Episode #54 The Puppy Potty Training Triangle

Housetraining is a top priority when bringing home a new puppy. Learn how to be successful using our Puppy Potty Training Triangle. 

Transcript

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This is the puppy training podcast episode number 54. The puppy potty training triangle. This podcast is designed to help you on your journey of becoming best friends through love and

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learning as you train your own dog from home,

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and I'm here to help you every step of

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the way. This is the puppy training podcast, and I'm your host, Amy Jensen.

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Hello, everyone and welcome to the podcast. Thanks for listening. I really appreciate it. I also appreciate you spreading the word about this podcast. If you know someone getting a puppy soon, they're going to need to know about this episode. Today we are talking about house training and the puppy potty training triangle which is a tool that every new puppy owner can use to ensure success with house training, which is very vital for the life of your puppy and happiness in your home. So we want to help everyone properly house train their puppy and today's podcast is all about So if you know someone getting a puppy soon, please share this episode with them. And if you're getting a puppy soon, we're super excited you're here because today we are teaching you the important things that you'll need to know for this to go right. And if there's anything that you want to go right, it's house training. So let's get into it priority number one when bringing a brand new puppy home, his house training. Depending on how this goes, it can change your outlook on animal ownership, for better or for worse. If you're diligent and consistent with what we outlined for you. It is very doable. So today, I have a plan for you. And as long as you follow that plan, you can be successful at this. So I put this together after helping thousands of people potty train their puppies. We know this works. In our program, there are two tools that we recommend you use to help Potty Train your puppy, the first being a house training chart, we have created this chart for you. It has seven days worth of charts on one page that you can print as many as you'd like. And basically what we asked you to do is to chart The Times that your puppy goes to the bathroom. So the times that your puppy pees, the time that your puppy poops, we want you to be able to anticipate these times moving forward on a daily basis. Now, in the beginning, your puppy might be a little bit all over the place. But as you keep these charts for several weeks, you'll start to see these patterns emerge, which will be really beneficial in helping you effectively house train your puppy. Let's say that you wanted to lose some weight and you went to a nutritionist, and you said, I just need help losing these last five to 10 pounds. Can you please help me and the first thing they're going to ask you to do is keep a chart of everything you eat, anything that goes in your mouth, you need to write it down, so that they can start to help you see calorie counts and how to get rid of these last few pounds that you're trying to get rid of. Now in house training, it's very similar we need to chart these things chart the times that our puppy is going so that we can anticipate their needs and set them up for success. The second tool, as I mentioned, is our puppy potty training triangle which looks like this. This is an equal lateral triangle with the base of the triangle being labeled as the crate. The crate is a space that your puppy views as theirs. So it's my space. Now puppies are different than us, we view our space as inside our house outside our house, puppies view their space as this is my space. This is not my space, and they are happy to keep their space clean. Whereas they might go somewhere else in your home that's not their space and feel like you know what, it's fine if I go to the bathroom here, what's the big deal there's plenty of space in this house for me to pee over here and play over in my space. So the crate is small enough. It's a great house training tool because it is just the right size that your puppy can be comfortably in it, but not large enough that they feel like they can go potty and sleep in it. So it helps them hold it until we can get to them to let them out and have a successful potty trip outside in their potty yard. The next side of our triangle is called the potty spot or the bathroom load. So this is where your puppy is going to go to the bathroom. Now if you're in an apartment, this will be an indoor potty spot. If you live in a home with a private yard, or you have a private area that is safe for your puppy to go outside in, you can start taking your puppy potty outside right away, we encourage you to go with your puppy out to this potty spot. You can take them out on a leash, or you can put them in a gated area such as an exercise pin that sit outside, they go into the potty area, you watch for them to go, you mark the second they finish and reward them so that they really start to associate that going to the bathroom outside means really good things happen. Now don't interrupt your puppy in the process of going as it may stop them from completing the process. And they'll come back inside and finish we don't want that. So wait till they're completely finished to mark Yes. And give them something super high value so that they really start to like these outdoor potty trips. Now if your puppy needs to go poop, it's a little bit more tricky. They can't just go on cue it only happens certain times of the day. So using that house training chart will be very beneficial for you. So that you'll know the times of day that you need to stay out maybe an extra 10 to 15 minutes even to get your puppy to complete that process. The third side of our triangle is called the play area or the soon to be my space area. So if you remember the crate was already my space in terms of our puppy. And this play area is soon to be my space. So this is a place where they can come after they've just gone in their potty spot so that they can then have some time indoors in our house plane. or this could possibly be outdoors in the yard plane as well. But it's the safest time really to bring your puppy then back into your house and let them play because you know, they just went to the bathroom and you have maybe 2030 minutes before they're going to need to go again. So in order to earn time in the play area, we have a rule that's called you must pay to play. So as long as your puppy went potty in their potty spot then they are allowed to come into the play area or the soon to be my space area. So we recommend using a timer to keep track of the party times and prevent accidents. When they are in this play area, we want to make sure that we were taking them outside frequently to that party spot so that they are keeping this play area clean as we want them to identify it as their space and timers really help. So if your puppies going potty when they're up and awake and running around and playing, say, every 30 minutes during the day, then I'm setting a timer maybe around 25 minutes to remind myself, hey, that puppy is going to need to go potty soon, let's make sure that they make it to the exit, I might need to help them make it to the exit until they start to get the hang of it. So again, this is a larger space than the crate and maybe we start with an exercise pin inside our home. Maybe that's the next space we want our puppy to identify as theirs. So this becomes their play area where now they can be in there with some toys. Some choose a nice bed, maybe a little water bowl, and they can spend you know a little bit of time in there again. We're watching it and making sure that they are getting out of that pen regularly for that potty break. Otherwise, they will see that that pen is large enough as it's bigger than their crate to pee in one corner and play in the other. Now another option for this would be to shrink down a room in your home, maybe you could open up an exercise pen and gate off a kitchen area, or a section of the tile in your kitchen to make it a play area for your puppy but not so large that they'll be unsuccessful. We really want our puppies to win a lot in these early stages of training. We want them to feel successful and gain some confidence in what they're doing. So help them achieve that by keeping that initial space very small. Now we're going to be watching our puppy when they're in this space and if they start to show signs that they need to go we're going to say hey, you need to go potty. Let's go outside and we'll put them on leash and take them outside to that potty spot again, where they can hopefully have another success. How will you know when it's time to add new living space? So let's say that you started with the exercise pen. And now your puppy is comfortably keeping that pen clean from accidents, he's going out regularly on leash to the potty spot and eliminating, and the pen is staying clean, there have been no accidents in the pen for the last week or so I would adjust the space to be even larger. So now we can take that extra size pen and add that to the bottom of our triangle so that now the puppy has a crate that's theirs, and also an exercise pen space that they identify as theirs. That means it's time to make a new side of our triangle or take that third side of our triangle and label it as something new, I should say. So instead, now it might be identified as the kitchen. Or maybe this is the dining room. And we're going to take one room at a time in our house and label it as the current play area where our puppy is working to make that their new living space. If your puppy starts having accidents in that new space that you let them play in, then the space might be too Big so we need to shrink it back down. Not all the way to say that exercise pin size but somewhere in between the size that they were successful with and the size that we then opened up let's find a happy middle ground and go from there to help our puppy be more successful. Also be sure that you're watching them and setting a timer so that they are getting out regularly to go to the bathroom and have successes. This is not a space where they are unsupervised. This is a supervised play area so we'll open up new space when our puppy is consistently signaling this time that they need to go outside to go potty so once you open it up to say the dining room or the kitchen, maybe a room that has that door that exit door in it is a great place to start. You can hang some potty bells there if you prefer or have some way that your dog can then signals that they need to go outside. A lot of times puppies will just start heading to the door because we've consistently been taking them there on leash to go outside and so they start to learn Oh when I need to go potty we head to the door. So once your puppy is consistently finding the the exit and going outside and having Some successes then it's time to open up the next living space, we take that kitchen or dining room area and add that to the bottom of our triangle. So now we have the crate, the exercise pin, the kitchen area or slash dining area. And we can work on a new area of our house as the play area and the soon to be my living space in terms of our puppy. So that's it that is the puppy potty training triangle. Again, the base is the crate it starts as that small living space where the puppy identifies that as my space. That is the only unsupervised space that your puppy currently has. We're pretty confident that if we were to leave our puppy in that crate unsupervised, they would be successful in not having an accident. The next side of our triangle again was the potty spot. This is our outdoor bathroom location or an indoor potty yard if you live in an apartment area, and you're not able to take your puppy out in public places to go to the bathroom until they're fully vaccinated. Now to get out of the potty spot and move into our play area which is our third side of our triangle. Remember that rule of puppy must be to play. Now the outside potty spot and that play area in our home are both supervised areas. These are both places that we need to watch our puppy. And make sure that number one, they're going in the potty spot, we want to make sure that when they are outside, they're not getting distracted and forgetting to do their business, we want to make sure that that's actually happening. We're marking it with a yes and rewarding it so that they'll be more likely to repeat that behavior in the future. Then once they pee, they can go to the play area. And this is their soon to be space by spending time in this area training, playing and just being there with them. They can be on the floor chewing a toy, they can be taking a nap. But being in this space will help them identify it as their space, which we can then move to the bottom of our triangle as part of my space as defined by your puppy. And we'll just keep building the bottom of that triangle so that your puppy has more and more unsupervised space in your home until finally they're completely House trained.

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Alright, I hope you enjoyed our podcast today and that you learned a lot about house training and how to do it successfully. Happy training. You guys have a wonderful week. If you have a question about anything you heard on this podcast or any other puppy training question, visit my site Baxter & Bella calm to contact me Transcribed by https://otter.ai