Could You Hang? TRAINING DAY

I'm going to hit my longest shot ever. To beat the sun. Came out. Fun fact, I'm not good at archery, but I do try every day. Training day. What started as a idea of inviting anyone that wanted to come and join me for a full day of training. I posted it on Instagram story on Saturday night, telling anyone and everyone to join me at Spokane Valley archery at 7am to shoot your bow. And then head over to elk shape HQ and join me for an elk shape training workout. And then after that, head to the hills and get a big, long ruck in and call it a day of iron sharpening iron. To my surprise, this turned out to be one of the best days I've had all summer. Training day. Cody, where are you from? Cool. DJ was like, how many guys are showing up? I was like, probably one. So you guys are awesome. To my surprise, we had a handful of guys show up at 7am ready to put the work in. Well, let's go shoot the course. I don't know if that. He invited me out here and there's a lot of folks out here. Excited. I just got off work and I need more practice shooting. So I figured with more people could become a little better. I'm pretty new to it. I only started shooting last year and a lot to learn, a lot to learn. Still, I hadn't shot with anyone for this entire year. I'm going to show my cousins, but the one day that I got to shoot with them when I first met him, I mean, I hit my longest shot ever. He helped me a lot. He helped me on these ink lines. So, yeah, I think me and more of these people, I'm going to accelerate even faster. I hope that happens. I hope. We spent a good chunk of time working on those steep uphill and downhill shots, making sure our third axis is dialed in. I hunt because I get to be close to nature and I find a lot of calmness in nature and it doesn't hurt that the critters taste good too. The thing I like about archery is everyone's looking out for each other. No one's trying to do better than someone. Shooting your bow is great, but shooting your bow with trustworthy peers, that's a lot better. Avid gardener, garden every day of the year, growing lettuce, blueberries, lavender, radishes, all sorts of stuff. I teach horticulture, so I try to put as much food on the table without having to go to the store, so that's one of the reasons I got into hunting. I've been hunting before the price of beef went up, but it's just so satisfying when you've got a family dinner and you've put a majority of the food on the plate yourself. So, yeah, I just love it. Give me a cut or an action. I don't know. That's the first time I've done anything like that, so it's pretty cool. It's new to me. Definitely nerve wracking shooting in front of people. I shoot by myself in my house, so that's a whole new thing, but there's a bunch of guys that do the same thing I do, so it's a little different. I'll piggyback straight off of that, but we talked a little earlier, had a long day already, but this is obviously intriguing enough that I wanted to stay up a little longer and do this, so I'm just excited to be around other folks doing this. I've already learned quite a bit. It's only been 30 minutes, 45 minutes, but everyone's really free with information and willing to help, so I like it. I'm about to become a Washington resident. That's the foundation over there. It got poured yesterday. I will be neighbors with Josh Jones. I don't know how fun that's going to be, but it's a fact. So, yeah, we're moving back from Idaho to Washington next year. It's kind of a fun fact. I'm really stoked about it. What do you got? There it is. I've only shot one and really just grinded the rest of the seasons, but I guess my fun fact would be I strive in the struggle, I guess. Strive in the struggle. I enjoy it. It's kind of a weird thing. Are you cutting pretty easy? Huh? Is that cutting pretty easy? It's hard as hell, but I like it. That's the thing. Yeah. How does it feel when you've been out there for a couple of days and you finally are able to, you know, get one? Ah, there isn't a better feeling. Yeah. There isn't a better feeling. I mean, packing the elk out sucks. You get that high and then you get the low, but there's not a better feeling than getting one on the ground. Yeah. Every guy here has a story to tell and I'm eager to learn from everyone. Just be a student of the critters. Let the critters teach you what, what they're doing. Yeah. I mean, you got to spend time, but it's hard. Some guys don't have a lot of time, but just get in there, live amongst them, see what they're doing, basically. Look where you, where most, the areas that most people are going to go and try and, uh, like, as far as like topography, what's going to funnel people. You can route around that by, if you know how topography works and the easiest routes, a lot of people are going to take the easiest routes. Same thing with predators. Hot outside of that. He's trying to warn them. What are you going to go out to? It was a beautiful morning. Lots of arrows sent, lots of stories told. What a great community. Now it's time to head over to my gym to get an elk shape training workout. The archery community never disappoints. That was awesome. I, I didn't think we'd have that many guys show up, like just with a random Instagram story post, but it was cool. All new people for me, like just great new friends. Everybody got along well with like-minded, shot their bows. Some of the guys got to peel off and go do other things. Some are coming over to work out at HQ and some are even going to do the rucks. So just honored to be able to be a member of this like brotherhood is really cool. With elk shape HQ only being a half a mile away from Spokane Valley archery. Most of us headed over to the gym to get a great workout. Shoulders, posterior chain, and then real sprinty and midline. So this is actually a training workout today. There it is. A lot of, you know, my background is exercise physiology, strength and conditioning. This home gym, this is Mecca for me. This is where all my elk hunting adventures start. This is the foundation and I was honored to show them the way I train to prepare myself for the rigors of elk hunting on public land. So the elk shape YouTube channel has been around since 2013. I've noticed I have a lot of people in the same, we'll call it niche industry and good for them, but they make videos about this cool product, that cool product and TMZ type stuff like, did you hear about this? And that I don't care about any of that. So I'm never going to change my channel. My channel is me documenting my journey to make myself better. And for those that dig it, you understand I don't make titles, thumbnails and content to get clicks. It's never been about that. It's about hopefully one person watching this and getting inspired, getting off the couch and finding maybe archery or fitness, something to help catapult them into a better version of themselves. That's really what we're trying to sell here. It's just hard work. That's it. Um, not bows, not arrows, nothing other than just hard work. It's plain and simple. We had people at different levels of fitness. It didn't matter. We're all working hard and it is really cool that the internet, social media, YouTube can bring strangers together. We're not really strangers at all. We all have so much in common. So one more piece to do, and I think it's a four or six, I'm not sure, mile ruck with some good elevation gain with all the homies that can go do that. And that will complete our first ever, our inaugural training day at OakShape HQ. I don't know where it's at. I think he said something like 25 miles. I don't know. I was pleasantly surprised to see that most of the guys from the gym wanted to go on a ruck as well. Since you have a physics background, my genuine thoughts on energy momentum, well, kinetic energy doesn't kill it, right? Hemorrhaging kills it. Yeah. So, um, super heavy when people say like it makes your pin gaps stay the same or it makes your pin gaps tighter. That's not physics. True. Just isn't how math works. Um, however, if you can get a heavy arrow going, you got a good speed, I don't see any reason not to. It could bail you out of situations, but the lungs are so big and the heart is so small and one thing I think I've gathered from, uh, your buddy Ranch Ferry is he aims at the top of the heart at that aortic valve area. That is such a small space to aim at. No one's going to hit that every time. So he's building an arrow for that, which makes sense. But if you just aim a little further back, you've got these giant lungs. Trajectory wise, when you're hunting, you need to be able to guess yardage. And if you're off half a yard, a yard with a 600 grain Lincoln lung and for a tough day. Yeah. Things do happen fast. Like I kind of have this set in stone rule where I won't shoot unless I know the range, but I mean, I break my own rules all the time. I was going to say under 40, I would probably be fine doing that. So with a certain speed, but anything over 40, I want at least one, if not two. Training day was a huge hit. And I think we're going to try to do more of those in 2026, super humbling day to just randomly throw out an Instagram story saying, Hey, who wants to come do training day with me? And I, I didn't even know if one guy would show up, turned out to be, had quite a few awesome characters that I didn't know until today. And now I feel like I know these guys and they're awesome. Uh, they're all different parts in their life. We share that common bond of love archery. We love elk hunting and we understand the work it takes to, to get ready. And it's just cool to join forces. And, uh, it's special what this community can do when you allow everyone to come together. So I'm super humbled, super grateful, all glory to God, and just hope to do more of these in the future. I'd love to see you guys comment below what you think about this kind of format. If you want more content like that, I'm certainly down for it. If that's what you guys want. And I just want to give everyone who came a shout out for just being brave and doing it and letting it all hang out.