You can learn an astonishing amount from dogs. You could do worse than to learn your social cues from dogs – be really excited to see the people you love, take a hint and bug off if someone growls or snaps at you, don’t hold grudges and act just as excited to see the same people every single day even if they just left five minutes ago.

One of the interesting things about dogs is that they are pure association machines. If you spend any amount of time observing your dogs you will notice this. Even people with a rudimentary understanding of dogs know that they learn by association. It’s not that they have been shown sufficient epistemological evidence that if they sit in a certain position they will be rewarded with a treat, but they’ve intuited the association between sitting a certain way and getting rewarded by your happiness and a treat.

But this association magic and calculation goes much deeper than that. For example, one of my dogs, Zoey, is as food motivated as you’ll ever find a dog. You can hardly be in the kitchen doing anything without her coming to investigate and see if there is any potential for spillage. Unless – and this is key – you are doing a certain combination of things that she has associated with no potential for reward. She now knows, for example, that the specific set of sounds of me getting out the kitchen scale, opening the cupboard and getting flour, and clinking glass on the counter means I am working on something (feeding sourdough starter) that never results in snacks for her. So she stays in whatever comfortable nook she’s in. This calculation and matching with previous associations is constant, and if I do something out of the norm you’ll hear her little feet hit the wood floors.

Humans, too, are association machines although I would argue that our association is much more clouded by cognitive burden – how we think about what we think.

One of the big drivers of motor learning is association.

What is the cause of hitting a baseball with a baseball bat?

Well it’s virtually impossible to determine and denote a causal link. Without even looking too closely you can see a massive variety of ways to hit a baseball.

So the body learns by association. “When this, this, and this sort of happen in a similar way we connect. Got it.”

This is, in a nutshell, why specificity is important to sports training and to a lesser degree fitness training in general. If the associations didn’t matter at all, you could train a deadlift to get better at hitting a baseball. But if motor learning were not based on association, there would only be one precise way to hit a baseball and you’d have to train that exactly.

Which is impossible, because the amount of variability required in even the most basic movement is almost incalculable.

Generally speaking, the more refined you are at performing a movement the less variability there is in it – you’re able to reproduce ​almost ​the same movement every single time. Unwanted or uncontrolled variability is seen in unhealthy population such as in the walking gait of people with MS. On the other hand, being able to withstand greater variability and maintain the desired movement pattern with fewer errors is a hallmark of someone who has highly refined movement. Tiger Woods could shoot a better golf game from a moving ship than I ever could under perfect conditions.

The rub is – if we want to reduce variability as much as possible – why would we ever do anything other than the exact movements we want to get better at?

The short answer is – because you have to. The longer answer is that you have to, and it’ll make you better at doing the movements you care about – through the associations it builds.

Why do you have to? Without getting deep into what is a substantially more complex topic than I can do justice to here, but there seems to be a pretty clear association between overspecializing in sport or athletic movement patterns and resulting pain or injury. You might think of it as overuse, I think of it more in terms of what isn’t used. If you’re ​always ​doing one thing, it means you’re hardly ever doing a lot of other things. It’s good to know that pull-ups hurt and you’ve overused them, but it doesn’t tell you anything about what you can do to resolve it. Knowing that you may have underused the pushing and extension functions of the upper arms gives you a lot more to work with. So increasing movement variability is a way to move where you can – when you can’t move where you want to.

The other big reason is that all of those variable associations are used as information that can be recalled later to accomplish the movement you want with less error. Think back to Zoey and her basket of associations that result in kitchen snacks. She knows that the cupboard, glass clink, plastic scale noise on the counter doesn’t result in tasty spillage – but if she hears the crinkle of a popcorn or chip bag she will come running, because she knows from previous unrelated situations that it usually means snacks! Suffice to say you have to move very, very carefully in the kitchen if you don’t want to disturb Zozo.

There may be no straight causal line you can draw from stand-up paddleboarding to hitting a baseball, but there may be some useful association information in that task. Does it mean it should be a big part of a baseball player’s training? Absolutely not I just made that up and it’s way too non-specific – but it might not hurt if they enjoy doing it as a recovery mode.

I told you that you can learn a lot from dogs.

You may have noticed I had to take a couple weeks off from sending emails. The week before last I went back to Minneapolis to help out with a slight remodel of my gym. I knew I was going to be helping out all weekend, but I didn’t know I’d be working on it from 6am to 9pm every day.

On the plus side we went from this:

 to this 

to this:

Obviously it’s not totally finished but we moved the big rocks and now Mark is in charge of putting the finishing touches on it.

The whole project was a great example of how it pays off to develop a wide variety of skills and competencies like I talk about a lot. I did a ton of electrical wiring (adding new outlets, moving switches to different walls, re-routing circuits, etc), some drywall installation, basic carpentry, and cut and welded a big box store shelf into a perfect custom fit for our space. Besides the costs these things would have incurred, the delays in getting them done would have been in the days or weeks.

Anyway, it was a lot of work in a very short amount of time and it gave me a hangover for a few days last week.

I thought I could sneak in an email in the morning or evening, but there just wasn’t any extra bandwidth, and that’s ok. If I’m good at anything, it’s drawing the line where I know I’d be paying too great a cost in terms of stress to do more. I could have stayed up an extra hour, or gotten up an hour earlier, but sleep is something I never sacrifice because the cost is too great.

If you’re just clocking in a regular 8 hour work day, exercising to maintain health and not do some big transformation or competing, don’t have super young kids who keep you up all night, and so on you can probably get away with “doing it all.”

But as soon as your work becomes a high-stakes project with tight deadlines, or you’re gunning for a major body transformation or competitive sport, or you’ve got a screaming baby, or any other number of things that up the stress quotient, you can not do it all.

Something has to be dialed down. Maybe it’s exercise (dial it down, don’t quit it completely.) Maybe it’s work. Maybe it’s friends. Don’t be an idiot, sleep isn’t an option unless you’re into taking out debts you can’t repay.

The key thing to remember though, is that it has to be temporary. It’s fine that I didn’t send some emails for a couple weeks. It’s not fine if I just stop completely and it takes me two years to get going again.

It’s fine if you take a few weeks off from hanging out with friends, or exercising at the level you normally want to.

It’s not fine if you never cycle out of that and get back to a balance.

You are not a machine, everything has a cost, and you can’t do everything.

Let’s say you woke up one day and decided you wanted to go hunting for the first time. You’d run into quite a few hurdles, any one of which could completely derail your plan. You need a weapon you know how to use, you need to know what you’re hunting and where to do it, you need to know what to do when you’ve made your kill and on and on with all the details that unless you grew up hunting you probably haven’t even thought about.

Why would you want to learn to hunt in the first place? Read this first. I’m going to have a few more pieces on this topic coming up as well.

In any case, maybe you just want to experience a hunt once, so you understand what goes into it and where meat comes from when it’s not raised for slaughter. Maybe you’re like my friend Aron who doesn’t eat meat that he hasn’t hunted, or hasn’t come from his butcher shop (where he has a deep relationship with the farmers who raise the meat ethically.) Or maybe you just want to put at least some ethically acquired meat in your freezer a few times a year.

Like any complex activity there is a lot to know, there’s a lot of variety in what you could know and how you could come to learn it, and there are very few right or wrong answers. I think it’s probably fair to say most hunters grow up with it and so they learn a lot over the course of many years without putting much thought into how they came to possess the knowledge. You’re probably going to have to be a bit more deliberate.

This isn’t a game of knowledge, such that you can acquire it the way you might collect facts or information. Being able to hunt successfully and ethically reflects a convergence of not only general knowledge, experience, and skill but also deeply local and specific experience and understanding, something the Greeks called mêtis. This kind of knowledge, for lack of a better term for it, can only be passed on through experience. All else being equal, if you’re primarily interested in deer hunting locally then a deer hunting trip in your local area with someone who has been hunting the area for decades is going to be more productive and useful than a hog hunting trip in another part of the country, which is going to be much more productive than virtually any amount of reading or watching videos.

As such, however you endeavor to learn to start hunting, the focus of your method should be to gain as much experience and applicable wisdom as possible.

What I’d like to do is lay out a process you could reasonably follow if you wanted to get into hunting. The paths you could follow are almost infinite, and it doesn’t do any good to be exhaustive at the expense of being actionable. Instead, I’m going to describe a combination of what got me into hunting as well as what I think you should do to cover the basics to get you started.

I very much did not grow up hunting, although I did get out occasionally when I was a kid pheasant and duck hunting. For all intents and purposes, I didn’t get my start actually hunting until much later, as an adult, about 6 years ago.

I’m going to give you a massive shortcut to increasing your hunting knowledge, but there’s one part of the equation that you can’t as easily shortcut.

You’re going to need a weapon, and you need to be able to use it well. More than likely that weapon is going to be a firearm, either a rifle or shotgun, unless you have some mad archery skills in your back pocket. If so, kudos. Without going too far into hunting ethics suffice to say you need to be able to shoot your firearm accurately, out to about a hundred yards. This is something that with dedicated practice you can become proficient in just a few months, but it’s absolutely necessary and you can’t hack it or skip it.

Simplest way to accomplish this? Go to your local gun shop and buy a scoped bolt-action rifle chambered in .308 and a bunch of high quality ammo. Find a public range, and start practicing. When you can put your first round in a 3 inch circle at hundred yards, you should be pretty good to go.

This next part is the shortcut and is going to compress a ton of learning into a short amount of time. Let me tell you how I got started hunting.

In 2013 my now good friend Aron Woolman was an online coaching client I had been working with for a year or two at the time. He is one of the main people behind the Silent Warrior Foundation and in that capacity was organizing a charity hog hunt for a small group of current and former special operations guys and some invited civilians. Aron invited me and it wasn’t an opportunity I was going to pass up. I’ve since gone every year, this will be my 6th.

That first year was my first time out hunting since I was a kid, and my first time ever hunting any kind of big game – pigs, deer, etc. Each year I’d pick up more knowledge and skill that I could go back home and do more hunting on my own with.

So let’s look at why going on an organized hunt (charity or otherwise) makes the most sense to shorten your hunting learning curve.

One of the biggest hurdles you’ll run into as a new hunter is that you need to know where to hunt, and to have access to that land. Depending on which state you live in you may have access to millions of acres of public lands, but the catch with those is you have no idea how many other people are hunting on them or what kind of game you can expect. This is why many serious hunters have access rights to land that has been passed down to them over generations, or lease rights to land they know is going to be good for hunting.

Going on an organized or guided hunt ensures that you’re hunting legally on what is most likely fertile ground.

Having gained access to good hunting land, you are going to need to spend some time scouting looking for game trails and understanding where you’re going to want to actually hunt. You could be on a hundred fenced-in acres of land and still not see a single animal stir if you’re not along a path or near a source of water or food. Scouting a vital part of hunting that you’ll have to learn – but is great to have an experienced guide do it for you at first.

Fast forward to the moment you’re sitting in your blind, or tree, or you’re quietly stalking through the woods and you spot something. It’s a deer! Should you shoot it?

Well now that entirely depends. Hopefully you’re aware of what the laws are where you’re hunting and you know if you can shoot a buck, or a doe, or a spike, or a forky. Assuming you know what is fair game and what isn’t, can you successfully identify your target? It’s a bad deal to shoot a buck whose antlers are just barely poking through (a button buck) or perhaps not at all so you think it’s a doe. Having an experienced guide along, or at least having briefed you thoroughly ahead of time is invaluable.

I’ll give an example from my own experience. On my first hog hunt the guides briefed us extensively on the difference between a Javelina and a hog. A Javelina, or bearded peccary, for the uninitiated, is a pig-like-creature that is not exactly a pig or at least not the kind you usually want to hunt. The problem is they look exactly like pigs, even more so in the dawn and dusk hours that you’re most likely to be staring down the scope of a rifle at trying to identify. They’re considered pests, but for some inexplicable reason some ranch owners don’t want them shot.

Guess what I did my first hunt?

Shot a javelina, of course.

Mistakes happen, but it’s always better to avoid them. I did exactly what you’d expect an inexperienced hunter to do, I got excited, I thought I knew what I was looking at and I decided to go for it.

(For the record I also shot a massive wild boar that is still the talk of the hunt six years on, okay?)

 

Now that you’ve found a place to hunt, scouted it, set yourself up on some fair game, and pulled the trigger, you’ve got a carcass you need to clean.

YouTube is a great resource for this, there are dozens and dozens of videos on how to field dress every animal imaginable, but having an experienced guide take you through the cleaning is worth at least part of the price of admission.

Having done that, you will have completed a successful hunt. I learned so much on my first outing at the charity hog hunt that I was able to go back home and start hunting on my own.

By no means am I saying you have to go on an expensive 5-day long guided hunt that raises a ton of money for charity – of course this is going to be one of the most expensive options.

But, looking around for guided or otherwise organized hunting options is going to shorten your learning curve substantially, especially if you do so in your area. A lot of the most applicable and useful hunting knowledge is going to be deeply local and specific to what you’re hunting and where you’re hunting it. The broad strokes are always useful, but if you can be taken on a deer hunt by someone who has hunted deer on the same property or land for 50 years you are going to be acquiring a depth of knowledge that simply can’t be touched by someone who hasn’t done exactly that, exactly there.

One final point on this. Even if I could write the mega-article to end all articles that would impart every single thing you’d need to know so that you could just waltz into the woods and walk out in a few minutes with your kill, you wouldn’t want that. A big part of the entire point of hunting is the process, the intimacy with which you connect with your environment and your quarry as you gain that mêtis that is un-obtainable through any other mechanism.

Whatever individual reasons you might have for wanting to explore hunting, I’d encourage you to pursue it. What you’ll get back from it, regardless of whether or not you ever fill your freezer, will be worth your time many times over.

[📸: The one and only Jason Albus.]