Exercise during the summer months is critically important in getting your dog ready for fall. If you expect your dog to hunt hard all day, sometimes for multiple days in a row, starting a crash course in conditioning two weeks before the season opener is not going to get the job done.

It’s worth your time to plan how you’re going to keep your dog in shape and build its endurance with exercises both on land and in the water, starting right now. Running and swimming are both forms of endurance training, of course, but let’s take a look at ways to maximize the benefits of these activities during off-season workouts.

Building Endurance on Land

By the time you get to mid-summer, the biggest obstacle to safely exercising your dog is usually the heat. Thankfully, summer’s early sunrises provide the opportunity to get your dog out before the temps become unbearable. So, no excuses—get up and get moving!

Regardless of the type of conditioning program you’re going to set up, always make sure your dog is properly warmed up. I’ve talked with veterinarian Dr. Jennell Appel about many aspects of conditioning, and the thing she consistently stresses is proper warmup.

“Whether it’s training, competition or hunting, proper warm-up is important,” says Appel, a Certified Canine Rehabilitation Therapist based in northern Florida. “Even when it’s warm, I recommend getting your dog moving at a controlled pace such as a fast walk, which increases the heart rate and starts warming the muscles.”

If you have the luxury of running your dog with an ATV roading bar, that’s great. For most retriever owners with one dog, that’s probably not practical. Going for a bike ride with your dog at heel could be an alternative, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about it.

“For productive conditioning as part of a maintenance program, you need to work up to at least 25 to 30 minutes at a slow to moderate pace, which would be five to six miles per hour,” says Appel. “Avoid pavement for anything other than an easy walk. When you let a dog run at a fast trot, a faster lope or a full-out run on pavement, it’s going to develop health issues later in life; it’s just too much stress on a dog’s joints. For true conditioning, you want to run your dog out in the field.”

I’m fortunate in that I live in the country and can run one or two dogs alongside my bike with no concerns about traffic. If you live in the city, you might want to shelve the biking idea. There are too many variables out of your control, so why risk it.

Maybe part of your conditioning program includes running long or multiple marks as part of a training session. That’s great, but to echo Appel’s point, don’t drop the tailgate and send your dog on a hard-charging retrieve without a little warm-up time. It would be a shame to lose a hunting season due to a crucial ligament tear that could have been easily avoided.

Working Out in Water

Water exercise during the hottest months is ideal for efficiently building cardio, eliminates stress on your retriever’s joints (a huge plus for older dogs), and provides relief from the heat. Your dog will naturally get a conditioning benefit just from going after water marks and blinds as part of your training routine. But here again, think about ways to increase endurance.

One simple thing I like to do (and this is nice because it doesn’t require a helper), is to go to a large piece of water and blast some long marks using a shoulder-mounted dummy launcher. With the right blank loads and a little help from the wind, dropping that dummy at 100 yards or farther is easily doable. This means the dog is going to swim for minutes at a time, and it’s one of the simplest workouts you can set up.

When I have a helper available, I’ll sometimes have that person row a boat across to a distant shore so we can set up super-long marks that require a long swim, the main purpose being to build endurance.  

When Dr. Appel builds an endurance conditioning plan, she sets a four- to six-week goal of working a dog up to a constant, 15-minute swim. This can be accomplished by sending a dog on a blind retrieve across a large body of water, working up to multiple blinds as the dog’s endurance increases. She also suggests getting into a Jon boat or kayak and encouraging your dog to swim behind you as you paddle.

Water & Temperature Concerns

For all the advantages of water training and conditioning, it does come with a huge caution: Just because your dog is in the water doesn’t mean it’s that much cooler than it is on land.

“When you start doing this type of exercise for more than five minutes total time in the water you have to pay attention to water temps because water gets warm just like the air temperature,” says Dr. Appel, who, living in the South, is probably more cognizant of this factor than those of us who live and train in the Midwest.

“I find that we can have a false sense of security about water. We all assume that a dog’s body is going to cool down in the water. Swimming is a whole-body exercise and it’s actually more stressful than running, because the dog is using every muscle to propel itself through the water, but also to keep its body buoyant,” she explains.

“So, there’s a tremendous amount of muscle activity, stress and endurance required to keep the dog swimming. All of that really heats up a dog’s internal body temperature.”

I’ve often heard retriever owners refer to the cooling effect that occurs when a dog finishes swimming and the water is evaporating off the dog’s coat. While this effect is certainly real, you do need to pay attention to the water temp as it relates to the air temp and don’t assume that because your dog is wet it’s automatically cooling down. While this is usually less of a concern in northern states as opposed to the South, shallow training ponds anywhere can get incredibly warm. So be sure to get your dog into some shade after a workout to start the cooling process, and make sure you have good air circulation when it’s in the travel crate for the ride home.

To make the most of summertime, keep the key conditioning principles in mind: always provide your dog with a proper warm up, get started during the day’s cooler hours, use water to your advantage, and strive for building your dog’s endurance. It will all be worth it when you head into the season with a retriever that’s in peak condition.