23/09/2026
Why teach heel?
If you’re here to learn how to make your dog think you’re the alpha, you’re in the wrong place.
Here’s what it is good for.
Impulse control - working that mental energy by ignoring distractions, staying calmly by your side and tuning out the rest of the noise is a huge game changer when it comes to building a solid inhibition in the dogs brain around what to focus on and what not to focus on.
Handler focus - a dog that looks to their owner for guidance instead of making self employment decisions is much easier to train and guide into the choices we’d like them to make. A dog that is pulling at the end of a lead ignoring everything you say is much harder to engage with and their brain might be on a different planet to begin with.
Environmental stability - excessive pulling, sniffing and darting from one place to another can be a symptom of overstimulation or potentially masking some insecure behaviours. Dogs will often use sniffing and fast movement as displacement behaviours to help themselves cope with the world. By asking our dog to focus themselves away from these strategies and onto a task, can help calm them in general and provide less opportunity for the brain to busy itself.
What it’s not good for
- fixing reactivity. Functional obedience is part of every dogs life, they need to know how to walk calmly on a lead because that’s the world we live in. But if walking to heel around a group of dogs is your only strategy when it comes to addressing reactivity, you will fail at some point
- puppies. Puppies don’t need to walk calmly at your side on a loose lead. They need to explore, move naturally and in low stress environments until they’re ready to learn how to walk well on a lead
- the only exercise your dog gets. Dogs were not designed to live their lives walking at a humans pace on a bit of string. Heel work becomes unfair if your dog never gets the opportunity to move freely
Dog Trainer
Heel work
