Heavy pack acclimation, long sessions under load, a resurgence in strength, and specific hunting movement prep are all in order to have you conditioned for hunting season. That makes July a training transition month. We progress past early preseason conditioning and begin the march to late preseason. Some important hunting fitness qualities must be restored while others get built.

Our fitness gains are only as good as our recovery. That’s right, kids. It’s not training that makes us better. Training only works if we recover from it. Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of activity our body recognizes as stress, and too much at that. We end up depleted, then our body gives us the finger and says, “That’ll be enough of that.” Gains turn to losses, and we get slower and weaker. Frustrated, we wonder what the hell happened. The back half of the summer becomes a slow march toward a hunting season that knocks the wind out of our lungs.

Pack training for hunters is nuanced. There’s no “just do this many days” answer. How many days per week you should train with your pack depends on a handful of factors. Let’s break them down and get you answer to your question.

To have confidence in your final prep, you have to start by asking yourself the right question. What matters right now? The answer to that question sets your training priorities. Then you can toss the training that seems productive but isn’t preparing you for climbs, descents, and days counted in miles instead of time.  Let’s give you the training focus necessary to use June’s four weeks well so you’re confident you’ll pound every ridge between you and your quarry.

Self-talk either makes or breaks our performance while also shaping our internal landscape and our identity. However, most hunters struggle with self-talk, especially during hard workouts and tough days in the mountains. They tend to talk to themselves like an enemy instead of a friend. The rise of positive psychology has also caused self-talk problems. It often motivates people to tell themselves flowery lies. Neither negative nor unrealistically positive self-talk works. Honest, instructional self-talk does. 

The chest strap heart rate monitor is a great tool. I think every hunter who’s serious about improving their endurance should own one and use it during most conditioning sessions. But sometimes we head out the door and forget to toss it in the truck. And other times, it’s just not practical, like when we’re hunting but still want to keep tabs on how hard we’re working so we don’t gas ourselves out. Each of those scenarios requires us to learn how to dial in on how hard we’re training using feedback from our bodies instead of following the heart rate read out from our chest straps.