“I just don’t want to feel like I’m starting strength training all over again in January.”

A Packmule Elite member said that to me at the start of this hunting season. He spends his autumns traveling the country to hunt upland birds, starting with sharpies in the Dakotas and finishing with chukars in Nevada. This year (2025) was his second year training with me. Last year, we parted ways completely in September and didn’t get back to training until after the New Year. He’s realized that’s not the best course of action, and that hunter in-season workouts matter a whole lot — especially strength training.

Hunters like him (read: you) spend all offseason and pre-season preparing to get after it during hunting season. And you do. The problem is that you lose fitness during the season if you don’t keep training — yes, even if you’re hunting hard. Losing fitness means decreased performance, increased injury risk, and a very big missed opportunity to continue improving your fitness year after year.

You can maintain your strength, durability, and conditioning by following the in-season principles and workouts I’m about to teach you.

Why In-season Training Matters for Hunters

Smart hunting fitness follows a seasonal progression from offseason to pre-season to in-season. Hunter in-season workouts have different goals than offseason or pre-season workouts. Knowing the difference helps you understand the why behind in-season training. And when you know why you’re doing something, it’s far more likely that you’ll do it. Let’s break that shiz down.

The offseason (January to May) lays the foundation by building and improving your raw fitness materials. This is when we expand our aerobic capacity, our aerobic power, and our strength endurance. It’s also the time to improve our max and relative strength. Then we transition into the pre-season.

During pre-season training (June to August), we use the raw materials built during the offseason to peak our fitness for hunting season. Specificity matters a lot — meaning we do a lot of strength and conditioning workouts uniquely tailored to hunting. Raw strength and strength endurance is channeled into uphill drive and downhill control. Aerobic capacity and power are turned into hiking and packing endurance so that you can move through the mountains all day, recover, then do it again. 

In-season training maintains all the fitness you’ve built during the offseason and the pre-season while keeping you durable and resilient. It also boosts your performance in the field and allows you to recover from big hunts. It does that by giving you doses of all the types of training you’ve done throughout the year, while also using recovery workout weeks to help you bounce back after big hunts. In-season strength training focuses on maintaining (or building) your max strength. In-season conditioning focuses on giving you doses of training across the spectrum of intensity. This keeps your aerobic system tuned up so you can perform and recover. How much of each you do depends on how much you’re hunting and your current fitness level. 

Let’s look at a few principles that help you put all this into practice.

Principles of In-Season Training

Hunter in-season workouts should follow a few, simple principles. 

First, the intensity and volume of your training should mirror the intensity and volume of your hunting. If you’re hunting like a mad man, a ton of training volume likely isn’t a good idea — especially conditioning volume. However, if you’re only doing a couple hunts and they’re spread out, you can handle a higher volume of strength and conditioning work. If you’re in the hard hunting camp, it’s a good practice to focus mostly on strength, mobility, and easy aerobic work for recovery. If you’re in the easy hunting camp, you can follow a well-rounded in-season program while working in recovery training weeks after a big hunt.

Second, keep your in-season strength training uphill based if you’re doing a lot of uphill hunting. A simple way to do that is to focus on squatting patterns instead of deadlifting patterns for your main lifts. Front squats, rear-foot elevated split squats, and goblet box step-ups are great examples. If you’re not doing a lot of uphill hunting, you can take a more balanced approach to your lower-body strength training. That means balancing between squat and deadlift movements instead of skewing toward squats.

Third, do things in training that you’re not doing in the field. This might seem to contradict the last point, but they work together. For example, if you’re a big chukar hunter, you’re already walking up and down a lot of hills with weight on your back. You don’t need to do more of that in your training. So, you’ll shift your conditioning work — which should mostly be recovery-based if you’re hunting a lot — to other things such as easy runs, biking, etc. If you’re packing a lot because you have several big game tags, then you need to do a lot of spinal mobility work. Packing creates spinal stiffness, so you need to do the opposite to create balance and keep your spine healthy. 

With the principles laid down, how about a gander at some sample workouts?

Sample Hunter In-Season Workouts

Here’s the thing about hunter in-season workouts: They don’t need to be complicated; they just need to be used in the right way and in the right contexts. Below are three in-season training examples straight from our 2025 in-season training block. 

Recovery Strength: CCS Workouts

We call these CCS workouts because the structure is based on Carries, movement Capacity, and Strength. The goal is to give your body a lot of mobility work, move a lot to get blood flowing, and give you a light strength stimulus to maintain strength and boost recovery. We use these workouts during the weeks after big hunts.

Below is a sample circuit from one of our CCS workouts. You’ll perform the circuit for eight minutes, moving at a relaxed pace.

CCS Circuit:

Prone Press-up Find Your Shoes x 4 per side

Single-Arm Rack Carry x 50yds per side

Inverted Row x 8

Regular Strength

This is a sample strength workout from Phase 1 of our in-season program. Now, folks in our Pathfinder and Backcountry Ready programs have more exercise options than shown below. The options give them the opportunity to have a customized path through the program. However, what’s shown below is a solid general in-season strength session.

A few quick notes. The letters correspond to create a superset. So, you do all of the A exercises together, all of the B exercises together, and all of the C exercises together. Also, power and strength love rest. There’s no need to turn the supersets into a conditioning session. Take your time. Rest between exercises.

A1) Vertical Jump: 3 x 4

A2) Ab Wheel Rollout: 3 x 10

A3) Standing Hip CARs: 3 x 2 per side

B1) Barbell Front Squat: 4 x 4

B2) Rib Grab T-spine Rotation: 4 x 5 per side

B3) Incline Dumbbell Bench Press: 4 x 4

C1) Low Offset Lateral Lunge: 3 x 8 per side

C2) Supported 90/90 Wipers: 3 x 8 per side

C3) 3-Point Dumbbell Row: 3 x 8 per side

Moderate Intensity Conditioning Maintenance

If you’re not hunting a ton, you’ll need to do conditioning workouts across the intensity spectrum to maintain your fitness. For example, we use abbreviated steady state interval seasons to maintain our Zone 3 work so that we remain efficient at using carbs for fuel. It’s a real big deal for staying ready between hunts and for improving our overall conditioning from year to year.

Here’s the steady state workout from Week 1 of Phase 2 of our In-Season Training Block.

If you've been running consistently, you can run for this workout. If not, you can use the stairclimber or the air bike. If you choose air bike, adjust the heart rate prescriptions down by 5 beats per minute.

1. 15-minute easy run warm-up, keep HR in zones 1 and 2 (the blue on Morpheus). 

2. At the end of the warm-up, build your HR up to the bottom to middle of the Green Zone, or bottom to middle of Zone 3 and hold it there for 15 minutes.

3. Slow down and hold your heart rate in the middle of the Blue Zone or Zone 2 for 4 minutes

4. Build back up to the bottom to middle of the Green Zone, or bottom to middle of Zone 3, and do another 15-minute interval

5. Cool down with easy running and walking for 10 to 15 minutes until your heart rate drops into Zone 1.

Balancing Workouts with Hunting

We chatted in the principles section about making sure the intensity of your training mirrors the intensity of your hunting. Let’s expand on that here with a little more on using hunter in-season workouts to complement your hunting schedule.

First, all days in the field count as training sessions. For example, if you go out on a Saturday and hunt elk in the hills from dusk to dawn, that’s a training session. Count it towards your conditioning work. If you don’t, you run the risk of adding more training volume into your schedule than your recovery will allow. 

Second, if you’re coming off a hard hunt, use the week after to recover. Do strength work like the CCS training listed above in combination with easy aerobic sessions under 60-minutes. If you were well-conditioned heading into hunting season, hit 2-3 recovery strength sessions and 2-3 recovery conditioning sessions. If you weren’t well conditioned heading into hunting season, hit one recovery strength session and 1-2 recovery conditioning sessions. (Then go sign up for one of our programs so that shit doesn’t happen again.)

Third, if you’re hunting consistently but not for long forays into the field, just build the hunts into your training schedule similarly to how we discussed counting hunting as training in point one. For example, Coach Jordan hunts chukars two days per week from October to February. Since he’s consistently out in the mountains for hours at a time, he counts those hunts as his conditioning and only strength trains 2-3 times per week.

Common Mistakes Hunters Make 

I’d bet you can guess the biggest mistake hunters make with their in-season training. You’re right, the biggest mistake is skipping it all together. A bunch of hunters shut training down entirely during hunting season. Then the offseason hits and they regret it. They’ve lost some, or all, of their fitness and they have to start again from square one. Typically, this happens with strength training. But it’s often the case that whitetail hunters from the east drop training all together and get woefully out of shape. Don’t do that.

Other hunters don’t give themselves the time to recover after big hunts and end up overtraining. They let the fear of losing everything goad them into making bad training decisions. It is important to train consistently throughout hunting season. However, training must have an ebb and flow. If you hunt and train hard, you must put as much emphasis on your recovery. A down week will not erase all of your gains.

A third big mistake is rushing. Hunters feel crunched for time, so they skip important mobility and movement work. They get to the gym and jump right into lifting instead of taking a few minutes to focus on joint range of motion. Mobility training is just as important as all other aspects of training — more so for some hunters. Take the time to keep your joints moving well and you’ll be rewarded with more and better days in the field. 

Conclusion: Train In-season, Improve Each Season

Hunter in-season workouts keep you durable and performing well during the current hunting season. But they also set you up to improve your hunting fitness over time. That’s a real big deal if you want the necessary longevity to hunt into old age. Follow the principles. Balance your hunting and your training. And use those sample in-season workouts to keep yourself fit this fall.

Want to know if your in-season fitness is up to snuff? Click HERE to download our Hunter’s Field Test. You’ll also join our newsletter, which lands you 5, solid hunting fitness emails per week. (We don’t spam, we only hook you up with the good stuff.)