Best Easy Tricks For Your New Aussiedoodle Puppy

Your Aussiedoodle puppy is having fun exploring their new home and getting to know their family. Is it too early to start training some tricks?

Your puppy can start learning tricks right away. The secret is to keep the training sessions short and fun! That way your puppy will always be excited when it is time to train. Stay successful by starting with easy tricks that every dog can learn. 

There are so many reasons you should start teaching your puppy tricks right now. Training will help strengthen the bond you have with your dog. It teaches both you and your dog how to better communicate. Training is also a great way to enrich your dog’s brain. When they learn that their behaviors can earn praise and other rewards, they will be more apt to be a willing student for future exercises. And if that weren’t enough, some tricks also provide great physical benefits such as strengthening.

As a dog trainer I have witnessed so many dogs blossom while learning tricks, including my own dogs. When teaching obedience skills, we get frustrated if our dogs are slow to learn, and that frustration runs down the leash. Most people are more relaxed when teaching tricks, which usually makes for a more successful training session. This can help us learn to train anything more effectively.

What Is The Best Way To Teach Puppy Tricks?

Your young aussiedoodle wants to have fun! So we want to harness their love of toys and treats to make learning a game. 

To help paint a clear picture of the behavior we want, use a marker while training your puppy. The marker tells the dog the exact moment when they have earned the reward. This is important because we have about ½-2 seconds to impact a behavior once it happens. Markers enable us to capture this moment more accurately. 

Clickers are a type of marker, and they work really well when used correctly. But you can also build a verbal mark. My dogs are conditioned to a clicker, but I have also conditioned a verbal marker. I use”yes”.  So when you begin, use whatever is easiest for you.

The marker is a promise to your dog that they have earned something they really love. Most often we use treats, because it is easy when we want to practice with several repetitions. But you can use whatever the dog loves, such as toys.

Conditioning your marker makes for a great warm up for your training session. Click, or say your marker work, and follow up with your chosen reward. 

Repeat a few times, allowing yourself to get a feel for pairing your marker with the treat. This also allows your dog to start to make the connection between the two.

For a more in-depth introduction to marker training watch this video.

The Best Way To Teach Verbal Cues

I always teach a behavior first and once they are doing well with it, I condition the verbal cue by saying it once, then following up with the hand signal described in each exercise. We tend to talk to our dogs too much. They rely much more on our body language, and they will start to ignore us if we keep repeating words that have no meaning to them.

Foundational Tricks

These are simple tricks that can evolve into more advanced behaviors.

How To Teach Your Aussiedoodle A Nose Target/Touch

Teaching your dog to target your hand with their nose often becomes one of their favorite tricks! And it is a great first trick, because the criteria is easy.

They simply have to touch your hand with their nose.

This has a multitude of uses. Once your puppy is reliably performing this you can use it to get them to stand up, come to you to touch, position them on the scale at the vet, or even touch a guest's hand as a more controlled greeting. It can also help puppies to see your hand as something other than a chew toy! 

Start by presenting your hand a few inches away from your dog. Most dogs will naturally sniff at a hand that is presented to them. When you feel their nose on your hand mark and reward.

If your dog does not sniff your hand, reset. You can walk away from them for a few minutes, and you can even season your hand with a treat. I don’t often advise putting a treat in your hand, as that is a visual cue to your dog that takes time to wean off. However, if seasoning your hand doesn’t work, you can try just a few repetitions with a treat tucked in your hand.

Do this several times using the same hand. Make sure the dog is making the movement toward your hand. People are sometimes tempted to put their hand on the dog’s nose. But we want the dog to make the motion.

Your open hand is the hand cue for this exercise.

As the dog gets better, you can condition the cue “touch” followed up by your open hand. Then to build a stronger behavior, you can switch hands, and vary the distance of your hand from the dog’s nose.

If your dog loves this you can play around with 6 Clever Uses For Your Dog’s Hand Touch Cue.

How Do I Teach An Aussiedoodle A Paw Target?

This is simply teaching your puppy to touch a target with their paw. The target can be anything visual: a tupperware lid, the top of a sour cream container, etc. I personally like to use sticky notes. That way if I want to transfer it to a button, or my hand for a shake, or anywhere that I want the dog to target.

The bigger the sticky note the better when you are just starting. You put the sticky note on the ground and mark and reward any time the foot comes in contact with the paper. 

Because your dog is playing a guessing game to figure out what you want, you can shape this behavior. Shaping means you will mark and reward successive steps toward the end behavior. So, mark any time the dog looks or moves toward the paper. As the dog starts catching on to the game, tighten up your requirement until you are only marking paw contact with the sticky note.

As they catch on, start to move the paper around. Then you can try putting it on your hand to get a shake or high five. Or on a smart button that talks. They can even help around the house by teaching them to paw target a cabinet door to close it. 

Once you teach the easy base level behavior, you can have lots of fun with this trick!

Tricks For Fun And Fitness

These easy tricks don’t just look cute! They are great physical exercises for your puppy.

How Do I Teach A Puppy To Play Bow?

This position is used in between dogs as an invitation to play. But it also gives your dog’s hips and groin a nice stretch, and it elongates the spine.

There are several ways to train this. One of my puppies play bowed at me all the time, allowing me to capture the behavior. He would play bow to entice me to play, and I would mark and follow up with a treat. Within a few days he was offering it even more. So I conditioned the cue by saying “take a bow” right before it looked like he was going to go into a bow.

This is called behavior capturing. You can learn more about it here.

You can also lure the behavior. When your dog is in a stand, take a treat and put it at your aussiedoodle’s nose. Slowly move it at an angle moving between your dog’s front feet. When you see any dip in your puppies shoulder’s mark and treat. 

When your dog becomes more fluent, remove the treat from your hand, but move your hand like you have the treat. Mark and treat responses. This builds a hand cue. 

Once your dog responds to the hand cue, you can give it a verbal cue. Pick the cue you want, say it to your dog just once, and follow up with the hand signal. With enough repetition your dog will predict what you are asking for with just the verbal cue.

How Do I Teach My Aussiedoodle to Sit Pretty?

This is a classic trick that is great for building your dog’s core muscles. It also helps to build balance. With that in mind, when first starting out with this trick, do a short training session to get your dog used to this position.

Start with your dog on a stable, non-slip surface in a sit. Take a piece of treat in your hand and start with the treat near your aussiedoodle’s nose and start to lift it up toward the ceiling, slowly. 

We are not looking for the finished behavior in the first attempts. Watch your dog’s feet. When they both start to lift off the floor while your dog reaches to get the treat, mark, and reward him with the food in your hand.

When your aussiedoodle starts to understand that when their front two feet come off of the ground, they get reinforced, you will start to wait until their paws lift up even more before you mark and treat.

When the dog is in the position you like, you will start to build duration. When building time spent in a sit pretty pose, you will build it in seconds (and sometimes microseconds). When performing a physical exercise such as this, pushing your dog too far too fast could frustrate them both mentally and physically.

How Do I Teach My Aussiedoodle To Spin?

Spin is a fun and easy trick to teach your dog that also supplies a nice spine stretch!

For this trick, your dog will turn 360 degrees, making a circle. 

Start with your dog in front of you. Put food right at their nose, and start to lure them into a circle. Since some dogs get confused by this, I recommend marking and treating for a quarter of the circle the first few times, and building to a half circle, and so on. 

You will want to teach the spin going both to the left and the right. Like humans, dogs will usually prefer one side to the other, so don’t be surprised if one side is easier to train than the other.

When you are ready to add a verbal cue to this trick, you will want to give the right turn and left turn different cues. Some people use “circle” and “spin”. But you can come up with any cues you wish.

At first you want to ask the dog for the cue in front of you, but as they get more fluent with it, you can start asking for it when they are at your side too.