09/03/2026
Your puppy does NOT need to be exhausted to be well exercised...
You may have heard the old guideline of "five minutes of exercise per month of age", and it actually came about years ago for a very good reason... to try to stop people over-exercising growing puppies. As puppies get bigger, particularly some of our larger breeds, they can start to look remarkably grown up on the outside whilst there is still an enormous amount of development happening underneath. Their body hasn't necessarily finished maturing just because they suddenly look like a small adult dog. So there absolutely is merit in the thinking behind that guideline, and I certainly wouldn't want us to throw the whole idea out. But our understanding of puppy development and exercise has moved on, and simply multiplying your puppy's age by five doesn't take into account the puppy standing in front of you. Puppies don't all grow at the same rate, they aren't all the same breed or size, they don't live the same lifestyles, and the exercise you're doing with your puppy isn't all the same either. Ten minutes wandering around a field together, sniffing, exploring and stopping every few feet is very different from ten minutes of repetitive ball chasing, running on hard ground or constantly jumping on and off things. So rather than becoming fixated on the clock, I want you to think about what your puppy is actually doing with their growing body.
As you can see in the graphic, your puppy's skeleton is still developing and their growth plates haven't all closed yet. These are areas of developing cartilage towards the ends of certain bones, and different growth plates close at different stages as your puppy matures. That doesn't mean we wrap puppies in cotton wool, stop them running or become terrified every time they jump off something... puppies absolutely need to move. They need to play. They need to explore. They need to experience different surfaces, use their bodies, build strength and learn how those bodies actually work. What we're much more interested in is the type of exercise we're asking them to do and how much control they have over it. Repetitive ball chasing, lots of jumping, pounding along on hard surfaces, long periods of forced exercise where they're simply expected to keep up... that's very different from your puppy pottering around, sniffing, playing and choosing when to stop. And this is where I think some of the nuance gets lost when we reduce puppy exercise to a certain number of minutes.
The other thing that's really easy to get caught out by is the completely bonkers puppy at home. Your puppy is biting everything, racing around the furniture, grabbing your clothes, jumping up, zooming from one end of the room to the other and generally behaving like they've been plugged into the mains... and the very natural thought is "Oh God, this puppy needs MORE exercise". So you take them for another walk. You play for longer. You get the ball out again. You try to wear them out because surely a tired puppy is going to be a calmer puppy. Except sometimes we've just added more activity to a puppy who was already exhausted in the first place.
An overtired puppy can look remarkably like a puppy who needs more exercise. Sometimes the answer to that completely manic behaviour isn't another walk at all... it's sleep. And I know I bang on about puppy sleep, but there is a very good reason for it. When we're looking at the whole puppy, rather than just the behaviour we're seeing in that moment, rest has to be part of the conversation too.
And sleep isn't only important because it helps your puppy regulate their behaviour. They're doing an enormous amount of physical growing and developing, and proper rest gives their body time to recover from all that activity. Sleep is also hugely important for learning and memory consolidation, and just think about how much information your puppy is trying to process every single day. New people, new smells, new environments, training, other dogs, household noises, walks, cars, visitors, things they're allowed to chew, things apparently they're NOT allowed to chew... their little brains are taking in an extraordinary amount. So when we're planning their day, we're not just thinking "How much exercise have we done?" We're thinking about everything they've experienced. Sometimes they've had quite enough.
So watch the puppy in front of you rather than trying to hit a perfect number on a stopwatch. Think about what you've already done together that day, what kind of exercise it was, how intense or repetitive it was, what surfaces your puppy was moving over and whether they actually had the choice to stop. Look at how they recover afterwards as well. We can build things gradually as they grow, mix physical exercise with sniffing, exploring and little bits of training, and make proper downtime part of their day rather than something that only happens once they've finally crashed out.
Your puppy doesn't need to come home absolutely shattered for a walk to have been worthwhile. A slow sniff around the world, a little bit of exploring and then a really good sleep can be doing far more for that growing puppy than another half an hour spent trying to "wear them out".
