For years I have been saying in my puppy classes to restrict your pups exercise for the first 12 months of its life. The gneral rule is no more than 5 minutes of exercise per month of your puppies age; so if your puppy is 6 months old he/she should only be receiving up to 30 minutes of exercise per day. You must also be very careful to prevent pup from climbling stairs; jumping into and out of cars or on and off of sofas; not to mention allowing play with size appropriate buddies only.
This kind of disclosure has usually had a room full of shocked and horrified new owners who then admit to be running their tiny pups for 1-2 hours a day to try and tire the little ones out. Once the shock passes I then meet with "but what can I do to tire him/her out?". That is really simple; mental stimulation is very important and learning new things such as those exercises being taught in class will tire them out. Instead of thinking about what you can't do for now, use this time to teach them vital social skills such as reliable recalls around the house and garden, loose lead walking and being handled and groomed, to mention just a few.
I am also in the process of writing my second book; this one is about puppies and exercises and games you can teach them safely during those first 12 months of life and going through those development stages. This should give you further ideas to keep you and puppy active, safely. I will add a link here once it is published later this year.
This subject came up on face book the other day and someone gave us the following link by Nash of animal-mrt.com. It basically sums up and explains everything for the new puppy owner so I wrote to Nash and asked her if I could share the link here on DogsandBlogs and she said I could. So here it is:
https://www.animal-mrt.com/blog/post/21701/Exercises-for-Young-Dogs/
I think it very much covers everything but if you have any further questions please don't hesitate to leave a comment below or contact me via my contacts page.
Safe puppy days guys -x-
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