Training concepts: What is shaping?
What helps top trainers get excellent results?
They understand and use shaping.
If you’re new to dog training or clicker training, you might not be familiar with the word shaping. However, this is a really, really important training concept. The more you understand about shaping, the easier it will be for you to teach your dog new behaviors.
Shaping basically just means that you are going to use a series of steps to teach your dog to do a new behavior. By breaking the behavior into easily-achievable steps, your dog will feel successful during the training process. This will also speed up learning and reduce confusion and frustration! Most importantly, as your dog learns more and more new behaviors using shaping and positive reinforcement, he will start to enjoy learning new things and will look forward to interacting with you during training.