Episode 46: How to Exercise your Dogs with Dr. Chris Zink, DVM

Today on the Good Dog Pod Laura is joined by a very special guest: Dr. Chris Zink, DVM! Dr. Zink is a sports medicine specialist and many times author. Dr. Zink and Laura will talk about how to exercise your young dogs - a relevant topic given that many people have gotten dogs in the past year. 

Dogs are so incredibly varied in their shapes and sizes: all the way from a 3lb Chihuahua to a 150lb Great Dane. So, as our dogs grow, we have to be cognizant of their growth rate. Ultimately, we need to find the appropriate balance of exercise for our dogs that suits the dog’s size - which is a little bit different from humans, given that humans end up a lot more similar in size compared to canines. 

There are various exercises that dogs can engage in. The most common exercise that we think of for dogs are walks, but there are other forms of exercise to consider. These include balancing exercises, flexibility exercises, strength and endurance training. And lastly, there are the good for the soul exercises: getting out in nature, paddling through a creek, going through grass, or stepping through rocks. 

Let’s look at the appropriate exercise for an 8 week old puppy, as well as a 6 month old dog. 

8 week old puppy: Baby puppies are running, tumbling, playing with their owners. They are stretching and flexing their muscles. They are working both on their balance and flexibility. If a baby puppy is going on a walk, that walk should be a saunter. They should be on a long line (20 feet), it should be loose, and you should be following around as they smell their surroundings. The puppy should be walking you. 

6 month old: At around 6 months of age is the appropriate time to add any kind of strength training to puppies. Dr. Zink made the comparison that puppies, up until the age of 6 months old, are as similar to children up until the age of 10-12 years old. At 6 months of age, that starts to diverge, and larger dogs tend to mature more slowly than smaller dogs. 

Something that Dr. Zink noted which is important to consider is the difference in puberty between dogs who are neutered/spayed and those who aren’t. Any heavy exercise can be introduced to a dog who isn’t spayed/neutered after the age of 14 months, once the growth plates have closed. Now if the dog is spayed/neutered, that age is now shifted to 20 months, as growth plates now close at 20 months since puberty is delayed. 

When, why and how you should exercise your dogs? Listen to this week’s episodes for answers!

Transcript

Laura Reeves [0:40] Welcome to the Good Dog Pod! I am your host, Laura Reeves, and today I have a very special guest, Dr. Chris Zink, who is a sports medicine specialist and many-times author and very, very passionate about the physical health and wellbeing of our dogs. Chris and I are going to talk today about how we exercise our young dogs. Everybody got a new dog in the last year. Like, everybody. So we want to give people some great ideas about how puppies grow, about how to exercise them appropriately and when and why. Welcome, Chris.

Dr. Chris Zink [1:20] Thank you! I’m glad to be here. Always glad to talk to you. 

Laura Reeves [1:22] I love it. You are one of my favorite guests. So, Chris, talk to us. We’ve got all these pandemic puppies out there. How are these puppies growing? What are their joints going through? How does that affect what and how we exercise them?

Dr. Chris Zink [1:38] Well, it’s actually really interesting because dogs have such great structural differences. I mean, a puppy could grow into a 3-pound Chihuahua or a Great Dane of 150 pounds. Dogs are so incredibly varied that as they grow, we have to be cognizant of what their growth rate is and how big they’re going to end up to be. It’s a little bit different from looking at how children grow, but how children grow is our best comparable. It’s the best way we can think about it. Because we often compare dogs, for example, to horses, which is a little bit ridiculous because they’re such different creatures. Dogs, structurally, are much more alike to children growing up. It’s important to make that comparison. At any given time in a puppy’s life, we want to be thinking about what is the best thing to do for them at that time. Of course, we know that exercise is important. The data are out there that exercise in children at least—and to some extent, we’ve got some data in dogs; a little bit less—that we know that proper exercise means healthier, stronger bones, muscles, cartilage, and all those body parts. We know from studies that dogs that get appropriate exercise have less hip dysplasia, which is really important. We know that proper exercise creates dogs that develop healthier hearts and lungs. They have better balance and coordination, so they’re not going to be as likely to get injured because they are doing the right thing with their body. Actually, with children we know that exercise improves self-confidence and helps their learning and gives them better overall lifetime health. I don’t know why that wouldn’t apply to dogs, too. All of those things are important to think about when we think about exercise for puppies. Now, the problem comes, as I see it: we have ideas that are at way extremes, people that believe you should not exercise puppies at all. You should put them in a little bottle and keep them there until they’re grown up.

Laura Reeves [3:56] With bubble-wrapping! 

Dr. Chris Zink [3:58] No bubble wrap! But at the other extreme are people who way over-exercise their dogs and take it to an extreme that actually can cause injury. So we have to have a balance there. But that balance needs to take into account the ultimate size and shape of that dog’s body, which is a little bit different from humans because humans all end up a lot more similar than dogs do. 

Laura Reeves [4:24] So you’re talking about proper and appropriate exercise. Let’s say I just brought home my new 8-week-old puppy, and it’s running and tumbling and I want to take it for a walk. Let’s start there and progress. Let’s say my puppy is sort of a medium-size, going to be maybe 50 pounds. 

Dr. Chris Zink [4:45] You’ve got an 8-week-old puppy you just brought home. Let’s think about types of exercise dogs can have. We all think about taking dogs for walks, but there’s many more other kinds of exercise. I want to talk about how to take a dog for a walk, too. I think that’s important. But if you think about baby puppies, they’re running and tumbling and rolling around and playing with us and playing tug and playing with our other dogs if we have any. So there’s all that balance and body awareness stuff that’s happening. We’re not even thinking about it as exercise, but it is. And then there’s stretching and their flexibility. We see little puppies stretch. They come out of their crate, and they stretch their arms forward and they stretch their legs back, so we can help them become better stretchers, which is also important. And then we have strength exercise: things like moving the body over through different resistance. For example, strength exercise in humans; the obvious one is weight-lifts. Well, you know, dogs don’t have opposable thumbs, so they’re not going to pick up the barbell. What they do do is they use their body as the weight, and they move it over short distances. When that happens, they’re doing strength training and we can help them with that. There’s also endurance training, like longer distance. Going for walks at a trot or long distance. And then there’s the other things we might be training. We might be training them to sit, stay, and down. That’s all types of exercise, too. And then there’s the last one, which we call “good for the soul” exercise. It's getting out in nature and paddling through the little creek and walking up and down hills with stones and rubble and going through grass and sniffing all that. That’s really another type of exercise, too. There’s a lot more to it than just taking the dog for a walk. We want to give our dogs a lot of all those kinds of exercises—except they need to be done at the proper ages. Those proper ages—we can give some general ideas about that. You have a baby puppy. He’s 8 weeks old. You want to take him for a walk. That walk should be a saunter. He should be on a long line—at least 20 feet. It should be kind of loose, and you should be following him around as he sniffs the trees and he sniffs the flowers and he eats a little bit of grass and he pees on a tree. That’s all really, really important—rather than taking him on a Bataan Death March where he goes in a trot all the way down. 

Laura Reeves [7:21] I think of it as the puppy walking me, not me walking the puppy.

Dr. Chris Zink [7:24] Absolutely. That’s the way that it should be. We should all think about that. We want to get exercise ourselves, so sometimes we drag our dogs along on that. It may not be particularly enjoyable to the dog. If that’s all they get, they’re going to look like they’re enjoying it because they’re actually getting out. But try to think of it from your dog’s point of view: they’d like to be able to stop and sniff. I see nothing wrong with that. In fact, it’s very, very good for them. That’s that “good for the soul” component we want to be sure to include from the time we get that little baby puppy home. The other two parts of the exercise types that we want to include at that age are the balance and proprioception. So, you have a garden and you have railway ties around the garden. Maybe encourage the dog to walk along the railway ties, playing with other dogs and playing with you, roughhousing. Putting them on little things that move. All really good for puppies. The other thing is the flexibility and stretching. We don’t want to ever take our dogs’ legs and stretch them ourselves by grabbing them and pulling on them at all. We never want to do that. But what we do want to do is give them exercise that will cause them to stretch on their own, things like standing on their hind legs and reachin up for something with their paws or even with their neck. Standing on their hind legs will give them a hind leg stretch, where they stand up on your knee or on the edge of a chair or something like that, while you’re giving them treats. All of those are the kinds of exercises that little puppies get. They need to have time to explore the world. 

Laura Reeves [9:02] Right. One of the most fabulous images I ever saw—we know this as dog breeders. You kind of know it in the back of your head, but when you see it in black and white—an X-ray of a baby puppy—

Dr. Chris Zink [9:15] Oh, it’s amazing, isn’t it?! There’s nothing attached.

Laura Reeves [9:17] They’re not connected to anything! They’re put together with rubber bands! Seriously, I think that is so important for people to understand. Those little bones are literally not connected. 

Dr. Chris Zink [9:31] We’re not going to worry about joint disease in a baby puppy, because there are no joints yet. Of course, as they begin to develop (around 4-6 months they’ll start to have joints that we can see or maybe a little earlier than that, depending on the size of the puppy), joints are one of the things we want to protect because they’re a moving part. Yet, we don’t want to put the puppy in bubble wrap and never let it come out until it’s a full-grown adult, because we know that’s not appropriate. Here’s the thing: Dr. Gayle Watkins, also a member of Good Dog, and I have looked extensively at the literature because what we want is evidence-basis for what we recommend. That’s really, really important. It turns out: there’s no evidence that we could find anywhere where it’s been studied on what you should do with puppies specifically—with a couple of exceptions. One was a study that came out of Norway, I believe it was, where they looked at puppies that were allowed to run over hilly terrain with stones (a little bit of rough terrain), etc., and they compared them to puppies that didn’t have as much exercise. The ones that were allowed to run over rough terrain had much better hip scores when they were adults, so much less likelihood of hip dysplasia. So appropriate exercise and appropriate amounts of exercise is what we really want to do with our dogs. Probably right around 6 months of age is when you can add actual strength training to those puppies. As little puppies (up until 6 months of age), they need to explore. They need to run around. They need to run over that tough terrain and have those experiences, but not under a controlled basis where we are saying, “I’m going to sit down and I’m going to build muscle on you. I’m going to make you stronger now.” That doesn’t happen until 6 months of age. Actually, other than that paper, there’s very little out there about exactly what we should do at what age. Here’s what Gayle and I did. We looked at all the references we could find and all the recommendations we could find for human children. There’s lots of that out there. The World Health Organization, the governments of Australia, Canada, the United States, New Zealand, Britain have all published recommendations for exercises in children. It’s really, really interesting because the recommendations are all the same. They all recommend that children up to about 6 years of age get 3 hours of active exercise a day, running around like little maniacs. 

Laura Reeves [12:13] Making us all crazy, yes. 

Dr. Chris Zink [12:15] That’s so important for growth and development! But they don’t tell you, “Take that kid to a gym and make them work out.” 

Laura Reeves [12:22] Put them on a weight bench! 

Dr. Chris Zink [12:24] Yeah, these little kids are running around and playing and roughhousing and rolling down hills and all the things that kids do. So how do we know what the equivalent ages in puppies? That’s kind of important to know. What we also did was we looked at how puppies grow, puppies that are going to end up at different sizes to see how they grow. Essentially, what we came up with is that puppies up to about 6 months of age (regardless of how big they’re going to end up) are just like kids up to about 10-12 years of age. By 6 months, they’re like the equivalent of 10-12 years of age. So we know that they need lots of that kind of fun/games/running around like maniacs type of exercise until 6 months of age. At 6 months of age, they start to diverge. They mature more slowly if they’re going to end up as a really big dog, and they mature more quickly if they’re going to end up as a small dog. But all dogs at about 6 months can start getting actual strength training exercises where it really looks like tricks. I mean, you can have your dog sit up on his haunches and beg for food and paw the air and all kinds of exercises that they can do that are actually directed to build strength, but they’re still fun. There’s still food involved, so the dog’s into it. But what we also want to be sure of is that we don’t overdo it. How do we know? What does it mean to overdo it? Overdoing it would be any time that you’re doing a repetitive action that’s longer distance (like road work). If any of you show in conformation, it always amazes me. You go to a specialty, like our Golden Retriever specialty, and what I see is that people bring golf carts, and they’ve got dogs on leash on either side of the golf cart, and they’re trotting them around, and they’re trotting them around and they’re trotting them for half an hour around the parking lot. All I can think to myself is: why are we doing this? Some of these are puppies. Their bodies haven’t matured yet. It’s an exercise that’s very repetitive and long-term. We don’t ever do that with dogs younger than 14 months of age, which is when growth plates will have closed. But if the dog is spayed or neutered, we have to wait till 20 months of age.

Laura Reeves [14:48] That’s an interesting piece of information. Talk to me more about that. 

Dr. Chris Zink [14:53] We know that the hormones in the testes and the ovaries help the growth plates to mature and close. So, what are the growth plates? For anybody that’s not sure what those are, they’re little soft areas of the bone where new bone is being made so the bone is elongating. When the dog matures and comes into puberty, which happens at about 12-14 months of age at the latest, those bones stop growing. That’s why we don’t grow forever. That’s why puppies don’t grow into great, big horses. Those are soft areas that are beside really hard areas. They’re at risk for injury. If they do get injured, then the bones become deformed. We want to be sure those growth plates don’t get injured. We don’t want to do something that’s repetitive, especially not concussive. Road work is concussive. There’s all this impact. 

Laura Reeves [15:45] Treadmills.

Dr. Chris Zink [15:47] All the time. Treadmills, same thing. Even though treadmills maybe are softer than pavement, it’s that repetition. It’s that dog’s weight always hitting the ground. The cool thing is we can do lots of exercises with our dogs that don’t require much impact at all. The other thing about road work is, unless you have a treadmill, you have to do it outside, so you’re restricted by weather. If it’s too hot or if it’s too cold or if it’s icy or wet, all those things are going to impair the exercise. We don’t have to care about that, because we’re going to do exercise indoors that’s a lot like trick training. 

Laura Reeves [16:23] I love it.

Dr. Chris Zink [16:23] I love the AKC trick program, because you can do it indoors and you can do it virtually and send in your videos. It’s wonderful. You can teach your dog to sit up and beg which, by the way, even though some people might have told you it’s dangerous for the dog, there’s actually been a study in dogs showing that a dog that is sitting up and begging has only ⅓ of the pressure on its spine than a dog going up a set of stairs.

Laura Reeves [16:52] Now that’s interesting. 

Dr. Chris Zink [16:54] Yeah, that was done in 1992. They looked at the actual amount of pressure on the spine. So, everybody, if you want your dog to sit up and beg, do it. It’s great for them. It’s not dangerous.

Laura Reeves [17:06] It’s core! We all want to build core strength, right? That’s another thing.

Dr. Chris Zink [17:07] Absolutely. And haven’t you seen little baby puppies sitting up on their haunches nursing from mom? They’re doing it at 5 weeks of age. It’s not dangerous. But lots of other things, too, like having your dog do high-fives, having your dog do waves—great front leg strengthening exercises. 

Laura Reeves [17:23] What about bow? Isn’t that a good stretching exercise?

Dr. Chris Zink [17:26] Play bow is a great stretching exercise. Great. You can have your dog play bow, and then what you can do is you can put a little trail of food along the ground, so they play bow and move forward and keep stretching along to get the food. 

Laura Reeves [17:39] Command crawl. 

Dr. Chris Zink [17:40] Yeah, that’s right. Lots of ways to make this fun for the dog. It’s not like they have to go to the gym and suffer through all this, which I just did this morning so I’m thinking about this. 

Laura Reeves [17:54] I know. I had my walk this morning, too. Let’s talk a little bit. We’ve talked about the size differences and slower maturing, large dogs more quickly maturing. Can we talk a little bit about some of the statistics and the research that’s been done about obesity in dogs and why (once they are past that 14 months for an intact dog or 20 months for an altered dog) regular exercise is so important and obesity is so bad? Can we talk about that a little bit?

Dr. Chris Zink [18:25] Yes, we can. Obesity in dogs is the same as obesity in humans. There’s a number of things. I’m going to talk about the two main things. Number one: of course there’s much more pressure on the bones and joints which, if possible, we would like to avoid. But the other thing is that body fat is an organ. It’s actually believed we should consider it like an organ. That organ is creating a great deal of small molecules that are proinflammatory. They create this proinflammatory environment in the body. These small molecules go out, they meet all the other cells in the body and they say to the cells in the body, “Get ready! Because something is probably going to happen here, so rev yourself up!” So all the cells in the body are kind of in the revved up state. We don’t want that. Just this morning, I read an article that looked at all of the reviews of studies that they’ve done—the best studies they’ve done—looking at obesity and the proinflammatory response and what it really does. What’s the evidence for having a proinflammatory environment in the body? The two best evidences are: 1) heart disease and 2) cancer. I mean, there are breeds that are particularly prone to heart disease, such as Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. Many of the smaller breeds are quite prone to heart disease. Of course, many of the larger breeds are much more prone to cancer than the smaller breeds. So, we’ve got all the breeds covered when we’re thinking heart disease and cancer. That’s a reason that we really love to control obesity. Of course, exercise is a great way to help control obesity, to use up those calories that the dog is ingesting. Of course the other way is diet, and that’s a whole other—

Laura Reeves [20:14] That’s a whole other podcast, man. 

Dr. Chris Zink [20:17] Yes. But I was really pleased to read that article today, because I think that that summarizes for us very much the importance of controlling our dog’s body weight. I guess the other thing that I’d like to mention is that the evidence is also very strong that when a dog loses its gonads (so spayed or neutered by removal of the gonads—and that’s the ovaries or the testes), then the dog’s metabolic rate declines by about 30-40% so that means that they need 30-40% less calories coming in, or they will become obese. I think a lot of people don’t get warned about that and don’t realize that. 

Laura Reeves [20:57] It’s something that you see so frequently. We think of it as the old spayed female situation. Speaking as one… it is a real issue! It is important that we are aware of that, I think, and that we continue the exercise program because the study that I saw that was really shocking to me was the number of years that are literally shaved right off your dog’s life. 

Dr. Chris Zink [21:30] Absolutely: 2-2.5 years shorter life span of a dog that’s obese. That’s the bottom line. 

Laura Reeves [21:36] That’s science-y.

Dr. Chris Zink [21:38] That’s crazy. Wouldn’t all of us love to have our dog for 2-2.5 years longer? 

Laura Reeves [21:44] Exactly. I think of it as loving our dogs to death. I see these dogs — “I just want to give them a cookie! He needs—” No. 

Dr. Chris Zink [21:55] The other thing is: I’m a little bit surprised by the fact that we all recognize. You see a fat child and you think to yourself, “Oh, what a shame. We should try to get that child healthy.” But we don’t feel the same about our dogs? 

Laura Reeves [22:10] Disconnect. 

Dr. Chris Zink [22:11] Yeah. People see fat puppies, and they think it’s so cute. Something is wrong with our perception there. 

Laura Reeves [22:21] Okay! So, once they’re past that age—final wrap-up here—all their growth plates are closed, they’re ready to go, are we still going to avoid the concussive and road work? Or can we add that into an existing strength training/flexibility training? 

Dr. Chris Zink [22:40] Excellent question. I believe you have to think about why we are adding in the road work. What are we trying to accomplish? If the dog is going to compete in a performance event that requires that—for example, there’s a performance event with Dalmations where they have to run 25 miles with a person on horseback. 

Laura Reeves [22:58] I can tell you that Wirehaired Pointers—any of the pointing breeds that are running in horseback field trials—most of them are literally road worked at a gallop, because they have to be able to run for an hour at top speed. 

Dr. Chris Zink [23:12] So that makes sense. But does every dog need that? When we think about how it’s concussive? I don’t think so. If we’re thinking about the sports events (just as a way of looking at this), you look at agility, obedience, rally, even coursing, dock diving. All of these kinds of activities all involve strength, they require strength, but they don’t involve endurance. The sports that really do require endurance are field trials and hunt tests, herding for Border Collies (not herding for the other breeds because that’s much shorter distances), and mushing. Unless you have a dog that participates in one of those activities, I don’t really see the benefit of road work. Now, there are people who are runners, and they love to have a dog companion running with them. That’s great if they want to do that, but they should have a dog of the right breed and size and energy level to do that. You probably wouldn’t want to do that with a Pug. 

Laura Reeves [24:15] I have a Pug that would think it was fabulous. But, no. A Wirehaired Pointer. 

Dr. Chris Zink [24:21] Something that runs long distances. Even Greyhounds don’t run long distances. They’re like cheetahs. They run a really short distance very fast. 

Laura Reeves [24:30] Right. I mean, you think about the endurance trotting breeds. You think about a Rhodesian Ridgeback—that was its job, to trot along for miles and miles and miles and miles as they were traveling and hunting in Africa. I think that that’s really important for us to understand. Yes, you can go jogging with your dog after the appropriate age, but that they don’t actually require that unless they’re competing in a specific type of event. 

Dr. Chris Zink [25:00] Exactly. If you do decide to do that, try to do it in a place where your dog won’t be running on pavement. There are neighborhoods that don’t have sidewalks. That’s ideal, because you could run on the pavement and have the dog beside you on the grass. There are, of course, tracks which have a grassy infield. You can run on the track, and the dog can be running on the infield. Try to think of ways to arrange it so that the dog doesn’t have to experience the same concussion as you. You can put your body through whatever you want. I don’t care. I do care what happens to the dog. 

Laura Reeves [25:31] You’re making choices for yourself, but the dog is not getting to make the same choice. Choose wisely for our pets—it’s something we can all get on board with. 

Dr. Chris Zink [25:41] We need to be our dog’s best advocate in every way. We need to think about the effect on them of what we’re asking them to do. I have to tell you: the mental/the emotional effect of exercise is fantastic for dogs. It’s not something we want to avoid. We just want to do it intelligently. 

Laura Reeves [26:01] Perfect. Chris, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and your expertise. I know that our listeners do as well. 

Dr. Chris Zink [26:10] Always love talking with you, Laura.