Today I decided it was high time I follow my own advice, and I've been deliberately looking for training opportunities to work with my dogs.

I've been setting the timer and concentrating on work for 15 minutes (today it happens to be editing), then getting up and moving around (with a winter lay-up I'm out of shape and my back's been acting up). Then I set the timer for another 15 minutes of work, and so on.

In the past, I'd go from one 15-minute task to another as a way to help me stay focused and on-task, swapping back and forth between the day's tasks as seemed best. Today, though, I've been taking mini-breaks between those 15-minute time slots. And I've been doing mini-training during those breaks.

For example, while I was waiting for the water to boil for a fresh cup of tea, I called the dogs into the kitchen and did a quick mini-session involving "Sit" and "Touch." Since I was working both dogs at the same time, this also gave the practice in distinguishing when a cue was for them and when it was for the other dog ("Brandy, Sit" versus "Nico, Touch" etc.).

I chose "Touch" because we've been working on long down-stays (helping Nico prepare for his Canine Good Citizen test) and I noticed a problem. Brandy's been having a tough time, breaking the stays much sooner than she used to and also much sooner than Nico was inclined to. In fact she sometimes broke the down as soon as I told her to "Stay."

This puzzled me until I took a look at the situation from her perspective and noticed that I was giving a sloppy hand signal with my "Stay" command. Specifically, I was moving my flattened hand toward her face in an older version of the "Stay" hand signal I used to use. I'd tried (rather unsuccessfully) to change it to a "Stop!" gesture, hand thrust out at shoulder level in a gesture that most people would understand as "Stop!"

With the older gesture, the similarities between the moving hand (with flat palm) for "Stay" and the still hand (with flat palm) for "Touch" or hand targeting were simply too great. And since Brandy prefers action over inaction, she was breaking her down to attempt to target my hand.

So that means cleaning up my hand signals. I'll put more effort into using the "Stop!" gesture for the "Stay" cue. But I also decided to change my hand targeting signal since my dogs touch my hands a lot even when I'm not specifically working on hand targeting. (In scientific terms, this indicates a "lack of stimulus control.")

So now there's a new hand gesture for cueing hand targeting: My forefinger and second finger out straight while the other fingers are curled in and my thumb rests on them. This makes a much more distinct visual cue for the dogs (I'm not likely to put my hand in that gesture by accident). Instead of touching a flat palm with their nose, our new hand targeting involves touching the end of those outstretched fingers.

So one pot of boiled water and several "Real Meat" treats later, each dog was correctly responding to "Touch" by moving forward and putting their nose gently but solidly against the end of those fingers. I used "Sit" to help each dog remain in place while I worked with the other dog.

I'll be looking for – no, making – training opportunities throughout the day, interspersed with micro-grooming sessions as that's more pleasant than the marathon grooming sessions we tend to have.

Update:

Mini-training since I wrote the above:

Loose-leash walking (with Nico out to the mailbox and back: with Brandy around the car while I put some stuff in it)

"Bark" and "Hush" (a self-calming exercise where we get all worked up and "bark" and jump around and then "hush" where were all stay still and quiet)

"Down-stay" -- including during dinner (Brandy had a hard time with this, the smell of food was overriding her self-control)

Plus several "leave it" exercises -- every time we went into the back yard we had the opportunity to "leave it" to keep Nico and Brandy away from the fence (when the back-door-neighbor's dog is out they tend to run the fence)

Not bad for a total of, oh, 20 minutes (plus the time it took for us to eat dinner)...