Why fitness matters

Staying in shape in today’s society seems to have taken hold of most men who are not working a physically demanding job day to day. Another reason or excuse to make is the highly accessibility to calorie dense and flavor addicting foods that run the gamut in most of our local grocery stores throughout America.

One simple solution we all hear is, eat less and do more physical activities that burn calories.

A lot of people just stop there not knowing how to eat less, or what kind of physical activity that best suits them. Or something I myself do is, start with way too much and either burn myself out or push to hard to fast and that results in a minor injury prolonging my progress.

Why all of this matters is not to be trendy and “look good”, its about being more comfortable on a backcountry hunt, or any kind of hunt, and prolonging how long we can keep up this pursuit. With common injuries in knees, torn achilles, sprained ankles, torn quads and hamstrings, and at the very least blistered and bruised feet, to name a few. Maintaining some level of fitness throughout the year will benefit you in more ways than just hunting.

One of the easiest and fastest ways to get your fitness journey on its way is doing a series of daily dynamic stretches such as, walking lunges, leg swings, and hip circles. What is the first thing your dog does after he has been taking a hard nap? Stretch! Stretching alone does not hold any proven data for preventing long term injury but what does is strength and balance training. Starting with simple movements that start help your body get these mechanisms firing can then start to lead to advanced conditioning. Strength training improves tendon resilience and muscle capacity, reducing sports injuries by 33% and overuse injuries by up to 50%, also training for Balance & Proprioception result in better balance and control which can reduce the risk of injury by 35% on Mayo Clinic trial stated.

Diet

Probably the most important factor in all of this is what you are putting into your body. This again feels like you are beating a dead horse, it is talked about over and over again and everyone wants to have a certain diet to push. When you break it down to the basics and what really affects weight gain/loss, muscle mass, and energy, it comes down to intake. Meaning the amount and the quality of food you have access to. First you need to understand where you are at now, I suggest to get some kind of app that helps track food intake through counting calories and macros. A lot of these you can just take a picture of the foods and it will do the rest. If you did this for 2 weeks, your base level knowledge of what is going into your body just went up 10 fold!

From here after having some kind of baseline for what your intake is, now you can determine your goal on whether you want to lose or gain weight, maintain or put on muscle mass. This will tell you if you need more or less and what kinds of foods help meet those needs. For instance I try to stay under 1460mg of sodium a day, if you read a lot of labels on food it is easy to blow that out of the water from one processed snack or drink.

Exercise

Now to go along with the new diet and more in depth baseline is exercise! Now that you can start to have a better understanding of your body and what it takes to fuel it, you can do the same thing for proper exercises. A good place to start if you do not want to commit to a gym, is at home with some basic body weight excersises. A program I back with no affiliation is the, “Hard To Kill Fitness Company”, basic at home workouts that build week to week and could provide a strong base for what is most needed, weight training. Referring the stats I provided above in the article about “balance and proprioception” to prolong health joint, tendon, and overall muscle strength some sort of weight training is required. An easy and affordable way to do this at home is with a kettlebell or a set of dumbbells.

A lot of kettlebell exercises and circuits work the full body or require full range of motion with emphasis on correct posture and provide some sort of cardio. With dumbbells too, you can cover a lot of the same exercises but also hit traditional movements like incline benchpress, or a sitting shoulder press.

Either way you are adding some kind of weighted resistance to your everyday life which one Harvard studied showed, “Weight training significantly boosts longevity, reducing your all-cause mortality risk by roughly 10% to 22%. The sweet spot for this benefit is remarkably short—just 30 to 60 minutes per week—and pairing weights with aerobic exercise provides a massive 40% to 47% reduction in death risk”

Final Thoughts

All of this is simply food for thought but what matters are the cold facts of what truly benefits you in the mountains and your daily life. Who doesn’t want to be healthier and feel better. It doesn’t have to be your personality either, this is about learning how to understand where you are at now and what you could do to possibly benefit from more stable diet and moderate exercise. Anybody can do anything for 30-60 minutes, the important thing is to start somewhere. I hope this helps get you pointed in the right direction.