Hey there. You're listening to drinking from the toilet. And I'm your host, Hannah Branigan. This week, we're going to talk about planning and training plans and planning routines.

I'm constantly pushing myself and my students in my online classes to make training plans.

I've even gone so far as to create a template, which is freely available for download on my website

to make planning out training sessions easier.

But why should we even bother?

Why should we make a plan when everything can change? As soon as you decide on a training plan, your dog will do something

and you'll have to make a totally different plan. Yes, Hannah, we know you're always going on

about science and crap like that, but training is an art. There's a feel to it. You have to feel

the training at the dog. I don't art. There's a feel to it. You have to feel the training at the dog.

Well, I don't disagree. There is a lot of art in the science of dog training. And you don't always

need a plan if you're doing something that is automatic. And you don't need to change it or improve it

in any way. You probably don't need a plan if you're brushing your teeth, unless you

discover that your previous toothbrushing technique behavior was flawed and needs to be

improved upon for health reasons. But probably most people out there are pretty happy with that

behavior and it's fluent for their purposes as far as their needs go. Plans do become important

when you're trying to train something new that you've never done before and you haven't any

experience with it. They're also important when we want to make some kind of change. If you want to

make something different happen than what's been happening

particularly if you want to change a habit in yourself or in your dogs and that's a lot of what

dog training is plans are also really helpful if there are a lot of moving parts that you have to

keep track of if the behavior is very complex or there are a lot of elements, if you're

working with distractions or multiple dogs or in distracting environments where there's a lot of different

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