Shake & High 5

Two of the most common dog tricks in history; shake and high 5.  These two tricks are a lot of fun and a great starting place for new trainers and a new pup. Being able to complete some of these simple tricks as a team is a great way to build trust an understanding between you, important for future training and tougher tricks!
Start with shake. Once you get that down it's easy to turn that into high 5.

So in order to teach your dog shake, you're going to need your training treats and your patience!

To start with, pick your command (most pick "shake" others include: "pound it""gimme some skin" whatever you preference) then you hold a treat in between yours and the dog's eyes and say "Shake" ( again, I like to snap at the same time as I say the command) and hold your hand out to the dog. The first few times you may have to grab the dogs paw and shake, then say "Goodboy!" and give praise and treats. Then, fairly quickly, you should start expecting the dog to pud their paw in yours, and poof they learned it!

You should take a break, play a game of fetch or something now to show the dog if he has a good training session he gets to play. After a short game, bathroom break, and some water, you're ready for a second round! Start by refreshing them of the newly learned trick, then once you're both confident in the first paw, graduate to the other. Add a another command to this and say "other hand." Other hand is a great command that'll come in handy when you're needing to clean feet, or cut nails later down the road.

After learning shake on the first day, its very easy to wake up the next morning and move right to high 5! Start with redoing shake a couple times, just to warm up and get them in training mode. Then you basically just say "High 5" and instead of holding your hand down low for a shake, you hold it at their eye level for a high 5 and they will remember that from the last time they put their hand on yours last time he got a treat, so they will quickly high 5 you! Again from here your can use the "other hand" command to reiterate that it means give me the other one.

Now that you got these down, all you need to remember is to practice these. Spend a few days helping them remember these and getting them to understand what they mean. Like when you get excited or the dog did something good, he knows its like a chest bump between athletes. Every time we get home from a walk, I say, "High 5 for a good walk!" and he knows; high 5, good, and walk and understands the excitement! He then high 5's me like "YEAAA!" is funny!

The easiest way to practice these is by using them as a warm up session for future training and tricks, you'll both start to get into learn and pay attention mode its a great frame of mind for getting things done!