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Bruce Hutcheon
Episode #121 with Dr. Brooks Teller @DrBrooksTiller of Orion's Kin TV
Dr. Brooks Teller : Yeah, becoming a healthy hunter is critical
Bruce: Welcome to another episode of Whitetail Rendezvous. This is your host, Bruce Hutcheon. Whitetail Rendezvous presents Episode 121 with Dr. Brooks Tiller @DrBrooksTiller of Orion’s Kin TV. We’re heading out to talk to a Dr. Brooks Tiller. He’s a husband, a father, international physical therapist, been involved with U.S. Olympic teams, Chinese Olympic teams, movement specialist, performance coach, author, speaker. He’s going to talk more about his upcoming book during the show. When he isn’t busy with all that, he hosts Orion’s Kin TV. Dr. Brooks, welcome to the show.
Dr. Brooks: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Bruce: Hey, let’s just start right off. You are a busy guy. How do you manage all that? And I think you like to hunt whitetails along the way.
Dr. Brooks: Yeah, yeah. Whitetail is my main prey. Yeah, it’s a busy…but for me, I think that an idle mind is the devil’s playground, so I don’t want the devil playing in my mind, so I stay busy. When it comes down to it, I love to do the things that I do. When you’re passionate about something, it doesn’t seem like work and a chore. So I do stay busy just doing the things I love.
Bruce: Let’s talk about, now, helping people achieve good health, good stamina, good flexibility so they can go out in the woods and enjoy their time, whether they’re spotting/stalking, they’re sitting in a tree stand, or they’re hunting from a ground blind. Let’s talk about why it’s important that we all are healthy.
Dr. Brooks: Yeah, becoming a healthy hunter is critical, because…I’m here in Tennessee, and of course in the southeast a lot of guys hunt. But we also have the biggest population of overweight. If you look at the most overweight people, they are most found in southeast. I realize this, you know, coming like from my family. My grandfather passed away, and a lot of it was some lifestyle choices of smoking and the work that he did. He passed away a little early, and it really got me motivated after I finished physical therapy school to get out and help people to be better and be healthier. Whether we’re traveling out west and you’re spotting stalk, and you’re walking ten miles up a mountain, or if you’re sitting in a deer stand, either way, you need to be healthy.
There are different ways to be healthy, but the biggest thing is eating the food that we actually kill. We have the best food available to us. You can go to one of these big, fancy stores and you’re going to find Boston for $10 a pound. But you can go out and get a deer and bring home quite a bit of meat for a lot less than $10 a pound, especially if you butcher it yourself.
Then it’s moving. If we’re sitting in a deer stand, this time of year, everybody’s getting ready to sit in a deer stand, and you’ll sit there…some guys sit there all day. Or you can just sit three or four hours. Your muscles get tight, and you lose a lot of flexibility. Then you many wind up getting injured. It might just be bending over to pick up your kid, or bending over to tie your shoes. It’s not the tying your shoes or picking your kid up that actually did it, it’s the fact that you’re sitting in your stand, sitting in your vehicle, sitting in a desk at work, for that long a time. Your muscles have gotten short, gotten tight, and you don’t have the flexibility that you used to.
I’ve seen this with anything from outdoorsmen to Olympic-level athletes, that they do the same thing over and over and over and over. And then all of the sudden they bend over to tie their shoes…and the guy that squats 1,000 pounds, he ties his shoes, and he blows his back out tying his shoes. When it comes down to being healthy and fit, we’ve got to make that a priority in our life. We take the time to make sure our stand is in a good spot. We make sure that we have the trail cameras out, we’ve got everything ready, we’ve tuned our bow, we shot our guns. We know exactly what’s going to happen, we know where we’re going to hit when we shoot. But then we often forget to take care of ourselves.
The greatest gift we have is our own body. God’s given us this body that we can take care of. If we don’t take care of it, we will pay the consequence. As a hunter, we have this great opportunity to go out and bring home the best choice of meat and be able just to walk in the woods. There’s nothing better than, as far as exercise goes, walking in the woods. So it’s really important we take care of ourselves, and we have a lot of resources available to become that healthy hunter that we all need to be.
Bruce: Let’s talk about how that impacts the next generation, because I, personally, and I know you do, feel we have a responsibility to bring up the next generation of hunters. Like we hear in the news all the time, or read in the newspaper, our kids are being bombarded by the digital world, and their whole world is right in front of them. How do we combat that, one, get the kids healthy, and get them into the outdoors?
Dr. Brooks Teller: For me, I grew up with my dad and my granddad, and they not only told me about hunting and fishing, they taught me hard work, how to be a man and how to do the things that I’m supposed to do. I’ve noticed that even back when John F. Kennedy wrote the article about the soft American that he published in Sports Illustrated, about how America was getting soft, and how a lot of the people that wanted to get in the military couldn’t because they weren’t physically fit enough. When you look back…and Teddy Roosevelt thought about the same thing. He challenged his men to “Can you hike 50 miles or ride a horse 100 miles in a certain amount of time?” Today it just keeps going downhill, it seems.
Dr. Brooks Teller Sadly, today, our kids, it’s projected that their generation will actually live a shorter life than we will.
Sadly, today, our kids, it’s projected that their generation will actually live a shorter life than we will. That’s really a shame, and that’s really on us. We need to not only get them out in the woods, but show them what it means to be fit and be healthy. They’re going to look up to us, and we’re going to learn the same way that we learned how to hunt and fish, from our grandfathers and our fathers. Our kids are going to learn the same thing, but they’re also going to learn the health and fitness aspect.
Just a few facts, in 1980, no adolescent had type two diabetes, which is also known as adult onset diabetes. But now, there are like 60,000 cases or whatever, there’s thousands, thousands of cases of adult onset diabetes in adolescents, which they now call it type two, because you don’t want to tell a 12-year-old he has an adult disease, so now you call it type two. There’s a client of kids…there’s kids that are under five years old, two-thirds of them are overweight. That’s not their fault. That’s what we’re doing to them. It’s feeding them…a fourth of their meals come from fast food, and a third of their meals are eaten in a car, and another third is eaten in front of the TV. I think it comes back to just those family values of sitting down together, having a good meal, showing them how to prepare it, and being mindful about it.
You can share the stories, like, “Hey, this is the deer that I went out and I killed,” and “Remember that deer I brought home, we took a picture of together?” And being mindful of the food that we’re eating, instead of just watching TV and not thinking about it, driving down the road and just shoving some not-so-good food in our mouth and not thinking about where it came from. As far as the next generation, it’s our responsibility to share with them our love and passion of the outdoors, but also pass on a good, healthy mindset as far as our bodies. Spiritually, physically, mentally, we have to pass that on to them. That’s really the only way that they’re going to learn. Otherwise, it’s going to be that steady decline, instead of improving it.
I think that it comes down to us. I mean, right now, it’s critical that we teach them that. If we don’t teach them that, nobody else will. Same thing as hunting. We hear the preservation and the conservation about hunting. If we don’t save our public lands and we don’t promote hunting, then those that are against hunting are going to win, if you will, and they’re going to shut us down. There’s going to be less land to hunt, and less time to hunt. Same thing goes with fitness and health. If we don’t promote the health and fitness, there are the sugar industries and things like that, their bottom dollar is all they’re really looking at. If we don’t promote the good health…same way smoking was many years ago. If we don’t promote the good health and fitness, then our kids are the ones that are going to pay the price.
Bruce: Let’s write that into how that all was framed by your passion, my passion for the tradition of hunting whitetails. Let’s share a few lessons learned about some of the hunts you’ve been on and how the mature whitetail bucks have schooled you.