Six Ten-Minute Drills for a Dog With Too Much Energy

Physical exercise builds stamina. Past a point, a fitter dog simply needs more of it. Mental work does not scale the same way: ten focused minutes can settle a dog more thoroughly than an extra half hour on the lead.

All six of these fit in a flat, need almost nothing, and stop before your dog gets bored.

1. Scatter feeding

Take the measured dinner, throw it across a rug or a patch of grass, and let your dog find it. Eating goes from ninety seconds to ten minutes and switches from gulping to searching. The easiest change you can make today.

2. Three cups

Three upturned cups, one treat, shuffle them slowly while your dog watches. Let them indicate. Start obvious and only add speed once they are getting it right. Dogs use scent more than sight here, which is why they beat most humans at it.

3. The name game

Pick one toy and name it every time you hand it over. After a week, put it among two others and ask for it by name. Some dogs pick this up in days. It is genuinely tiring work for them.

4. Middle

Teach your dog to walk between your legs and stand still facing forward. It is a useful practical position — vet waiting rooms, crowded pavements, anywhere you need your dog anchored — and learning it demands real body awareness.

5. Find it, with a target

Hide a specific toy in another room while your dog waits, then release them to find it. Start with the toy barely hidden. Build to properly concealed. This is the domestic version of what detection dogs do all day, and it drains them accordingly.

6. Stillness on cue

Underrated. Ask for a settle on a mat and reward at increasing intervals while ordinary household noise continues. You are teaching that nothing happening is a reward-worthy state. For dogs that pace and monitor, this is often the missing piece.

How to run them

Short sessions, ended by you rather than by your dog losing interest. Two or three drills a day is plenty. If your dog is getting things wrong repeatedly, the exercise is too hard — go back a step rather than repeating the failure.

Watch for the settle afterwards. That is the point of all of it.