Labrador puppy training, for a mouthy ball of energy

Mouthy is normal — teach bite inhibition, don’t punish it

If your Labrador puppy is constantly biting hands, sleeves, and ankles, you don’t have a problem puppy — you have a Lab. This is a breed built to carry things in its mouth, and puppies explore the whole world that way. The goal isn’t to stop your puppy from ever mouthing overnight; it’s to teach bite inhibition (a soft mouth) and steadily redirect that mouth onto appropriate things.

Punishing mouthing tends to backfire: it can make a puppy more excited or more nervous, and it teaches nothing about what they should do instead. The reliable approach is to mark the moment teeth touch skin, calmly disengage, and redirect to a toy — over and over, in short reps, until the lesson sticks.

• Always have an acceptable chew or tug handy to redirect the mouth onto.
• Disengage calmly when teeth hit skin instead of yelping in a way that ramps a Lab up.
• For the ankle-grabbing and nipping specifically, follow the focused plan at /how-to-stop-puppy-biting-ankles.

Channel the energy (and the chewing that comes with it)

A Labrador puppy with nothing to do will find something to do, and you won’t like it. The classic Lab combo — boundless energy plus a need to chew — is why so many owners come home to a shredded shoe or a chunk missing from the couch. The fix is to give that drive an outlet: age-appropriate exercise, sniffing and foraging games, training that makes them think, and a rotation of chews that are actually theirs.

Mental work tires a smart puppy more than a long walk does. Five minutes of training games, a puzzle feeder, or a sniffing exercise can settle a Lab far better than letting them run until overtired (an overtired Lab puppy usually gets more bitey, not less).

• Mix physical and mental outlets — a thinking puppy is a calmer puppy.
• Give your Lab their own chews and reward chewing the right thing.
• When chewing turns destructive, redirect it with the plan at /stop-dog-chewing-everything.

Jumping and recall: get ahead of them

Labs greet the world with their whole body, so jumping up shows up early and gets harder to fix the bigger they get. Teach four-on-the-floor from the start: greetings only happen when paws stay down, and the fun stops the moment they jump. Done consistently, your puppy learns that calm gets attention and bouncing gets nothing.

Recall is the skill that keeps a friendly, distractible Lab safe for life — and puppyhood is the easiest time to build it, before the world gets more interesting than you are. Keep it short, fun, and heavily food-rewarded so coming back to you is always the best deal going.

• Reward four-on-the-floor and withdraw attention for jumping — for guest arrivals, use /jumping-on-guests-management-plan.
• Start recall now, in short rewarding games, and build distance gradually with /recall-training-2-minute-daily-plan.
• Get the whole household using the same rules so your puppy isn’t rewarded for jumping by one person and corrected by another.

How Bubbas turns this into a daily plan

Rather than leaving you to stitch together puppy advice, Bubbas asks about your Lab and your home — the main problem, severity, your schedule, your experience, and who else is involved — and builds a plan from all of it. For a Labrador puppy that means short, energy-channeling reps, a single shared set of rules for the household, and progress tracking so you can watch the biting and jumping fade.

It’s positive reinforcement only — no shock, prong, choke, or “alpha” advice — which suits a soft, eager-to-please breed perfectly. And it’s honest about limits: anything beyond normal puppy mouthing that looks like genuine aggression or fear gets a referral to a certified in-person professional.