5 Ways to Exercise Your Dog on Rainy Days
1. Food search games – Food search games are a great way to burn some energy in your active dog. Scent work of any kind is tiring for dogs. Hide food around the house and allow your dog to search and find it. You can also hide food in boxes, food containers or even plastic Easter eggs! By the way, this exercises works great with birds and cats as well!
2. Fitness and conditioning exercises – Whether you have a houseful of fitness equipment for your dog or one single piece, you can use this activity to burn some energy in your dog. With even on piece of equipment, such as a balance disk, you can do many exercises.
3. Trick training – Trick training is a great way to spend quality time with your dog. Any kind of training is fun when you train with positive methods, but trick training is particularly fun for the owner which makes it fun for the dog. Another upside to trick training is that it requires very little space, even with a small dog. Look for our Trick Dog Novice online course coming soon.
Food toys are a great way to offer enrichment.
4. Puzzle games – Food puzzles are another great way to offer mental stimulation and enrichment for our dogs. Too nasty out for a walk with your dog? No problem, offer a food puzzle to burn some energy. Food puzzles can be purchased online and at most pet stores ranging in easy to fairly complex. You can easily make puzzle toys at home too out of things like boxes, egg cartons, soda or water bottles or anything you can think of to hide food in.
5. Living Room Agility – I used to offer a class where we taught students to exercise their dogs at home by creating an indoor agility course with household items. It was extremely popular as people learned to create jumps out of brooms and mops, tunnels out of chairs and blankets and obstacles out of furniture and items around the house.
Sometimes bad weather requires us to get creative. Look at this as a way to create fun games with your dog with mental stimulation and enrichment in mind!
