House training is usually understood to mean teaching a dog to urinate and defecate (pee and poop) in a place convenient to the owners. This should be a very simple process, dogs are 'house trained' by their mothers while still only a few weeks old.
With today's love affair with reward based training techniques, it can be hard to choose the right reward. Food is the usual choice, but with obesity nearly as much a problem for dogs as it is for humans – estimates are that 25-40% of all dogs are overweight – the risk of overfeeding dogs should not be ignored.