The Six Minute a Day Dog Training Challenge is a 5 day online training program during which you will teach and/or improve your dog’s ability in either Down (as in lie down) or Stay in just six minutes a day. You’ll learn principles and methods that you can later apply to teaching your dog any skill, as well as gain tools that will make fitting training into your a day an easy habit to maintain.

I get it. It’s hard to find 20 or 30 minutes a day for “training time”. What I’m saying is you don’t need to work for that long to make huge improvements. Anyone can spare six minutes a day for our dogs (and if you can’t, you’ve got way bigger problems that dog training).

But telling you to “do three two minute sessions a day” is not going to be enough to get most of you to actually do the sessions. You’ll forget or the day will “get away from you”.

Instead, I’ve incorporated tools from psychology and habit forming research that will make it more likely for you to remember and follow through on the training.

Specifically, The Six Minute a Day Dog Training Challenge was inspired by Dr. BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits® program and follows a similar format. In Tiny Habits, you use an already existing daily habit as a trigger to perform an extremely simple behavior that you want to turn into a new habit. For example, if you already brush your teeth daily and want to get better about flossing, you might make your Tiny Habit: After I brush my teeth, I will floss one tooth. I did Dr. Fogg’s program a few years back (also free) and realized that a similar format would work for dog owners that want to train their dogs but either can’t find the time or have problems making progress when they do train.

For five days you will work with your dog three times a day for just two minutes. In each of these training sessions you will focus on making just a little bit of progress. At the end of the week, after 15 of these two minute sessions, those little bits of progress will have added up to big steps forward.

When I ran an experiment using this format, owners reported making some kind of progress every two out of three sessions.

As part of this Challenge I give you detailed instructions, with photos and videos, on teaching and improving your dog’s “Down” and “Stay”. However, the principles can be applied to teaching and improving virtually anything.