June brings intensity: longer days, higher drive, hotter training sessions. This issue offers insights and tools to help your dog recover well, regulate faster, and stay grounded without burning out.
Heat Changes Everything
If your dog’s behavior shifts in the summer to more reactivity, slower recovery, skin flare-ups, or agitation, it’s not “just the weather.”
Heat puts pressure on every system of the body from the gut to the nervous system, the skin, the brain, and the muscles. The more we understand this, the more we can adapt without sacrificing our dog’s performance.
The good news is that neither we nor our dogs have to “live with it.” We can take steps to bring ourselves and our dogs back to a calmer, more centered state, where cooler heads (and bodies!) prevail. Here’s how:
Nutrition: Think Cooling, Not Cutting
Summer isn’t about cutting the fat, especially since dogs use fat as a primary energy source. Whether you’re feeding raw or kibble, you can experiment with cooling protein sources such as rabbit or duck (especially if you’re already rotating proteins.)
In Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine (TCVM), rabbit, duck, and fish are considered more energetically cooling, supporting a calmer energy and improved digestion.
If your dog doesn’t tolerate switching proteins (like mine), that’s okay. Instead, focus on hydration, gut support, and anti-inflammatory whole foods like blueberries, cucumber, and fresh herbs such as:
- Nettle (for inflammation and detox support)
- Chickweed (traditionally used to cool skin flare-ups)
- Marshmallow root (a soothing demulcent for the gut and urinary tract)
- Skullcap (to support a stressed nervous system)
When giving herbs, look for glycerites, which is a type of preparation that uses vegetable glycerin to extract the herbs’ medicinal properties. Alternatively, you can steep the herbs in water, strain them, and then freeze the liquid into ice cubes.
Movement Insight: Train to the Nervous System
Your dog’s recovery depends less on reps, and more on regulation and rhythm.
After high-drive work, build in decompression time:
- Off-leash “sniffaris” or structured decompression walks
- Gentle massage, especially around the shoulders and spine
- Bonding exercises where you sit or lie on the ground with your dog and get on their level
These help settle your dog’s nervous system (and yours!), lower inflammation, and maintain emotional clarity between sessions, especially when incorporated into your dog’s daily rhythm.
Connection > Control
I’ve recently learned that clarity and connection trump control.
What does that look like? Less reliance on e-collar stim and prong pops, and more reliance on breaking behaviors down into the smallest steps possible.
Most dogs (even our high-drive working dogs) need more clarity and less control. When we break things down in a way that they understand, the lightbulb goes off, and their joy is palpable.
The other huge piece is making sure that I’m regulated every time I step onto the training field. How’s my stress level? Am I breathing into my chest or my belly? Our dogs can hear our heartbeat, so if we’re stressed, so are they.
Dogs under stress often show up as “stubborn,” “hard,” or “amped.” However, real connection and clarity come from the relationship you have with yourself and your dog, not from correction.
Try leaning into connection and co-regulation before you hit the stim button or pop the leash, and let me know how it goes. Summer is a powerful time to lean into calm, clear communication with your dog.
Tool of the Month: Peppermint Hydrosol Cooling Wraps
A gentle, dog-safe way to help your partner cool down post-work.
Mix a splash of peppermint hydrosol into cool water and soak a clean cloth or bandana. Store it in the fridge or cooler, then apply it to pulse points such as the armpits, groin, belly, or behind your dog’s ears.
What’s a hydrosol? It’s the mild floral water left behind after distilling peppermint or other herbs. Unlike essential oils, it won’t overpower your dog’s senses. In fact, I’m a big fan of lavender hydrosols for myself and my dogs.
I highly recommend testing the hydrosol on yourself first — you should feel a light cooling effect, not an icy shock.
Your Takeaway This Month
Heat magnifies everything, so don’t just train harder. Train smarter.
You don’t need a massive overhaul — just aligned tweaks rooted in physiology, behavior, and rhythm.
Remember: a regulated dog is a responsive dog. A resilient dog is a reliable one.