In this episode we dig into the concept of drilling, and how it applies in dog training. It’s pretty common for most of us to have an emotional response just to the term itself – for good reason! But is there any baby in this bathwater?

In this episode, we discuss:

  • Drilling is significant for skill acquisition in various contexts beyond dog training.
  • Our emotional responses to drilling are shaped by personal experiences and the nature of the activity.
  • A good drill should isolate core components of skills for focused practice and efficiency.
  • Coercive drilling methods that ignore the learner’s needs lead to negative associations and even hinder learning.
  • Repetition alone is insufficient for learning; reinforcement and iterative adjustments are critical.
  • Deliberate practice involves observing, learning, and modifying activities based on feedback.
  • Mindless repetition without feedback and adjustment does not lead to improvement.
  • Continuous improvement requires proactive engagement and measured adjustments based on outcomes.
  • Seeking help and guidance when progress stalls is essential for effective skill development.

Links mentioned:

This podcast is supported by: MET Conference 2024

The Modern and Ethical Training Conference is coming up on March 9-10, 2024! MET is a virtual meeting of the minds between dog lovers and trainers embracing modern and ethical training practices. Speakers include trainers from all over the world (including yours truly!). MET Conference 2024 has been approved for CEUs by CCPDT and IAABC organizations. Click the link below to get your ticket.

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] The idea is that you have to repeat something some prescribed number of times in order to learn it. “You have to practice the habit for 21 days,” or 60 days, or 27 years, I don’t know. There’s some number of times that you have to do the thing over and over again for it to count. But I think our lived experience would show us that that’s not true.

[intro]

Hey there, fellow training nerds! You’re listening to Drinking From The Toilet. If you like to geek out about combining the science of behavior with positive reinforcement philosophy in real life, you’ve come to the right place. And I’m your host, Hannah Branigan: teacher, trainer, podcaster, and author of the book Awesome Obedience and its companion, Awesome Obedience: The Field Guide, which are both available from clickertraining.com [00:01:00] 

Alright, before we jump into this week’s episode, I have a quick announcement to make. If you remember our friend Shade Whitesel – she’s been on the pod multiple times – we are working together, teaming up again to do a reboot of our Barking Shitshow workshop. We ran this one a while ago (time is a construct) and we’re kind of renovating a little bit. We’re going to put it back up very soon, next month, which I believe is the month of March for those of you that follow the calendar. The date for the live workshop is going to be March 19th. I don’t have the rest of the information ready for you, but I wanted to give you the heads up about it.

The way our live workshops work is that when you first sign up, you’re going to get some homework, some reading material, videos to watch and stuff, in advance. Then you’ll have some time to play with that. Then we’ll meet together live – I’d say [00:02:00] “in person,” but not, because we will be virtual – so virtually in person. You’ll be able to see me and Shade because we’ll be on video. We’ll meet live and talk about the material, go over some exercises, do some demos, and you’ll have a chance to ask any questions that you have. So they’re just a lot of fun. I really love doing these workshops. This is the first one I’ve done in a little while.

So the date for the live portion is March 19th, but you’ll be able to sign up and get access to some of the material before then. And I’ll let you know when I have more information ready to go. In the meantime, you can keep an eye on the website. If you’re not already on my email newsletter list, you can sign up there and then I’ll email you and let you know when it’s time to enroll.

All right. So this week, this episode, we’re talking about drilling in the context of dog training.

So, drilling: is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? What do dog trainers need to know about [00:03:00] drilling in a dog training context, or at least my opinions on that?

And my opinions this week are brought to you by the MET Conference and fabulous folks on Patreon, like Taylor A. If you’d like to support the podcast, get your questions answered and get access to some super-secret extra podcast episodes, you can go to patreon.com/DFTT.

This topic idea was inspired by one of our very awesome Zero To CD team members, Jane. If you follow me on Instagram or Facebook, you probably saw the really cool template that I shared on there recently and she is the one who designed it.

She also asked a really interesting question in our Q&A this week about drilling. I thought it was such an interesting topic to discuss that I kept thinking about the question even after the call was over. And because I have some thoughts, I have some opinions as well.

So drilling is definitely a word that [00:04:00] shows up and it usually shows up in dog training conversations with kind of a tone: drilling [tone of voice: serious, severe]. It’s got a bad reputation and I think there’s a good reason for that reputation. It’s an earned one. But I also wanna explore it a little. Because we really need to be clear on what we mean by drilling or by a drill, right?

So drilling as a strategy for skill acquisition shows up in a lot of places, not just dog training of course, right? It also shows up in sports and in other contexts where you are learning skills. That is what skill acquisition is – you’re learning to do stuff.

And I think the emotional response that we have (or that you and that I have) to that word is built on– I mean, it has everything to do with your experience of learning new stuff, especially the early [00:05:00] stages of learning mechanical skills.

So if you think back in your life, what were the experiences that you had when you were growing up, when you were learning that were labeled as drilling?

So an example that shows up for my childhood trauma is if maybe you had to do repetitive math problems in school, like for example mental math drills? Because I did and I absolutely experienced those as trauma.

But what made them that way? Because it wasn’t the math skills themselves, right? Or maybe. But let’s say that it wasn’t. Let’s say that it wasn’t the math itself. It’s something about the activity.

So what is a drill? Well, most of the time, a drill is a specific activity that’s designed to isolate a component of a skill, a core component of the skills that you need for whatever application, so that you can emphasize it and practice it in a really [00:06:00] short cycle, so a very tight loop. Which means you can do a whole lot of those loops in the same amount of time. You can come into contact with that isolated skill repeatedly in a short amount of time. And that in and of itself is a really useful thing.

We apply this as part of good training practices all the time, right? Like that’s very much part of what loopy training is (or loopy training is a part of that, or should be). And this can also be applied in, again, lots of different skill acquisition contexts. So music, sports. I played soccer, swimming, we do it with horses as well. Any sports drill.

You’re isolating a piece of the fundamental mechanics so that you can separate them to some degree from the complexity of the whole rest of the action. You can simplify it and really focus on that [00:07:00] particular piece so that you can practice it until it’s fairly automatic, right? You’re not having to think about it a whole lot.

So if you’re doing a passing drill in soccer, if you’re playing in a soccer game, you might not get to pass the ball very frequently. If you’re playing prep basketball– I played intramural basketball and if, like me, you spent most of the game standing in the corner trying to be mostly out of the way because they needed to have two girls on the court for it to count–

But anyways, in a game, you’re using a whole mixture of different skills, depending on what’s happening. And in a drill, you’re really grabbing just one or a section of skills so that you can practice it a whole lot. And since it’s not as diluted in time, you can really focus on it. And that’s useful for learning!

If you only get to practice dribbling or passing a ball [00:08:00] two or three times or four times – I guess it depends to a certain extent on the sport – over the course of a game–

I think these kids soccer games seem to last probably, I don’t know, eight, twelve hours. They really do go on and it’s always very hot or else very cold. That’s not what we’re talking about.

So you’re only practicing it a couple of times we’ll say per hour. That’s not going to be very efficient for you to iterate that skill from a motor skill standpoint, right? Like you can’t learn from what just happened when you went to kick the ball. I think I may have started out talking about basketball and then I’ve circled back to soccer. I’m talking about soccer here, because we’re kicking the ball. If you’re kicking a ball in basketball, it is my understanding that something has gone wrong and you should not do that.

Okay. More sports ball content in other episodes, but alright, so you need a chance to do something with the ball and figure out how well that works, get the feedback from really the [00:09:00] ball, from the outcome and then make an adjustment and apply that adjustment again while you can still remember what happened. I’m being kind of loose with language here, but bear with me. But you can see how if you have to wait a long time, especially like a week, to get another another chance. it’s gonna take a very long time for you to acquire that skill because you won’t be able to make adjustments very effectively.

But we can make a passing drill where you get to practice passing the ball and every couple of seconds you’re getting another chance to kick the ball and another chance to kick the ball and then you could systematically adjust what happens, like what direction the ball is coming from and what you’re trying to kick it to, who you’re trying to kick it to, how fast you’re running or your teammate is running, or what happened right before you got the ball.

There’s a lot of variables you could adjust there, but you can design an activity– I’ll say activity instead of drill here. We can design an activity that really lets you focus on that [00:10:00] specific skill and practice it a whole lot back to back so that you’re applying what you’ve learned.

And so if you’re passing 30 times or, I don’t know, I just made that up. But you’re practicing a lot more often, then you’re getting that feedback from the environment, you’re making the adjustments and then you’re testing again, you’re iterating on that skill, and you can acquire that skill a lot more efficiently.

Okay, but I think where we tend to have trouble is when we disconnect the activity from the learner. And I think that’s probably a big part of why most of us have that negative association with the word “drilling.” It’s because of that disconnection. And if I think back on everything that I’ve learned how to do in a teacher/student context or coach/athlete, whatever, it’s that when there’s that big gap between what I need and [00:11:00] what I’m doing and what I’m experiencing and what they’re throwing at me, that tends to be pretty unpleasant. We lose the dialogue component.

And then to compound that, when the contingency that’s set up around that activity is almost entirely coercive, it’s– I mean, a lot of our learning experiences for most of us, most of the time, were primarily negative reinforcement, right? Like, you only hear when you’re getting it wrong.

And particularly if, on top of that, the difficulty level of the activity itself is set too high for your current level of ability that makes your success rate too low if you’re being reinforced at all. And for a lot of these drills or activities, it can also be really unclear if you’re being successful or not. So you get very little feedback and what feedback you get is negative.

I think a lot of our early education growing up is [00:12:00] around just trying to stay out of trouble. I don’t know, maybe I’m just talking about myself.

But ultimately, in a lot of these negative experiences that we have, there just isn’t any functional reinforcement. It’s not effective. And then, again, let’s add to it while I’m ranting. It so often – at least for me – went on well past the point of fatigue where I’m starting to get really tired. I’m also not getting reinforced very effectively. I don’t understand what’s happening. I want to go outside. I want to go do something else.

Oh, and I just thought of one more thing. If the pace of the session of the activity is a mismatch for what you need as well. Either they’re firing those math problems at you so quickly you can barely get one written down before the next one is being thrown out there and you can’t remember was it minus seven or plus seven. Or maybe it’s too slow and there’s big gaps from [00:13:00] one repetition to the next one opportunity to perform to the next and that you might experience that is very boring. So you’ve got a very low success rate because the difficulty level is set too high, the pace is off and you end up just feeling lost and overwhelmed and tired and you just want to go home.

And you put those things together and very quickly you start to hate math. Well that’s no good because it turns out you can’t get away from it. You’re always having to do some amount, but you can use calculators so that helps. I digress.

My point – and I do have one – my point is that with a skilled instructor, a trainer, a teacher, a coach, whatever the activity is, if they’re doing their job, they’re doing a good job, then they’re constantly observing their learner, adjusting the difficulty level, adjusting the pace, the rhythm of the session, they’re adjusting the nature of the activity [00:14:00] and the variables that are in play based on what their learner is showing them. Right? Like that’s what makes it effective teaching and effective learning – well, that should be the same thing, but it isn’t always – because it’s a dialogue. The teacher is putting out information and then also receiving information from the learner.

And that’s really what I want to focus on because in a good activity, a good drill, it should be iterative on both sides. Both you and the learner, if you’re the teacher. You’re both observing and learning and adjusting according to the information that you get from the other. And that’s what makes a good teaching relationship, a good training relationship.

[sponsor break]

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So MET stands for Modern Ethical Dog Training and this is the fourth year they’ll be holding it. It is entirely virtual, and yes, it will be recorded. One of the things I like about this conference is there’s always time for live questions from the audience. This conference is approved for CEUs for both IAABC and CCPDT, and you can find out more by going to their website, metconference.com or of course, click the link in the show notes.

[episode resumes]

And it’s maintaining that dialogue. That’s what allows us to design those activities so that we can isolate the skills and practice them so that they can be learned more efficiently. And that part’s a good thing, right? So that’s what we want to aim for: a good experience that is also effective learning.

Alright, but I also want to talk about the repetition side of things, right? There is an idea, dare I say a myth, that repetition is [00:17:00] necessary for learning. Okay, it’s not really a myth exactly. Hmm. Well, we can talk about what we mean when we say repetition here.

We’re going to talk about repetition though. Okay. So the idea is that you have to repeat something some prescribed number of times in order to learn it. “You have to practice the habit for 21 days” or 60 days or 27 years, I don’t know. There’s some number of times that you have to do the thing over and over again for it to count, for you to have learned it, for you to have established the behavior.

I think our lived experience would show us that that’s not true. And I’m going to actually go out on a limb and I’m going to say that repetition is not necessary for learning. And in fact, repetition alone really isn’t sufficient for learning, right? Again, I mean, depending on how we’re defining learning and how we’re talking about that.

But it isn’t the repetition, it’s the reinforcement, [00:18:00] right? It’s the success that determines the behavior that we see again, so what happens, it’s that consequence. Reinforcement drives behavior. It’s the only thing that drives behavior. You can do the same behavior multiple times and it stops being reinforced. What do we call that? We call that extinction. Right? So just repetition by itself isn’t enough. We need to adjust the reinforcement side of things.

They say, you know, “practice makes perfect.” And of course, then they also go on to say, “well, no, practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes permanent.”

That’s assuming that there is some reinforcer in play! And often there is because not all the reinforcers that are present in your dog’s environment are ones that you control in a training session. Again, not something that I enjoy being true. But [00:19:00] yeah, “perfect practice makes permanent,” or poor practice – if you practice poor – poor practice just makes you hate whatever the thing is that you’re practicing.

So that’s, again, not what we want. I want my dogs to like to train with me. I want them to enjoy training with me. Alright, so there’s no value in poor practice and there’s very little value in just blind repetition without an eye to all of the other stuff that we were just talking about.

And I do think that that’s one of the things that plays into the belief that training with positive reinforcement or training things the right way takes a long time because it takes a lot of repetitions. And of course, the other side of that myth is that if what you’re trying to train seems to be taking a long time, that’s okay, because it just means you’re doing it right and you just have to get in a lot of repetitions.

But I will actually argue the exact opposite. [00:20:00] In fact, I do frequently argue the opposite. I would argue that if it seems to be taking a long time, it’s not right. Something is going very wrong and we need to change it because just continuing to repeat the thing, hoping that if you if you just do the behavior enough times, that then your learner will learn, that someday they will wake up and now they’ve got it… I mean, yes, sometimes that happens, but not for the reasons that you think.

And this includes you as the learner, right? If your training plan depends on you just trying over and over again to do the thing in the hopes that you wake up tomorrow and are a different person, you’re not going to be very successful. I know because I have scientifically tested this training plan. It’s the “try harder” training plan. And again, I’ve probably said this, I know I’ve said this a lot of times. I may have said it a lot of times here on the podcast. Trying harder cannot be a training plan and just repeating something a bunch of times [00:21:00] is not a training plan. We can do better than that, right?

Like, an example that gets talked about a lot is stuff that you do all the time every day and you don’t really get better or worse at it. Like brushing your teeth, right? If you’re really together, if you’re one of those people that just really has it together and you’re brushing twice daily, flossing all the time, I don’t know who you are, but you don’t necessarily get better at it just because you do it. Right? It’s not the repetition.

Instead, we need the deliberate practice aspect, right?

So: deliberate practice. This is a concept from the research of Dr. Anders Ericsson, who wrote a book called Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, which I do recommend. It’s a good book. I believe it’s also available on Audible. I mean, you’re listening to podcasts; you probably also listen to audiobooks. I don’t want to make assumptions though. But you’ll be interested in that.

So that’s the idea [00:22:00] of deliberate practice. I forgot where I was going with that. The idea of deliberate practice is about the how you practice. It’s not just spending a lot of hours. It gets misinterpreted as like the ten thousand hour rule where you have to just practice doing whatever the thing is, playing the piano, violin, etc, you have to practice it for ten thousand hours to be good at it. And that’s wrong. It’s not accurate. It’s the how you practice that matters more than the how long.

Now, if you practice really well and you practice a lot, then you’re probably going to get better faster than like, not training. I’ve tried both training and not training and my behaviors do, so far, tend to improve when I do training than when I don’t do training. Especially when I’m doing good training.

So, if we look at drilling from a deliberate practice standpoint, isolating a specific skill that’s part of a planned program [00:23:00] that’s connected to the learner’s experience, that’s a dialogue where they’re getting feedback, hopefully positive reinforcement too, the activity is set appropriately, the variables are adjusted for the learner’s needs and it’s kept alive so that it is adjusted and modified as your learner’s experience changes, as their conditions change? Then that’s good! It’s definitely a “quality over quantity” kind of thing.

But also I can’t emphasize enough the iterative process aspect of it. Performance, feedback, revision. It’s collecting data on every single repetition and making changes for the next repetition, designing your setup to allow that iterative process for your learner.

And in a dog/human or dog sports [00:24:00] relationship, that’s always gonna be both of us because we’re always both learning, right? So we’re both making adjustments. You are watching your dog and you’re adjusting how you’re delivering the food or how far or how fast. You’re adjusting the distance. You’re adjusting the setup of your props. Your dog is attempting behaviors, accessing reinforcement, building on that. Again, a dialogue.

That’s good training and that’s what a good drill should let you do. A good drill should actually have the opposite effect from what we all experienced with those unpleasant drills growing up, right? It should let you apply that whole iterative process (performance, feedback, revision) just on a smaller behavioral target.

Far from being tedious, it should be fast-paced and fun because you have a really high rate of reinforcement because [00:25:00] the cycle is so short between doing the thing and being reinforced for the thing and then getting to do another thing and getting to do another reinforcement.

It should never be like just doing a lot of repetitions, like you’re doing bicep curls in the gym, right? Because if you just– And no, it applies here too, right? Because if you just do bicep curls, you do the same movement with the same weight, the same way all the time, you won’t get any stronger. You might get stronger at first, but then you’re not going to get any stronger from there. And in fact, you’ll start to get weaker.

So there really is no point in repeating the same thing without, again, connecting to your learner, connecting to their experience and making those adjustments, making it that iterative process and just very, very small.

Okay, so clearly I’m very passionate around this. This is a bit of a soapbox for me. I’ve got big feelings and I don’t want you to [00:26:00] just feel like I’m yelling at you.

So if we’re not using just repetition for the sake of repetition, what do we want to do? Well, again, I think the important part here is we want to get a really small, focused in slice of the behavior, a smaller piece of behavior. If you have a sufficiently small behavior, then you have a very small loop, then you have a high rate of reinforcement and that means that we can apply all of the good things with loopy training. And this is where I would also want to bring in one of Alex Kurland’s mantras: When the loop is clean, not only can you move on, you should move on.

So when I’m thinking about designing a good drill for my training, I’m isolating a small slice of the behavior and making sure that I’m keeping the variables moving, but always [00:27:00] in response to what my dog, my learner is giving me. But as soon as I’m getting done what I wanted to accomplish, I’m going to move on, right?

So actually you can apply this in two ways. Every time I get a clean loop, I’m going to change something, right? So when the loop is clean, you should move on. So I’m going to change something. It might not be something big. This is a beautiful place for just like a “different every day” kind of practice or process here. So I do the behavior. It’s the way that I want it. I’m going to change something. And it might simply be that now I’m going to drop the treat instead of handing it to my dog. Or if I was dropping the treat, maybe I drop it in a slightly different spot. Or if I was sitting on the floor, maybe I go to kneeling. This is where you can introduce that small variation, different but not harder. We use this all the time in Zero To CD.

But then also on the larger scale, with your whole session, once the loop is clean with the behavior [00:28:00] that you’re working on, stop that drill and go on to another drill. Move on to a different drill. Oh gosh, you can get so much more done in the same five minutes if you spend 90 seconds really tightly focused on a very carefully designed exercise, make a little bit of progress there and then spend the next 90 seconds on a different also well-designed exercise. You can make so much more progress, right?

So if you’re working on heeling, right? Oh yeah, I’ll just choose heeling, right? So this is an easy example. This is one I was just working on this morning with my own dogs. I could practice a whole heeling pattern: forward, fast, normal, left turn, slow, normal, about turn, right turn, halt. I could do the whole pattern and I would practice each of those components once or twice. Probably there’d be a lot of errors in [00:29:00] there. (That’s for another– Actually, I mean, I could talk about here, but we’ll talk about errors separately.) That would give me a chance to practice several components a few times.

Or I could practice my left turns for 90 seconds or less, 60 seconds. “One handful of food” is often how I measure my training sessions. One handful of food, practice those left turns, move on. One handful of food, now I’m going to work on right turns. One handful of food, now I’m going to work on start and stop, halts and that first step forward. Maybe work on going faster and slower. Or I could use 60 to 90 seconds and I could practice pausing right before the judge says forword and then exploding into play.

There’s so many ways that I could grab those little individual skills that go in a whole heeling pattern and motivate the heck out of them. (I marked explicit. Why did I say “heck”? I don’t know. We’ll just call that character.) [00:30:00] 

I can isolate those little skills and practice each one for a short amount of time, but with a lot of repetitions and get so much more done in the same five minutes of practice. And my dog has a much better experience with the whole training session! A higher rate of reinforcement overall, because if you’re doing a heeling pattern, if your heeling pattern takes 35-45 seconds, maybe a minute if you’re walking kind of slow or it’s a big heeling pattern, then that’s like one reinforcement per minute. That sucks. Versus a left turn, you can probably be rewarding every 3-5 seconds, maybe more often if you’re tossing treats in between. There’s a lot of ways to keep your rate of reinforcement really high. Much better experience, much better opportunity to practice the cue, the behavior, the reinforcer, whatever you wanted to focus on for that.

And we can drill down even further than that because they’re so– Oh, I can get very excited talking about exactly how to design drills for training in general and for [00:31:00] heeling. You know I love training. Heeling is one of my favorite things to train. But we’re already at 30 minutes into this episode.

So where was I going with that one? A better experience, better emotional learning as well as better skill acquisition, better motor learning, more efficient, get a lot more done, get a lot more accomplished and so much less opportunity to dig a hole, so much less of an opportunity to make your dog hate training with you or hate obedience. Because it doesn’t have to be like that! We can do better.

And all of this, I’m throwing out here: a handful of food, 60 seconds, 90 seconds, five minutes. I don’t want you to have the impression that that’s an absolute, because far from it! Again, my argument would be that we need to be paying attention to the learner and making those [00:32:00] adjustments really quickly. So if I did three repetitions and something was starting to go sideways or my learner was giving me some feedback like, “hmm, this isn’t– I don’t understand what you want,” I need to change the setup or “I’m starting to get tired” so we need to move on. I need to pay attention to that. And I’m going to make those adjustments.

So some behaviors I might do three times and then move on. That’s okay. That doesn’t mean anything’s wrong necessarily. Because repetition is not sufficient for learning. It’s the reinforcement. Deliberate practice.

Okay, I think that those are the high points. That’s everything I had on my outline here when I started talking. I hope that that was useful for you.

So, I am curious what your thoughts are. What were your experiences of drilling? Were you a child athlete or student athlete? Did you participate in sports or experience drills or drilling in school? And I would actually really love to hear from you and [00:33:00] validate if you had an unpleasant experience with that kind of repetitive practice. But I would especially love to hear from those of you that maybe have some good experiences with that style of practice. And maybe we can get some insights that we can use to design our training sessions.

So if you have thoughts you’d like to share, I’d like to hear them. You can find me on social media, hit me with an email, you know where to find me.

[outro]

Thanks for listening. If you liked this episode, well, you have good taste, and I hope you’ll hit the subscribe button on your podcast app to make sure you don’t miss the next episode. It might be even better than this one. If you are already subscribed, well, thank you. I really appreciate it. And there are still some ways that you could reinforce me if you were so inclined. You could always leave me a five star review on iTunes or Stitcher or wherever you happen to be listening to this podcast. And you can also check out and support the sponsors because they help make the podcast possible. You can find links and information about them and the other things that we’ve talked about in this episode [00:34:00] by going to the show notes, which can be found at www. wonderpupstraining.com/podcast.

And while you’re there, you could also pick up a free PDF training template to help you plan your training sessions. There’s also some other articles and previous podcasts and that sort of thing that you could always find if you were interested. So until next time, happy training!