I think a week might be a bit too long for the average hunter training for elk hunting. You may be going past the point of recovery, and getting into losing for fitness.

Whatever training you do make sure you simulate packing out meat too. This means wearing a pack with progressively heavy loads just like you add a little weight in weight training. Start on level ground, and then gradually start to climb up and down hills/mountains. Straight weight training isn't as good, and hiking with a heavy pack with develop all the small supporting muscles, tendons, and ligaments you need to carry a heavy pack. Also, going up and down hills will develop the structure from different angles.

Also, getting good cardio can't be suggested strong enough. You'll need all you can develop. I hike the Rockies everyday at 11,000ft, and carrying a heavy pack still kicks my butt.

I've always trained hard, and eat nothing but natural foods. Here's me at 49 years old. Exercise and good food will keep you in shape. Don't let off in the off season, and then try to catch up when hunting season is getting close. It doesn't work. Staying in shape is a full time job.

In flat lands, you can also add stair climbing. Living here, I do my daily walks and weights. My walks are up hills and down hills. At the tender age of 72, I no longer try extreme hunting....just enough to survive it!
Dan

Nice Pete! I never do anything different when i go out west hunting, besides the obvious quit work, pack up and drive? Either your in shape or your not. Speaking of cardio, a low resting heart beat rate is important, say 49-65 beats per minute is a pretty good fit rate, thats where i'm at, and never had problems hunting anywhere.

Pete's a stud!!!

I think you are right on the week off matter. I'm planning to make it 4 days off. I'm not working out as intensly as some of these top flight athletes. By the way, I have laid-off 2 days now and I was thinking as I drove on errands today that I felt really energetic and strong, because of no workout for several days.

I agree on the packing. I hike 4 miles per day with a 70 LBS pack on my back. I worked up to it.

I've hunted elk in the area I'm returning to this year 5 times before. We camp at 11,500 feet and hunt at about that elevation or slightly higher. This is my 6th trip there. On three of those hunts there were several elk to pack out. So I'm familiar with the ardors of DIY elk hunting. I'm never in adequate shape. I always feel I could have done better. At the same time, I never run out of gas and never give up. This year may I may be in my best shape ever, but that remains to be seen. Of course, it only takes an unfortunate momentary error to slip blow out a knee, and all that training is to naught.

My first elk I packed the elk quarters down off the hillside where I cut it up about 150 feet down to a reasonably level trail where my partners helped me pack it out from. The hill was steep and I did some switchback-like traversing back and forth of the hill. But this placed me sideways to the hill which was a bit muddy from snow that had melted. I slipped and strained my knee. Just a minor tweak, but it revealed to me that a bad knee was just a slip away.

I have some spikes I can slip on my boots when it's slippery. They save a lot of falls, and injuries.

I use these.

http://www.rei.com/product/890608/ka...raction-system

You mean they had color film when you were 49 Pete?

They added the color like they do with old movies. :p

They took the Kodachrome away.

Kodachrome was a very popular slide (chrome) color film back in the day. The process was a special one referred to as K-14, where the color was added during processing. Now Kodachrome is gone. Don't tell Simon and Garfunkel.
Momma, they took his Kodachrome away!

I would also say that now I would do as much as possible to slide that elk meat down the hill. For example, I could have put those chunks of meat on a plastic tarp and slid them down the hill. I might have even done two loads of meat on every trip, saving myself half my trips.

I remember being proud that I had thought to slide my dead elk off the hillside about 40 yards to a level area shaded by a few trees with snow where I could bury the cut-up elk meat. The steepness of the hill and the slipperiness of the surface made skidding the elk not too difficult. And that was a good plan. It was my first elk kill. But now in retrospect it occurs to me it would have been an even BETTER plan to skid the whole elk carcass all the way down to the level trail area. That would have made the bringing down of the elk meat easier.

On the other hand, that might have been a kind of advertising sign to rival hunters "Looky here, y'all!!! An elk was killed near here!!!"

It is good to think about all these things. It takes a while for such layers of thinking to come to a hunter.