April and May are transitional months in the world of hunting fitness. They bridge the gap between early offseason training done January through March, and preseason training done June through August or September. Planning these transitional months well, especially when it comes to strength training, makes a huge difference in your preparation for hunting season. 

Being strong is cool. But strength only gets you so far as a hunter if you can’t repeatedly use it over time…say, while walking up and down mountains. That’s where strength endurance and muscular endurance come in. They should be the base of your late offseason strength training.

This is also the time to use strength training to prepare for the awkward movements you have no choice but to make in the mountains. 

Late offseason strength training is a crucial bridge you must walk well to perform at your peak while staying healthy during hunting season.

Here’s how to do it.

Strength Endurance and Muscular Endurance

You might think, “Hell, Todd, aren’t strength endurance and muscular endurance the same thing?” Well, they work together. But they aren’t the same. 

Strength endurance is more about training your nervous system to send strong contraction signals to your fast-twitch muscles in spite of fatigue.

Muscular endurance takes place more at the local level—meaning, in your muscles. It’s the ability to repeatedly contract your muscles over time without fatigue. 

They work in concert. Strength endurance makes sure you can still use your higher-threshold muscles when you need them. Muscular endurance keeps you marching up and down the mountain without losing your legs. 

Now that we have solid definitions laid down, let’s cover the overall strategy for late offseason strength training.

Late Offseason Hunting Strength Training: The Big Picture

In our system, the late offseason lasts six weeks. We break that into two, three-week training phases. We train strength and muscular endurance twice per week during those 6 weeks, giving us a total of 12 sessions. This is a perfect amount of training for turning the maximal and relative strength built during the early offseason into specific strength and muscular endurance during the preseason.

One session per week is devoted to strength endurance and strength in awkward positions, while the other starts with a blend of strength and muscular endurance before transitioning fully into muscular endurance training. Each session includes different types of power training. The strength endurance session starts with repeated vertical jumping variations to condition repeated power, but also to train the quads for downhills. The muscular endurance session includes low-level plyometrics to build strength and resilience in the feet and lower legs, as well as to train for spring that saves energy with each step.

All of the strength and power work coincides with our conditioning to ensure that we are getting the right amounts, and the right kinds, of training during the late offseason. Our Backcountry Ready members do varying levels of higher intensity conditioning based on the outcomes of their testing. To make it all work, conditioning volume is cut back a bit during the six weeks to account for the increase in training intensity. You can’t pull all of the levers at once and expect it to go well.

With the big picture covered, let’s chat about the specifics of each session and the methods we use.

Strength Endurance Methods Training Methods for Late Offseason Hunting Fitness

Our main strength endurance method is eustress training. It’s a high-volume, relatively heavy lifting method that uses heart rate to monitor training intensity. We do it for total time and for total reps. It’s also a great method for training to deal with stress, that’s why it’s called eustress training. You choose weights you can handle, but they should be heavy enough that they make you a little nervous to do them for the amount of time or number of reps. We break the work up into sets of 1 to 3 reps, while setting an upper heart rate limit of 150 in most cases, and resting between sets until heart rate drops to 160 minus age. For example, one set of 3 front squats, stand at the bar and control your breathing until your heart rate drops to 160 minus age, then immediately do 3 more reps. Continue on this way until the total number of reps are completed or until time is up.

We also do high-intensity continuous training (HICT) pack step-ups. HICT is kind of a bridge between strength endurance and muscular endurance. It trains strength endurance because it requires a lot of strength nervous system signals to fast-twitch muscle fibers. And it trains muscular endurance by improving the aerobic capacity of fast-twitch muscle fibers, especially Type IIa fibers. 

Strength-Based Muscular Endurance Methods Training Methods for Late Offseason Hunting Fitness

HICT is our main, strength-based muscular endurance method during the late offseason. It builds nasty uphill muscular endurance when used in concert with uphill Zone 2 training. During phase 1, we pre-fatigue our legs with eccentric-emphasis split squats before doing HICT step-ups. The slow eccentrics (lowering phase of the lift) conditions the quads for downhills. They also create neuromuscular fatigue. This raises the relative intensity of every lower-body exercise that comes afterward, and it makes it easier to recruit fast-twitch muscle fibers during HICT training. It also trains the legs to withstand fatigue, which builds an important bridge before getting into longer duration Zone 3 uphill work.

Phase 2 includes more fatigue-inducing muscular endurance work. We use interval-based strength training to keep stress on the muscles. Each subsequent set is done with incomplete rest. This trains the muscles to get better at buffering metabolites that cause fatigue. It’s a productive preamble to long duration Zone 3 pack work. 

Conditioning-Based Muscular Endurance Methods for Late Offseason Hunting Fitness

The Zone 2 incline pack work we do during the late offseason also counts as muscular endurance training. We do a good amount of it in both phases. Our Zone 3 uphill progression also starts in phase 2, and we carry it through the preseason. The Zone 2 and Zone 3 incline work is the necessary specific conditioning that keeps our legs pumping on hard climbs, day in and day out, in the mountains.

Use Your Strength for Endurance

Regular ol’ strength training is important for a lot of reasons. But if we want to perform our best in the mountains, we have to train our bodies to produce strength over time, even as we fatigue. That’s why it’s so critical to train for strength endurance and muscular endurance at this point in the training year. Skip it, and you might be okay. Do it, and there’s a much better chance that you’ll be a rocket in them hills every day that you hunt.