Training Your Dog To Lie Down For A Long Time

The prolonged lie down is an advanced dog training technique. It is similar to the normal “down” command – only it is designed to teach your dog to lie down for a long time – meaning as long as you want him to lie down.

Why would you want to do this? The reason is you’ll be able to take your dog on shopping trips, or even to your workplace, and be fully confident that when you tell him to lie down, he’ll be in the exact same place 15 minutes later.

Now this isn’t fool-proof. Depending on yours dogs personality, this may or may not work.

This exercise will require patient training, but it’s going to be well worth the extra time and effort.

Your dog ignores your lie down command?

We recommend the Adam Katz dogproblems.com membership site for a fast, easy and simple way to fix your dog's behavior problems. To find out more, Click here.

Here’s the steps:

First, you must position your dog beside your chair and give the commands “Down” and “Stay”. You should be holding his leash loosely.

When your dog starts to move, hold him by the collar and pull him gently back into the down position. Say “No”, and then repeat the command “Down” and “Stay”.

If your dog tries to leave the down position again, you should quickly stop him as you did before. Say “No” as your dog rises, give the commands “Down” and “Stay” once again, as you reinforce the down position.

After a while your dog will eventually find a comfortable resting position lying on his side. Once your dog is lying on his side, he is happy with your command, and he’s more likely to stay in that position and not get up.

Even 25 minutes later your dog should still be in the same relaxed position. You can increase the duration of this exercise gradually over several training sessions, until you have faith that your dog will stay lying down until you release him from the command.

If you have a particularly dominant dog, it may be a good idea to command him to do the prolonged down position at least once a day to remind him of your authority.

I know that this training session can become frustrating, especially at first. It does require patience and persistence, but the rewards will be well worth it.

Just think: You’ll have complete control over your dog. Things like stealing food from the table, jumping on visitors, and plenty of other problems will be non-existent once you’ve taught your dog to lie down for long periods of time.