Have you ever worried that your dog wouldn't perform a cue if they couldn't see a treat in your hand? Maybe this has already become the norm and you've resigned to believing your dog won't do anything unless they see the treat first. No worries we can change that! But first, we need to understand reinforcement schedules and how they can help OR hinder us.

Over the next few weeks, we're going to learn about the different reinforcement schedules and how they work, but today is about continuous reinforcement (CR). Continuous reinforcement is the act of rewarding (reinforcing) a behavior each and every time it occurs (continuously).

CR is G R E A T for when we are beginning to teach our dog a new cue (i.e. mark and reward every time your dog goes to "place") or when we are trying to modify a behavior, but we shouldn't make this our go-to for every training session. One example of how I would like you to not use continuous reinforcement is marking and rewarding every time your dog sits even at home.

I am a huge fan of rewards-based training (obvi), but if we keep our dogs on the CR schedule for too long, we set them up to be unreliable in situations where we may not have access to tangible rewards. This can become a real road block if a dog is conditioned to expect a reward for every cue they perform and we suddenly stop providing that reward. We never, ever want our dogs to think "why bother?" when we ask for a cue. The idea is that we move away from CR once our dogs are performing a cue fairly reliably more on how to do that in the coming weeks!

I want to note that there are a few situations where I believe you should use continuous reinforcement even after a behavior is known:

• For every Recall - we want this to be one of your dog's most reliable cues and providing high-value rewards every time they perform the cue is a great way to make that happen.
• In new environments - dogs do not generalize well and for that reason, we may need to briefly go back to CR when training in environments that are new to the dog.
• If regression has occurred - this happens! It's not the end of the world and all of your hard work has not been undone! Simply pretend you're teaching your dog the cue for the first time and you'll be back on track in no time!

Happy Training!

- Caitlyn