This is a video of a typical training session for Blitzen.

My dogs rarely eat directly out of food bowls at meal time, especially as puppies. Meal time is training time at my house.

Since I want my dogs – and especially puppies – getting most of their calories from meals and healthy food, I use meal time for my main training sessions. I will still do plenty of other small training throughout the day and use treats, but I take advantage of meal time to get our main training sessions in.

So what does that look like? In this video, you will see a typical training session for Blitzen at meal time. Blitzen is two years old in this video.

We do a lot of Heel work. As I describe to my students when we start working on Heel, it's a position. No matter what I do, you are at my left side. I walk straight ahead. I make a 360 or 180 or 90 degree turn. I stop. I back up. No matter where I go or how fast or slow I move, my dog stays in heel position.

We also do other things, like Paws Up. In this case, Paws Up means front paws up on the railing of the deck. This is one of Blitzen's physical therapy exercises to help stretch out his back, since he has recurring back pain.

You might notice when I ask for Around, he fails to do the exercise the first couple of times. Around, in this case, means to go around the table and chairs and return to heel position.

It is actually really rare that he does not do Around right away. The reason in this case, is that Ed is standing there holding the video camera to tape my session, and Blitzen is a bit thrown off by him standing near where Blitzen needs to go. The context has changed slightly, and having to walk past Ed throws him off his game for a minute. But eventually he does it.

We work on other things in other sessions, but we typically do Heel work every day.

While he does not work for every single meal, he does work for most of them.

What does your dog's meal time look like?