7 Awesome Reasons To Play Fetch With Your Dog

A well designed fetch training program does so much more than simply teach your dog to retrieve. Here are just a few of the benefits.

Photo of a yellow tennis ball in the foreground with a Black Labrador in the background and text overlay that reads: 7 awesome benefits of playing fetch

#1 You’ll Be More Important To Your Dog

When a human is the center of their dog’s world, the possibilities for further training and teamwork are endless. The best students are always the ones that pay the most attention to the teacher!

Winning your dog’s attention is a core aim of all basic training and fetch training is one of the very best ways to achieve this.

Through playing fetch with your dog you quite literally become more important to them

#2 Your Dog Will Have Better Impulse Control

Fetching things can be very exciting. And for some dogs its very exciting indeed. We’ve all seen the dog that cannot bear for the game to stop and drops the ball endlessly at people’s feet or barks hysterically when you pick up a toy to throw it.

Structured fetch training changes all that.

The very first thing that the dog learns is to break away from a toy. And later to sit patiently while the toy is thrown. You’ll also learn games where your dog can hunt and retrieve a toy without the excitement of seeing it thrown at all.

And how to balance the different types of game to match your dog’s personality.

#3 The Bond Between You Will Deepen

The change in my relationship with Polly through Fetch training has been quite an eye opener for me. And it’s confirmed everything I always knew about the power of retrieve training to improve the bond between a human and a dog.

Polly belongs to my husband and spends a lot of time with him. And while she and I have always lived together and been good friends, she is now far more devoted to me, and focused on me, than she ever was before.

What a lovely bonus of a training program that was such fun!

#4 Your dog will give things back!

Teaching a dog to let go of the things they are carrying is an important part of fetch training.

In the past, when Polly picked up our shoes or children’s toys, her natural impulse was to run off with them. Especially cuddly toys.

Now, when she picks anything up in the house, her natural instinct is to find a human and offer it to them. Even though I have only ever played fetch with a couple of specific toys, she brings me shoes, and other items that untidy humans leave around.

This propensity to return to people with objects they carry, is normal in a dog that has been taught a structured, trained retrieve, and is great side effect of fetch training.

Just make sure you always have plenty of rewards to hand to maintain this lovely behavior.

#5 Your Dog Will Be Fitter

Regular games of Fetch can be a good cardiovascular workout for your dog and help to keep them fit, and slim.

Obviously you need to take precautions to prevent over-doing it too soon, and to reduce the risks accompanied by any form of vigorous exercise.

Fortunately there are some great ways to adapt the game of fetch to suit all energy and fitness levels. And these are explained in my book.

Playing fetch can be an addition to your dogs daily walks or sometimes you can swap a walk for some fetch games. Several of the games in the book are well suited for use during or as part of, your walks.

#6 You Dog Will Be More Focused

Fetch teaches dogs to concentrate. Not just on you, but on a problem in hand.

It becomes easier to find the toy as the dog learns to watch and mark where it falls. As part of the fetch training course your dog will learn to pay attention to the different signals you are teaching.

She’ll figure out how to differentiate between when she is required to sit still and when she is required to watch, and when she is required to run. These attention skills are a great outcome of fetch training and will spill over into everything else you do.

#7 You Will Have Off Leash Control

Off leash dogs often get into mischief. They become very distracted and without the right training, many off leash dogs stop listening once they are out of reach of their human companion.

Part of the problem is that the devil makes work for idle paws! An off leash dog without a purpose is a dog primed for mischief.

Of course, solid recall training is the ultimate aim but in the meantime, it is possible to give your dog bursts of exercise and some off leash freedom in a controlled way, through games of fetch.

You’ll need to teach a structured retrieve first, and you can do that using my book. And then start to practice at a distance from distractions. You can decrease that distance as your dog’s ability to ignore those distractions improves.

How To Begin

Please note that there are affiliate links in this article. The Labrador Site is an amazon affiliate and if you make a purchase after clicking on one of those links we receive a small commission which does not affect the price you pay.

You can start fetch training right now using my new book: Fetch, published in June 2025. It’s available on Kindle in the USA, and on both Kindle and in Paperback in the UK. Paperback will be available in the USA from October 2025.

photo of a jack russell terrier jumping a straw bale with a red bone in its mouth next to an image of Pippa Mattinson

You can find out more about the book here: Introducing Fetch. We’ll be posting some videos shortly, over on the Dogsnet training site. And you can get help with your training in the Dogsnet Facebook support group.