Todd Bumgardner: Training Your Body for the Backcountry Hunt

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 510, featuring Todd Bumgardner...

Todd is a strength and conditioning coach who trains backcountry hunters, everyday clients, and a tier-one tactical unit using the same core principles. He calls the approach the human predator pack mule philosophy, and in this conversation he breaks down what it really takes to move quietly, hold still for long stretches, and pack heavy loads in and out of the backcountry.

Meet Todd Bumgardner

Tom Rowland: Todd Bumgardner is a writer and a trainer who is very into health and fitness. He owns a gym in Virginia and trains everybody from tier-one operators all the way down to someone who is just looking to get in a little better shape. One of the things he focuses on is fitness for hunting, and we talked about that as well as many of his own hunting trips.

The Human Predator Pack Mule Philosophy

Todd Bumgardner: The human predator pack mule idea comprises everything you need to do to be physically prepared for a backcountry hunt. The human element is the basics of strength and conditioning and having a healthy body from a mobility standpoint, a quality-movement standpoint, and a strength and aerobic-development standpoint. That translates into being able to move like a predator. A lot of hunt-training programs miss the fact that stalking requires you to move pretty slowly, and it takes a lot of energy to move slowly. If you do not practice that, it is a problem. Then there is the third big thing everybody trains for: packing in and packing out. That is mostly what everybody trains for, but there is way more to preparation than that. It also comes down to mindset. You have to be smart, but the pack-mule part means you also have to be tough.

Tom Rowland: How long have you been in the fitness world?

Todd Bumgardner: My entire adult life, about fifteen years as a strength and conditioning coach. I started as a strength and conditioning coach at the college I attended, training the women's lacrosse and softball teams. I was actually in school to be a teacher, but I kept finding myself in the library reading strength-and-conditioning research, so I went to graduate school for exercise science. The original plan was to become a collegiate strength coach at the Division One football level, but I realized that world doesn't pay well until you're middle-aged and it doesn't give you much freedom, so I moved into the private sector working with general-population clients and athletes. Now I co-own a gym in Sterling, Virginia, I run a mentorship program for other personal trainers and strength coaches, I work with a tier-one tactical unit, and I also run Human Predator Pack Mule.

Tom Rowland: How do the fitness requirements for a tier-one tactical unit compare to the requirements for hunting?

Todd Bumgardner: They are actually very similar. For backcountry and mountain hunting you need a good aerobic system, quality movement, reasonable strength, and athleticism, and a lot of the programming I write for the tactical guys is similar to what I use for backcountry hunters.

Building a Training Program

Tom Rowland: Hunting season is coming up, and I don't think it's ever too late to start. You might not transform between now and September 1st, but between now and next September 1st you can be a completely different person. How do you structure a program to hit all the different requirements, whether it's a tier-one operator, an elk hunter out West, or a whitetail hunter in the East?

Todd Bumgardner: It starts with understanding what the person needs. In general we strength train about twice a week, condition in various ways three to four times a week, and do something athletic and powerful two to three times a week. Ideally we assess someone and see where their deficits are: if they have a strength deficit, they do more strength work; if their aerobic system is poor, that's where we focus. What I do is called concurrent programming, where every element of the program exists at the same time rather than in separate blocks. The proportions just change based on need and timing.

Tom Rowland: How much focus do you put on mobility and flexibility?

Todd Bumgardner: Every day. It builds movement capacity, which is the range of different movements your body can do, but it also builds something called movement fidelity, which is your ability to keep producing good movement over time and under stress. At my gym we have a deadlift test using a sixty-kilogram, or about 132-pound, kettlebell held between your legs, and you have to complete two good sets of eight. It shows us whether someone can move well, do it under stress, and repeat it. Working on joint range of motion and control of that range of motion feeds forward into movement fidelity, which keeps you performing in the backcountry and also keeps you from getting hurt.

Tom Rowland: I like that term, movement fidelity. It's like running a mile and asking whether your form at the end looks like your form at the start, and if you extend that to twenty-six miles, does your form break down?

Todd Bumgardner: Exactly. If you can't reproduce a movement, it doesn't matter. The foundation is quality movement and movement capacity, because without those you can't access movement fidelity. You can't get into a good deadlift position, or your foot strike gets sloppy when you run, because you don't have those base needs.

Tom Rowland: When you see someone whose movement fidelity breaks down partway through a test, where do you go from there?

Todd Bumgardner: The kettlebell deadlift is just one example. We have tests and movement-fidelity strength standards for the squat, the push, and the pull as well. We do movement assessments like the active straight-leg raise, or simply checking whether someone can touch their toes, and we look at variations of each movement, like the kettlebell RDL, to see if they can control a hip hinge. We also do work-capacity testing. A low resting heart rate is one indicator that your aerobic system is in good shape; a resting heart rate of sixty or above usually means it isn't. We also run a bike test where people breathe only through their nose and go as far as they can in six minutes. All of that gives us a snapshot of the person, and then we use progressions and regressions to place them in the right exercise. Instead of a barbell RDL or a conventional deadlift, we might back someone down to the right movement for where they are right now, and a big, strong person might actually need a movement regressed rather than forced into something heavy.

Tom Rowland: Can you explain the difference between a regression and a progression?

Todd Bumgardner: The conventional barbell deadlift is the ultimate expression of the hip hinge. Really what you look at is how much of the body is loaded against gravity, how much weight is involved, and whether the person is getting any assistance -- something called the four-by-four matrix. All of our progressions and regressions start on the ground and work up to standing. Someone just learning to hip hinge might start in a tall-kneeling position, on both knees, holding a kettlebell behind them and learning to reach their hips back. From there they progress to doing it standing, then we move the weight to the front of the body because that's harder to control, then we work up to heavier loads and more complex exercises, like moving from two feet to one foot with a single-leg RDL. It's about introducing more complexity or load, or reducing it, based on what will work for that person's current ability.

Coaching Different Types of Clients

Tom Rowland: That's a sophisticated system. Do you run every new client through it?

Todd Bumgardner: It's one session. They sit down with my business partner, Chris, who does the consultation and finds the right exercises for them. We have one gym-wide program that we individualize based on need, because our people are all geared toward challenging themselves and living a bigger life -- adventure races, hunting, hiking. Chris walks them through our progressions and regressions to figure out where they should start. If they hit one of our strength standards, like the kettlebell deadlift, during a session, they graduate to the next level. Every thirteen weeks we have a testing week for conditioning and strength that lets people move up levels and unlock new exercises.

Tom Rowland: That's almost like a martial-arts belt system.

Todd Bumgardner: It really is. We use colors: green, yellow, blue, and black, with black the hardest to reach. It takes a lot of commitment and time, and we didn't want it to be a false achievement -- reaching the next level and seeing real progress is one of the things that keeps people moving, so we built the system around that.

Tom Rowland: Some people love hearing all of that detail, and some people's eyes glaze over and they think it sounds too hard. How do you handle that difference?

Todd Bumgardner: First, you can't help someone who isn't ready for help, and being upfront about that instead of selling someone into something that isn't right for them yet matters. Beyond that, I developed a concept of client archetypes about six years ago: what, why, and how clients. What clients just want to know what to do -- tell them to run through a wall and they'll do it twice. Why clients want all the answers before they commit, because they're innately curious and need justification, so we answer their questions and stay in tune with that. How clients want to relate to people and be part of a community before they buy in fully. Through years of conversation -- listening to how people talk, what questions they ask or don't ask -- Chris and I have gotten good at figuring out which type of person we're working with and how to talk to them.

Tom Rowland: How long has the gym been open, and how long have you had this whole system down on paper?

Todd Bumgardner: The gym has been open since 2011. The archetypes and assessment system came together around 2013 or 2014, so it's been almost a decade of figuring out how to make things simpler. Most people don't need it to be complicated. At bare minimum, we tell people to show up to the gym three days a week, walk at least seven thousand steps a day, drink at least seven glasses of water, and get at least seven hours of sleep, and everything else falls into place from there. For most people, fitness is really simple. Getting someone into peak shape for something specific is a different story, but most people just need to show up, be generally strong, have a decent aerobic system, and move well, and that gives them the foundation to do pretty much anything with their life.

Tom Rowland: What's the average age of the people who come to you?

Todd Bumgardner: Somewhere between twenty-five and forty. Most of our people already have some experience with fitness, often because they've had bad experiences elsewhere, but some of the best clients are the ones who want their life to be different but don't have any baggage from an old coach telling them to do five-by-five and run hills like it's 1994. Overall it's less about age and more about a mindset of not wanting to be limited by your body -- wanting to run up a mountain, hunt, or do an adventure race.

From the Gym to the Page: Todd's Writing Career

Tom Rowland: I actually found you through your writing. How did that get started?

Todd Bumgardner: When I was twenty-two or twenty-three, still in grad school, I sent an article to Elite FTS and they took it, which gave me some confidence. Writing is a good way for me to consolidate the ideas in my head and actually understand them better, and then communicate them to other people. After that I started sending articles to T Nation, then wrote for Bodybuilding.com and did some work for Men's Health and Men's Fitness. Once our businesses really got going I dropped the outside writing to focus on that, but over the past year I've gotten back into it because a lot of our business now runs itself. I reached out to contacts at places like Peterson's Hunting, and a buddy told me the editor of Free Range American, Mike Shea, was looking for writers. I applied, sent my resume, wrote an article he really liked, and he asked me to do one or two a week from then on. It's been fun jumping back into it.

Tom Rowland: Is Free Range American mostly fitness writing for you, or hunting and fishing too?

Todd Bumgardner: Mostly fitness so far, but I have some hunting and outdoor articles in the hopper that I'm about to pitch to them.

Home Waters: The Appalachian Trail and Pennsylvania Rivers

Tom Rowland: Your gym is right up near parts of the Appalachian Trail. Have you spent time on it, or thought about doing the whole thing?

Todd Bumgardner: I've thought about doing the whole thing. One of my hunting spots is actually right by the AT, so I do training hikes on some pretty rugged sections of it in Virginia. There's also a wildlife management unit where the AT runs through that I go squirrel hunting in when I don't have anything else going on later in the season.

Tom Rowland: There's some good smallmouth bass fishing up that way too. Do you fish any of it?

Todd Bumgardner: I've fished the Potomac quite a bit for smallmouth, but I'm originally from Central Pennsylvania, where we have the Juniata and Susquehanna rivers, and I think both are better smallmouth water than what's down here. As for trout, Virginia isn't great -- the closest decent spot is a place called Mossy Creek, about two hours away, and my home water in Pennsylvania is only two and a half hours away, so I usually just drive home instead. Around home we have the Letort, Big Spring Creek, Spring Creek, Penns Creek, Big Fishing Creek, and a lot of other great limestone-influenced water. We're spoiled for trout back home.

Hunting Coast to Coast: Turkeys, Caribou, and Elk

Tom Rowland: Do you fish or hunt more, and what do you like to hunt?

Todd Bumgardner: Hunt, and pretty much everything. I hunt deer and turkeys on a couple of properties here in Virginia, and I go home to Pennsylvania to hunt waterfowl with buddies up there since Virginia's waterfowl hunting isn't great. I also take about three out-of-state trips a year. This year I went to California in the spring to hunt turkeys -- Easterns, Rios, and Miriams. We have access to a private ranch with a lot of acreage and Rio turkeys, and up in the high country in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada there are Miriams. We killed more than five turkeys in about four days in March.

Tom Rowland: And you just got back from Alaska?

Todd Bumgardner: Just got back from hunting caribou in Alaska, the second time I've done that trip, and after that I have a Montana trip for elk and mule deer.

Tom Rowland: Both of my boys live in Bozeman, Montana, and I'll be out there archery-hunting elk with them from the tenth through the twentieth of September. We try every year, and archery elk is very difficult -- my son was actually a guide out there and has had good success guiding but still hasn't put one on the ground himself. He and his generation of Western hunters train all summer, running, shooting, and lifting every day with the goal of being the ultimate predator, so it's my job to stay in good enough shape to keep up with them.

Todd Bumgardner: That's good for him. You have to know what's important to you and why you're doing it, and there are a million ways to make a living these days.

The Alaska Caribou Hunt

Tom Rowland: Tell me about the caribou trip.

Todd Bumgardner: We drive up the Dalton Highway -- the same haul road from the show Ice Road Truckers -- which supports the oil pipeline. We fly into Fairbanks, drive up the highway, and start glassing to see where animals are. I hunted with a rifle this year instead of a bow, and because of the pipeline you have to get five miles off the road to hunt with a rifle; there's an archery-only corridor closer in. Last year I got a really nice bull. This year we weren't seeing the same numbers, but we had a guy with us on his first big hunting excursion, and the goal was to get him on an animal. A couple of days into the trip we spotted a group of bulls behind our camp, made a fast play on them, dropped down into a riverbed, got a couple of miles ahead of them, and set up in a small drainage coming off the tundra. They walked in to about seventy yards and he made a great shot for his first bull. Since we were five miles off the road, he also got to be part of breaking the animal down and packing it out, which he'd never done before, and it was rewarding to mentor him through that.

Tom Rowland: Was he new to hunting?

Todd Bumgardner: He's a lifelong fly fisherman from Idaho who designs for a magazine called Modern Huntsman. He got into hunting a few years ago and killed his first deer on his own, but this was his first big hunting excursion, and it really solidified for him that hunting was going to be part of his life.

Tom Rowland: Is caribou meat as good as elk?

Todd Bumgardner: Honestly, my favorite game meat is pronghorn. I think elk just gets great PR, but pronghorn is actually better. I've only ever hunted pronghorn with a rifle so far, though I'd like to try it with a bow -- for me it's really about having tools that extend the season, since I can bow hunt before I can rifle hunt, but I also just like hunting with a rifle.

Training to Move Slow: Stalking, Stillness, and Breathing

Tom Rowland: Earlier you mentioned it takes special preparation to move slowly. Can you explain that?

Todd Bumgardner: If you're getting ready for an archery elk hunt, you have to be able to move slowly, avoid making noise, and at some point stand completely still, which is one of the hardest things to do. Most training people do is like stormtrooper training -- running all the time, busting up hills, lifting fast -- and that has its place, but if you're not also training yourself to hold positions, move slowly, and practice those specific skills, you'll tire too fast, and it will affect your decision-making and your ability to execute. We work on things like army crawls to stay low, and practicing walking slowly while feeling where your body is in space. I use balance-beam walks, not necessarily to improve balance, but to get people to pay attention to their foot placement and to train their bodies to move slowly. Being generally strong with a good aerobic system helps, but then it's about applying that in the actual skill of moving slowly, holding positions, and controlling your breathing to control your emotional state. That whole piece is often neglected.

Tom Rowland: How do you train breathing?

Todd Bumgardner: One of the simplest ways is box breathing. We start by having people lie on their back with their feet up so their hips and knees are bent at ninety degrees, and work on slow breaths in through the nose for about four seconds and out for about four seconds, since making the inhale and exhale roughly equal tends to calm the nervous system. Lying down puts less of the body under the influence of gravity, so it's easier to learn the skill in that simpler position. We also work on apical expansion, where the torso expands in all directions starting low at the pelvic floor and moving up into the chest, rather than the shallow chest breathing that accentuates the stress response. Lying down, you can put a hand on your belly and feel the breath press into it and into the floor, then feel it press out at the sides above the hips. From there we work on transferring that same breathing into standing and into movement.

Tom Rowland: That sounds similar to what XPT and Laird Hamilton do, staying in nasal breathing while riding a bike so you eventually operate at a higher level with a lower heart rate, almost like developing another gear before you have to switch to mouth breathing. Do you train that too?

Todd Bumgardner: Yes. You look at your aerobic window -- your floor, which is your resting heart rate, and your ceiling, which is your anaerobic threshold. You want the floor as low as possible and the ceiling as high as possible, because you fatigue much faster once your anaerobic system takes over. We do a lot of zone-two conditioning, which is roughly sixty to seventy percent of max heart rate, and an easy way to gauge it without a heart-rate monitor is being able to nasal breathe comfortably the whole time. That makes whatever activity you're doing more efficient, and it also makes your aerobic system better at burning fat for fuel instead of carbohydrate, since even a lean person has far more stored fat than stored carbohydrate. Most of the conditioning I do with hunters is nasal breathing, whether it's rucking, rowing, biking, or running -- we do a lot of zone-two rucking in particular. We do get into higher heart rates for some threshold work, but you don't need much of it; most conditioning should sit in zone two, maybe touching zone three.

Wearables, Readiness, and the David Goggins Debate

Tom Rowland: What do you think about heart-rate technology like Whoop, Fitbit, Polar, or Garmin? Is it necessary, and does it help or hurt?

Todd Bumgardner: It helps a ton, though I wouldn't say it's absolutely necessary. Wrist-based devices typically don't work very well because of the light-based technology they use; a chest strap, or a strap worn around the elbow, is much more accurate. If you're going to use one, get a chest strap. But heart-rate zone training is hugely beneficial if you have access to it and know how to use it.

Tom Rowland: Do you look at heart-rate variability?

Todd Bumgardner: I don't, mainly because getting people to measure it consistently is the hard part, and without consistent data there's nothing useful to work with. There's also research showing that how tired you subjectively feel is often just as accurate as what heart-rate variability tells you.

Tom Rowland: I've thought about getting something like an Oura Ring, mostly to know my sleep quality, but part of me worries that if a device on my wrist told me not to work out, it would just become one more excuse.

Todd Bumgardner: Devices like the Oura Ring are good because they get you to pay attention to your behaviors -- if you only got five and a half hours of decent sleep, it prompts you to ask what you need to change. If something like that gives you a readiness score, you should listen to it. We're conditioned to think we always have to go hard or nothing works, and that's just not true. Really understanding your readiness lets you give your body what it needs at that moment, whether that's pushing your recovery or pushing your fitness.

Tom Rowland: There's the David Goggins approach of never slowing down, versus the more scientific approach of listening when your body says no. Where do you land on that?

Todd Bumgardner: David Goggins is wrong on that point. Nobody can argue with how tough the guy is, but when I read his book, I thought it should have been titled something like, if I'd prepared better, I'd have been more successful. He's great if you need a mindset boost, but being a hard-ass all the time isn't sustainable. Often you'd be in better shape if, on a day you're not supposed to train hard, you instead take a walk or do some mobility work to keep the momentum going and give your body what it actually needs. Then when it is time to train hard, you can actually train hard instead of being behind the eight ball. People get hurt and think it happened arbitrarily, but it's usually cumulative stress building up until something gives.

Tom Rowland: That connects back to what we talked about earlier with movement fidelity -- if you don't have the base and your body needs rest, your form breaks down and that's usually when injury happens.

Todd Bumgardner: Right, and that form breakdown is far more catastrophic when your body is already depleted than when it's well-recovered. If you're chipping away at your capacity and running at a deficit, any small mistake becomes a bigger problem. You don't have to be maxing out or crushing yourself all the time -- your body wants to adapt and have resources available. A good analogy is the difference between practice and play: if a football team smacks pads every day in practice, they won't be ready for Saturday. You want to work on skills and stay in decent shape without beating yourselves up, so that when it's time to play the game, you actually have something left. If you constantly tap out your resources training too hard all the time, you never build a surplus, and when it's time to perform you either get hurt or it doesn't go as well. Training usually needs to sit at a moderate level of effort, and you'll end up stronger and more conditioned than you'd expect.

Where to Find Todd

Tom Rowland: It's been a pleasure getting to know you, and I really like your writing -- I found you through Free Range American. If people wanted to find you, where should they go?

Todd Bumgardner: You can read my work on Free Range American, and find me on Instagram at Todd underscore Bumgardner, and at Human Predator Pack Mule.

Tom Rowland: And just for fun, what's your email address?

Todd Bumgardner: humanpredatorpackmule@gmail.com, all one word -- no underscores, despite how it may have shown up when I sent it to you before.

Tom Rowland: Thanks so much, Todd, for all the training advice -- we'll be looking out for your writing.

Todd Bumgardner: I appreciate it, Tom. Thanks so much for having me.