Put your shoes on first, all too often, we have students tell us that their puppy
was starting to get the hang of house training, but they kept having
accidents right at the doors. They were trying to get ready to
go outside. This is really common. So before you bring your
puppy to that exterior door, put your shoes on first with millions
of views across all of our different puppy, potty training videos, and all kinds of comments from our
YouTube audience to really understand the questions and challenges
that they're having. I've decided to create the ultimate guide
to puppy house training in one video. Now, if you're trying to solve a specific
problem with your house training, I'll list the chapters in the description
below to each element that we're going to talk about today, but I will warn you. A lot of people continue to struggle
with host training because there's a step that they didn't even realize they
needed and they've just missed out on it. So the big picture of what we're going
to talk about today is going to be important. Now with no further ado, let's talk about the best way
to potty train your puppy. I'm Ken STeepe and welcome
back to McCann Dogs. A lot of house training accidents are
fairly predictable and to avoid your puppy, having those accidents,
you need to be proactive. Now you've probably established
some kind of time schedule. So you take your puppy out every
hour or every couple of hours, but that schedule is going
to be fairly puppy-dependent. And it's also going to change over the
first couple of weeks that you bring your puppy home. So on top
of that time schedule, I want you to be proactive
and take your puppy out. Anytime one of these five things happens
before and after they go into their crate before and after a meal, after a nap before and
after a play session. And anytime you just aren't
sure if they need to go, that's a great time to take them out. You're going to be amazed when you realize
how being proactive can make it less likely for your puppy to have an accident
indoors because they just don't have to go. I know a lot of our viewers live in an
area where they just can't take their puppy outside. They need to use a pad. And if you look through the comments
section in all of our videos, you'll notice that people using puppy
pads often struggle a little bit more, but for the course of this
video, anytime I say, go outside, you can replace that with go to your pad
because all of the exact same rules are going to apply while you're
in the process of puppy. Potty training supervision
is without a doubt, the most important thing to take into
account great supervision will lead to great training moments
with your potty training. So let's take a look at how you can use
supervision in your training and why it's so important. First things. First, you need to be a good dog
trainer for your puppy. And that means you need to have good
timing. You can't fix what you don't see. So supervision of your puppy, while you're trying to fix these house
training issues is an absolute must. We have lots of videos on our channel
that talk a little bit about house-lines and why they're so important,
how they can be so helpful. It's even more important when you're
struggling with tennis training, to be able to get a little bit
more control of your puppy. Come on back this way. Remember if
you don't see it, you can't fix it. I want you to focus on quality time with
your puppy while they're out of their crate. It's not about the quantity of
time. So this means when they're out, you're focused on them. You're playing
with them. You're training with them, you're with them, but
you were focused on them. So that the moment they start to
sniff the floor in a weird spot, or they maybe scratch, or
they do a little circle, you can mark that with an Ah hey,
before they start to go. Now, this isn't necessarily going
to stop your puppy midstream, but it's really going to
mark that moment for them. Some people may even clap
their hands, really abruptly, a sharp sound that your
puppy knows immediately, that they're making a wrong choice. Now,
if your puppy does stop, that's great. You can pick them up, take them outside and they can
quickly finish their business. But if they don't leave them in position, it's so much easier than cleaning a trail
of piddle all the way out to the door. Keep in mind your puppy.
Isn't trying to be defiant, but if you've ever used
an outhouse before, you'll know that indoors is a much
more comfortable option for doing your business. And the thing that's really
working against you is that
puppies are going to do whatever feels good and emptying their
bladder and their bowels is actually kind of rewarding. Now, if you're
struggling with puppy, potty training, supervision is going to apply.
Even when you go outside, puppies are so easily distracted. All of the sights and the smells and
the sounds, even with a full bladder, they may completely forget
why they're out there. So if I'm outside with my puppy on leash, I can easily redirect them away from
something that they get distracted by. But even more importantly, I can make sure that my puppy
is actually gone that way. When we get back inside, she's much less likely to have a full
bladder and squat and pee right at the door. If you have a puppy who will
go pee immediately after
you bring them back inside that I'm talking to you directly
right now, when you come back in, you really need to watch
your puppy closely. You're doing your best
to teach them what to do, but it's just as important
to tell them what not to do. I talked a little bit about
that negative verbal reprimand. So if they make a mistake and
start to pee on the floor, you'll use that verbal reprimand with an
app or a hay or something to mark that moment so that they understand
that this isn't the right choice. You probably may never have had
to hold their bladder before. So this is going to be where your
direct information is going to help them really understand the rules of your
home. Here in our training facility, we help more than a hundred thousand dog
owners to overcome the most common dog training challenges. And every
week here on our YouTube channel, we publish videos to
help you to do the same. So if this is your first
time on the channel, make sure you hit that subscribe button
so that we can help you to have a well behaved for like a family member. Are you dreading the thought
of the overnight part of
your puppy potty training? What if I told you that you don't
need to set multiple alarms, but what you do need to do is have a plan. What a lot of people don't realize is
that overnight potty training actually starts earlier in the night. There are certain things that you can
do in the evening. In the late evening, that's going to set yourself
up for success overnight. And that first one is going to be
sort of your evening prep. Now, one of the most important things is to
make sure that your puppy goes to sleep with an empty bladder. And there's a couple of things that
you can do to ensure this happens. Number one is, think about limiting their
access to water after a certain time. Now everybody's going to be different
depending on what time they go to bed. But for us, we stopped letting her have access
to water about after 8:00 PM or so. And that way we knew that she didn't
have any water left in her bladder. When she went to the bathroom, she'd
be pretty empty along with water. We're also going to change
or limit the access to food. And when we feed her now, it's pretty common for me to train
pretty late into the evening. So when I do that, I'll only give
her a limited amount of food. And then I try to choose to use maybe
a toy reward in the late evening, instead of foods that I'm not
giving her a bunch of extra stuff. And then we try to make sure that she has
a poop before we take her to her crate for the night. Let's talk a little
bit about poop dog poo specifically, and it's actually subject, I know quite a bit about because I've
gotten pretty good at getting my dogs to go to the bathroom before bedtime,
which means I get a night's long sleep. Now there's a trick to getting
your dog to go to the bathroom. And one of the most helpful things
that you can do is get your puppy to be active. One of the things that I like to do
later in the night with my training using that toy is she's more energetic.
I'll either play a little fetch, a little tug of war, or sometimes they'll just take her for
a little rock around the outside of the property, just to loosen things up. And she's far more likely to go to the
bathroom and often if I take her outside and she doesn't go, I find if I just walk her around
for a little while before I know it, she's she's gone to the bathroom. And
that way I know that throughout the night, she's empty. And it's very unlikely.
She's going to ask to to go out again. I have really important question and it
could change everything in terms of your overnight potty training. Do you know
your puppy's potty schedule at this point? Now this is something that took us a
few weeks to figure out with Euchre. One of the things that we discovered is
that you don't get to talk about poop again, but she's a double
pooper in the morning. I found that I would take her outside.
She'd have her normal P her normal poop. And I would think, whew, we're ready to
start the day and within an hour or so, she would be looking for a place
to go to the washroom once again. And so I actually learned over time that
there was certain times of day that she is much more likely to
go to go to the washroom. And that allowed me to ensure that
those times those points had been met before we went to bed at night. It's very common for her to have to go
to one more time before we go to bed. So it's getting close to bedtime, and I know she still hasn't
had her her evening poop. I'll go through some of those things
on the list. I mentioned earlier about, you know, doing a bit of training with
her, maybe doing a bit of exercise, taking her for a walk, get those things moving so that she
actually does follow her schedule, which makes overnight much
easier for both of us. He talks a lot in our previous potty
training videos about common times, where they do have to go
things like coming out of
their crate or after they had a big nap or after they had a lot of play. We want to take advantage
of those opportunities and
use it to help us make an overnight potty training plan. A lot of people think they have to set
an alarm overnight and get up several times to let your puppy outside. But I'm very happy to say that you
don't actually have to do that. You have an alarm system
built in right here. And we would recommend that you
keep your puppy's crate nearby, where you're sleeping,
so that if they do stir, you can hear them and then
get up and take them out. Now with a lot of the other tips that
we're going to be mentioning in this video, hopefully you're going to be able to
find that even within the first couple of nights, your puppy will
sleep for a long time. She did whimper a little bit the first
couple of nights that she was home, but it wasn't until early in the
morning that we had to get up. And I heard her stir. Got up, let her
out and dealt with it at that point. But they're going to, there's going to be a time when you don't
want that to become the routine. Now, eventually we pushed our
six hour timeframe to, she sleeps about eight hours a
night, which is pretty great. So the way that we did that, as you know, after a few days of getting up at
6:00 AM to let her go to the washroom, we would then push it five or 10 minutes.
I might let her whimper a little bit. I might just bang on her crate a
little bit and tell her quiet, settle, wait a few minutes for her to settle. And then I would let her up and
take her outside to go potty. And each day I sort of
pushed it a bit more. And I think after the second day she fell
right back asleep for another hour or so. So it was a pretty easy transition, but it's much easier for me to feel
less guilty about letting her outside. If I know that before she went to
bed, she fully went to the bathroom. She had good exercise. You know, I
know that I've set her up for success. So I feel less guilty about letting
her out all throughout the night. She learns to have a long, good
night's sleep. And so do I. Now I do have to get up in the middle
of the night to have your dog go potty. It's really important that
when you take them out, that you make sure it's all business
and no pleasure. So if you come out, your puppies are running around and
being, you know, having a bit of a party, just keep the leash a little bit
shorter, just encourage them to hurry up. We often suggest teaching our puppies
to go to the bathroom on command. I'll often tell her, hurry
up, hurry up, hurry up, and then encourage her to go from there
if she's not going within a minute or so, I'm just going to take her back inside
and put her back in her crate before we try it again. But if we come out
and then we do a little plague, we make it a bit of a game. I don't want her waking me up in the
middle of the night so that we can go outside and have a little party
together. So make sure it's all business. No pleasure. Get the job done
back inside, back to bed. I'm talking a lot about
structure with our puppies, but looking down the road a little bit, there are certain things that you might
not need to worry about as your puppy gets a little bit older. Things like
restricting water throughout the night, or you know, not feeding or playing with
them at a certain time of the evening. As your puppy gets a little bit older, there are going to learn
how to self-regulate. And one of the ways that you're going
to know that you're ready to kind of loosen the rules a
little bit is, you know, is your puppy successfully
making it overnight every
single night without asking to go outside without
having any issues? You know, are they typically doing well with their
house training during the day as well? Do they understand to hold it
or to ask you to go outside? Do they understand not to
have accidents in their crate? Can they spend a long time in their
crate without needing to go outside? These things are all going to slowly
start to come together for you. And at that point you can start to decide
whether you want to be a little bit more relaxed with some of
those rules and structure. Yes. Good boy. Sometimes puppy training can
feel stressful and all of
the YouTube videos in the world won't help you without
the right information. If you feel like you're
looking for specific advice, that's right for your puppy
in your training situation, make sure you check out the link in
the description below to our Puppy Essentials program so that you
can work with the McCann Dogs, instructors to find out what
strategies are right for you. A common question I get is how do I teach
my puppy to let me know when they need to go outside? And there's actually some cues that your
puppy is probably already giving you and to really understand
what those cues might be. We need to take a look at this next
video. Here's a dog trainer hack. We know that after your puppy has
been in their crate all night, that they're going to have to go.
So here's what I want you to do. You're going to grab your puppy's leash. You're going to go open your
puppies crate and pick them up, clip on their leash, and then head up to the exterior door
that you're going to use to take your puppy outside to potty. The reason we pick the puppy up is that
we don't want to risk the chance that your puppy is going to have an accident
when they come out of their crate between their crate
and that exterior door. So the best thing you can do is pick
that puppy up so that they don't have an opportunity to make that mistake. And then you can take them up to the
inside of that exterior door. Now, most people will do at this point is
take their puppy directly outside, but here's the trick. At this point. We want you to sit the puppy
down and hang on to the leash. Your puppy's really got two choices. It's
either have an accident on the floor, which we've talked about in previous
potty training videos. You know, it's not the best outcome, but it gives you an opportunity to tell
the puppy that that's not what you want, or your puppy is going to indicate
they're going to maybe sniff, or they're going to maybe go towards the
door, or they're going to look to you. They're going to look a
little bit uncomfortable. And that's the moment you mark with
your, do you want to go outside? And this is the foundation for this skill
that your puppy needs to come to you to indicate that they
need to go outside. Now, this isn't the kind of skill that
will be learned in one session. You're going to need to plan the same
routine, a few mornings in a row as well. At other times of the day, you need to be really supervising your
puppy and very aware if they start to indicate that they need to go potty
and maybe those signals are sniffing or looking to you or scratching
or whatever they might be, you're going to learn them
in those morning sessions. If your puppy indicates
they need to go outside, do you need to pick them up
and immediately take them out? It's beneficial to have your puppy come
and find you to let you know that they need to go outside. Rather than that,
being stuck, waiting at the door. Well, you don't know that
they need to go outside. So remember set your puppy up to be
successful by starting this first thing in the morning. When you know that
they need to go at this point, I hope you're thinking to yourself. There is no way that I can
supervise my puppy 100% of the time. And you're right. That's why using a crate or a limited
space area is so good for a young puppy in training. It gives them a safe
place to go. That is just their own. And it keeps them from
getting into trouble. When you can't watch them simply having
a crate and putting your puppy in there doesn't necessarily mean that
the accidents will stop. In fact, some poppy owners have
trouble with their puppy. Having an accident in the crate. Let's take a look at why puppies might
have accidents in their crate and what you can do to stop them. We want our
puppies to be comfortable in their crate, but if you're having potty training
issues and your puppy keeps having accidents, it's important to do
things like remove their bedding, whether it's a bed or a towel or
whatever from their crate puppies will sometimes go pee or poop on
that bedding or on that towel. And then they'll sort of scrunch it up
to the side so that they can still sleep comfortably. Now, this won't be forever. This is just while we deal
with this potty training issue, we're going to remove the
bedding from the puppies, crate if they continue to have accidents, remove other things like pee pads as well. It creates a bit of a
conflicting message for puppies, and we're going to show them exactly
how they can very quickly potty train by giving them very clear boundaries. So
by taking them outside, for example, and if you're using puppy
pad training in your house, there's probably lots of videos on YouTube
that talk about progressively moving it closer to an exterior
door, for example, but let's make sure for now that all of
the other things in our puppies crate have been removed. If they're having
problems with potty training, next, we need to look at how much room
our puppy has in their crate. Now, a lot of us will buy a crate
for the puppy's lifetime. We're going to buy it big
enough for them to grow into. But the problem there is that
when your puppy's really little, there might be too much room available
for them to go have an accident in one corner and then sleep soundly or lie down
and be comfortable and dry in another corner of the crate. Something that you can do is especially
for those of you who have a wire crate for your puppy, you can get a divider. Now I know there's probably some plastic
crates out there that you can get a divider for, but you may need to look at doing
something like creating bulk in one end of your plastic puppies crate, make sure that you really have a good
look at how much room your puppy has. They need to be able to stand up, lie down and turn around quite
comfortably in their crate. But if you're giving them
too much more room than that, then they may feel like there's lots of
opportunities to go pee in one side and sleep on the other. I'm going to use
hippie shake as my demonstration dog. And I want her to feel like there's
a bit of a consequence if she has an accident in her crate,
and you can see here, I pour an entire cup of water
in one end of the crate, and she's still able to you know, relax comfortably in the
other end of the crate. So make sure that that crate
has the appropriate amount
of space for your puppy, especially when you're having
potty training problems. Another option is going in like a buy
and sell website and grabbing your crate from there really inexpensively. Now, people are often selling crates because
they feel like they don't need to use them anymore. Maybe their
puppy has grown out of it. So you can definitely check that out
while your puppy is this size and just a quick search on a local
buy and sell website. And I found all sorts
of puppy crate options. We want our puppy's crate to be somewhere
that they can be safe and comfortable and to help us with their
potty training process. And we don't want to have
to be supervising them when
they're in there. However, when you're working on crate training, especially with you're having potty
training problems with your puppy, it's a great idea that if they're in
their crate and you're able to supervise them, that you do keep an eye on them, that you really listen for them
to maybe start making noise, that they might need to go outside. Now,
this may seem a little inconvenient, but moving your puppy's crate around to
wherever you are in the living space is going to be really helpful after your
playtime or your training session, or when they want to have
arrests, moving your puppy. Maybe beside you in the living
room, while you hang out in there, it's going to allow you to hear them make
noise and let you know when they need to go out. Maybe they begin to stir. Now, if your puppy just all of a sudden
decides to go potty in their crate, that's also going to allow you to capture
that moment and use your voice with an oops or an eye or something, some verbal marker to let them know that
that's not what you want at that point. You can take them outside and, you know, praise them for going into a
place that you do want them to go. But that moment that you're able
to catch them in the act. And mark, that moment is going to be really
helpful. If they do have an accident, we have lots of great training videos on
our YouTube channel that will help you to make your create a safe and
comfortable place for your puppy to be. I'll make sure I list a couple of the
links to those videos in the description below. Did you know that you can actually
teach your puppy to go pee on command? Kayl McCann has helped thousands of
puppy owners to master this exact skill. Let's figure out how to teach your
puppy to go pee and poop on command. The first thing that I want to talk to
you about is how to actually teach your dog to go to the washroom on command.
Now, when you take your puppy outside, they can get very easily distracted. So it's best to keep them on a short
leash and just stand still and try not to talk to them too much, stay quiet and
let them just think about their job. Once they go to the washroom, start to pair the command that
you want to use with your dog. Now I use the command hurry up. So what I feel most comfortable
saying in public around people. And I just say that over
and over and over again, as the dog starts to go to the
washroom, once they finished, then I simply just praise the
dog. Don't make a big deal. I don't necessarily give
them cookies or treat them, but I do use my voice to let them
know I'm happy with what they've done. Another thing to consider is the best
time of day to teach your dog to go to the washroom on command. I like to teach my puppies when they
first get up in the morning from a long sleep overnight to take
them outside at that point, because they know they
have to go to the washroom. When they go to the washroom
for the first couple of days, I wait until they go before I start
saying my command over and over and over again, the puppy doesn't
know what the word means yet. So what I have to do is pair my word
with the behavior that the dog is already doing now, after a few days, days go by I may consider saying the
word a few times before the dog goes and see if they start to sniff
or initiate behaviors. That mean that they're
going to go to the washroom. If the puppy is more interested
in playing and jumping around, I'm going to stop saying that command
and just go silent again and wait for the puppy to go to the bathroom or show signs. And at that point I can start
repeating my word again. There's no point in giving a word if
the doc doesn't know what it means. So you have to make sure the first couple
of days is more of a behavior and word association. One problem we might run into and
teaching your dog to go to the washroom on command is that puppies often get
really good at going to the bathroom on command quickly in locations
that they're used to. So such as your house or places
you take them on a regular basis, but there's going to be times when you
have to take your puppy and make them go the washroom in places
that aren't so familiar. So maybe you're heading
to a dog class or you're, you're traveling on the road for
a while. And, and in my case, I fly a lot with my dogs and I have
to go to a lot of different airports. And unfortunately, airports, aren't always the greatest place to
find areas for your dog to go to the washroom. There's been times when I've only had a
very small piece of grass that they been have to go on or, or even
just concrete itself. And the fact that my dogs can go to the
bathroom quickly when I asked them to, and they're not as picky,
but the location, it makes
my 10 hour trip to Europe, a lot less stressful, knowing that they're down below and
they've relieved themselves in their, in their. Along with house training, nipping, inviting as a common challenge
that puppy owners have. It's because they're making a couple of
really big mistakes in their training. If you want to avoid making the biggest
mistakes in puppy biting training, click that card right there on
that note. I'm Ken, Happy Training.
