Updated September 2025.
In this post, I’m sharing a chapter from my extensive online course Getting Behaviour! The video below is one of the 108 similar chapters from the course.
The video discusses why training sessions should be shorter rather than longer, and why training more than once a day may in some cases actually hurt your training; sleep consolidates memory, so a second same-day training session may interfere with the consolidation of the first training session.
Lisa shared the following: “I totally agree with the concept of allowing the animal time to ‘sleep on it’. When working with my ponies, if we have had a session that has seemed to be less productive, on returning to training the next day, it just seems to ‘click’ the next session!”
With regards to ways of ending training sessions, I should also clarify that if you can, ask for another behaviour rather than walk away if things are not progressing. Sometimes though, for instance in the case of aggressive behaviour, negative punishment may be warranted – or, if you will, a cool-down period. But, if you have to resort to that, you should ask yourself: how can I avoid this situation in the future?
Generally, I wouldn’t be too concerned if you end the session with a frustrated animal on rare occasions, as long as it’s not the norm – and as long as you take such occasions as learning opportunities to understand how you can avoid them from recurring. Sometimes it’s better to quit than continuing a session that’s not working – and getting frustrated yourself.
I had one great question to this chapter: “If sleep is important to consolidate learning, is it only extended sleep (overnight sleep)? Many animals have short sleep periods during the daytime. Don’t naps contribute to learning consolidation?”
Here’s what the research says: “After a comparatively brief sleep episode, subjects that take a nap improve more on a declarative memory (knowing what) task than subjects that stay awake, but that improvement on a procedural memory task (knowing how) is the same regardless of whether subjects take a nap or remain awake. Slow wave sleep was the only sleep parameter to correlate positively with declarative memory improvement.”
Extended sleep is also needed for procedural memory consolidation, though..!
There are three sleep stages.
- Stage 1: eyes closed, easy to wake.
- Stage 2: light sleep. Heart rate down, temperature drops.
- Stage 3: deep sleep – this is when declarative memory consolidation occurs – and we typically don’t get to this stage during short naps.
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6 replies on “How often should you train the animal?”
How long does it take for a puppy to go to a deep sleep cycle? So a half an hour nap won’t do it but would an hour and a half to two hour nap help to solidify learning?
Michele, great question and one that I don’t have a good answer for. Assuming the same is true for dogs as for people, that memory consolidation occurs during deep sleep, it would depend whether that stage is reached or not during the nap. I haven’t found any data on whether dogs reach deep sleep during daytime naps.
Hi – I’d think that when we add cues, that would be more of t memory (knowing what we call the behavior) versus knowing how (procedural).
If that’s the case, then maybe when we’re working on something like proprioception or new physical skills, that needs deep sleep to consolidate, but just adding cues to behavior they already know how to physically do can be consolidated with just a nap?
Or is that not borne out by the data?
Oh, interesting question! I wouldn’t really know where to put cues: are they explicit or implicit? We humans might think of the cue as semantic (meaning it’s explicit, focusing on the word and what it means), but to the animal it might be more emotional (classically conditioned; implicit). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicit_memory
As to the two studies I discuss, none of them seem to have done any stimulus control training; rather the animal responding to visual cues, such as targets, present in the environment.
Hej Karolina
Min egen erfaring med min gamle Bouvier (konkurrence hund/lydighed) var helt tydeligt at når jeg var ved at opgive indlæringen af et specielt moment så skulle vi ikke træne det i et par dage og pludselig ud af den blå luft så kunne hun det, så jeg plejede at sige “hun skal lige sove på det” …men altså mere end en nat …
Er den viden man har nu ikke den at leg efter træning i stedet for ind i bilen og hvile som man sagde før i tiden det giver bedre indlæring end hvile?
På KU/Københavns Universitets Hospital 2010 lavede biolog Helle Demant sit speciale med 44 Beagles (til topkarakter) som handler om noget ala samme
https://videnskab.dk/miljo-naturvidenskab/hunde-skal-traenes-i-sma-doser
PS der skulle stå “moment” og ikke “øjeblik” 🙂
Iben