What Is Balanced Training?

If you have been reading about dog training for more than about ten minutes, you have probably found that everyone is very certain and nobody agrees. So here is exactly what I do, why I do it, and what it will and will not look like when I am standing in front of your dog.

The Short Answer

Balanced training means I use whatever the dog in front of me actually needs. Most of the time that is calm, positive energy — which is what dogs use with one another to show they are in agreement. When your dog is doing something I need to disagree with, and ignoring it will not make it stop, and a word will not make it stop, then I add a physical signal through the leash. That is the balance. Agreement most of the time, and a clear disagreement when one is needed.

At no point are we ever hurting your dog or creating fear. I want to be blunt about that, because it is the thing people are actually asking when they ask what balanced training is. I am vegan. I would be the worst vegan on the planet if I were hurting dogs and calling it training.

Love, Trust, And The Part Everyone Is Missing

Pretty much every dog is going to love you, because it is a dog. Most dogs are going to trust you, because you are not an asshole to them. You almost certainly have both of those already.

What is usually missing is respect. Without respect you do not have a complete relationship, and that is the gap I am trying to bridge. Not respect in a micro-managing, militant way — in a calm way, where you are the one making the choices and decisions, and your dog is relieved that somebody finally is.

A lot of owners think they have this already, because the dog listens once in a while. Then when the dog does not listen, the dog is being stubborn. It usually is not stubbornness. There just is not any real respect there yet.

Why It Starts With The Walk

The most useful thing we can do for a dog at the start is give it a structured walk. Through the leash we are teaching rules and expectations, teaching observation, teaching restraint, and making it clear that you are making the decisions — while keeping all of the love and the trust you already have.

What you end up with is a dog travelling with you in a zone: aware of everything happening around it, but not reacting to it and not chasing every thought. It is genuinely enjoyable for both of you. And it sets the tone for the entire rest of the day. When you get home, your dog is content to nap — which is what dogs should be doing about 80% of the day, and puppies about 90%.

Because you are asking a dog to move at our slow human pace, and to look at whatever it likes without escalating, one properly structured hour is worth about three hours off leash. You get a dog that is tired psychologically as well as physically. Running a dog for hours on trails only tires the body. It does not settle the mind, and it does not change anything.

What A Correction Actually Is

When dogs disagree with each other, one will bite along the neck, between the ear and the jaw line. It is not an attack. It is a signal that says: I am serious, and I disagree with what you are doing.

What I do through the leash replicates that signal. We are essentially moving air. It is a snap — not a pull, not a hold. That distinction matters more than anything else in this page, because pulling and holding is fighting tension with tension, and it makes reactivity worse. The hardest part of this work is almost never the dog. It is the owner unlearning the pull.

Then there is intensity. Think about a door you open the same way every day. One morning it sticks, so you push harder, and it opens. Nobody got angry at the door. You simply matched what the situation needed. That is all we are ever doing with your dog. We are never mad at the dog. We are disagreeing, matching the intensity, and helping it relax.

Timing is the other half of it. If I help your dog at a three out of ten, it can still think, and it makes the connection that what it was starting to do was unnecessary. If I wait until it is at an eight, I can still bring it back down, but it will not learn anything from it — the same way you cannot reason with someone already out of the car in a road rage incident. Catch it early enough and you barely have to do anything at all.

“We are never mad at the dog. We are disagreeing, matching the intensity, and helping it relax.”

Why Treats Alone Do Not Fix This

I am not against food. There are times and places for it. But if positive-only worked the way people claim, we would all have perfect dogs, because every one of us has already tried food. And if it worked, nobody would need to pay a professional to be shown when to hand a dog a treat.

The real problem is that a dog which has become too fearful, too excitable or too aggressive cannot pay attention to food — no more than you could. If you were hungry, and someone offered you a sandwich, and at that moment a person came round the corner covered in blood holding a gun, you would not be thinking about the sandwich. A lot of dogs going into fear or reactivity are seeing exactly that. Food will not reach them. A correction will, because it signals the brain to relax — and once relaxed, the dog can register that there is nobody with a gun, and everything is calm again.

There is also a practical trap. Intelligent dogs work out the pattern and start performing the bad behaviour to earn the reward. It is like telling someone you will not make their favourite sandwich, but if they punch you, then you will.

When clients ask whether they should bring treats, I usually tell them that if treats worked, we would not be meeting.

Why I Do Not Start With Sit

Basic obedience feels unnatural to me. Dogs do not make each other sit. They almost never make each other lie down. Getting a dog to sit does not give you authority and does not create respect — and you have probably seen a dog sitting perfectly while vibrating, ready to be just as difficult the second it is released. That is a short reprieve, not a change.

I would rather change how your dog experiences the world. Once that is done, sit is trivial and largely beside the point.

Excited Is Not Happy

People see a dog that is wildly excited and read it as joy. It is usually not. It is extreme intensity, out of control, and it sits at the opposite end of the same spectrum as anxiety. Neither is healthy. When a person is that worked up around us and we are not sharing the same energy, we find it uncomfortable — but somehow we accept it from dogs.

The only times I want to see a dog genuinely excited are at the start of a game, or playing with another dog that is sharing the same energy. The rest of the time we are aiming for calm, because a calm dog is a dog that can think.

How Long This Takes

Most dogs can change inside two weeks. However many times you have to help your dog through the first fourteen days, by about day fifteen you are almost never correcting anything, because the association has been made and the dog is comfortable with it.

It took us our entire childhood and part of our adult lives to learn to self-regulate. Dogs can do it in fourteen days. Once your dog is reliable on the leash, the same behaviour carries into the house, the elevator, the hallway, the car, the backyard, the cottage — and eventually off leash, in the same way your parents held your hand near traffic until the day they no longer needed to.

What You Get Back

The biggest shift is not really the dog. It is that you stop being a passenger. Instead of the dog did this and the dog did that, it becomes I allowed that to happen — and now I know how to change it.

Instead of dreading walks because you get dragged around, stopped constantly, and embarrassed every time another dog appears, you start thinking: good, there is the situation we always struggle with, and now I can help him see it differently.