Ep 27: Fitness and Nutrition for Fishing and the Outdoors, with Sara Camiscioni
Sara Camiscioni is the founder of Find Your Strong with Sara, a program created to help others achieve their outdoor goals. Sara coaches everyone from kayakers to hunters and everyone in between. Instead of focusing on working out for the sake of working out, she believes in using exercise and nutrition to be safer, more confident, and more capable during the activities we want to do. She also believes that in order to be effective, a program needs to be sustainable long-term. In this episode, we discuss why fitness and nutrition are important for outdoorsmen, how to bring healthy foods into the backcountry and stick to a routine, and some specific exercises to help with both fishing and backpacking.
Instagram: @FindYourStrongWithSara
Website: www.saracamiscioni.com
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Katie
You're listening to the Fish Untamed Podcast, your home for fly fishing the backcountry. All right, welcome to episode number 27 of the Fish Untamed podcast. Today I got a chance to talk to Sara Camiscioni with Find Your Strong with Sara. And I've been wanting for a while to get someone on the show to talk a little bit about fitness and nutrition when it comes to the outdoors. Obviously, you don't need to be in perfect shape to go fishing. You don't need to eat a perfect diet. And that's one of the great things about fishing is that it's pretty accessible to whoever wants to do it. But that said, I know a lot of my friends and I like getting pretty far in the backcountry to, you know, find fish and find places to fish. So I do try to stay in decent shape and eat a decent diet just so when I want to go far back in the backcountry, I don't need to worry about how much of a struggle it's going to be. There's times that, you know, the hike in is a real grind and it's tough. But if you're prepared for that and you've trained for it, it's not the end of the world and you can go a lot farther than you think you could, even for just a day trip. Or if you want to do a multi-day trip, just being in good shape and eating a good diet and just taking care of your body is a great way to basically prepare yourself for whatever you're going to come across. And so that's why I wanted to have Sara on because her business, Find Your Strong with Sara, is completely focused around this idea that instead of exercising just for the sake of exercising, exercise for the ability to make your hobbies or your outdoor passions a little bit easier to do. She works with all different kinds of clients with different goals, but kind of the overarching theme is that most of our clients just want to be stronger, healthier people so they can really enjoy what they like to do outside. So a lot of this interview isn't specific to fishing, just because fishing itself is not necessarily any different than anything else you're doing in the backcountry in terms of the fitness you need. But we just talk about a lot of the general things that she does to take care of herself, things she recommends to her clients. And then we do end on a couple fishing-specific exercises you can do that are more for the flexibility and the fact that when you're fishing, you're doing a lot of repetitive motions. And that can take a toll on the body in itself. So some recovery exercises as well to keep yourself from locking up or pulling something just from that repetitive motion. so without further ado here is my chat with Sara Camiscioni. if you just want to kind of explain your background and whether you kind of started in the outdoors and that inspired your fitness journey or if fitness was your passion and you realized that that kind of assisted you in getting into the outdoors
Sara
that's funny that's a good question so I guess it's a a discussion or an argument of which one came first the chicken or the egg. So I started, you know, being drug on my sister's outdoor cross country runs when we were really young. I grew up in a small town in Florida, but then I moved at a very young age to a really small town in Kansas. And so like kind of country folk. And so by default, my mom would be like, go play outside. So I grew up outside playing with sticks and like climbing trees, you know and so I was always a real outdoorsy girl in a small town and would always like find the creeks and the lakes and the ponds to play in and as a small kid our family had a small dairy farm out in the country and so we would go fishing on the ponds when I was younger but I would always go on these long cross-country runs with my sister out into the middle of nowhere So I think at a really young age, I was exposed to fitness in the outdoors. I was exposed to running through these back roads in the trees, in the woods, on the trails. And it was really cool. It was a really meditative experience and just a really unique way to experience the outdoors. So I would say they came hand in hand. You know, one didn't come without the other or before the other. They, they happen simultaneously because, you know, it was through the body and using my body that I got outdoors. And so, but on a, on a more relatable scale with the fishing side of stuff, you know, I started fishing on my uncle's ponds and on the ponds on the property when we were really young. And, you know, as I grew older and I ended up going back to Florida when I was a really young teenager. And that's when I really got heavy into saltwater fishing and sport fishing, which was super fun. The girls, we would call ourselves, I was like 16 to 20 at this time. And I had linked up with, you know, 40 year old women, 50 year old women. And the girls, us, meaning the child and the adults, you know, we would take the boat out, one of their boats. we would take one of their boats out usually once a week, every other week. And we would just go sport fish off the coast for mahi-mahi and tuna and come back off the boat on the dock, on the marina and like immediately do like fish fries and like fish tacos. And that was probably when I really I think got into fishing like compulsively and then you know obviously when I moved to Colorado in my I think it was about six or seven years ago we talked about this I can't figure out how long it's been since I've been here about six or seven years ago I moved here and got introduced to fly fishing from a friend actually.
Katie
So is that why you moved out here for the fishing?
Sara
I was finishing undergrad and grad school in Kansas city. And, I'd been in Kansas city for about 10, 12, 15 years. It's kind of gray. My timelines are really gray if you haven't picked up that theme yet. But I was kind of living in the suburbs and I was that outdoor girl at heart stare still where I would go on a trail for a walk, a wooded, you know, a paved trail. And I would be a grown 20 something girl jumping off the trail into bushes to find the creeks and like explore and, you know, coming out covered in poison ivy and poison oaks. So I was super outdoorsy, but like trapped in a non outdoorsy place, which is Kansas city, Kansas, even the burbs. So I moved out here. I had only been out here for like a day in, in my whole life. I'd come out here for a day trip and I was like, I love it. It was due West. I knew someone here who had offered me a place to stay until I got a job after grad school and just drove straight out. And that was it. So I came out here because I had a free place to stay and I was really into the outdoors. And I thought that this would be a good place. I'd done some research. It had seemed really sunny. Um, it was sad or go back to South Florida. and I don't think that was really an option. But I came out here for the outdoors, not to fish. I didn't fly fish until I was here for about six months or eight months is when I really got into fly fishing here.
Katie
Well, I feel like you picked a pretty good spot to merge the fitness and the fishing, well, just the outdoors in general. I mean, it's a hot spot for both of those things separately and together, people who like both. But it sounds like you had a similar childhood to a lot of people, I think, who grow up and get more into the fitness, wellness side of things. Just because as kids, I feel like there's very few kids who would label something like exercises as, you know, a hobby of theirs. You know, they might play sports, a specific sport. But the keeping themselves healthy isn't like a priority. That's not something that kids really care about. But a lot of them are naturally just very active. Like, you know, you don't want to sit inside. You want to be out running and playing and things like that. So, you know, a lot of kids are participating in it without actually thinking about the fact that that's what they're doing. So I feel like it kind of makes sense that the outdoors is what you were really participating in as a kid. But naturally, you were just, you know, involved in the fitness world as well just by being out there.
Sara
Yeah, you know, this is funny because I just had this conversation on some Instagram stories recently because I started – I picked up golf. Well, my boyfriend is a golfer. So he has taught me how to golf. and it came up during COVID because it was just a way to move my body it's like a way to kind of swing a golf club in the bedroom when we can't go outside or get outside and just use your body in a different way to exert energy and to just feel strong and just move and I I realized when I picked that up when I've, since I started picking that up, how much, how important it is to use your body. And a lot of our hobbies like golf, fishing, whatever it is, it requires you to have some sort of functionality within your body. You need to be able to move without pain so you can enjoy what you're doing longer. You know, you need to have a little bit of flexibility and core strength to swing a golf club, or it's not going to be good. You know, you need to have fairly competent, strong legs to stand or cross a swift river, a swift river, you know, and now that's kind of the mindset that I take with my personal approach to fitness, which is making my body stronger and more functional so that I can do all of these adventures safer, longer, harder, and more enjoyably. So I'm not super fatigued trying to backpack or hike up to, you know, an alpine lake. I can, you know, more so enjoy it versus struggle up it. And as a result of that, that is a large basis of my clientele, our outdoor pursuant people, mostly women. I was about to say women, but I do have a handful of male clients. But most of my clients are really about living in the outdoors and they need their bodies to be pain-free, to be strong. They need strong legs to hike. They need strong cores to fish and rowboats and stuff like that. So it really does tie hand in hand seamlessly. And Colorado and the whole Western border in general is a really popular, a lot of my clients are all the way up to the Pacific Northwest in Washington. They're all active women and we need strong bodies just to also feel safe, to feel that we can take care of ourselves when we're out there, especially if we're out there by ourselves, which is a big one. That's a big one for me too.
Katie
And that's why I reached out to you in the first place. I've been wanting for a while to talk to somebody related to the fitness side of the outdoors. But there's so many people out there who are into fitness and they're super fit and would probably do great outside. But a lot of people, you know, maybe their primary thing is I like weightlifting and I like, you know, being jacked or this way. Like there's the exercise is the primary thing for the purpose of exercising, which is great. You know, if your goal is to lose weight or this or that, that's totally fine. But for me, like you said, fitness has been more of a means to an end. As much as I get, you know, mental benefit from exercising, at the end of the day, the goal is to be better at the things I like doing. And that's why I was drawn to you when I found your profile. And I don't know if I heard you on another podcast, if that's where I came across you, but I've followed you for a while. And that's when I thought to reach out because from what I had seen, you had a very similar in terms of, you know, of course there are benefits to exercising beyond just being better at what you want to do. But at the end of the day, if all you're doing is working out, working out, working out, and then you have no hobbies, I mean, what are you really living for at that point?
Sara
Yeah, this is really interesting. So, you know, and I'm going to, I'm going to say this with like, almost like a caveat, like if you are just going to the gym, that's fine. I mean, to each their own, Like it's not my cup of tea anymore to just spend a ton of time in the gym. Like my approach to my fitness and the business model for my clients and my, my brand is fast, efficient, effective. Like we want to get in, get out because we want to do other things. We don't want to spend an hour and a half in the gym anymore. Just carving away our physique. We want to still have a strong physique and feel and strong, confident in our feel and be strong and confident in our bodies and our clothes and things like that. We still want to look good and feel good, but we want to do it in a more sustainable fashion, which means probably more frequent, shorter duration workouts for the most of us. Now, I'm not going to harp. I'm not saying that anyone should harp on it, but if someone doesn't want to hike and climb mountains, cool. If you still just want to go to the gym, that's good. I'd rather have people really just in better health and better shape for themselves, even if they don't quote unquote functionally do anything with it. but for me and most of my clients, that's just not what we're doing anymore. And for a long time, for a small window of time, I did that when I was in Kansas city and in grad school and in undergrad, you know, there was nothing to do with, with my body. You know, I can only go on so many trail runs out in the same loop in the middle of the suburbs. You know, I wasn't hiking mountains. I wasn't fishing. I wasn't hunting. Um, you know, I was barely recreational and fishing because you don't just don't have access to a lot of that stuff. And so all I did was carve and push my body in the gym. And so for a while, I was really kind of obsessive compulsive with it. And that's just part of my journey. It's helped me get to where I'm at now. But it's really interesting, the people that come in without really intense outdoor hobbies or pursuits, and they come into fitness and they start to see the strength and physicality that their body is capable of. And sometimes it takes that base level of confidence and knowledge and the foundation of strength for them to trust their bodies to go do other things outside the box. So that's been really cool for me to see, like building up physical strength through the repetition of pumping iron, it builds up inner and outer self-confidence and inner strength and you develop strength and resiliency that carries over into so much more than just that workout and that confidence that you can take that your body can actually hike you know like you know my some of my clients would say things in the past like you know they want to be able to hike without pain or they want to know that they can go on a hike with a handful of people and not slow the whole group down and that fear has held them back from going on those hikes and so you know it's really cool to see people unsure of their physical abilities break through those mental and physical blocks just through repetition of lifting weights in the gym. You know, it's a really underrated thing to do for your body, but the value you can get back from it is immeasurable for what it can do in your comprehensive life.
Katie
Yeah, I think that's a good point in that, for example, like you said, there's obviously nothing wrong with if going to the gym is your hobby, like if exercising is your hobby, then that's totally fine. But I think that especially in adults, there's a lot of distaste around exercising because if you're not using it for something, it just seems like a chore. Like I go to the gym, I run on the treadmill for an hour, I hate every second of it, I come home, and I don't actually feeling better because I hated it. Um, but, if you're using it for something, let's say hiking or, golfing or, or any of the examples you've thrown out now when I'm in the, even if I am in the gym, cause like I do some trail running during the week, but I also do usually three days a week of just lifting and I'm not usually having that much fun while I'm lifting, but there is a certain aspect of, it's probably not fun, but there's a satisfaction in seeing the weights I can lift increase where I'm like oh that's a milestone my boyfriend and I always joke that because we've got the different plates and they're different color colors and it's always fun to like jump up a color like oh I can do I can do this color plate now because I've never been able to do that before and that translates to wow I like I've improved myself and that satisfaction alone makes it a some sort of fun form of fun where it's like I'm I'm more capable now than I was before and I think 100 yeah having that outside aspect knowing that like, because I'm more capable, I just saw progress in the gym, which I'm not really having fun in here, but because I saw progress now I can translate that over and think, wow, maybe I can, maybe I can hike steeper Hill for longer now because my legs, I can see are in more in better shape than they were before. Um, so I think it's, it's a, it's a good way to learn that the gym can be fun when you are stuck in the gym, because you can see that progress and translate in your mind. What can I do with this now? What can I do with this progress that I've made?
Sara
A hundred percent. You know, some of the things that I've had to, that I've instilled with the framework that I coach my clients on is they'll come in with a real loose goal. Like they don't really necessarily need to lose a whole bunch of weight or to hike a mountain or whatever. And we'll just work on general conditioning. Okay. Let's just get you into a routine of movement and not just a routine, but let's work together to make sure you have a workout routine. Seven to eight times out of 10, you really enjoy. We have to find a way for you to enjoy what you're doing because if you don't overall enjoy it long-term, those habits are really hard to stick just because of what you just said. So I work with my clients really uniquely to find out specifically what they enjoy. At the end of the day, it's always going to involve for me some form of resistance training. It's always about building muscle with my brand and my body and my clients' bodies. We've always just got to build muscle and burn more fat and be stronger because long-term that's the healthiest thing for your body. On a cellular level, the more resistance training you have, you know, the better you age, the stronger you are going into your older years, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, the results and benefits are limitless, but the other side of it is then once they start to get that stuff formed, they're more curious of what their capabilities are. And so we set these incremental, Hey, what do you think about like four months from now trying to do this 5k or, Hey, what do you think, you know, you know, and even it can be sidebar conversations. Like, what are you up to this weekend? Or what are you going to, what's, what are your big goals this summer? Do you have any plans or any trips or anything? I'm like, well, you know, I kind of wanted to take this like kayaking trip, but I just don't know if I have the upper body strength and endurance to kayak like 15, 20 miles a day for four days. Well, you know what? I tell them like, why don't we train for that? And then we start to build in these self-actualized goals. Like maybe she didn't realize that that was actually something she wanted to achieve and was paranoid she couldn't do. And so as a result, she was holding herself back from doing it. So let's start to train for that. And I've got another girl who wants to be able to carry her canoe up by like the, I don't know the proper terminology of it, but this was pre COVID the way that we were testing her milestones with her fitness was how much easier it got every two weeks for her to manipulate her canoe overhead and then like rack it onto her car. And just seeing how, you know, from day one, you struggle to get it up to day, you know, six weeks later, you've got the leg strength and the core strength and the upper body strength to actually do these things in your day to day life that were really hard previously. So I still try with what I do to like help my clients actualize dreams that they didn't know that they had. So like, how can we build in some milestones? Because when you start to see your strengths and your body and your physique and all this stuff changing in these milestones, it's a very rewarding, like positive reinforcing behavior cycle that you're getting into. And the more that you can stay in that cycle, just the more reinforcement you have that what you're doing is good and right. I'm using air quotes. And then you'll just keep doing that. And that's what we need when it comes to creating a routine and something that we actually want to stick to. So, and that can be really fun for a lot of clients, but then we also take times in which we just take a break from having a goal and just move to move and experiment with our bodies and, you know, try fun things to see what they're capable of. But yeah, that's a really fun, like playful side of stuff for me too. I really enjoy that with my, with my folks.
Katie
I feel like that goal setting is super important, not just because A, if you do complete the goal, the satisfaction of that alone is going to be a positive impact on your mental health, just knowing that you completed something, A. B, you get the benefit of whatever it was you wanted to do. So, you know, your client who is trying to lift her canoe, now she can do that. So there's an actual achieved goal that she can now participate in whatever she wanted to do. But see, also, if you don't complete your goal, you're still better off. You know, maybe you can't do the four-day kayaking trip you wanted to do, but maybe now you can move your kayak by yourself. And so now you can start kayaking in order to get to that goal maybe next year. You know, you're not going to come out of it. It's not a win or lose. I didn't complete my goal, so I just wasted all that time. you know you didn't complete the goal but maybe you completed 80 percent of what you needed to do and now you're 80 percent better than you were
Sara
you know I think there's a saying though I'm gonna misquote it because I don't know it but I'm sure it goes something along the lines of even if you don't get to the destination no one ever regrets the journey you know you're not you don't ever chances are you're not going to regret doing something just because you didn't arrive where you thought you were going to be because you're going to learn so much along the way about yourself and have so many unique experiences that you wouldn't have had, that that makes it worth it. You know, my, my, my girls that come to me and they say they want to be able to lead climb with no takes, you know, a five 11 something, you know, in, in two months. And that's why we change up our programming. COVID can jump in and they can not actualize that in a timeline that they had initially desired, but it doesn't mean that they didn't generate enormous strength physically and mentally by trying to train for that goal. So, you know, I'm trying to think of like what goals I have right now. I think for me and you know, my boyfriend, he's got these goals on his buddies right now. Cause they're all playing, they're all training for like elk season and elk season's not until September. So it's like way ahead of the curve, but they're compulsive. So, but they're like strapping backpacks on their backs and like running up the sides of like mountains right now. And so I've kind of gotten caught up in the hub love of it. And I'm doing a lot more like trail running up in Klein Hills just so that I can, just so I can pack out meat. You know, I'm, I have a lot of hunting trips planned in the, in later this year, and I need to be able to, you know, continue to pack out my meat and pack in gear and pack out gear. And there's a lot of, success and, pride that I have when I can hunt and harvest and then pack out my own animal. Be completely self-sustainable. It's, it is, I, there are, there are very few words and like ways I can describe what that feels like. And hunting has 110% reframed my personal approach to my body and my health. And so have things like camping alone. Obviously, I have a boyfriend now, so I camp alone less frequently. But I absolutely love camping and fishing at 7,000 feet by myself for four days. And it's really important to me that I can scale down a steep ravine safely and get up out of it and using my hands and my legs and my core and not, not just struggle through it, but safely be able to get in and out when I'm, you know, outside of self-service miles away from anyone and by myself with my dog. Like it's, it's really important that our bodies can perform for us if we're going to be doing that kind of stuff, not just for our own peace of mind, it's almost a social responsibility for us to go put ourselves in those situations that we can potentially endanger ourselves and then have to call in search and rescue and endanger volunteers to come get us out. I mean, that's a, that's a real irresponsible thing to do. So if I'm going to be doing that, I need to take my, you know, supplies preparation seriously, as well as the physical. And I feel the same way for my clients. I want my clients to be getting in and out of situations that they are safe and competent to handle.
Katie
This is kind of a side tangent, but it's something that I kind of wanted to bring up. I was going to bring it up later, but I think this is a good time based on what you just said. But I think that is kind of an understated quality, basically being completely self-sufficient and knowing that you have put in the work to be as efficient and safe and strong as you can be just beyond the I you know I want to be able to hike up this faster or I want to make it to this destination just just for the sake of it but like you said I like to go on one or two solo camping trips a year too partially just to acknowledge that I'm brave enough to do it because like you said as a woman camping alone it can be scary. And I like to put myself in that scary situation to prove to myself that I can do it and to train myself with that fear, because I know it's mostly an irrational fear. But in doing so, I need to feel like I've prepared myself well enough to do it, that I'm not going to need to call for help or get myself in a sticky situation. And it brought me to the topic that I wanted to touch on later but and that's just self-discipline I feel like that has been it's it's come to light I think a little bit more since coronavirus hit because people have seemed to either go one of two ways they're either like this is my time I've got time now I should work on myself I should use this time to put in work and better myself and the other the other group is I i should take this time to take care of myself but in a different way in a like it's okay if I if I want to sit down and binge watch Netflix because this is a hard time and I don't I don't want to you know place judgment on either of these these groups because you know things are so up in the air right now people are in different situations but I feel like the idea of self-discipline right now is something that needs to be you know considered by a lot of people what happens when shit hits the fan and you need to take care of yourself. I think having the skills to face situations, whether it's camping alone or, I've got all this time now and I don't know what to do with it. Uh, just having a little bit of self-discipline. I saw, I, did you see the, the, pushup challenge that was going on recently on Instagram where people were, you know, challenging each other to do 10 pushups? I think I participated that in that early on. Yes. So I didn't really know how to feel about it. I didn't, you know, get requested to do it or anything. But so I saw someone complaining that they were upset about it because they weren't able to do a pushup. And it was they didn't like that they were seeing other people doing it because it made them self-conscious about not being able to do a pushup. And my reaction to that was, well, why don't you work toward that then? Like, use that as motivation to do one. I mean, there are like 900 different variations on how to do a push-up.
Sara
Sure, that too. I mean, like, go off an elevated bench where your hands are, like, on the side of, I mean, you can do a push-up against a wall and still start to progress towards that push-up, you know? I mean, so obviously someone was triggered about their own inadequacies and also probably felt shameful of their lack of framework or whatever it is to help them get what they want. You know, when we aren't satisfied with our abilities and we see someone else doing something, it's really easy to project our shit onto someone else. And, you know, that's unfortunate, but it is what the name of the game is for some people. And on the other hand, you know, there are so many resources and stuff available that if someone really wants to do something, there are so many ways like to do it. My whole thing is tearing down that fitness and nutrition is time-consuming and complicated. I'm also all about tearing down the facade that it's hard and there's always a way to start something and you don't know until you do it. And just to kind of jump back on that thing that you said with the two classes of people right now and self-resiliency and like self-discipline, you know, I definitely don't want to pass any judgment either because this COVID quarantine time has not been the time in which I pull out, you know, another side hustle, like all the means are where it's like, if you don't have a side hustle after, you know, COVID, are you even serious about what you want? I mean, this has been a very, you know, very insane time for a lot of people on a lot of levels. And right now may not be the time to burn the candle at both ends and create a side hustle or, you know, start trail running 50 miles a week. But it is a good time, like you said, one, to really take care of ourselves and really take care of our bodies. We're less busy than we've ever been because we're not driving, we're not commuting, we're not having all these extra responsibilities in our days. We have the time right now to care for our bodies and to move our bodies and to fuel our bodies with food. And there are resources available and you can find access to food to make sure that you can provide yourself with that food. And there are resources available for people that are struggling with food and procuring those things right now. So, the self-discipline side of it and the self-reliance I, you know, last year I was super, super single. Like I'd been like really single for about two, two, three years, two years. And I was like, you know, the year preceding, summer preceding last, I didn't do a lot of stuff. I did some stuff. I would fish alone and do all that stuff. But I wasn't like really pushing the boundaries of my explorations. You know, as an entrepreneur, I have a fairly flexible schedule. I can set my own hours for the most part outside of my client appointments. And so I found myself with like a lot of three and four day weekends. And because I was single and not all of my friends had as much flexibility, I decided last year, I was like, you know what, this is, this is bullshit. Like I want to do these things. I want to, I want to hike. I want to camp. I want to travel. I want to explore. And if the only thing holding me back is not having someone to go with, I'm not going to do that anymore. And that's also the reason why I traveled around the world by myself when I was 19, I've always kind of been like that, but I'd forgotten about it for a while. Last year, I probably spent every other week for about four months. I was camping about six to 10 days a month for about four months. 95% of it was by myself and my dog, which was basically not by myself. and it was remarkable it was beautiful there's a really there's a lot to be said about being on your own time and being on your own agenda and waking up when you want to wake up and leaving a fishing spot when you want to leave it and staying as long as you want to stay and not being tied down to somebody you don't have to ask anybody like do you want to move to the next spot what do you want for lunch do you want to stop for lunch do you need water what do you need out of my pack It's super liberating. It's amazing. It was amazing. I had, you know, I had, I had some incredible, incredible fishing trips last year and I am chomping at the bit to get back out. Um, this year, it's been a little bit slow cause I have been trying to be really respectful of like local water over the last month with COVID going on. Um, but in with the time of the year, Everything's frozen over up high anyways. But learning how to do that on my own, take care of myself in the wilderness, be at 7,000 feet with no cell service and having to cook my own, find my own water, carry my own gun, take care of my own fishing stuff. I was always practicing catch and release last year. I haven't really practiced a ton of like catch and keep because I haven't needed to when I'm on the water, but you really develop a deeper sense, especially as a woman. I find, I don't know, I'm not trying to just speak to women, but for me, it really helped me develop my confidence in the outdoors and the ability to face like kind of sketchy and scary situations. Like when I thought there were bears outside the car and like, what am I going to do at 7,000? I was like 8,000 feet, seven, five or something in Wyoming by myself in this one area. And I had been fishing just this beautiful glacial stream for a day and a half. And just like, Western slope, cut throats, just gorgeous 18 inch fish. All of them, all of them, all of them, just beautiful fishing, like a day I'll never forget. And I'm car camping that night. and I've got the dog and I like to bring my Netflix and like on my iPad and maybe like watch a show as I'm going to bed you know with the sun setting because when you're camping alone it does get a little lonely in those down hours
Katie
you also realize how much extra time you have because you get back to the tent and you're like well I ate it's like six like now what do I do for the next couple hours until I can fall asleep I've got a book yeah I'm gonna get bored after an hour and then I'm just sitting here
Sara
yep so girl you know I was like in the back of my forerunner with the with the tailgate up, my twinkle lights on my, like, sometimes I'll give myself like a facial. I'll like clean my skin, watch a big old Netflix, drink a beer, and just literally have the time of my life. And doing that over and over and over again, showed me first and foremost, that I was physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally capable of doing that. And that's a confidence that carries through all areas of your life. Yes, I agree. All areas. And, you know, it was late last year that I actually, last, last fall was the first time I started hunting. I just started hunting. And that kind of adds a whole other layer into this self-discipline, self-reliancey. And I'm experiencing that tenfold now because we aren't buying meat in, you know, what's going on right now with the supply chains, there's not a lot of meat available. And so we've been just eating our own meat. You know, my boyfriend hunts and I hunt, but I will mention right now, he didn't take animals last year. So primarily my meat is the only meat in the freezer, not tooting my own horn, but a little toot of my own horn.
Katie
Just a little toot.
Sara
I mean, it makes me kind of feel good.
Katie
No, it does. I agree.
Sara
I mean, like most of the meat that's in the freezer is mine. And I don't take that lightly. I mean, hunting is a huge, a huge different thing. But with COVID and everything that's going on, it feels really good to know that I can provide meat from my house and myself and my family, my boyfriend. And as a result of COVID starting up a couple, about five, four weeks ago, we started our own produce gardens. And so we're actually growing produce now as well, because we're just like, well, I'm just going to go full blown hunter gatherer here and, you know, not have to rely on the supply chain demands that is already, you know, stressed. And I, you know, we want to eat healthy. We like, we like green smoothies. We like salads and we like fresh produce. And with, with us going to the stores less frequently because of safety concerns, how can we get that produce in the house? Grow it.
Katie
Right.
Sara
So we started growing it.
Katie
I know we've gotten a bit off the like the physical side and
Sara
tangent.
Katie
Oh, no, no. I think it I think it's really relevant because I know we've gotten off the fitness specifically and we'll get back onto that. But that goes hand in hand. The idea of your program, which is, you know, being as good as you can be for the things you want to do. That's just like a microcosm of being self-sufficient in general. You know, I if you want to hike to the top of the mountain, that's still you relying on your power like no one else can get you to the top of that mountain. If you want to wait in the, wait across the river and it's, you know, it requires strong legs. No one else is going to carry you across that river. You need to do it. And I think that's just a, you know, a small portion of like what you're talking about. We've been feeling the same thing. We've got two deer in the freezer and it feels really nice to know that if all the meat were gone from the store tomorrow, we'd be okay. And we've got a garden going. And I think the type of personality who wants to, you know, for example, you don't need to be in peak physical condition to go fishing. Anyone can go out and cast a line. But if you want to be your best while doing that, it's going to be easier if you've put in the work to be at your peak physical condition. And it's the same way now. Yes, most people will fare through this coronavirus just fine. That's why we have protections in place to help people when they're struggling. And like you said earlier, I'm not here to pass judgment on anyone who's struggling right now because these are, you know, unprecedented times and not everyone has afforded the same privileges that we have. But that said, there's also a way to prepare for things like this. When things go south, having things prepared and being, you know, knowing that you can count on yourself to take care of yourself is a very comforting feeling. And I think that that goes hand in hand with just taking care of yourself physically. It kind of permeates your whole life and the mindset you get from it.
Sara
It really does. And it is more than just, this is when you were talking about this, it reminded me of an extension I wanted to make on that. I was explaining to you all the trips I had last year. And what is really common for a lot of people is we make these strides. We start to gain this momentum. Okay. I'm going to start working out a little bit more consistently. I'm going to start incorporating some smoothies or some more fresh produce into I'm going to make these XYZ changes. And being who we are, us adventuring folk, here comes Thursday, Friday, we're out. Summer season, okay, next week, Thursday, Friday, we're out. So what I just said was I camped that country for around an average of 10 days a month every about four or five months last year. if I hadn't figured out how to take my health on the road with me, what happens is what happens to a lot of people. You get on track, quote unquote. You start to do the movement. You start to do the eating Monday through Thursday. Friday comes around. You're on the river. You're drinking cases of beer. You've got shitty food. You're just dropping all the stuff that you just did. And then you go back on Monday, you do it again for another four days, again, another trip out the window. So that is what holds a lot of people back from ever taking the initiative or the start. They're like, well, how is this going to work? And people don't see the end because it's so far away. When what we want to look at is what are some really simple strategies that you can do on a daily basis with your nutrition that surprise, I'll tell you the secret, they correlate really well on the road. I, it's one of the things that I love teaching my clients is okay, what can we do comprehensively with your nutrition that is sustainable long-term. And that's very unique per person because it's going to look unique to you and your lifestyle. But if what you're doing Monday through Thursday cannot carry over Friday through Sunday, it will not work long-term because you'll just start, stop, start, stop, start, stop, which is exhausting. It's ineffective. It's time consuming. It's complicated and it costs a lot of money. People don't like it. You're not going to do it. So the ultimate goal is what can you do Monday through Sunday? You can have a couple glasses of wine. You can have a couple of beers. You can have, you know, hard seltzers on the river. You can find these staple meals for like breakfast and lunch that you can pack up in a cooler and take on your road trip with you and have so that you're not spending a ton of money eating out so that you're not eating a whole bunch of shitty food that's also going to make you feel bad when you're hiking five six eight miles a day fishing or you know hiking for an alpine lake you know we've got to think about how can we sustain this active lifestyle for me and for my clients our bodies and our workouts and our nutrition here in the city are for the purpose of making sure that we can adventure as long and as hard for years and years and years and years and years. And if we want to do that healthfully without diseases and injuries and ailments to our bodies, we have to find a way for it to be seamless, not seamless. That's a bad use of words. We have to find a way for it to transition and carry over from Monday to Thursday into Friday through Sunday, month in and month out. It doesn't mean it's always going to be perfect and always going to be the same over and over and over, but we've got to find those daily non-negotiables and those weekly goals with our nutrition that it's common sense. Okay. You like breakfast of eggs and some bacon and maybe some tomatoes and like lettuce and some guacamole. So all last summer, my breakfast that I prepped on the road was the same thing I had in the house. So I would literally just buy extra and take it on the road. I had a butter lettuce, a whole bunch of hard boiled eggs, a whole bunch of turkey bacon, a whole bunch of sliced tomatoes and guacamole. So I'm having these like protein vegetable lettuce wraps every morning for breakfast when I'm on, on in the back country, because I don't cook a ton when I'm by myself. Like I'm not going to fire up the Coleman every time I want to eat. It's You're eating like breakfast burritos, which are nothing, there's nothing wrong with them if you, if you prepare them yourself and kind of put your ingredients in them. So what I'm trying to say in a very long winded half, half a beer, half a beer route is we, we, we, we think in tunnel vision and we think, well, how can I be healthy on the road? How can I be healthy in the back country? How can I be healthy when I'm in a car on a, on a four day car trip, road trip? Like there are so many ways that you can carry over the healthy habits you have at home in the house. You can carry them into your office when we go back out of our stay at home orders and you can carry them into the car and into the back country. It does take a little bit of planning. It does take some forethought and foresight, but at the end of the day, you're going to be able to adventure more because you're going to save money. You're going to be able to adventure longer and harder because you're going to be healthier and you're going to offset the expenses of what you're doing by just preparing a little bit. You know, it's basically like food prep while you're in the back country. So, I wanted to make sure I didn't forget that. Cause that's a big one of like, how, why does this matter? If we can't figure out a way to make this work in our quote unquote adventure life all the time in the gym here and all the food prep and work that we do on our nutrition, if it just goes down the drain every time we're in the back country and we're in the back country, you know, two, three times a for a couple days each time like we're just spinning our wheels
Katie
right especially when that's the time that really matters the most in terms of fueling yourself you know if you're eating healthy during the week because you're like I really want to be good at hiking and then when you go hiking you're like well I gotta stop it I gotta stop McDonald's on the way because I'm out of time and then all I'm gonna eat on the trail is a handful of like sugar granola bars and like if if that's what you're working toward why are you not fueling for that while you're while you're out there if that's the whole goal but do I know you you mentioned this and I was really excited to to talk to you about this because this is something that I've struggled with I'm I'm fairly good about staying on track when I'm home and I'm not I'm not the type that eats like a bad meal and then thinks like well I'm off track so like it's all lost like I'm pretty good about putting myself back on track when I've had to veer off and that happens you know like maybe you are in the road and you ran out of time because you had to stay late at work or something like it you know it's not all or nothing. If you miss a meal, you just get back on track with the next one. But with a little forethought, that should only happen once or twice at a time, not the entire weekend. Like you said, most of us are going for an entire weekend and it's a predictable thing. Every Thursday or Friday, we're driving out. Every Sunday, we're coming back. So it's one thing you have to miss that meal that night, but you can still plan for the rest of the weekend. So do you have any tips on how to prepare some generally healthy meals that are pretty easy to take on the road?
Sara
Yeah. So I'll dig back into what I predominantly did all of last summer. And as a result, I've encouraged a lot of my clients with very similar lifestyles to explore these same eating frameworks and ideas. So first and foremost, one thing you mentioned is when you quote unquote kind of, you're throwing a curveball is what I call it. You're working late and you weren't expected to work late. So you're going to miss a meal. One of the first things I work with my clients is we anticipate roadblocks. We anticipate a curveball. And instead of being caught by surprise, we take two seconds to look at our calendar and we know that our kid or our partner has a potential conflict one or two evenings a week in which we could be thrown a curveball and not have time to prepare a meal. In those situations, what's your go-to? We need to have a strategy pre-built in place of, I'm going to have some curve balls this week, or I'm going to have some curve balls this weekend because the weather's bad and we're going to be in the back country. I'm not sure I'm going to have time for X, Y, Z. And then we're going to start to build in like two to five meals that are your defaults, you know, and my defaults are required to be a few things. They need to be from start to finish, meaning prep to eating. They need to be done in 10 to 20 minutes max. You need to have quick results, quick intake of food. It needs to be highly satisfying. If it's not highly satisfying, we're going to find ourselves unhappy with it and probably just snack on a whole bunch of shit afterwards and it's going to defeat the purpose. And then two, it needs to be chock full of protein and good carbs. So for a lot of my clients, I recommend that they keep like a multitude of things frozen in the freezer throughout the week so that you can have frozen shrimp thawed with like a couscous, multi-grain vegetable blend thawed and cooked and done and under your belly within 15 minutes. So you're hitting the protein, you're hitting some good carbs, you're hitting some good vegetables. Is it 110% perfect? No, but it's a lot better than snacking on a whole bunch of cheese or eating a half a bag of popcorn or drinking two glasses of wine and eating a granola bar. because you didn't have anything else to do. So in terms of preventative measures throughout the week, definitely look ahead, plan ahead, anticipate a roadblock, plan for it, and just have a plan in place. Eventually it will become instinctive so that you can just default to it. In terms of eating on the road, I already mentioned my breakfast. I'm a huge, easy breakfast person. The prep side of that is easy too. Hard boil six eggs, take them on the road with you, cook up a whole bunch of turkey bacon, take it on the road with you. A head of butter lettuce, a whole bunch of guacamole that you can also use for some chips and salsa and dip. And then, you know, tomatoes or anything else that packs really well, handles very well, stores very well. And you can just re, re you can reuse it really easily, very easy to construct that breakfast. So I like those for breakfast when I'm camping. And I'll also take like a really low sugar, high protein, you know, 15, 20 grams of like a Greek yogurt, individual Greek yogurts. Between those things, you're getting a pretty good breakfast, depending on the activities for the day. This is just like a general fishing day, not a ton of hiking or cardio. I'll caveat this with that. And then I drink a lot of spiked seltzers on the river. My preferences are Crook and Marker and snow melt. So those are really good. Crook and marker actually uses like whole grains and millet. And so their, their hard seltzers actually have protein in them in like organic alcohol. And so they're pretty bougie in that regard, but it's a really nice way to consume alcohol and still be conscientious of your health. I mean, I'll put, I'll put a whole, you know, 16 of those down in a four-day fishing trip easy when I'm out there by myself even I've got no shame in that hard seltzer river game at all you know and then another thing that I usually do for breakfast and dinner breakfast and or lunch is I already mentioned this I'll make burritos so make my I'll go get like a whole wheat tortilla get some breakfast potatoes make them up in the skillet obviously those are really good carbs, add in some peppers and then go to my protein source and some eggs and I'll wrap my burritos in foil and make five or six of them, wrap them up really tight, put them in a Ziploc bag individually with foil. Now, in order to reheat those, you can honestly do super ghetto reheat and put them on the dash. And so the glass like warms them up. If you're driving for 20, 30 minutes, you're driving for a while, like reheat your burrito on the dash turn the heat on too or you can just throw it in the ziploc bag and boiling water on a jet boil so those are my favorite breakfasts and lunches and then for dinner it's usually a leftover or I'll do burgers with the butter lettuce and the tomatoes guacamole and just do burgers or something like that I'm trying to think about some other stuff that I did a lot of last year. And for some reason I'm drawing a blank. Oh, my favorite, my favorite, favorite, favorite. People overlook it all the time. And for a while, there were a lot of photos of me in like a bikini top or like a sports bra in the middle of the back country or hunting with just a bag of salad. So those pre-made salad kits. I'm a huge fan of taking one or two of those on a trip and breaking them up into two or three meals. And what I'll also do then is bring two or three packages of pre-cooked smoked salmon from the grocery store. I've been liking that too. So pre-cooked grocery, pre-cooked salmon, a big thing of salad, a hard boiled egg in the salad, slices of turkey bacon in the salad, tomatoes. I mean, you can beef up that salad to be 500 calories, add some pre-cooked couscous into it. I'm a big fan of vegetables and protein and meat on, in the back country, on the river all day. And those are really easy to transport. You buy the bag of salad. You don't have to do any prep, throw it in the cooler. When you get to where you want to go, have a piece of, have a Tupperware and a plate, portion out half of it and then save the rest of it and just eat it on the plate itself. And then some of my favorite like snacks that can sometimes stand in with that salad salmon dinner are going to be like charcuterie. So you think about charcuterie on the road. So big things of lunch meat that are, there's a brand of lunch meat called simplicity that doesn't have any preservatives. It doesn't have any sugar. So a whole bunch of lunch meat, some charcuterie meats like salami, et cetera, et cetera. And then little snackable cheeses. Again, we're going for high protein and like high, higher good fat because it's going to help you feel satiated. And those are actually really good balances of calories as well. When you're just really active on a river all day, I would say that what I just went through is about 70% of my overall food cooler when I, when I go out and I know I got my clients really hooked on a lot of those things too, because once you start doing them, you see how easy it is to do that. You see how easy it is to eat a fresh, delicious salad in the back country with a whole bunch of grains and proteins and like and you don't feel like crap afterwards it's a game changer
Katie
I think it's important to say too I know that you've been mostly talking about things that you can carry in a cooler like if you're if you're probably car camping and have access to the cooler but a lot of things are surprisingly stable if you take them backpacking too like obviously that some things are out like there's some things that you're just not gonna be able to carry for a week and have them survive but there's a lot of things that are surprisingly stable like I get the little baby cheeses that have the wax on them. And we'll take those on three or four day trips and we'll still eat them after three or four days. They might be a little slimy and warm, but they're fine.
Sara
And the same with hard, I mean, sorry, I didn't mean to jump in, but the same with hard boiled eggs, the same with turkey bacon and salami, hard salami too. Like a huge portion of the backcountry time in Colorado, you can get up high and access cold water and snow. So if you're concerned about something perishable, if you put it in a plastic bag and pull it out when you get to camp and put it in, you know, a freezing glacial lake or in a, you know, a snow bank, you can keep it colder longer. And if you're doing a three day trip, that'll keep stuff fresh for three days. And then if you're doing a seven day trip, front load the perishables for the first three to four days, and then back load, you know, two or three days of freeze dried. When it comes to freeze dried, I'm a huge fan of peak refuel. Peak refuel is all organic, all natural meats and produce and vegetables. They're one of the only companies that I have found that has high, high, high, high protein content in their meals and very, very, very clean. In terms of like Mountain House and Backpackers Pantry, the protein content doesn't compare and the fat is a lot more manageable. I'm getting to knitting gritty. Long story short, I don't get any endorsements from Peak Refuel, but huge shout out. They are really, really good with the nutrition that they're providing to quote unquote athletes in the back country. They really do specialize on athletic performance in the back country and in the wilderness. And that food is really good for that too.
Katie
We also have some complaints. I don't know about Peak Refuel's calorie content, but we have some complaints about Mountain House's calorie content. If we're hiking 10 miles a day, and then we'll open up a meal that says it's for two and it has a total of 400 calories in it. And I'm like, I don't understand how. When you're at home, you're like, oh, this has way too many calories. This is just a, you know, pasta cheesy nightmare. And then you get a mountain house and it's, you know, mac and cheese that's got 400 calories. And I think it's a lot of it's because, you know, fat doesn't dehydrate well. At least that's what I've been under the impression of. So you're kind of missing out. A lot of things are pretty lean and you're not getting that fat and getting the calories from it. But a lot of times we're trying to supplement by putting, you know, we'll bring a packet of tuna or something and dump it in because we're trying to add on to the one time you actually do want a ton of calories when you're burning that many calories. And that's been one of our big complaints about some of the freeze-dried meals is they just don't have as many calories as you want from a whole meal.
Sara
Tuna packets, I'm glad you mentioned those. Those are a really, really good option to have in the backcountry as well. With peak refuel, their calories, I mean, we're in the middle of figuring this all out right now because we he has to he does a 10-day elk camp and so we've got to he's got to buy we've got to buy and we're using it for that country we've got to buy a lot of this stuff for the coming months and all of the freeze-dried foods are sold out because a lot of doomsday preppers have gone in and completely depleted their stock and their inventory and so elk season six months out people are already really concerned about getting the stuff so that they have it for six months because they have to have it they literally cannot do it so we started doing the numbers of compared to mountain house and peak refuel and you can get more food higher calories cleaner cleaner product for a little bit less money and I'm a you don't have to twist my arm on that one so because he was it's the same day with the calories when he's thinking about, oh, camp and you're hiking 10, 15 miles a day and packing out a 100-pound animal on your back or a 100-pound quarter, you've got to have calories and you need to be able to access that fuel. And if you're having to eat three packets of food to recoup your calories, you're just going to have to carry so much food and it's just not going to be feasible. So huge shout out to Peak Refuel.
Katie
I'll have to check them out. I've heard of them, but I've never, I think I've eaten Mountain House, Backpackers, Pantry, and maybe one other. And all of them have been, you know, like I don't hate them as much as some people do. Some people, you know, they refuse to ever eat another freeze-dried meal. And I'm not to that point yet, but maybe it's because I do eat a lot of other things when I hike. I tend to only eat them for dinner. And just because I want to be able to heat up water and not worry about it. I don't want to have to do much when I get back to camp. And just heating up the water and putting it in is about as much as I want to do. But for breakfast and lunch, I'm mostly just snacking. And like you said, I like bringing some fresh things for the front of the trip because most of my trips are under three or four days. You know, most of them are a weekend trip. And I'll bring fresh fruit. You know, it's not too much to carry when you don't actually have seven days worth of food. If you're only carrying two or three days worth of food, you can pack fresh foods, fresh vegetables and fruits and meats because it's not going to go bad in the one or two days before you're back at your car. So I really like that idea of not just thinking, well, I'm in the backcountry. I have to have freeze dried. You don't. Freeze dried is what you need when all the fresh foods won't have lasted. You know, that's when that really kicks in. But for the first couple of days, which is most people's trips are, especially for fishing, just a couple of days, you know, pack some fresh foods or at least bring some additions to those freeze dried. You can get the dehydrated vegetables or like we mentioned, the tuna packets. You can throw a glob of, you know, oil in there, bring some olive oil and throw it in there. just like something to add a little more flavor and calories and good fats and things like that to those meals.
Sara
A hundred percent. And I, I mean, last year I'm sold about car camping. I mean, I can, I can, I can, I can park at the trailhead and do a short hike to an alpine lake or I can hike, I can park, you know, on the basin of a remote glacial stream and fish it by myself for two days. Um, with that comes extreme amounts of convenience of a cooler. I've never eaten, I've never eaten so good in the back country and even doing like long day trips into Alpine lakes. I mean, if you've got a cooler at base camp, it's a no brainer. It's a no brainer. Um, I, I usually, I have a 45 liter Arctic that serves me really well for about, I can do four or five days with a fair amount of alcohol and food in there. Um, sometimes I have to resupply the alcohol more than the food. I mean, like, you, you know, you're, I mean, when I'm in Wyoming, I'm fishing from, you know, eight o'clock, nine o'clock in the morning, depending on how cold it You know, nine o'clock in the morning, I'll fish till six o'clock, seven o'clock every day. So I can put a good six. I can put some I can put some seltzers down on that river. It's it's man, that's heaven.
Katie
You know, I think that's an important point, too, is that I'm glad that having talked to you more, there was a part of me, and this maybe came out in the email that we had earlier, but, you know, there's some people that get so focused on, you know, what is the right thing to put in your body that anything that is not in that rigid framework is considered almost blasphemous. Like, why would you do that? And I think I like the balance that you have of, you know, obviously, generally alcohol is not a good thing for the body. But there's a mental benefit to to having a couple of drinks when you're fishing. Like, I really like fishing with a beer. And I think the mental benefit I get from that supersedes, you know, the benefit of choosing an eight ounce glass of water instead of the beer. Would it physically be better for me? Probably to drink the water. But, you know, there's a benefit to having that comfort. And I think it's nice to have the balance of being able to recognize that I can enjoy this and still stay on track for whatever it is I'm trying to do, either via nutrition or physical training or anything like that.
Sara
You know, honestly, that's one of the factors as to why I think it's important for myself and my clients to find a way to maintain these baseline nutritional components. If you're maintaining, if you think about that framework of nutrition I gave you that I kind of go through when I'm in a backcountry and fishing for a day. If you're eating like that and fishing for 10 to 15, 10 to 12 hours a day and like camping, which is a lot of manual labor. If you're having a couple of hard seltzers, you're still going to be under caloric deficit. So that means you're not going to be coming out of every weekend, having gained weight by overeating and then over drinking. So in a way, my balance is I'm going to drink when I fish. There is nothing more like American and soul fulfilling to me than Tom Petty on a dirt road with a hard, cold seltzer standing in the middle of the river. Like it literally melts my soul. That is so important to me to have. And one of the ways I offset that nutritionally is by eating lean and clean throughout the day. Keep it lean. Keep it clean. give yourself a lot of margin in your nutritional intake to have some hard seltzers. It's another reason why I moved to hard seltzers is because of the hydration factor. It is a little bit of like hard water, you know, it's bubble water in there. So it, so it helped me still know that I was kind of hydrating. Now, let me sidebar this and say, I got real sick in Wyoming last year by drinking too much hard seltzers on the river and not drinking enough water. I was like, I'm drinking water. I'm drinking hard seltzer. I'm hydrating. And when I was fishing, floating all day and it was not the case. And so I, I, bring a, I really struggled with consuming enough water on the river. So I have a packable, crushable Sawyer. And so it's really helped with, just consistent rehydration. Um, I usually, every time I crack open a new beer or something, or if I'm switching out flies, I'll bend down and fill up the Sawyer, slam half of it. You know, and when it's wet waiting season, it's really easy because you're not in gear. So you're not having to take your waders off a ton to like go to the bathroom, especially as a girl.
Katie
Yeah, that's a big, big problem. Someone, some engineer needs to fix that. We need to make women-friendly waders. That's what we, that's what we want in waders.
Sara
I mean, I have the Patagonias that come down in the back, but I mean, there's still, it's still such a pain to get in and out of gear. So, but thankfully, you know, we are on a shoulder season of wet waiting season. I usually start wet waiting in May, which is usually early. It's a little early to do that. It's usually cold water. But if it means I can wear a pair of like Lulu lemon, like workout shorts and, you know, boots or Chacos and just have easier access to going to the bathroom when you're drinking a ton of water and hard, you know, hard seltzers on the river. it definitely it definitely it helps because I know a lot of people don't drink a lot of water when they fish because they don't want to have to get out of gear a ton and it's not good to be that dehydrated on on a river in the sun and then also be drinking alcohol we all know that we're adults we need to be more careful with that for sure yeah we've all been there though it's happened to everybody myself included last year it was great it was really great but I caught some epic fish on that day and it was you know I was celebrating the epic fishing with a lot of hard seltzers and yeah that'll happen I didn't realize I didn't realize how much higher up in elevation I was as well and so yeah but that's okay we all learn
Katie
well I kind of thought that this is where the conversation would start but I've really liked where it's taken us so far, but do you want to kind of backtrack and just talk about your business and the way you approach kind of a, I don't want to say fitness because I feel like that's just a small portion of what you focus on. I know you mentioned, is it the three Ms, muscles, movement, and mindset? Like, and I think that's a good approach to take just because obviously any one of those things isn't particularly useful to anybody if you're not working on the other ones, but do you want to talk about your business for a little bit and how you kind of focus on meeting your clients needs in regards to people who want to be better for outdoor activities, like particularly fishing?
Sara
Yeah. So obviously my business is, the business name is called Find Your Strong with Sara. And I came up with that name because I pride myself in my approach on empowering my clients to find their unique form of strength. And that is going to be very unique to them. Primarily I do work with women and all of them lift weights. And so we're all about cultivating that strength and that muscle inside and outside, you know, with my clients in particular, I have a woman that I work with. She's a, well, let me, I have a woman that I work with. I'll say she's in the professional fly fishing industry. And some of the stuff that we work on is really unique to fishing and casting and rowing strength so that you have core strength and you have core stability and function and rotation and you have the upper body shoulder mobility to cast you know spay cast or you know large casting movements over and over and over and over if your livelihood depends on it so we do a lot of functional rotational training and full body utilization, skill building is for lack of better words, what I would say that how we do it. And, you know, most of my clients that are fishing, they're rowing boats as well. So we do work on a lot of counterbalance. So a lot of rowing is a repetition. So we've always got to work on front body movement and counterbalancing that repetition of movement in one direction. And most of the girls I work with that are really avid anglers are also really wanting stronger legs because they're athletic in other areas. I'd say 90% of the women that I work with that are really, really avid anglers are also trail runners or backpacking and hiking and or hunting. And so just as much as they want to be better and safer in the water, their legs need to be, our legs are our power horse, our powerhouse. So the stronger and more functional our legs are, the better on the river and out of the river, up the hills. So, you know, my three M's blended together because people started coming, people came to me and when, when they first started coming to me on my business, I said that the wrong way. They just wanted bodies, like change my body, fix my body, give me this, give me that. And we would always start to work on the body. I'm like, yeah, I got you. I can do workouts. I can, I can carve physiques. I can do the whole vanity, just change your body thing. We'd start carving these physiques in very, very quickly. All this other stuff started coming up with their nutrition and their self-worth and their, you know, their day-to-day lives. Like it was like peeling like an onion back. And that's what happens when you start working with someone's body, the onion is going to pull away. And all these layers of complexity around an individual's health and fitness and mindset are going to be exposed. And if we do not nurture and train and focus on all those elements, the muscles, the movement, and the mindset, neither one will ever be what we want it to be. We'll never have the health we want if we don't have clarity around the health that we actually want and why we want that and what that means to us and what value that serves us in our life. So, you know, I take that approach with all of my clients. We get very, very clear on specifically what they want and why they want that and what they're willing to do to get there. And we work from the end backwards and incrementally progress them to that. And every time we get there, they always want more. They've achieved that goal and they're realizing that they're capable of so much more and then we just keep going. So, I think I answered that at this point at this point I think I've had like almost a full beer so that means…
Katie
I just finished mine
Sara
I'm on a fairly empty stomach so I might be a little biased
Katie
I think I think that's a good example too of what you mentioned you mentioned a couple times during the podcast but you also mentioned it several times in the notes that that we sent back and forth before this that you're one of your like main beliefs is that if it's not sustainable there's no point you know it doesn't matter if you do eight hours of a workout in a day if you're not going to continue to work at yourself over time in small increments and I really like that idea because I think it's it makes things seem more achievable you know if if you're told that you have to do a two-hour grueling workout every day you're going to want to be done after day one but if you're told that you can make progress by a half you know going for a half hour run every day and hey you get to do it on your terms, you have to go where you want and do it the way you want, then not only are you going to do that and be successful at it, but you're probably going to be motivated to do more versus being discouraged and saying like, I didn't, you know, I didn't feel good during that. I, I failed before I finished. And why, why would I even do that? And I think having that, that whole mindset around it kind of plays along with that because if you're only working on sculpting your body, then if, you know, if that doesn't start to work right away, then you're like, well, you know, I didn't, I didn't get what I wanted. So why would I keep doing it? But if you're focusing on this whole lifestyle change in that, I want to be the best person I can be, and focusing on the mindset and things like that, then maybe you do only go for a 15 minute run today because you're, you're super busy and you've got things on your calendar, but Hey, now I feel like I accomplished something and that means I can do it tomorrow. Maybe I can do it five minutes longer than I did today. And I think that that sustainable model, you know, even if it takes longer to get to where you're going, at least you're going to get there.
Sara
You know, I'm a big, I hate New Year's resolutions. I'm a, I'm a, I'm an anti overhaul kind of girl. And what I want from myself and my clients is incremental improvements. And there's nothing wrong innately with who we are now. So we don't need to change everything. And we need to understand that. And it's important that we understand that before we get started and off the bat, it's my job with my clients to tear down barriers for them. If they cannot see, if they want to lose 50 pounds and they've struggled to lose 10 for the past two years, you don't start off with that 50 pound goal because they can't see it. I'm, I'm showing you right now. Like if your goal is here, you you're literally so stuck, you cannot see it and not seeing it stops people from starting because your brain can literally not actualize that happening. It's so far from the reality. So it is my job to show them a more immediate reality, a more obtainable reality and tear down the barrier, make the workouts challenging yet successful for them so that they can as quickly as possible start to have positive reinforcement. They're not getting their asses torn down. They are feeling stronger. They're feeling tired and fatigued and hard worked, but they're feeling successful. They were able to do it because a professional is going to not destroy you. They're going to empower you through movement. They're going to push you to the edge, but they're not going to dangerously push you over. They're going to take you to the edge and slowly start to build that. Wow. I can really do that. I can go that hard. I didn't know I could do that over and over and over again until you've now been able to actualize that goal that once was so far away. But it's like telling someone who's never run a quarter mile in four months, you're going to run a half marathon and you're going to do it in four hours. You know, you don't do that. You're going to go, okay, let's start incrementally. You know, the first month let's do, you know, let's work on some strength training. Let's work on some cardio. And by the end of this month, we're going to run, you know, two or three miles, you know, you, you do it slowly so that it doesn't scare people away. And that's why I don't believe in overhauls. I don't believe in extreme. I don't believe in time consuming and I don't believe in complicated because I've done them all. I've, I've showed people how to do them all in the past and everyone that's done all that shit, it doesn't last. And so they're back at ground zero. And it's because we went for the sexy, we went for the hardcore, we went for the extreme, we went for keto, we went for CrossFit, We went for low carb, no carb, and they all fail us because they're not teaching us how to do something for 10 years. And yeah, it drives me crazy. That stuff drives me crazy. But that's also what I love is like someone who doesn't think that they're capable of doing something. And for so long, they weren't able to be successful because they just didn't have the right framework. They didn't have the right guidance and the right coaching. And it's really awesome to see that they're successful. And it's also another part of my job to help them actualize intrinsic versus external goals. So what's motivating you? Is it something deep within you or is it something societal, external? External motivation will fail us long-term because we are basically doing something to fulfill something outside of ourselves and we'll never be happy with that. And it's only when there'll always be more expectations. Always, always. We're never going to fulfill it. So, that's why when someone does come to me and say, I want to lose weight, I go, why? And they go, well, you know, I feel a little pudgy in my clothes. Okay. Well, why does that bother you? Well, you know, my, my dad has heart disease and I don't want to have heart disease. Okay. That's really important too. Why else does it bother you? Well, I just don't feel comfortable with my body anymore and I don't like my reflection why does that bother you well I'm uncomfortable to get naked in front of my partner and why does that bother you because it's affecting my sex life and my intimacy and I'm worried about losing my partner that is more intrinsically motivating to anyone versus I want to lose 10 pounds because I feel fat right which one which when you're when you're feeling knocked down dragged out like you want to quit, which one of those goals is going to pick you up off the ground and keep you going forward? I want to lose 10 pounds or I want to feel more confident and comfortable in my skin because my sexuality and my intimacy with my partner is on the line and that's important to me. And so understanding that is the first step to taking action on a goal for anybody. And I love that. That's a really powerful thing for people to uncover for themselves.
Katie
I think it's also like you could look at situations and be confused off the bat, whether it's extrinsic or intrinsic. For example, in what you just said, you could view that as an external motivator. Like I want my partner to find me attractive. So you could say that that partner is the external factor. But at the end of the day, that is something that's so deeply important to you that it becomes intrinsic because that you know your partner that's the most important person in your life like you want you want that person to want you so it becomes a part of who you are but if you're just saying I want to lose 10 pounds to go to the beach and have people look at me you're not really you don't really care that much about that because you don't know any of these people so although it sounds kind of like the same thing like I want my partner to think I look good or I want these people on the beach to think I look good like of course one's gonna have a much stronger impact on you and I think that's where it almost becomes intrinsic even though they both seem to start off in the same coming from the same direction yeah I think that's the case with a lot of things just like the kind of the overarching theme of our talk is that you you want to be better outside like maybe maybe that is I don't want to hold up the group and you could say well that's an external factor because you know the group should wait for me if if they're really my friends but at the same time you want to it's not that you want the group to not be mad at you for holding them back. It's like you want to feel like a part of the group. You want to feel like you're keeping up. And it's not your thoughts about whether the group's going to judge you. It's the satisfaction of knowing that you're a part of the group. And those are two. It's kind of the same thing, but it's the way you frame it and look at it.
Sara
It's so much. Well, it's so much deeper. And we've got to dig deep from the get-go with our goals because we will be challenged. In your process, your journey of your health and your wellness, you're going to be challenged. You're going to face extreme hardships at some times. And sometimes you won't have as challenging of a journey. Everyone's journey is different. And if we aren't intimately intrinsically connected with why we're doing something, we will jeopardize doing it and we'll, we'll throw it away. And for a while, it's okay to throw things away. It happens to all of us. We've all thrown our stuff on the backside and the back burner. But when we're intrinsically connected with why something is important to us, in terms of our body and our health, we will always come back to that because we cannot deny that to ourselves forever.
Katie
Awesome. Well, I guess the one last thing I want to talk about, I know we've been going for a while now, especially with our like 45 minutes of COVID before we started recording. I do want to just ask if you have any either specific actual workouts for someone who wants to be better at either fishing or just getting in the back country because I know a lot of people you know fishing itself you're just you're standing there casting it is a repetitive motion so that in itself could have some some specific exercises that might help but also just getting back in the middle of nowhere takes a lot of physical fitness so if you have any specific exercises that might be good for a backcountry outdoorsman in general or an angler or just any thoughts about kind of the balance of flexibility and strength and endurance and what are some good things to work on even overarching in terms of like what you want to be good at to be the best you can be outdoors?
Sara
Yeah, so that's a good question. A lot of what we want to rely on with our hiking and any kind of backcountry work, there's some maybe 50% carry over to what we want to think about when we're in the river as well. We want to work on unilateral, So unilateral and bilateral, so double and single leg, lower body strength, balance, and stabilization. So you want to, when you're hiking, you're pushing off a single leg over and over and over again. So you need to train two leg squats and you need to train single leg squats and a lot of frontal plane and then lateral side to side plane. In doing so, we want to develop strong muscles around our knee joints so that we've got more stabilization in our ankles as well and running the less risk of rolling and doing twists and aches and stuff like that. But also, when we're hiking and when we're crossing a waist-high swift river like you have in Montana and Wyoming or higher, you need balance on one leg. You need to be able to really have strength in your single legs. And so training two legged movements, anytime you train lower body, you need to train double. So like squats, deadlifts, RDLs, and you need to train the single. So single leg, Bulgarian split squats, lateral lunges, you know, pendulum lunges, front to back, side to side, and then elevating your lunges. So you've just got, I talked about this, like your legs are your power horse, your, your legs and your glutes are going to propel you up a mountain stable, more stable, more strong, faster than anything else. So you can never neglect your low body. So I'm a huge fan of low body. And then I'm a huge fan of glute training. So when we're doing hiking and back country work or trail running, we need to stabilize our glutes. Our glutes need to work in order to move our legs properly and fire in the backside of our bodies, our posterior chain so that we don't destroy our knees and our ankles. So people that are doing like trail running or a lot of hiking, you know, things like clams and adductions and little glute toning exercises are really important because most of us are quad heavy and we don't utilize the posterior chain or backside of our bodies when we walk or when we run. So it's the backside of our bodies aren't as strong as the front and that's natural because we have more muscle in the front side of our body. So we need to activate and develop those posterior chain muscles pre exertion, especially for a while, if you're just getting started. So clams and glute bridges and hip thrusts and, you know, donkey kicks and fire hydrants and a lot of adduction and abduction of the glutes is really, really important. And for a lot of the girls that I have in the river, a really good core exercise and it's good for running as well and for hiking. I call them pallof presses. I think if you Google them, they're called pallof, P-A-L-L-O-F, pallof presses and pallof rotations. Those are some of the best core exercises in the world. They're also really incredible for pre-post-pregnancy women in your diastastis recti and your abdominals. Those are probably my favorite core and everybody wants to get fancy with it, but some of the best things you can do for your core are planks and you need to work on stabilization. You know, you can get fancy, but at the end of the day, if you can't stabilize, you need to do planks. And you can progress your planks from a normal plank to an extended plank where you've walked your hands out and you're more of a hollow hold. You can do plank touches where you're alternating your balance and challenging your core stabilization or leg lifts while you're in a plank so that you're challenging your base and your stability. But I'm a big believer that people all just need to do more blanks. And if they're easy, you know, if they're easy, do them so that one arm and the opposite leg is lifted for, you know, 10, 20, 30 seconds and then slowly lower and alternate that way. But stabilization needs to be worked in. And then those pull-offs are really good for stabilization and rotational power as well, especially with the girls that are doing like a lot of rowing and casting. They need to work on these. I just had a girl that is in the industry and she'd been doing a lot of call-offs and she had really noticed a lot of change in her core strength with them. So those are really good. Those are my faves.
Katie
I'll have to look that one up. I haven't done that one. So good. My newest core exercise that I've been doing is just a sandbag carry where I just like bear hug it and walk around. And boy, that like gets your heart rate up too.
Sara
Those are hard.
Katie
Those are hard.
Sara
I've got a woman who's a first responder. She's also a firefighter in one of the mountain towns out here. And we had to do some sandbag workouts so that she could replicate carrying bodies. I mean, in an emergency situation and then carrying like welding fire hoses and stuff. So yeah, sandbags are really fun. I've got a really unique, fun group of clients now that I spew them out right here. It's really fun. It's really cool.
Katie
Yeah, I'm sure you get connected with quite a few fun people. Just, again, the crowd that I think you're attracting is the type who does really cool shit. So they want someone to help them do it.
Sara
It's great, yes. Come work with me. I love working with the – I love it. It's great. It's my life and it's great when that's my clients' lives and it's great when I can help them do what they love to do better.
Katie
Yep.
Sara
Something more rewarding.
Katie
I think that's a great note to end on. If you want to just like plug some of like where people can find you, if they want to work with you. I know that right now things might be a little stirred up because of coronavirus, but also this probably won't be coming out for a little bit. So even if people want to reach out virtually or maybe set up something in person down the road, where would they find you?
Sara
Yeah, so I'm pretty prolific on Facebook and Instagram, and that's find your strong with Sara and it's spelled just like how it sounds except for there's no H on my name. I have a ton of coaching options and I work with people virtually and I've got a really great Stronger You Workout Club, which is a virtual workout club. We meet live via Zoom from your hotel, your conference room. All these people are at home now, but in real life, it travels really well. And we just do home workout programming that's really specific to what I just talked about. I write the workouts on a month-by-month basis. So that's my Stronger You workout club. It's virtual. And then I've got my Stronger You coaching package, which is my big muscles movement mindset kind of branded stuff. And I'm getting ready to graduate a group of participants, a group of clients that started at the beginning of the year with that. So, I mean, I'll definitely have a little bit of room to wiggle, for new, new folks coming in in May. Um, so, but I'm always a resource, you know, if you, if you listen to the podcast and you have questions about any of this stuff or anything about fishing or hunting or fitness or nutrition, you know, I love to talk about it. It's, it's, it's my passion and it's what I do. So I always want to encourage people just don't hesitate to reach out and ping me and ask questions and, you know, we can explore if it's a situation in which it's viable for us both to work together, if it's a good fit, but otherwise we can also just chat about all this stuff that we love and if I can be a resource, that's what I'm here for.
Katie
Yeah. And that's, I think that's one last point that, I'd like to make is that, and maybe this is my personality, but I'm the type where if I see someone doing something, incredible or better than I am, like I, I use that as motivation. Like I want to use that to strive to be at that level. I know some people might be the opposite where they see something and they're discouraged, but especially right now, I'd encourage people to maybe consider, consider, you know, watching people that are doing things that you aspire to do. And instead of thinking of that as maybe somewhere that you're going to be discouraged and not want to continue on, like think about how if you do have some extra time right now, maybe use that as motivation to start small. And even if it is just if people don't have the time or the extra funds right now to sign up for something formal, even just connecting with someone like you to hear what other people are doing and think about how to incorporate that in your own life, even if it's just a little bit of motivation to start going on walks or do a little bit of light lifting. I think that people like you on social media have a positive effect, even if people aren't directly signing up for a program, just keeping an eye on what everyone's up to.
Sara
A hundred percent. And I love that. And, you know, I have a, on my website, it's saraCamiscioni.com. It's probably going to be hard for anyone to spell. So just literally ping me on social. I can direct you to the website, but I have a ton of free resources and one page cheat sheets and downloading, you know, guides and resources on nutrition and, you know, eating on the road and how to, you know, incorporate an extra hour of movement into your day without losing an hour of time. So even if you aren't in a situation, if you are, you know, having a hard time coming out of COVID, even if you aren't in a situation to invest in coaching, you know, that I don't want that to stop you from reaching out and knowing that I still do have resources that are free, that are beneficial and free workout programs that are on the website. If that's what you guys need to get going, you know, that's what I'm here to provide. And I'm more than happy to do that.
Katie
Awesome. Well, I really appreciate you coming on today. I know we could probably go for another couple of hours. I actually still have more questions to ask, but I don't want to take too much of your evening.
Sara
Yeah, that's awesome. Well, maybe we'll have to do another one.
Katie
Oh, I'd love to. I'm ready for a second beer.
Sara
Oh, me too.
Katie
Awesome. Well, I will let you get going. But thanks again. I had a lot of fun chatting and hopefully we'll do it again soon. Yeah, thank you.
Katie
All right. And that is all. As always, if you liked what you heard, I'd love for you to go over to Apple Podcasts or wherever else you listen to podcasts and subscribe there. If you've got a couple extra minutes, a rating or review would also be much appreciated. It doesn't take too long and it makes a big difference on my end. You can also find all my episodes on fishuntamed.com in addition to fly fishing articles every two weeks and you can find me on social media under my name Katie Berger on Go Wild or at fishuntamed on Instagram. I will see you all back here in two weeks. Bye everyone.
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