How the App Works

A structured sequence of steps that starts with something your dog can already do easily and ends at the finished behavior.

Each step raises the difficulty a little, using one dimension at a time: a little more distance, a little more duration, a little more distraction, one less bit of help. The first step of a good plan looks almost insultingly easy. That is deliberate. Starting below your dog's current ability costs you two minutes and buys you a dog who is already succeeding when the real work starts.

You do not choose which step to train. You pick the plan, and the app puts your dog on the right step and moves them as the data comes in.

Often confused with

A course, or a curriculum. A plan is not a schedule to get through. Some dogs walk a 16-step plan in two sessions and some take six weeks, and the plan does not care.

One rung of the ladder. A single small version of the behavior, with its own setup and its own definition of success.

A step is the unit the app makes decisions about. Your dog does a handful of repetitions at one step, and the result decides whether they move up, repeat it, or drop back.

Good steps are smaller than owners expect.

Often confused with

A session. A step is a difficulty level. A session is a period of time, and usually contains several steps.

The observable description of what counts as success on this step, decided before you run the rep.

This is the most important word in the app, because pass and fail are meaningless without it. "Did my dog sit?" is not criteria. "Within three seconds of the verbal cue, without a hand signal, and their bottom stays down until I mark it" is criteria.

The test for whether you have real criteria: could a stranger who does not know your dog score this rep and get the same answer you did? If not, you are judging on feel, which drifts across a session, gets more generous as you get tired, and hands the app data that describes your mood rather than your dog.

Every step in every plan comes with its criteria written out, in the pass and fail lines. Read them before the first rep of a step, not after your dog has done something ambiguous.

One more rule, and it is the one that makes small steps possible: change one criterion at a time. If you add duration, do not also add distance. If your dog is learning the word, do not also move to the garden. When a step contains two changes at once, a fail tells you nothing, because you cannot tell which change caused it.

Often confused with

Standards, or expectations. Criteria are not how well you hope your dog will do. They are a line drawn in advance so that today's judging matches yesterday's.

Short for repetition, also called a trial. One attempt at the current step.

Reps are usually run back to back so the data comes from a consistent moment: same room, same mood, same hunger level. A rep starts with you setting your dog up, includes whatever you prompt, and ends when you score it.

Some protocols do not fit that shape. Classical conditioning reps are often scattered through the day, one at a time, whenever the trigger happens to appear.

Often confused with

A try. A rep is a measurement. If you were not ready to score it, it was not a rep, and it is fine to reset and start it properly.

A group of reps at one step, usually five, after which the app makes a decision.

Five is enough to tell a real pattern from a lucky rep and small enough that a struggling dog is not stuck failing for long. Timed steps work slightly differently: the set runs for a minute and you fit in as many reps as the pace allows.

Finishing the set matters. Abandoning one halfway leaves the app without a decision, and the temptation to bail out is strongest exactly when the data would have been most useful.

Often confused with

A session. Most sessions hold several sets.

The two buttons. A pass means the rep met the step's criteria. A fail means it did not. That is the entire meaning of each.

A fail is not a judgement of your dog, and it is not something that happens to your dog. A fail is a measurement, never an instruction. No consequence follows it: no scolding, no repeating the rep until it works, no disappointed sigh, no withheld affection. The treat simply does not arrive, you set up the next rep, and the app gets a data point. See Positive Punishment.

One nuance, because some plans do ask you to mark a miss out loud. A no reward marker, a light "oops", is information rather than a consequence: it tells your dog that this particular attempt will not pay and invites them to try again. It earns its place on clear-cut criteria like a stay, where dogs often reset themselves the moment they hear it. It works only while it stays kind. Said sharply, or with a sigh behind it, it stops being information and becomes something your dog wants to avoid, which is positive punishment wearing a friendlier word. Keep it cheerful, use it where the criterion is obvious, and if your dog looks worried when they hear it, stop using it. They are optional.

Tapping the fail button is not a no reward marker. Your dog should not be able to tell which button you pressed.

Your honesty here is the whole product. It runs wrong in both directions:

• Generous judging feels kind and is not. Marking near-misses as passes makes the app push your dog to a harder step they were not ready for, and they fail there instead, having lost the easier step that would have got them ready.
• Harsh judging leaves your dog stuck repeating work they had already mastered, which is boring, and boredom looks a lot like disobedience.

Some practical rules that make judging easier:

• If you genuinely cannot decide, it is a fail. And note the ambiguity, because it usually means the criteria were not clear before you started.
• Judge against the step, not against your dog's best ever rep. Also not against how much you want to get to the next step tonight.
• Fails immediately after a push are healthy. The app just raised the difficulty and is finding the edge. That is what pushing is for.
• Fails late on a step your dog already owned mean something different: tiredness, or a stacked day. See Trigger Stacking.
• On comfort steps the criterion is comfort, not compliance. A dog who completed the exercise while lip licking and looking away has failed that rep. See Stress Signals.

Two step types remove the button on purpose. Capturing has no fail button at all, and Errorless disables it until the timer ends.

Often confused with

Right and wrong, or good dog and bad dog. The dog is never wrong. Either the criteria were met or the step was too hard, and only one of those is your dog's business.

One sitting of training, usually made up of several sets.

Keep them short. Five to fifteen minutes suits most dogs, and shorter is better than longer when something is new. The instinct to keep going after a great set is the most common way a good session turns into a bad one.

Stop while your dog is still fresh and still keen. That is not a soft suggestion, it is where the learning is: a dog who ends wanting more comes back to the next session ready, and a dog who ended flat comes back slower. If your dog is tiring, the answer is fewer sets today, not easier reps.

How often is up to your life. Daily practice is lovely and entirely optional. Train as often as your schedule genuinely allows, and know that a day or two off is not lost ground: dogs consolidate what they have learned in the gaps, and a rested dog often comes back better than they left. Two short sessions a week that actually happen beat a daily plan you abandon by Thursday.

Often confused with

Practice time. Sessions are not the only training your dog gets. The rest of the day is teaching them things too.

Move forward to the next, harder step. Your dog has this one.

The app pushes when your dog passed enough of the set, which on most steps means four or five out of five. You do not decide this and you do not need to. Judge the reps honestly and the push arrives when it has been earned.

A push often produces a rougher next set, and that is correct. The app is looking for the edge of what your dog can do, and it finds it by going slightly too far and then adjusting.

Move back to the previous, easier step. Too hard, right now.

A drop is the app protecting your dog, not a mark against either of you. Nothing has been lost: your dog gets a set they can win, the confidence comes back, and the harder step is still there.

The phrase to hold on to is right now. A step that was too hard on a hot Thursday evening after a stacked day is frequently easy on Saturday morning. Dropping is how the app absorbs that without asking you to diagnose it.

Often confused with

Failing the plan, or going backwards. Judging honestly and letting the app drop will get you through a plan sooner than judging generously to avoid it. A generous pass does not help your dog, it moves the difficulty up onto a dog who was not ready for it, and you pay for it two steps later.

Repeat the same step. Right on the edge.

Roughly three out of five means your dog is genuinely learning this one and is not ready to be asked for more. Another set at the same difficulty is exactly the right amount of help.

Two sticks in a row is perfectly normal, and often exactly what a hard step needs. Three or four in a row is worth noticing: it usually means something outside the step is interfering, such as the environment, the treat value, or your dog's day.

Insert an in-between step, because the gap between two steps is too big for this dog.

The app splits when your dog bounces: push, drop, push, drop. That pattern is not confusion or stubbornness, it is a measurement, and what it measures is the distance between two rungs. Splitting is the app building a rung in the middle.

Some steps have several splits available. Some have none, in which case the app will drop again instead.

Of the four moves, this is the one to be most pleased about. It means the plan is being fitted to your dog rather than the other way round.

The in-between step itself. An easier version of the step in front of it, kept hidden until your dog needs it.

Split steps do not appear when you browse a plan in the phone app, which surprises people who go looking for them. They are held back deliberately: most dogs never need them, and a plan that showed every possible rescue rung would read as intimidating rather than achievable.

So if your dog is stuck and you are wondering whether the plan needs an extra step written for it, the answer is usually that the extra step already exists and the app will produce it after a repeat drop.

If you do want to see them, the website shows every step of a plan, splits included, along with more of the machinery than the app puts in front of you: the training type, the treat values, the rep count, and the exact push, drop and bail thresholds. The app shows you what you need while you are training. The website is where to go when you want to read how a plan is built.

Every step is judged by one of five sets of rules, shown as the step's training type. The type is chosen by whoever wrote the plan, based on what the step is teaching.

• Prompting — the standard. You prompt a behavior and score whether you got it.
• Shaping — timed. Tracks two criteria at once, most often while a verbal cue is being added before a known hand signal.
• Capturing — you reward a behavior your dog offers on their own. No fail button.
• Classical — building a good feeling about something. Drops after a single fail.
• Errorless — timed, and set up so failure is nearly impossible. The fail button is disabled until the timer ends.

The last two are the back-off-fast rules, and they are what the app uses for anything to do with fear, comfort, grooming or handling. If a step is judged by one of those, that is a signal about what the step is for.

One clarification, since grouping them can mislead. Errorless steps are operant learning, exactly like the first three: your dog does something and you pay it. What makes them different is the setup, arranged so the right answer is very nearly the only one available. Classical steps are the only ones that are not operant, because they are not about what your dog does at all.

The app's main rules, used for most steps: you prompt a behavior, your dog does it or does not, you score it.

The thresholds are two thirds in each direction, which is what makes the app forgiving of one bad rep and unforgiving of a pattern.

If all reps are completed and more than two-thirds pass, then Push
If more than two-thirds of completed reps are fails, then Drop
Unless the step has already been repeated, then Split
Otherwise Stick

Timed rules for when you are tracking two criteria at once.

The first is your current criteria, something your dog can already do reliably. The second is your shopping criteria, the better version you are watching for them to offer on their own.

Most commonly this is a verbal cue being added before a trained hand signal. The current criteria is sitting for the hand signal. The shopping criteria is sitting from the word alone, before you have had a chance to give the hand signal, and when that happens you pay it immediately. See Jumping the Prompt.

The order is the whole exercise, and it is worth being blunt about it. Say the word first, on its own, then pause, then give the hand signal. A new word becomes a cue the same way anything else does, by predicting something, so it has to arrive before the thing it predicts. Said at the same time as the hand signal it predicts nothing, your dog keeps reading your hand, and the word never gets any meaning at all. That is one of the most common reasons a dog who "knows sit" does not sit when nobody moves their hand, and it gets read as stubbornness when it is really a word that was never taught.

A timer is used for these steps.
If all reps are completed and more than two-thirds meet the shopping criteria, then Push
If less than two-thirds of completed reps meet the current criteria, then Drop
Unless the step has already been repeated, then Split
Otherwise Stick

Rules for steps where you are rewarding something your dog offers on their own, with no prompt and no cue.

Because you are only ever paying a behavior your dog chose to produce, there is nothing to fail, and no fail button. Your dog cannot get this wrong. If the behavior is not happening, that is about the setup, not about your dog. See Capturing.

If all reps are completed and passed, then Push

Rules for emotional work, where what matters is how your dog feels rather than what they did.

These steps Drop at the first sign your dog is uncomfortable. A single fail is enough, and that is the point.

Do not worry about dropping repeatedly in the early stages. Trust is much harder to rebuild than to keep, and moving faster than your dog is ready for costs you far more time later than it saves now. The genuinely strange truth of this work is that you will get to the end sooner by going at what feels like a ridiculous crawl.

If you fail a single rep, then Drop
Unless the step has already been repeated, then Split
If all reps are completed and passed, then Push

Timed rules for steps where your dog is not meant to fail at all.

The setup is arranged so that the right answer is the easy answer, and the fail button stays disabled until the timer runs out. If you do use it, one fail drops the step.

These are the steps where the app is most explicitly on your dog's side: they get to be right by default. See Start Button.

A timer is used for these steps.
If you fail a single rep, then Drop
Unless the step has already been repeated, then Split
If all reps are completed and passed, then Push

How many treats your dog earns per minute of training.

For a dog learning something new, aim high: eight to twelve treats a minute, which is roughly one every five or six seconds. That feels like a lot of food and it is meant to. A high rate is what keeps a learner in the game, and most sessions that fall apart do so because the dog stopped getting paid often enough to care.

As a behavior gets solid the rate comes down on its own, and an established behavior maintains on much less. One caution on thinning it deliberately, though: an unpredictable, occasional schedule makes behavior persistent, which is not the same as making it enthusiastic. A dog on a very thin schedule often still responds, just slowly and flatly. If you are there to cue a behavior, you are there to pay for it, so the better move is usually to widen what counts as payment rather than to pay less often.

One important exception. On steps that are mostly waiting, a sixty second settle, a long stay, a duration hold, the rate will be low no matter what you do, because your dog is being paid once for a rep that takes a while. That is not underpaying, that is the exercise. Judge the rate against what the step is asking, not against a number.

And one thing to watch mid-session. If your rate is dropping as the session goes on, that usually means the reps are getting slower, which usually means your dog is tiring. Fewer sets. Finish while it is still good.

Often confused with

Spoiling your dog, or "he only does it for food." See Reinforcement vs Reward. A generous rate while teaching is not the same as a generous rate forever.

A milestone step that records something meaningful your dog can now do: responds to the hand signal, responds to the word alone, holds it at a distance, holds it for a duration, does it around a distraction, feels good about something that used to worry them, does it in its own context without being asked each time, or offers it entirely unasked.

Goals group hundreds of small repetitions into the handful of achievements you would actually tell someone about. Each type has its own icon: a hand for a hand signal, a talking head for a verbal cue, a double-headed arrow for distance, a timer for duration, a squirrel for distraction, a party popper for comfort, a light bulb for automatic, and dice for offered.

The last two are worth a word, because they are the ones owners are proudest of without having a name for. An automatic goal is a behavior that runs in its context with no cue each time: the sit that happens when you stop walking, or the rest of a chain carrying on after one cue. An offered goal is one your dog volunteers unasked: a check-in on a walk, settling on their mat on their own. Both mean the behavior has stopped depending on you asking for it, which is usually the point where the training starts to feel finished.

You earn a goal by pushing off that step, and it turns green. If you later revisit it and drop, in a plan or a game, it turns blue, which means it needs a little review rather than that you have lost it.

Often confused with

Finishing a plan. Goals sit inside plans, and most plans hold several.

Practising a behavior your dog already knows in harder places, until it works in real life rather than only in your kitchen.

Dogs are far more context-specific than people expect. A sit that is flawless by the fridge can genuinely not exist at the park, and that is not your dog being difficult, it is how learning works. The behavior was learned along with the room.

The rule that makes proofing pleasant: a new environment is itself a difficulty, so lower everything else. Shorter durations, less distance, better treats, easier criteria. Let your dog succeed in the new place before you ask for the standard you had at home.

The app gives you four ways to proof, none of which involve a correction:

• Proof steps — replay a finished plan's hardest end in a new place. See Proof Step.
• Proofing games — cues from several plans, shuffled, so your dog listens instead of guessing the pattern.
• Blue goals — anything that turned blue on your home screen is the app telling you exactly which skill wants review.
• Other people — hand the phone to family or friends and let them run proof steps or a game. A cue that only works when you hold the treat pouch is not finished, and this is the cheapest way to find that out.

Often confused with

Testing. Proofing is teaching, and it should look like your dog getting it right a lot.

Once a plan is finished, proof steps let you replay just the harder end of it, in a new place or around distractions, without walking the whole ladder again.

Unlike split steps, proof steps are visible in the plan from the start, and it is normal to see one sitting before a plain step in the list. They interleave where they belong.

A short, shuffled drill built from the goals your dog has already earned, pulled from different plans and called in random order.

This is the answer to a problem every trained dog has: within a plan, your dog can succeed by guessing the pattern. Games remove the pattern. Sit, then wait, then touch, then down, in an order nobody can predict, means your dog has to actually respond to the cue you gave. See Stimulus Control.

Goals your dog nails stay green. Goals they miss turn blue for review, which is the game doing its job: it just found the cue that was leaning on context rather than standing on its own.

Games are also the app's whole answer to proofing under pressure. There is no correction anywhere in them. You raise the difficulty by shuffling the order, not by adding a consequence.