every thirty. Read a book while you do it.

Take the mat everywhere. The mat becomes a portable cue, so a puppy that settles at home settles in a café, at the vet and at a friend's house.

The most common cause of a puppy that cannot settle is not a training failure at all. A puppy that has been awake too long is physically incapable of relaxing — 18 to 20 hours of sleep a day is normal at eight weeks, and enforced naps in a crate are what make it happen. The pattern is in the puppy sleep schedule by age.

How Long Should Training Sessions Be?

Three to five minutes, several times a day. Two minutes at eight weeks.

Distributed practice beats massed practice, in dogs as in people. Six sessions of four minutes across a day produce faster and more durable learning than one twenty-four-minute session, and it is not a close contest.

Drilling produces avoidance. A puppy worked past its attention span starts to associate the training area, the pouch and the cue itself with pressure. That is much harder to undo than to avoid.

Sleep consolidates learning. A short session followed by a nap sticks better than one followed by a walk, which is a useful reason to slot training just before nap time.

Reward within two seconds. Later than that and the puppy has connected the food to whatever it did next — a step forward, a look away, a sniff.

Five to ten repetitions per cue per session is plenty. Two cues in a session is the practical maximum for a young puppy.

Finish while it is still going well, always. The last repetition is the one the puppy remembers, and the case for starting all of this early is in when to start training a puppy.

Why Does a Puppy Obey at Home and Not Outside?

Because cues in dogs are strongly tied to context, and almost nobody accounts for it.

A puppy that sits perfectly in your kitchen has learned "sit in this room, facing this way, with you standing there". Change any of those and the behavior genuinely may not appear. This is not stubbornness.

Retrain in each new place. A handful of easy repetitions in the hallway, the garden, the front step, a quiet street, a friend's house. It gets quicker each time until the cue generalises.

Change one thing at a time. Distance, duration and distraction are the three variables — raise one and drop the others. A puppy that can hold a down for thirty seconds at home cannot hold it for thirty seconds in a park on day one.

Raise the reward when you raise the difficulty. Kibble indoors, chicken in the park.

Do not repeat a cue that is being ignored. Move closer, make it easier, and get a response you can pay.

Leash work is the hardest thing to generalise, because the outdoors is where all the distractions live — the approach that survives it is in how to leash train a puppy.

What Goes Wrong With Puppy Training?

Five recurring problems, all of them cheap to avoid.

Punishing mistakes. Startling, scruffing, shouting or telling a puppy off after the fact teaches concealment, not compliance. A puppy cannot link a correction to something it did even a minute ago.

Cueing repeatedly. "Sit, sit, sit, SIT" teaches that the word means nothing until it is shouted four times.

Keeping the food in the hand too long. Fade the lure within about ten repetitions or you build a cue that only works when food is visible.

Training a tired puppy. Most of what looks like defiance in an eight-week-old is a puppy that needed a nap an hour ago.

Expecting linear progress. Puppies plateau, regress in adolescence, and have off days. A two weeks of no visible progress is normal and is not a reason to change method.

FAQ

What commands should a puppy learn first?

Its name and a hand target, then sit, then down, then come. Leave it and settle follow at around ten to twelve weeks. The order matters because each cue makes the next one easier — attention first, then simple positions, then the safety cues.

How long should you train a puppy each day?

Fifteen to twenty-five minutes in total, split into five or six sessions of three to five minutes. At eight weeks, sessions of two minutes are more realistic. Total daily time matters far less than keeping each individual session shorter than the puppy's attention span.

At what age can a puppy learn commands?

From eight weeks, and often earlier with a good breeder. Puppies can learn sit, their name and a hand target the week they come home. What limits them is concentration and physical coordination, not the ability to learn, so keep sessions to two or three minutes.

Should I use treats to train my puppy?

Yes, early on — food is the clearest and fastest way to mark a correct choice. Fade it within about ten repetitions of each new cue so the behavior is not dependent on visible food, then move to intermittent rewards including praise, games and access to things the puppy wants.

Why does my puppy ignore commands outside?

Because cues are context-bound and outdoors is a different context with far more competition. Retrain each cue in each new place, starting easy, and raise the value of the reward when you raise the difficulty. It takes weeks, and it gets faster with every new environment.

Do I need a puppy class or can I train at home?

Most basic cues train well at home. Classes earn their fee on the parts that are hard to arrange privately: socialization, working around other dogs, and a second pair of eyes. Look for small groups, force-free methods and proof of first vaccination.

Getting the First Seven Cues Right

The commands themselves are not difficult. What separates a puppy that responds from one that does not is almost entirely format: sessions of three to five minutes, payment inside two seconds, the lure faded early, the cue never repeated, and every skill rebuilt from scratch in each new place rather than assumed to transfer. Teach the name and a hand target first, add sit and down for easy wins, take recall seriously and never waste the word, and build a settle on a mat because that is the cue that changes daily life. Expect adolescence to undo some of it temporarily. Track growth alongside the training with the puppy weight calculator.