@noahsk This will be an unpopular opinion here because most people train wrong and harsh but use comforting words like "calm, obedient, communication etc" to make them feel like theyre not suppressing tf out of the dog
Teach it as an activator and motivator first before using to suppress or punish. Dont do what someone else said and start by saying no and popping the leash in the house, he'll hate the prong and all youll do is suppress him and make him supersitious to go ahead of you, he wont be walking next to you out of clarity, only out of confusion, that method will eventually desensitize the dog to the prong and cause reactivity when the dogs arousal trumps the suppression which it will in the case that your dogs reactive to squirrels etc
You need to use and teach the prong to activate a reward and engagement, when thats done and the dog is clear how to shut off the pressure, not by dull compliance, but by switching into a state of high engagement, then you give a few really harsh corrections, timed well to put him off the stuff you want him to stop, while also cueing the engagement, this will teach him that instead of suppressing but still fixating around triggers, to actually engage with you and ignore the trigger
People throw around words like "calm" when talking about prong collar, thats all bullshit, suppression isnt calm, or a healthy state of mind. Bring your dog UP before you bring him down. Ie once my dogs state of mind is switched from fixating on a thing to engagement on me, now i can tune down how intense i want that engagement to be and make a neutral dog with a healthy and actually calm state of mind
Also be aware context is really important, opposites give context to eachother. You want your dog to really understand "come" he must also understand to "go away" and so on. If you only use the prong to make the dog walk next to you, the dog is confused,
"when can i go ahead? do i just walk slow? Which positions get me corrected? Wheres safe to walk?". Its important to build and proof behaviours based on true understanding, not just correcting the dog into position,
The dog should be able to be punished, petted and retreive with the same stick - bart bellon.
Starting with punishment will make it nigh impossible to condition positive associations to your tool and they become collarwise and hate it. Whereas if you make them love it, then show them in certain contexts you must do a,b & c or this thing they love has the potential to hurt them, they dont stop loving the thing, they just avoid the potential hurt.