Luring, Shaping, and Capturing for Effective Fitness Training

The way you teach exercises matters just as much as the exercises themselves! Luring, shaping, and capturing are three powerful training techniques that can help you refine movement, build confidence, and improve engagement in canine fitness. In this post, we’ll break down each method, when to use them, and how to maximize their effectiveness in your dog’s fitness routine.

When it comes to training in canine fitness, often our hardest challenge is communicating precision and accuracy of the desired exercise with our dogs. There are a few different methods that people tend to employ to help your dog do the target movement. The three most common methods are luring, shaping, and capturing.

It’s really important, especially in canine fitness, that we are not forcing or heavily manipulating our dogs into movements, positions, or onto equipment. Doing so can result in injury to your dog and aversion to training or to certain equipment. By using the above mentioned techniques, we can get our dogs to actively participate in learning exercises with clear communication while staying motivated. 

The key with all training methods is making sure you have a solid marker. Using a clicker or a designated marker word that your dog has associated with a reward will allow you to communicate with your dog exactly which behavior they are being rewarded for.

Luring

The basic concept of luring is using a reward to coax or “lure” your dog to do the desired position, movement, or behavior. Most often this reward is food since toys likely are too high arousal for this to work effectively. See our article on reward choice for more information. By keeping several pieces of kibble or treats in your hand, most dogs will naturally want to follow where your hand goes. We can use this food motivation to lure the dog into the target position with the position of our hand. When the behavior is satisfactory, we mark and give them the reward from our hand. Luring can become frustrating for the dog when they are not being rewarded often enough. If this begins to happen, we recommend tossing a few reset cookies, trying a different method of teaching the behavior, or breaking the behavior down into smaller steps that may have a higher probability of success. Often, we use luring when the dog needs clear direction or struggles to offer movement on their own. It also is helpful when you are looking for a precise small body position change like head position or weight shifting. 

Capturing

Capturing is where the dog is performing a natural behavior and through marking, we are able to put that behavior on cue. In canine fitness, often we manipulate the environment around us in order to make these behaviors possible and repeatable. A good example would be that we have a rug on the floor. We toss a cookie to the back of the room and when the dog comes back to get another cookie, it has to walk across the rug. We may choose to mark the exact moment both front feet hit the rug. We then toss another cookie and repeat. In this way we are teaching the dog that we want their front feet on the rug. We’re then able to add a cue to this behavior and transfer it to other situations.  Something to be cautious of with capturing is making sure that you are being consistent with what you are rewarding. Dogs can develop confusion on what they are being rewarded for if we are constantly changing our criteria for being rewarded. Capturing works really well to develop larger motor behaviors but we may need to implement other training tactics to refine the behavior to be more precise. 

Shaping 

Shaping is a training tactic where we take a final behavior and break it down into smaller behaviors that the dog naturally offers, that we can then progress over time. Essentially you use “capturing” to mark and reward behaviors your dog offers, and build the criteria over time to eventually get to the end behavior. We take the time to teach each individual step and only progress to adding the next step once the first is mastered. We often don’t put a cue to each step, but rather will add the cue once the final behavior is achieved.  With shaping, it’s important to make sure we are breaking the behavior down into small enough steps that the dog doesn’t get frustrated or discouraged. Shaping is typically where the most learning occurs for a dog and great for behaviors you really want them to understand like targeting. It also gives them a way to “opt in” and be more mentally engaged with your training. 

Notes:

Dog training is not a linear process, each dog learns at their own pace and just because one teaching strategy works well for one dog does not mean it will work well for another. You will probably find yourself combining and switching between training strategies for different exercises or days- this is completely okay, and highly encouraged! You should be trying out different methods of teaching behaviors, especially when your dog hits a learning barrier. 

As long as your dog is completing the desired behavior, there is no need to associate every behavior with a cue. It is certainly helpful to have several common behaviors on cue(sit, down, shake, nose, etc) but we’re not here to see how many tricks your dog knows. If you have to lure them for every rep, there’s no problem with that. Their body still gets the physical benefits of the completed behavior, and you’ve developed a clear communication to achieve it.