Puppy Training Schedule: Week by Week, 8-16 Weeks

10 August 2026

A realistic week-by-week puppy training schedule from 8 to 16 weeks: what to teach, when, and how long each session should be.

Most puppy training advice fails for one reason: it tells you what to teach without telling you when. So you end up practising recall in week one, sit in week three, and crate training whenever the crying gets bad enough, and your puppy learns that nothing is predictable.

This is the order that works, and roughly how long each piece takes.

The two rules that matter more than the schedule

Short sessions beat long ones. One to three minutes, several times a day. An eight-week-old puppy has almost no capacity for sustained focus, and a session that ends while they’re still succeeding is what makes them want to train again tomorrow. Sessions that drag on until the puppy checks out teach them that training ends in boredom.

Finish on something easy. Always end with a repetition your puppy can definitely do. This is the difference between “training is fun” and “training is where I get confused”.

Everything below assumes five minutes of deliberate training per day, split into two or three tiny sessions. That’s genuinely enough at this age. What isn’t optional is the routine around it: potty breaks, sleep and meals do more of the work than the training does.

Weeks 8-9: routine, name, and not much else

Your puppy has just left everything they’ve ever known. The goal this week is not obedience. It’s predictability.

Priorities

• Potty routine. Outside after waking, after eating, after play, and roughly every 30 to 45 minutes in between while awake. Go with them, wait, reward the moment they finish outside.
• Name recognition. Say the name once, and the instant they look at you, mark it and feed. Ten reps a day. Never use the name to scold. The name should mean “something good is about to happen”.
• Crate as a good place. Feed meals in the crate with the door open. No forcing, no shutting the door for long stretches yet.
• Sleep. Eight-week-old puppies need roughly 18 to 20 hours of sleep a day. Almost every “hyperactive, biting, impossible” puppy is an overtired puppy.

Skip this week: long walks, dog parks, teaching sit properly, anything with duration.

Weeks 9-10: the first real behaviours

Now that the routine is holding, add the first two behaviours that make daily life easier.

• Sit, lured with food, marked and fed. Three to five reps, twice a day.
• Hand target (nose to your palm). This looks trivial and turns out to be the most useful thing you teach. It becomes recall, it moves your dog without pulling, and it gives them something to do when they’re unsure.
• Handling. Touch ears, paws, mouth, collar, one second at a time, followed by food. This is what makes vet visits and nail trims survivable for the next fifteen years.
• Crate with the door closed for a few minutes while you’re in the room.

Socialisation starts properly here too, and it isn’t about meeting dogs. It’s about neutral exposure: traffic noise from a distance, different floor surfaces, umbrellas, hats, bicycles, men with beards, children’s voices. Calm observation from a comfortable distance beats enthusiastic greeting every time.

Weeks 10-12: duration, and the biting peak

Two things happen around week ten. Your puppy gets better at learning, and the biting gets worse. Both are normal.

• Settle. Reward your puppy for lying down and doing nothing, on a mat, near you. This is the single most underrated behaviour in dog training and almost nobody teaches it deliberately.
• Bite redirection. Have a chew within reach at all times. When teeth land on skin, the interaction pauses and the chew appears. Consistency matters here far more than technique. See the full guide to puppy biting. It does end, and roughly when you’d expect it to.
• Leash introduction indoors. Collar, then leash dragging around the house, then a few metres of walking with food at your side. No corrections, no destination.
• Alone time. Two minutes behind a closed door, then five, then ten. Practising this before you need it is how you avoid separation problems later.

Weeks 12-14: the world gets bigger

Your puppy is now more confident, which means they’re more likely to practise the wrong things.

• Recall in the house and garden. A distinct word, said once, followed by a genuinely excellent reward every single time. Never call your dog to do something they dislike.
• Loose leash walking, properly. Reward the position you want rather than correcting the position you don’t. The three exercises that do the work are short enough to start today. Expect to cover very little ground: a “walk” at this age is mostly standing around sniffing, which is exactly what it should be.
• Door manners. Sitting before the door opens. It takes about a week and it prevents years of escapes.
• Impulse control games. Food in a closed hand, opening only when the puppy backs off.

Weeks 14-16: proofing, not new tricks

You now have a small set of behaviours. Rather than adding more, make the existing ones work in harder places.

Take one behaviour, sit for example, and practise it in the hallway, then the garden, then the pavement outside, then near a park. Dogs don’t generalise the way we assume; a puppy who sits perfectly in the kitchen genuinely does not know what “sit” means on a street corner. Every change of location resets the difficulty.

This is also the point where most people quietly stop training, because the puppy is no longer a disaster and the urgency fades. The dogs that end up easy to live with are the ones whose owners kept going for another two months.

What a normal day actually looks like

If that looks like it’s mostly sleeping and going outside, that’s because it is. Training is a small part of raising a puppy well.

If you’d rather have this generated for your dog’s exact age and the time you actually have, there’s a free puppy training schedule generator, and no signup.

The most common mistakes

Training when the puppy is over-threshold. An overtired or overstimulated puppy cannot learn. Sleep first.

Adding new behaviours instead of strengthening old ones. Five reliable behaviours beat twenty unreliable ones.

Repeating the cue. “Sit, sit, sit, SIT” teaches your dog that the word means nothing until the fourth time.

Punishing the growl or the accident. Both suppress the signal without changing the cause, and both make the underlying problem harder to see coming.

Expecting linear progress. Regression around 16 weeks and again in adolescence is normal, not failure.

Where to go next

Each of these gets its own complete treatment:

• Potty training a puppy: the routine, the setbacks, and night-time
• Stopping puppy biting: bite inhibition without punishment
• Crate training: making the crate somewhere your dog chooses to be
• Loose leash walking: walks that stop being a tug of war