You're not wrong about carrying packs in the mountains. That's the coup de grace of my hunting training, but I do it only in a couple of weeks leading up to hunting season - time sufficient to harden my feet and strengthen my lower legs. That time is also sufficient to get my wind back for the long uphill pull. This is more an issue of convenience than anything - the closest hill to where I live is 20 miles and a long drive away, up here at work the brooks range is quite a ways south.
The big strength puts a few things in your favor. You can generally do more of a given movement, if that movement requires less of your overall strength. This is particularly true when loaded heavy. I think this translates gym time into the long slog, where the hard uphill pull doesn't wear you down because it doesn't require a relatively large part of your overall strength. I don't go into a big hunt cold from a cardio standpoint - see the paragraph above.
You might be a big strong SOB - so I don't know if you will relate to this. I am a fair bit stronger than the average guy, and the gym effort required to squat and clean what I'm doing now leaves me a bit queasy when done. I don't do much else than front squats, deads and standing press one day, back squats, cleans and bench press the alternate. There is a lot of hard work happening. There is a lot of time spent standing around with a very elevated heart rate. It is not comfortable.
I'll stretch the volume a bit as the season nears - sets of 15 instead of 8 for squats. That is *really* uncomfortable.
What little upper body work I do (presses, pullups and chins) is augmented by very strong trapezii and lats from cleaning and deadlifting. Heavy packs (80+ lbs) worn for hours aren't uncomfortable to me, even if I've not worn one for a long time.
Bottom line, IMO the average guy will get more bang for his buck in time spent doing weights and intervals than doing long slow things, but the long slow things have their place in polishing up before the main event. The strength and interval work puts you in position to quickly acquire whatever capacity you might be missing.
Regarding mimicing mountain movements - my next planned acquisition is a prowler.
Originally Posted by smokepole
Good one!! Here's a question I've been pondering lately though.
I understand and agree with the need for strength training like you and others have outlined. I also think the best way to get in shape for carrying heavy packs in the mtns is to carry heavy packs in the mtns.
But most of us can't do that as much as we'd like, so we're stuck with the gym. So here's my question: shouldn't the workouts in the gym mimic (as closely as possible) the activity we're training for?
When I read about your workouts and Pointers, I know they're good for building and maintaining strength, but it seems that compared to humping loads in the mountains, they are higher intensity but shorter duration. Humping loads many times seems more like a multi-hour slog that's not as intense.
So my question is, are high-intensity, short duration strength training sessions the best way to train for hauling loads? Seems to me that every now and then, you'd want to work in some sessions that were lower intensity, but 2 hours or so long, to build endurance?
