you may remember from one of the first videos in euchre's series that i mentioned that her very first night home she actually slept six hours without getting up okay it's been six hours it's some sometime in the morning and uh we just had our first peep now this was not by accident in fact we were pretty sure this was going to happen this way in today's video i'm going to share with you a bunch of tricks that we use in order to help us get our puppies to sleep through the night and it doesn't involve setting alarm i'm cam mccann this is euchre welcome back to mccann dogs [Music] what a lot of people don't realize is that overnight potty training actually starts earlier in the night there's certain things that you can do in the evening in the late evening that's going to set yourself up for success overnight that first one is going to be sort of your evening prep now one of the most important things is to make sure that your puppy goes to sleep with an empty bladder and there's a couple things that you can do to ensure this happens number one is think about limiting their access to water after a certain time now everybody's going to be different depending on what the time they go to bed but for us we stopped letting her have access to water about after 8 pm or so and that way we knew that she didn't have any water left in her bladder when she went to the bathroom she'd be pretty empty along with water we're also going to change or limit the access to food and when we feed her now it's pretty common for me to train pretty late into the evening so when i do that i'll only give her a limited amount of food and then i try to choose to use maybe a toy reward in the late evening instead of food so that i'm not giving her a bunch of extra stuff and then we try to make sure that um she has a poop before we take her to her crate for the night let's talk a little bit about poop dog poo specifically and it's actually a subject i know quite a bit about because i've gotten pretty good at getting my dogs to go to the bathroom before bedtime which means i get a nice long sleep now there's a trick to getting your dog to go to the bathroom and one of the most helpful things that you can do is get your puppy to be active one of the things that i like to do um later in the night with my training and using that toy is she's more energetic i'll either play a little fetch a little tug of war or sometimes they'll just take her for a little romp around the outside of the property just to loosen things up and she's far more likely to go to the bathroom and often if i take her outside and she doesn't go i find if i just walk her around for a little while before i know it she's uh she's gone to the bathroom and that way i know that throughout the night she's empty and it's very unlikely she's gonna ask to uh to go out again i have a really important question and it could change everything in terms of your overnight potty training do you know your puppy's potty schedule at this point now this is something that took us a few weeks to figure out with euchre one of the things that we discovered is that i'm going to talk about poop again but she's a double pooper in the morning i found that i would take her outside she'd have her normal pee her normal poop and i would think we're ready to start the day and within an hour or so she would be looking for a place to go to the washroom once again and so i actually learned over time that there was certain times of day that she is much more likely to go to go to the washroom and that allowed me to ensure that those um times those points had been met before we went to bed at night it's very common for her to have to go one more time before we go to bed so if it's getting close to bedtime and i know she still hasn't had her her evening poop i'll go through some of those things on the list i mentioned earlier about you know doing a bit of training with her maybe doing a bit of exercise taking her for a walk get those things moving so that she actually does follow her schedule which makes overnight much easier for both of us we've talked a lot in our previous potty training videos about common times where they do have to go things like coming out of their crate or after they had a big nap or after they had a lot of play we want to take advantage of those opportunities and use it to help us make an overnight potty training plan a lot of people think they have to set an alarm overnight and get up several times to let your puppy outside but i'm very happy to say that you don't actually have to do that you have an alarm system built in right here and we would recommend that you keep your puppy's crate nearby where you're sleeping so that if they do stir you can hear them and then get up and take them out now with a lot of the other tips that we're going to be mentioning in this video hopefully you're going to be able to find that even within the first couple nights your puppy will sleep for a long time she did whimper a little bit the first couple nights that she was home but it wasn't until early in the morning that we had to get up and i heard her stir got up let her out and and dealt with it at that point um but they're going to there's going to be a time when you don't want that to become the routine now eventually we pushed our six hour time frame to she sleeps about eight hours a night which is pretty great so the way that we did that is you know after a few days of getting up at 6 a.m to let her go to the washroom we would then push it five or ten minutes i might let her whimper a little bit i might just bang on her crate a little bit and tell her quiet settle wait a few minutes for her to settle and then i would let her up and and take her outside to go potty um and each day i sort of push it a bit more and i think after the second day she fell right back asleep for another hour or so so it was a pretty easy transition but it's much easier for me to feel less guilty about letting her outside if i know that before she went to bed she fully went to the bathroom she had good exercise you know i i know that i've set her up for success so i feel less guilty about letting her out all throughout the night she learns to have a long good night's sleep and so do i now if you do have to get up in the middle of the night to have your dog go potty it's really important that when you take them out that you make sure it's all business and no pleasure so if you come out and your puppies are running around and being you know having a bit of a party just keep the leash a little bit shorter just encourage them to hurry up we often suggest teaching our puppies to go to the bathroom on command i'll often tell her hurry up hurry up hurry up and then encourage her to go from there if she's not going within a minute or so i'm just gonna take her back inside and put her back in her crate before we try it again but if we come out and then we do a little play we make it a bit of a game i don't want her waking me up in the middle of the night so that we can go outside and have a little party together so make sure it's all business no pleasure get the job done back inside back to bed i'm talking a lot about a structure with our puppies but looking down the road a little bit there are certain things that you might not need to worry about as your puppy gets a little bit older things like restricting water throughout the night or you know not feeding or playing with them at a certain time of the evening as your puppy gets a little bit older they are going to learn how to self-regulate and one of the ways that you're going to know that you're ready to kind of loosen the rules a little bit is you know is your puppy successfully making it overnight every single night without asking to go outside or without having any issues um you know are they typically doing well with their house training during the day as well do they understand to hold it or to ask you to go outside do they understand not to have accidents in their crate um can they spend a long time in their crate without needing to go outside these things are all going to slowly start to come together for you and at that point you can start to decide whether you want to be a little bit more relaxed with some of those rules and structure if you're still struggling with your puppy potty training make sure you click that card right there and find out the biggest mistakes that people make with their puppy potty training if you're looking for some more help and some specific advice for training your puppy make sure you check out our puppy essentials online program the link for that is in the description below on that note i'm kale this is euchre happy training