The Week-by-Week Puppy Training Schedule

Most puppy schedules you'll find online are lists of commands with weeks attached, and they make new owners feel behind by day four. This one is built differently. It tells you what your puppy's brain is actually capable of at each stage, what matters at that moment, and — just as importantly — what you can safely ignore until later.

There is only one hard deadline in the whole first year, and it isn't sit or stay. It's socialisation, and it closes around 16 weeks.

The one thing that is genuinely urgent

Puppies go through a sensitive period for socialisation that runs from roughly 3 weeks to somewhere between 12 and 16 weeks of age. During that window, novelty is processed as interesting. After it, novelty is increasingly processed as threatening.

That's the whole mechanism. A puppy who meets a man in a hat at 10 weeks files "men in hats" under normal. The same puppy meeting his first man in a hat at 7 months has to work much harder to reach the same conclusion, and some never entirely do.

You get one pass at this. Sit can be taught at any age; a dog who is comfortable with strangers, traffic, vacuum cleaners, vets and children is mostly built before four months old. If you do nothing else on this page, do this.

What counts as socialisation: calm, positive exposure at a distance the puppy can handle. Watching a skateboard go past from thirty metres while eating chicken is socialisation. Being surrounded by six shouting children at a market is flooding, and it can create the exact fear you were trying to prevent.

Aim for a handful of new experiences a week, not a checklist crammed into a weekend. Your vet can advise on how to do this safely before the vaccination course is complete — carrying the puppy, using clean private gardens, and meeting vaccinated adult dogs are all standard answers.

The schedule at a glance

Note what's in the last column. A 9-week-old puppy losing focus after ninety seconds is not being stubborn — that's the physiological limit. Training past it teaches your puppy that training sessions end in frustration.

Weeks 8 to 10: the foundation fortnight

Your puppy has just lost their litter, their mother, and every familiar smell in their world. Week one is not a training week. It's a settling week with training woven into it.

Priorities, in order:

1. House training routine. Out after waking, after eating, after play, and every 45 to 60 minutes in between. A puppy this age physically cannot hold it longer. Reward outside, within three seconds of finishing — later than that and the reward attaches to walking back to the door.
2. Name response. Say the name once, and the instant the head turns, mark it and pay. Ten reps a day. Never use the name to interrupt something the puppy is enjoying, or you'll poison it in a fortnight.
3. Sit. The easiest first cue and a useful default for the next fifteen years. Our five-minute guide to teaching sit covers the luring steps.
4. The crate as a good place. Start feeding meals in it with the door open. Full method in crate training without the crying.
5. Handling. Touch paws, ears, mouth and tail daily, pairing each with a treat. Ten seconds a day now saves years of nail-trim wrestling later.

Sleep is training too. Puppies this age need 18 to 20 hours of sleep a day. An overtired puppy looks like a badly behaved puppy — frantic, mouthy, unable to settle. If your puppy turns into a small crocodile every evening around seven, the answer is usually a nap, not a training plan.

Weeks 10 to 12: adding structure

The puppy has stopped being a guest and started being a resident. Attention spans stretch to three to five minutes and you can now do genuine short sessions.

Add:

• Down. Lure from sit, mark the moment the elbows touch the floor.
• Come, indoors only. Make it a party every single time. Never call your puppy to do something they dislike; go and get them instead.
• The leash and harness, indoors. Wear it around the house for two-minute stretches with food. Walking comes later; feeling normal in the equipment comes now.
• Bite inhibition. Needle teeth are at their sharpest and mouthing is at its peak. This is a skill to shape, not a habit to punish — see why puppies bite and how to make it stop.
• Alone time in small doses. Five minutes behind a closed door while the puppy chews something good, several times a day. Building this early is far easier than fixing separation anxiety later.

This is also the fortnight to push hardest on socialisation. You are near the end of the easy window. Count your exposures: surfaces (grass, tile, metal grate, gravel), sounds (traffic, hoover, doorbell, thunderstorm recording at low volume), people (beards, hats, wheelchairs, high-vis jackets, children at a distance), and handling by someone who isn't you.

Months 3 to 4: the window closes

Somewhere in here your puppy will start noticing things they previously walked past — a bin bag, a statue, a man with an umbrella. A brief wobble in confidence around 8 to 11 weeks and again in adolescence is normal and well documented. The response is the same: more distance, more food, zero pressure. Never drag a puppy towards something they're worried about.

Training goals for this stretch:

• Stay, measured in seconds. Three seconds is a real achievement at 14 weeks. Build duration before distance, and distance before distraction — changing two at once is the classic reason stays fall apart.
• Loose-lead walking. The rule is simple and brutal to follow: the lead going tight means forward motion stops. Ten minutes of this beats an hour of being towed.
• Recall on a long line, outdoors. A 5 to 10 metre line means you never have to test a recall you might lose. Every recall your puppy ignores makes the next one weaker.
• Teething management. Adult teeth arrive between roughly 12 and 24 weeks and the gums genuinely hurt. Frozen carrot, damp frozen flannel, and rotating chew toys. Chewing at this age is not defiance; it's pain relief.

By 16 weeks, treat the socialisation window as closed. Anything not introduced by now can still be introduced — it just becomes a deliberate desensitisation project rather than a walk in the park.

Months 4 to 6: proofing, not new tricks

Most owners at this stage think their dog "forgot" everything. What actually happened is that the cues were only ever learned in the kitchen.

Dogs are poor generalisers. A sit learned in your living room is, to your dog, a different behaviour from a sit in a car park. The work of months four to six is taking the five or six things your puppy already knows and rebuilding them in ten different places, starting easy.

Also worth adding now:

• Settle on a mat. The most useful behaviour nobody teaches. Reward calm lying down while you eat, work, or watch television. Build to 20 minutes.
• Drop it and leave it. Trade, never grab. A dog who learns that giving things up leads to something better does not develop guarding.
• Impulse control games. Food on the floor, covered by your hand, released only on a cue. Two minutes a day.

Sexual maturity and adolescence begin in this period, earlier in small breeds and later in large ones. Expect a stretch — often between six and twelve months — where recall degrades, distraction spikes, and the dog seems to lose the plot. It passes. Consistency through adolescence is what separates the dogs who come back at three years old from the ones who don't.

Session structure that actually works

Regardless of age:

• End on a success, even a small one. Always.
• Stop before your puppy does. Finish while they still want more.
• Five to six repetitions per set, then a break or a game.
• One new thing at a time. Two half-taught cues are worth less than one solid one.
• Use daily food. A puppy on three meals has 300-plus training rewards a day already portioned out. Training with kibble avoids the weight gain that comes with treat-heavy plans — see how much to actually feed your dog.

What not to worry about

You do not need a puppy who can heel at 12 weeks, hold a 30-second stay at 4 months, or perform anything in front of other people. Those are competition timelines, and they cost more than they return.

What matters at 6 months is narrower than most owners think: your dog is comfortable in the world, comes when called in easy conditions, can be left alone without panic, has a soft mouth, and can settle in a room full of people. Every other skill is available for the next decade.

When to stop reading and call someone

Some things do not resolve with a schedule, and waiting makes them worse:

• Stiffening, freezing or growling over food, toys or resting places. Early resource guarding is very treatable and very fixable by a professional. Do not punish a growl — it's a warning you want your dog to keep giving.
• Genuine fear of people or dogs that doesn't improve with distance and food over two to three weeks.
• Panic when left alone — vocalising, drooling, destruction at exit points — rather than mild protest.
• Any sudden behaviour change, and house training that regresses after being reliable. Urinary tract infections and pain are common causes and a vet should rule them out before you rebuild the training.
• Biting that breaks skin on adults, or intensifies rather than softens between 16 and 20 weeks.

A single session with a qualified, force-free trainer at four months costs considerably less than a behaviour rehabilitation programme at two years. Learning to read what your puppy is telling you helps too — our guide to dog body language covers the early signals most owners miss.

The honest version

You will not follow this schedule exactly, and that's fine. Puppies get ill, owners get busy, and weeks disappear. The plan is a direction, not a contract.

Protect the socialisation window, keep sessions short and frequent, and let the rest arrive at its own pace. A dog trained slowly and kindly over six months is indistinguishable at three years old from one drilled hard for six weeks — except that the first one still enjoys training.