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Bruce: Okay, 5-4-3-2-1. This is Bruce Hutcheon, your host of Whitetail Rendezvous. Today listeners, guys and gals, we have two gentlemen from Fit To Hunt. If you’ve hunted for a number of years, you know the importance of physical conditioning and mental attitude. We’re going to dive into being fit to hunt with Jeremy and Nick. Guys, say hello to our listeners.
Jeremy: Hey guys, how’s it going? Thanks for having us on, Bruce.
Bruce: You’re welcome. Jeremy, why don’t you just give us 30 seconds of your background and then, Nick, you can introduce yourself. And then we’ll roll right into what we’re going to talk about. And that’s to be fit to hunt.
Jeremy: Absolutely. So I’ve been working in the fitness industry going on about 20 years. And like my passion for being physically fit, at a very early age my grandfather had me fishing in the woods, brought me up hunting squirrels, all the way to now it’s the big driving force, which is the big game: the whitetail, the turkey, things of that nature. And I’ve been kicking around this idea for a couple of years now of merging the two, because I trained a client several years ago for an archery elk hunt in Colorado. And he came back and just raved with how well he was able to traverse the mountain. And took a fantastic bull, just was so excited.
I thought, “You know what? There’s something to this.” And then if you look into the industry now, between the different outdoor shows, Under Armour has a line of outdoor apparel that is geared more so toward the fitness side of things. I believe this is a growing trend and that the thing of what we want to do is to help the outdoorsman, the outdoors woman, the outdoors man, improve in the field, have better performance on their hunts, their fishing trips, their hiking, their adventure, it doesn’t matter. If they’re outdoors, we want to help them get fit.
Bruce: Nick, what do you think? Or who are you and what do you represent?
Nick: Well, I grew up here in St. Louis. Hunting whitetails was probably the biggest thing. My dad and I used to go out a lot. I’m not quite as versed in the fitness industry just yet as Jeremy is. I’ve been in this industry now for about five years. I graduated with my Bachelor’s Degree in Exercise Science from Missouri State.
And over the last five years, just trying to acquire so much…as much knowledge as I possibly could in the fitness industry. And once Jeremy came to me with the idea for Fit To Hunt, I realized this was a chance for me to combine two things that I love together. And within the last year, Fit To Hunt included, I’ve helped open two different fitness businesses, one being a gym where we do train our Fit To Hunt clients out of, as well as being a pretty integral part of Fit To Hunt with Jeremy.
Bruce: Thank you, guys, for that. When we go out in the mountains…I live in Colorado and I know what it takes aerobically. I know what it takes physically and mentally to hunt elk or sheep or goats or whatever. And the interesting thing, to me, is the better shape I’m in, both mentally and physically, the better I hunt and the more success I have. So let’s unpack that for our listeners. Let’s talk about, Jeremy and Nick, about what the edge is that you get by being physically and mentally ready for your hunt.
Nick: Well, one story that comes to mind is actually a buck that I shot this last year. Everybody thinks that Midwest hunting is just really long shots and shoot it, it’s done, the whole deal. Well, this last year I had my first experience with a shot that would have had a questionable hit. And the deer took off in a direction that I knew there was about a seven foot ditch straight down and if he gets there I’d probably lose him. So it was the first time that I actually had to take off on a dead sprint after a deer.
Now, I’m not saying I ever got up to him, but I tried to get as close as I could to make sure that it was a clean, ethical kill. And it was then that I realized, man, what we have going, you never know what a hunt is going to bring. You never know what the deer is going to do. You can’t really predict it to a certain point. And when that happened, I realized that there are a lot of people that have these encounters that may not have gone after that deer because they may not have the physical ability to do so.
And along with that goes with controlling the heart rate for that shot. Maybe I didn’t control my heart rate or my breathing properly before I took the shot, and it required me to be physically able to go after an animal that I was trying to make sure was ethically taken from where I was hunting.
Jeremy: I’ll echo a slightly different angle. Missouri turkey season was the last three weeks here. And I was able to harvest a pretty nice gobbler in the first week, but what ended up happening was we were moving to a new position. We hit a call, the bird ran out within about 40 yards, and we had to drop to the ground. So I was with my grandfather. He ends up doing the calling, but I had to hold a modified plank position for about 30 minutes before that bird decided he was going to walk on the other side of a deadfall, which took a tremendous amount of core conditioning.
So my question, immediately, when I got done with that hunt was, if I hadn’t been in the condition that I was in, I don’t get that animal. So I think there’s a direct edge to the performance factor. How hard you can go, how long you can go, before you’re either going to have to stop or you can continue, I should say, the pursuit of that animal.
Bruce: Let’s just start off with the level one, level two, level three. A lot of people work hard at their job and they just don’t do the basics. So let’s talk about the basics, in your opinions, the basic conditioning that a person should be in to have an enjoyable hunt. Second level is they want to hunt hard all day, spot and stalk, not just sitting in a tree stand, so they want to be engaged on the train most of the day. And the third person would be somebody that no matter what the terrain or the altitude, they can go day after day after day after day.
Jeremy: Okay.
Bruce: Does that frame up pretty good?
Jeremy: Yeah, I’m going to take number one here, because I deal with a lot of people, both in…with just a hunt and then just training regular, every day clients. And I think level one is always going to come down to movement. I’ve trained some individuals who just getting them up and out of a chair for basic conditioning is pretty important. So when you go back to the basics of what might be considered the minimum standards, walking 3 to 5 days a week, 30 minutes at a moderate pace. The ability just to be able to do that is a big deal.
Basic strength training: pushes, pulls, being able to stand up. Flexibility, something that I think a lot of people take for granted, but if you’re just going to sit in a tree stand all day, people don’t think that takes a lot of conditioning, but again, from a flexibility standpoint…or if you’re archery hunting, the ability to stand up to take that shot without rocking around all over the place, creating a ton of movement, and busting that deer out of there. So for me, that’s a level one. It’s just hitting the basic minimum of what a person needs to do to remain categorically fit. Nick, as far as movement or level two…
Nick: Well, level two and level three can be a little lumped together. Level two, if you’re going for an entire day, you’re looking at creating better movement patterns throughout the course of a day. Simple things, like Jeremy said, getting up and down out of a chair, but also doing things that mimic walking, hiking. You’re not going to get the same thing in an office building that you would get if you’re hiking up and down the hills, mountains, wherever it is that you’re hunting. It’s hard to duplicate inside of a building. The closest thing you can get to is stairs if you’re trying to walk up rocky terrain or different things like that.
The other part is actual strength training, getting your body to realize that there is a resistance in whatever you’re doing. If you’re hiking out West or even on the East Coast, you’re going up and downhill a lot. And your muscles are going to…it’s going to take their toll on your muscles and it just becomes a mixture of making sure your heart can get where it needs to be, as well as your actual muscle fibers being where they need to be in order to carry you through those hunts and into those hunts.
Bruce: Let’s talk about what you would consider the average whitetail hunter: guy, gal, young, old. And let’s go back to the base. Just talk about five different exercises they should be able to do. And then how do we measure that they’re ready to go out and not only sit in a tree stand, but drag that buck out or doe out of the field?
Nick: I’ll take one. This is bob back and forth here. So one, for me, is going to be basic aerobic conditioning, and that can mean a lot of different things. But depending again, I have places where you might walk 5 minutes to a stand, and I have places where you might walk 30 minutes to a stand. A hunter needs to understand what the terrain is going to be like.
So for example, if I’m going to take someone who is basically starting from scratch, I like to use resistance or rating levels of intensity. I’m going to get them walking, and that could be 15 minutes, it could be 10 minutes. It really depends on their conditioning. And slowly progress them upwards to 30, 35 minutes, in that realm. Probably somewhere between a rating of about moderate to hard, somewhat hard. Again, it depends.
If you’re in flat country versus hilly country, we’ll do our best to duplicate that on a treadmill or outdoors, or even where you’re coming from, maybe even a stair-stepper. But that is going to be one of the first that I’m going to work with, is making sure that they have the juice to walk from point A to point B. So that’s my number one. Number two, Jeremy probably knows where I’m going to go with this, and that is deadlifting. Now, I’m not talking about power lift deadlifting.
There’s so many variations of a deadlift, when done properly, with proper spotting position. Most people live in a world where they use their quads for just about anything, even just sitting in a chair. You’re constantly flexed at your hip. And what a deadlift can do is actually start to strengthen the back side of your body. If you’re going up and down hills, and your back side doesn’t know how to work, it’s going to get really tiring, really fast. You’re going to start complaining about aching knees a lot faster.
So deadlifting is really just an all-inclusive movement when done properly. Upper back is involved, core is involved, your back side is involved. It’s just an all-around way of being able to tell your body that it needs to be able to work as a whole, as opposed to just piece by piece.
Bruce: Yeah, in another life I surfed. I don’t surf as much, but a lot of different places. And every time I went out, if I stretched, I had a better session. And I learned that really young, at a young age, from some pretty fit guys and pretty flexible guys. And so where does stretching come in to the whole mix of getting ready for you hunt? I know our listeners are going, “What are you talking about stretching? I’m just going to be sitting in a stand all day.”
Jeremy: Right.
Bruce: Go ahead.
Jeremy: I tell you what, one thing, I’m pretty sure Nick does the same with his clientele. The stretching aspect is good. We want clients to stretch, but if you’re getting ready for any activity whatsoever…and I explain to people, if you’re going to go hunting, if you’re going golfing, if you’re going to work in the yard, if you’re going to go to the gym, we do more of what’s called active warm-ups these days, or what one might call movement prep, which is a little different than just stretching a muscle for 20 to 30 seconds and then moving on to the next muscle group. Yeah, [inaudible 00:13:58] is when you turn a computer on, the green light goes on, it makes a little whirring noise, and it boots up. That’s what we’re wanting to do in the same breath.
So is stretching involved with that? Absolutely, but for example, one of my favorites is what we call a toy soldier. Where you’re going to stand tall and you’re going to keep your foot flexed and you’re going to kick that leg out in front of you and walk 20 to 30 yards, getting that hamstring, but also getting it booted up and ready to move. So we’ll work with a series of different movement preps, if you will, to get them ready for activity, and the same thing can be translated straight to a hunt.
Bruce: Nick, anything you’d like to say on that?
Nick: Well, I can definitely get on board with that for sure. Stretching is a very important and integral role in the dynamic warm-ups that he’s talking about because stretching, in a way, is just activating muscles. You pull them from end-to-end and the muscle fibers turn on because there’s parts of that muscle that don’t want it to go too far and so on. Another thing that I like to get into, because it helps the brain connect neurologically to muscles, is called soft tissue release. I don’t know if you’ve ever used a foam roller.
There are probably some listeners that know what it is, at least, and they know they sit on it and they roll out their muscles. It’s kind of like, if you think about it, it’s a rolling pin on cookie dough. It’s a way to taking your muscles and…
Bruce: That’s funny.
Nick: Yeah. It’s a way of taking the muscle and lengthening it without actually going through a stretching motion, because at times, some stretches may end up causing more harm than benefit. So what I like to use along with the dynamic warm-ups is foam rolling, connect your brain to those muscles just by touching it, along with, like I said, rolling pin on cookie dough kind of effect in stretching.
Bruce: We’re talking about fitness. Let’s spin it and talk about whitetail hunting. And do you guys bow, muzzleloader gun hunt? Do you stalk, use ground blinds, tree stands? Let’s just unpack that…
Nick: Go that route?
Bruce: …a little bit.
Nick: Yep. So I’ve been hunting with a rifle, probably since I was 12 or 13. And honestly, it wasn’t until about the last five years that I caught this sickness called archery hunting, which is really…my wife questions me at times why I go and do what I do, but I’m absolutely just in love with the concept of it. Most of our hunting, when I first got into it, we had large tracts of land. Now most of our tracts are pretty small, so a lot of it is get to the stand as undetected as possible and get out without leaving a lot of scent [inaudible 00:16:50].
But there are some opportunities that we get here in Missouri to still get out and do spot and stalk. But primarily what I end up doing is mostly ground blind or stand. And then again, archery and rifle.
Jeremy: Well, my answer to your question is yes, all of the above. When it comes to rifle hunting, get in the stand, sometimes we’ll do drives, and then archery hunting. Yeah, I do sit in the stand, but there are occasionally times when a buddy of mine, I will get out of the stand and walk the property a little bit and see what we’ve got to work with for the day. Typically, that’s on a slower day. I’ve been hunting like that now…I think I’ve been bow hunting since I was 7, so almost 20 years of bow hunting. I’ve been rifle hunting, again, probably since I was about 11 or 12.
There was a period of time where we didn’t have many places we could hunt. But as far as muzzleloader, rifle, archery, I do it all. I try to go from season to season. It also depends on how many tags I have left. If I’ve tagged out or if I know that I’ve taken enough to be able to feed myself and provide for some of the other people in my life, then I call it a season at that point in time. But like I said, the answer to your question is yes, all of the above: stalk, muzzleloader, rifle, bow. You name it, I’m trying to get after them.
Bruce: Let’s talk about the youth of our country and their fixation with social media or computerized devices. How do you guys look at your company to be able to motivate those kids to get outdoors and fish, hunt, just to get into the outdoor activities? Obviously, I’m looking at getting kids into hunting somewhere or another. So let’s spend a couple minutes talking about that.
Jeremy: So I’ve actually, I’ve got two boys ages nine and five. And I’ve been taking both of them with me bow hunting for a couple years now. But the nine-year old we just introduced to turkey hunting the new season, this year. And it’s funny. It’s a slippery slope because the social media and things of that nature, I think can both hurt and help at the same time, depending upon how you deliver that.
For example, on our social media site, one of our big things is we want to promote this to the youth. We’d like to help what I consider to be a growing movement where we see more ladies that are taking up the activity. But making it as fun as possible for my boys is absolutely essential. I hate to admit it, but I will take a phone or some type of handheld device out there because there are times that they will lose interest. So packing snacks, I let the younger one take toys with him. Whatever the case might be, we make it fun.
And I live by a rule that one of my hunting mentors gave me is that if you’re going to get kids involved with it, make it fun. And when it’s time to go, they’ll let you know. So for example, there’s…
Bruce: I like that. I like that. Take that again.
Jeremy: Where I’m like, “Come on, guys. Hang in there. I know that we’ve got a turkey over here or we’ve got a deer. They’re going to come.” “No, Daddy. I’m done.” “Okay, we’re done.”
So I don’t want to…I’ll sit in a stand all day long because I know what’s there. They on the other hand, once the boredom hits, get them out. But I will tell you this much. We were at that point last year where we were getting ready to leave and a little spiked buck walked out. And let’s just say the interest level went from “I want to get out of here” to “I am absolutely amazed by watching this deer” so there’s trade-offs there. But I definitely got to watch the kids and keep them entertained and make sure that they want to go again.
Bruce: What was that saying that you had?
Jeremy: When they say it’s over and done…if they say, “Daddy, I’m bored. I want to quit,” we quit. I don’t want to…as much as I love it, my grandfather, when we were done, I was done, rabbit hunting, whatnot, he took me home. If it was cold, he took me home. I don’t see that as not making them tough. I want them to enjoy the experience. I think they’re going to continue with it. They’ll get tougher. They’ll be able to handle the cold weather or the adverse conditions, but five and nine, my biggest thing right now is, regardless of whether we harvest an animal, regardless of whether we even see one, I want them to have fun.
Last week when I took them turkey hunting, we didn’t get a turkey, but he caught three frogs and he was ecstatic. He heard a turkey. He saw a turkey. He caught three frogs. It was a win day for him.
Bruce: Thanks for sharing that. What about when you have women come into your facility and say, “Hey, I want to get in shape.” How do you bring up the conversation about women in the outdoors?
Jeremy: Well, at this point in time…do we have any female clients at this point?
Nick: I don’t believe we do.
Jeremy: Yeah, I don’t think we do. Honestly, most of the female hunters that we work with…I’ll take a step back. I actually do coach one. So we’re based in St. Louis, Missouri. We actually do online training and coaching, so I’m actually coaching this person from Pleasanton, New York City or New York State. I forget where.
But at any rate, it really does depend on where we’re at. So for example, I can’t really get into the specifics of where this client is coming from or what we’re doing, because that’s more of a between her and I type scenario, but there is a growing interest in it. And what we’re seeing, from a social media perspective, is we have people that are on our social media, on our website, going through our blogs, looking at our videos, from Florida, from as far north as Canada. We actually are contributors to a new, all female hunting and fishing magazine called “Girls, Guns, and Rods” so that’s a bi-monthly publication.
And our main purpose for writing these articles is to help the outdoor athlete, if you will, that’s geared to seeing more women involved in hunting and fishing. And so it actually is a lot of fun. It’s something that we really enjoy working with.
Bruce: Let’s talk about who instilled, in both of you, the tradition of the hunt.
Jeremy: I tell this story all the time. So it’s a little different, but my grandfather took me with him to cut wood, to go walk in the woods, from an early age on. My first memory of really the outdoors, was my grandfather and my uncle were packing up an old Ford pickup truck with a camper shell on it, sleeping bags and all kinds of stuff. And they were [inaudible 00:24:19] out to go trout fishing and I was about five years old. And I remember I was mad because they said I couldn’t go along. I wasn’t old enough.
And from that point on, the outdoors…it bit me. I was ready to go. So whenever he said, “Hey, you want to go walk in the woods?” he made it fun for me. He showed me attention, and that was the biggest thing. He cared about me. And so again, going back to what I do with my kids, that’s what got me involved is he just took the time to be with me. And that’s how I got, I guess, indoctrinated into the outdoors, was someone just cared enough to spend time with me.
Nick: Well my dad and I are pretty close. He grew up in a little town in central Missouri and he used to tell me that back in his day, when he was my age, he’d be able to walk out of the house and walk across the street and start squirrel hunting or rabbit hunting. So that’s kind of where I got my start was going out squirrel hunting with my dad and just being able to spend time with him. And I think what Jeremy said is so important when it comes to getting somebody involved in the outdoors, and that’s being able to show somebody your attention, being able to give somebody your time, to be able to teach them something. You go out into God’s creation and be like, “Hey, we’re out here. We may not get anything, but at least it’s a great day to be here,” and making it fun.
If we don’t get anything, somehow, some way, we made it fun. And that’s what I grew up with. And even still to this day, my dad’s almost 70 years old and might have a little trouble every now and then getting out with me, but he showed me that attention, so now that I’m older, I show him the same attention and try to give him the same opportunities that he had when he was younger to get him out and make sure that he’s still a part of the outdoors, the same way he made me a part of the outdoors.
Bruce: Can Jeremy and Nick, can you each share a lesson learned from last year that you’re going to make sure darn sure you implement into your hunts this fall?
Jeremy: Absolutely. I was lucky enough to harvest three deer last year. And I ended getting two in the same day. So first and foremost for me, I like filling the freezer. That’s what I’m after, but everybody likes to shoot big deer. And I knew on the farm, I knew the deer that were on there.
And I screwed up a chance to knock down a giant. So later that morning, I have a pretty decent 7-point come walking through. And so I thought about it. I’d been hunting hard for about six, seven days in a row, so I took him. It wasn’t giant, but it was a respectable buck. That afternoon, I went with my grandfather to another farm.
I had a doe tag to fill. And out jumps the giant 8-point that we had seen two or three times beforehand and I had burned through my buck tags. So right there, the concept was patience. To trust yourself, to trust to know that that big guy is still out there looking, and you may get another opportunity. Now hey, I’m not upset. Like I said, I filled the freezer.
We’re happy as clams in that aspect. But going in the next year, I always tell myself patience. And I think as I get older, I get a little more patient. But that was a big lesson to me, because he would have looked really nice on my wall.
Bruce: We’ve all been there.
Jeremy: Yeah.
Nick: Yeah, Jeremy might be actually surprised. I’m really big into weightlifting. Not so much into long distance running like Jeremy, so it might surprise him when I say that conditioning is a huge aspect as far as my hunt for this last year. I talked about it a little earlier. I shot the biggest buck of my life this year and ended up having to sprint after it. Now, I don’t condone that with a loaded firearm.
However, it seemed to have been necessary at the time. There’s a long story short, made what I thought to be a decent shot. When I saw the bullet hit, I realized it might have been a little questionable and I had to take off running about 300 yards to make sure that he didn’t get into a ditch that was only 20 yards past him. Well, he never made it to the ditch and all was well. But that’s probably the one thing that I can tell most whitetail hunters is you may be sitting in a big box or you may be sitting in the tree stand, and you shoot a deer and it runs off, and you think, “Oh, well I made a decent shot. It’s probably dead not far back in the trees.” But then all of a sudden, you get up and you jump the deer up, it runs a while, and all of a sudden you’re traipsing all over the place trying to make sure that you can actually stay on the trail of this thing.
So that was one of the biggest things that I learned is that it’s not always sit, bang, there’s the deer. It’s sometimes sit, bang, holy crud, I gotta go, and then you end up finding your deer and [inaudible 00:29:38].
Bruce: Guys, I’m looking at my counter and we’re at 35 minutes. Wow, the time has flown. What I’d like to do at this point in time, listeners, I’m going to have Jeremy and Nick back on the show as soon as we can get that scheduled. But right now, I’m just going to break this off because we could talk over an hour. You guys have great information and we all need to really think about being fit to hunt.
So you’ve got about a minute or two here to share whatever you want about Fit To Hunt, share about sponsors, share how people can get ahold of you on social media. So the mic’s yours for about one or two minutes.
Jeremy: Got you. So the easiest way, because we’re on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, the easiest way [inaudible 00:30:36] would just be to go through our website, which is www.fit2huntperformance.com, fit2huntperformance.com. And what you’re going to find on there is that we continue, on a weekly basis, to put on new content, whether that be through blogs, videos. We are pretty close to launching an online training series, so depending upon where you are and what you hunt, we can work with you wherever you are. So whether you’re in St. Louis, whether you’re in the Pacific Northwest, it does not matter.
We can help you out. We’ve also got some really awesome product sponsors that work with us. Wilderness Athlete, we can train you all day long, but if you’re not fueling correctly, putting the right foods into your body, it’s going to be a struggle. So they have helped us out tremendously through everything from basic supplementation up to protein shakes, weight loss, etc. And in the line of supplementation, we also work with a very awesome company up in New York called Yo Buck!, which is a phenomenal brand of minerals that has not really hit the mainstream yet. Extremely cost effective.
You want to go to our social media and look at some of the pictures that we pulled off just in the first year alone of using this product, the deer come running. So depending upon your state, if you can use mineral, I would highly recommend checking it out. And just take a peek through the website, because again, we put up a tremendous amount of free content and we do that on purpose. Our main job is to make sure that we’re spreading the message that fitness will improve your outdoor experiences. And we’re just honored and blessed to be able to help people to do that.
Bruce: We’ve got about 30 seconds, guys.
Jeremy: Nick, is there anything you want to kick in there?
Nick: I think one of the biggest things that I can say fitness-wise is making sure that you’re treating yourself right. And your mind, making sure that you’re talking to yourself in a positive manner. And that’s where real fitness starts is being able to say good things about yourself and then transferring that into your fitness, and even the rest of your life.
Bruce: Guys, Jeremy and Nick, from Fit To Hunt, thank you for starting us on a journey here at Whitetail Rendezvous where we’re going to be asking a number of people what it takes to by physically and mentally ready to hunt. Gentlemen, thank you for being on the show.
Jeremy: Absolutely, thank you.
Nick: Thank you. It was our pleasure.