I don't really stick that close to the 5 minute rule and my vet says we exercise our pup just fine. I mean, walking leisurely around the neighbourhood is hardly exercise. I can see if you brought your dog to the park to run around... then the rule makes more sense. He's just under 8 months right now and gets about 50-60 minutes of walking a day. It's kind of like the "don't swim for 30 minutes after eating" rule in humans. I've only every followed that rule if I had like a massive dinner. That being said, DO NOT enforce running before 1 year old. It's fine if he runs around on his own to play, but don't have him on a leash and run with him or, worse, bike and have him run beside you. That can do serious damage to his bones. So do not do this at all before 1 year old. My vet has seen several very sad cases where a puppy's bones were ruined because they did this.
The thing is, that the environment has a huge impact on how our dogs' joints form and develop. Whilst roughly 15 - 50% of joint dysplasia is ruled by genetics, meaning the heritable risk of developing joint problems, the rest is up to us. That's a huge responsibility towards our dogs we have around exercise and diet. At 15 weeks, the only priorities I would have are socialisation and training some basic puppy life skills. Socialisation meaning not just other dogs, in fact, more around new smells, new experiences in order for lots of positive associations made around novel things. This means increasing the likelihood of having a more resilient adult dog and therefore reducing the risk of reactivity towards new things. The other priority is developing good behaviours, calmness for example, and the ability to settle in a distracting area. So you see it is less around activity...or tiring a pup with physical exercise. Just sitting on a bench and watching the world go by, whilst rewarding for calm is a great example of being out and about, but not actually physically exercising our dog. So in summary, stick to the 5 mins of exercise...avoid more than a few minutes of walking to heel..because you are dictating the pace not the pup, let them off lead by all means, to potter, sniff and play. Training good behaviours/ life skills is very tiring for our pups, so try those instead of walks. There are lots of great ideas on the kikopup youtube channel. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF26FD559887E7EA4
