An Easy Way to Quickly Exercise a High Energy Dog to Help Reduce Her Anxiety

For this Omaha dog training session we show 7 year-old German Shepherd Macy’s guardian an easy way to exercise the dog to help with her anxiety and reactivity to new people.

Macy likes to machine gun bark and air bite at people she doesn’t know so I arranged to meet her outside. Using a few Dog Behaviorist tricks I had her taking treats from my hand and no barks or air bites.

One of the tips I used was to have the guardian not use the pinch / prong collar. These are pain causing devices and work via the concept of pain or discomfort for non compliance. Modern dog training eschews the use of these devices as studies show that aversive training methods often lead to fear, stress and aggression.

We went inside and spent a few hours going over how dogs learn, how to communicate what the human wants in ways that the dog understands and wants to follow. Petting with a purpose, passive training and limiting Macy’s access to things she responds negatively to are all things that will help her learn to relax and reduce her stress which will lessen her barking and air biting.

One thing I saw right away was that this dog needed more exercise. Her guardian moved from a home with lots of land to a house with a small back yard which is likely a contributing factor. Your average dog needs an hour of exercise every day, but its best done every 2-4 hours. One of the tricks to exercising a dog is what I call a doggy stair master. You can learn how to quickly and easily exercise a dog by watching the free positive dog training video below.

Doing the doggy stair master 2-4 times a day along with feeding out of a snuggle matt, using a dog back pack, some scent games, fetch and walks with lots of sniffing will put Macy in a position to succeed and greatly reduce her anxiety and barking behavior.

Id also like to see Macy’s guardian practice a focus exercise as demonstrated in this link. Macy was too anxious in the session for us to do this with her live, so I walked the guardian through the exercise a few times and asked her to let me know if she has any questions or problems with it.

Because of how anxious and reactive a dog Macy is, we will need to set up a follow up session in a month or so to build on the progress we made in today’s in home Omaha dog training session. I think our Loose Leash Walking program will also help a ton and ensure the pinch collar use is discontinued and control on walks is achieved.

To help the guardian remember everything we covered, we filmed a roadmap to success video that you can check out below.