when I started with ddb , the breeds hips were almost completely horrible , very near every dogue was dysplastic , best there was were mildly dysplastic dogues , most typey dogues moved like they were about to fall apart , today their is a definite improvement . pete curley had some good moving dogues , some were typey ...... lots of the popular typey dogues that were being bred / marketed and sold , is what the breed is still trying to recover from , the health history of some of them popular dogues i'm sure has a lot to do with why dogues as a breed don't live as long as they used to .......... today ddb have better hip type but don't live as long , go figure ….... ….. vets saw an x-ray like the one above and acted as if it was a death sentence , had all kinds of crazy ideas to fix it , today not so much .
as far as exercise , impact and twisting is what you want to avoid , fetch , imo , is a horrible exercise , a flirt pole is horrible ....... it's not feasible for a lot of folks , but pups left loose in a large yard with same age pups 24/7/365 will have better hips than one exercised an hour or two a day .... a skinny pup will grow up with better hips .... walking up stairs is a great low impact exercise , builds a lot of strength and coordination , walking down is a lot of impact on the front , not on the rear ...uncontrolled running up and down stairs , not so good ...... walking up hills is low impact , coming down a bit more on the front , not the rear , but really a good type of exercise , running down hill , bad idea ........... drag pulling low weights is pretty low impact ..... I've known quite a few folks weightpull their dogs at the highest level , they start pulling their pups at 8 weeks , most all of them are American bulldogs , Johnson type , a breed that doesn't exactly have stellar hips , their dogs have way better hips than the breed average .......... I take my pups in the woods on a horse trail by my house and just follow them on light 20 foot leads , serves a bunch of purposes ...... I start taking them 2 weeks after they get their vaccinations which I give at 12 weeks ....... at 14-15 weeks my pups will walk 2-3 miles without a problem , then they are loose in the yard with other pups the rest of the day ........ if they trot I follow them , if they break into a gallop or a lope I tell them no and return them to a trot or walk , if I return them to a walk I tell them walk , they know what walk means .....
a good moving dog at a slow trot is really no more impact than walking .......... pups need kept strong during their entire growth period , waiting for them to 12-18 months (fully orthopedically developed) and then start exercising the when they are 100+ lbs , imo , is a mistake ...........