How Does Virtual Dog Training Work?
Virtual dog training is incredibly effective, and more and more trainers are offering virtual. We don’t need to be physically in the room with you to coach you through training your dog!
With virtual dog training, your dog does not have to adapt to a stranger being in the house. There’s no overexcited greetings or anxiousness that we then have to spend valuable session time coming down from. When we train virtually your dog is in the comfort of her own home with no disruption from a stranger visiting, perfectly positioned to be able to focus and learn.
All you need for virtual dog training is some kind of camera and microphone, whether that’s a desktop computer or your phone or tablet.
A wide range of skills can be taught virtually; even the more complex cases can be effectively addressed with virtual training.
But a lot of times people have questions about how virtual dog training works exactly! So we’ll run through what a typical virtual session looks like below. Note that before you have your first virtual training session, you will have had an initial consultation during which we will have talked in-depth about your dog’s behavior, history, and your training goals.
How a Typical Virtual Session Goes
First, a catch-up and review.
In the first few minutes of the session we’re going to talk about how your dog has been doing since we last met — any progress, setbacks, concerns you might have, wins or struggles you’ve had, et cetera. We will review your training goals and evaluate where we’re at with those and what we need to do to stay on track.
Demos and practice!
I always have my own dogs available during virtual sessions to demonstrate a behavior before you practice it with your own dog. I will show you what to do by demonstrating the behavior with my dog, and then you get to try with your dog! I will then give you clear instructions to get started with and will coach you through as you practice, guiding you through step by step toward training success. We’ll troubleshoot if we need to as we work on building the behaviors you want to see in your dog.
Brain break for your dog!
We usually take at least one short break for your dog to decompress a little, in between practicing different behaviors. For some dogs this looks like getting to play with a toy, for others it’s a snufflemat or lickmat, for others it’s just a water break and some petting.
Back to practice, and then wrap up.
We’ll continue to practice and progress toward your individual training goals. Then, when we are reaching the end of the session, we will wrap up and talk about what you and your dog learned, what you’d like to focus on for next time, and how you feel about how the session went. After the session, you will get a personalized post-session summary that goes over what we worked on that day, tells you what to focus on till the next time we meet, outlines the goals we talked about for future training sessions, and contains any resources you might need going forward.
In-between sessions: reach out!
I always encourage my clients to reach out in-between sessions if you have any questions or concerns. I especially encourage my virtual clients to send me video of a training session or two, if you would like to, so I can review these sessions and offer feedback. This helps to keep us on track and progressing faster!