Decompression
Deliberate quiet time that lets a dog's stress load come back down, without which nothing else you do sticks.
Also called: rest days · sniffari · stress recovery
It is the least intuitive instruction a trainer gives, because it sounds like doing nothing. After a hard week the useful prescription is often fewer walks past the trigger, not more practice — long sniffing walks somewhere empty, a decent chew, and no visitors.
The reason is chemical rather than philosophical. A dog carrying leftover stress starts every session closer to its threshold, so the same exercise that worked last week now fails, and the failure gets logged as a plan that is not working.
For rescues, the same idea covers the first weeks in a new home, where the most productive thing an owner can do is very little.