Episode 42 - Troubleshooting Free Stack Training

3/3/2026

This episode’s question is from one of our Killer Free Stack show training students, but my answer is equally applicable to anyone training a dog:

"Hi all, I have a 10-week-old Labrador puppy. I have the Killer Free Stacks video…when I try to get a moment of stillness to mark, she auto-sits. If I hold the food in front of her, she digs at it hard and will sit. Any tips for teaching a stack would be great!"

In this podcast I cover:

Tips for hand position to avoid cueing sits
How to know if your puppy understands what you want him to do
What to do if your puppy’s just not “getting it”

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To read the transcript for this episode, click the link below.

Transcript - Episode 42

I'm Jane Messineo Lindquist. And this is a Puppy Culture potluck podcast. You bring the topics, we bring the conversation.

This episode's question is from one of our students who's working on show stacks, and she's running into some challenges. Here's the question.

Hi all. I have a ten week old Labrador puppy. I have the Killer Free Stacks video, but she was raised with Puppy Culture. So when I try and get a moment of stillness to mark, she auto sets. If I hold the food in front of her, she digs in at it hard and will sit. Any tips on teaching a stack would be great.

Okay, this is me again. So before I answer her question, I want to get a couple of things out of the way that I'm not going to address in this podcast.

First of all, neither Manding nor teaching a puppy to sit automatically because they're not the same thing. And I'll address that next. Neither of those things will interfere with the show stack. On the contrary, teaching your puppy those things will just make him a more confident and enthusiastic showman. That's its own whole podcast, but you can read my article on this at madcapuniversity.com. If you click on Free Resources and then navigate to articles, the name of the article is Will the Real Show Stack please stand up?

There's video in there. It explains everything, as I say, beyond the scope of this podcast, but I'm just going to get it out of the way that teaching Manding or an auto sit - two different things not going to interfere with your show stack. Going to make your show stack better.

Second of all, Manding is not auto sit, although the querent is conflating the two things, they're not even similar to each other. It's what I call a behavior homophone because both involve the dog in a seated position. Manding doesn't have to be seated, but often it is. And that's the way that we teach it. People tend to get them confused because to us it looks like the same thing, but it's not. Manding is a puppy forward request for something. And auto sit is a top down rule that the puppy cannot access resources until they sit first. Apples and orange. Not even related behaviors in the puppy's mind. Again, way beyond the scope of this podcast. But I did write an article on this again in Madcap University, Free Resources, Articles section. Read Manding quote failure unquote and emotional learning. I go into it all there.

Okay, those two things out of the way. Let's talk about this because it's a common problem, right? We think we have a behavior, and then we want to start getting duration on it. And things start falling apart. I did ask the querent to send in a video, and she didn't either didn't see it or just didn't get around to taking the video.

So I did not see this behavior. But I can say almost for certain that it has to do with one of two things. Either hand position or she's trying to up the duration too quickly.

Let's talk about hand position first, because it's the easiest thing to fix. If you're trying to get duration and you keep getting a sit on a show stack. The most obvious answer is probably the correct answer. Meaning to say the puppy probably thinks you want a sit, and the reason the puppy thinks you want to sit is most likely your hand position. Not some preconceived notion that they need to offer a sit. When you're trying to get a dog to stand versus sit. You have to make sure that you're pulling your hand forward and not up when you move it away from the dog.

So you want to go straight out at the at the nose level of the dog. In Killer Free Stacks, you see me letting the puppies nibble on the meat and then quickly pulling my hand up and out of the puppies line of vision.

First of all, I do it really fast and I'm very good at it so I can, what I'm doing is I'm just having it, like, now you see it, now you don't with these puppies where they're chewing on it and then it's gone. So it's that poof disappearing that sort of stuns them for a second, and they freeze and that's when I can get a click in.

But those are five week old puppies. She's dealing with an eight week old puppy. It's a little harder to fool that eight week old puppy. So it's possible that if she's pulling her hand up and out and she's already done some training with the dog, using her hand for a sit, you know you're not writing on a blank slate any more with an eight week old puppy.

So probably at least some of this is going to be her hand position coming up and coming up too slowly. So I would say for an eight week old puppy, especially one that's had some training, some with sit, maybe some hand position, maybe some luring already that you want to bring that hand straight out at the level of the nose and maybe not all that fast, maybe move it away a little slower.

00:06:37:12 - 00:07:02:04 Jane Messineo Lindquist So again, I have not seen what's going on with this team, but if I had them in front of me, I would try having her do the slow forward hand and also the poof it's gone hand, but really make sure she's doing the poof it's gone fast enough and crisp enough, and then just see which one was working better for her.

Okay, I'm going to close the hand position advice by saying the slow bringing of your hand forward instead of up and out of vision is handy if you're going to be doing any kind of rally or obedience, because that will become your stand signal for the dog.

So now let's say you clean up your hand position. You're sure you're not giving a sit cue, but you still can't get duration on the stack? My best guess at that point is that the puppy's not yet clear that it is stand that's paying, and you've tried to jump to duration before the puppy is really solid on that first level, which is understanding that the behavior is a stack.

With duration, in that case, you probably need to stay on the level of no duration for 1 or 2 more sessions to solidify in the puppies mind that it's stand. So I would do at least two separate sessions over a couple days. Not back to back, not in the same day. You want to give some room for distributed learning there?

Then I would want her to try again, but try for just a split second. A really split second of stillness. So you want just enough that if it were punctuation, it would definitely be a period and not a comma. But you don't want an ellipses, okay. You're not looking for three dots. You're looking for one dot. And reinforce the heck out of that for another two sessions.

Now at that point, when you start going for that split second of delay, your puppy may sit, but that's okay, because if you have reinforced the previous level enough, it should not take more than three times for the light bulb to go off that it’s stand.

Now I want to pause here because I'm giving you like $1,000 of free dog training advice, right here. Dog training is binary. It's zeros and ones. There are no wrong behaviors or right behaviors. There are only behaviors that pay and behaviors that do not pay. You have to give the dog the opportunity to guess what you want, and sometimes the guess is going to be wrong. But if, and this is the $10,000 if, if you have set up the training criteria correctly, it should not take more than three wrong guesses for the dog to get it right.

If it takes more than three guesses, you have made a mistake. You have bid wrong on that session. You have raised or changed the criteria too quickly or too much. You know, this is really the tricky part about dog training is that as a trainer, we have to bid. As I say, we we guess going into a session, what we think that dog is going to be able to guess because the dog's throwing guesses out with their behavior.

They're like, I think it's this. I think it's that they're in it in good faith, okay? And we're in it in good faith. But sometimes we make a mistake and we don't bid right, and we try to get too much out of our dogs. So what do you do then? I have an answer for this. If you're in a session and the puppy's gotten it wrong three times, has not been able to guess what you want out of the three times.

My recommendation is to end that session for now. You can come back to it a short while later with a lower criteria, but I do not recommend that you change the criteria to make it easier within that same session. Why is that? Well, a lot of people think I want the puppy to end with success. I want to end on a good note.

But here's what the problem is. When you're doing this kind of training where it's free shaping and the dog just throwing out behaviors and guessing and the dog's not getting it right, and you say, oh, here, you know what? I'm just going to make it easier for you so you can get it right. You're now making a rule.

You're establishing a rule in this game, which is, hey, you know, you really don't have to try that hard to get it right. All you have to do is throw out some kind of behavior, and then I'm going to make it easier for you. It's not a moralistic thing, okay? There's no morals in dog training. There's morals and criteria.

That's a different story. But there's no morals in dog training. The dog isn't taking advantage of you. You are not being mean to the dog by not ending on a good note. No, what you're doing if you lower your criteria, is you're teaching the dog a new rule, which is that, hey, you know when the going gets tough, my handler makes it easier for me.

And that is the opposite of what we want to teach our dogs. We want them to be operant and determined and keep trying. So ironically, by doing something that you think is encouraging, by making it a little easier for them so they end on a good note. Well, in fact, you're teaching them to be quitters essentially. And again, when I say quitters, I don't mean it in a moralistic sense.

I mean, it's evolutionary efficiency. There's an evolutionary advantage to doing the least you can to expending the least to get the food. When I used to do a lot of seminars on the road, I'd see it all the time. People would sign up for my free shaping seminars and they would say, my dog can't free shape. He gets stressed.

He gets stressed. Well, what does stress look like? Stress to them is the dog would throw out two behaviors and then start barking at the handler. And what would the handler do? Make it easier and give the dog a treat. It's just an understanding. The dog. The dog's not stress. The dog doesn't think, oh, I can't. Oh, I'm so stressed, I need to bark. I need to, you know, release my stress through my barking. No, it's like this works. I mean, I bark, my handler gives me food. Well, what's the problem here?

So circling back to a direct answer for this woman, if her puppy gets 3 or 4 zeroes in a row, meaning to say behaviors that are not the behavior you're looking for, the puppy doesn't get paid, it tells you that you overbid the session. You raise the criteria too quickly. Put the puppy away for at least ten minutes and you know, ten minutes, give or take. It's enough. You don't need a long break like you need for distributed learning. You just need enough break that it's clear we're starting a new session and then come back. Drop your criteria and try again.

Now, I do sometimes make adjustments during a training session, but let me talk about this for a second. When you go into a training session, you should have a very clear picture of the criteria for that session. Just for instance, I've got an eight week old puppy. I've done three sessions of just Click for Standing Still, and now I'm going to go for that split second of hesitation.

And I know that's my criteria going in, but if I take out that puppy and start working with him and I don't have attention, he's wandering away. I can't even get the stack that I had before. I'm going to jettison that criteria that I came into the session with and address what I've got going on right now. And usually that's going to be dropping back a level or dealing with some environmental stuff.

Who knows? But the point being that I will, I will change my criteria during a training session. But early in the training session, okay, I'm never going to change my criteria once my puppy has given me repeated wrong answers which really aren't wrong answers. They’re zeros. Once my puppy's given me repeated zeros, there is no way out of this.

Okay, I'm going to take my lumps, put the puppy away, come back with lower criteria in the next session. And by the way, I'm also going to give myself some grace here because I'm not a machine. The puppy's not a machine. We're all bidding these training sessions, okay? And sometimes we just don't get it right. And that's okay.

But what does this mean in the bigger picture? It means that the trainer who takes the longest to train a behavior usually wins. Our human tendency is to think that the puppy that learns the quickest, or the trainer who can shape the puppies up faster is better. But the faster you go, the more you're pushing criteria and the more likely you are to overbid criteria and wind up with no good options to drive out of it.

So I said all this, and I don't want to leave you on this note, because I feel like it's a little bit of a cautionary tale. Like I'm trying to scare you into slicing the criteria so thinly, and now some less experienced people might feel a little bit paralyzed, like they don't want to make a mistake. And I'm I'm just giving you permission to make mistakes, okay?

Everybody makes mistakes. And now great news. You know what to do if you make a mistake, you have a procedure to follow. And I'd go even one step further and say, don't think of it as a mistake. Think of it as information, because that's really what it is. It's a conversation between you and the puppy. You got the information you have to adjust your criteria.

That's okay. Listen, the only people that don't make mistakes are the people who never try.

If you like this podcast, you'll love our show training videos available at puppyculture.com. And while you're there, check out our bundles. We have bundles for breeders, bundles for pet puppy owners, bundles for show puppy owners, bundles for new puppy owners, bundles for training. Check them all out at puppyculture.com.

Well, that's it for this time. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.