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For diet, just reduce calories but still eat lots of protein to keep from losing muscle and keep your energy up. Drinking additional water helps keep you from feeling hungry.

Here's the hard part, you have to give up Mexican food. :)

Small amounts of weight make a huge difference in your endurance while climbing and how your legs/feet feel at the end of the day and when you're not beating yourself up as much, your recovery is faster.

I'm 6'0" and currently weigh 160 lbs. The most I've ever weighed in my life is 164 lbs. But I work out year round and it's been more than 20 years since I've had any sort of sweet drink like a Coke or eaten at a chain fast-food restaurant. Once these things are no longer part of your life for a while and you view them as poison, you cease missing them altogether and it becomes easy.

If you live off of meat and veggies, it makes a huge difference to your metabolism. Ditch the bread, pasta, and potatoes and workout every single day.

Don't focus on weights for hypertrophy, but rather weights for strength, which means lower weight and higher rep count. Hypertrophy, especially in the upper body, is purely cosmetic and hinders you in the mountains because you have to lug those big deltoids around that do you no good when you're staring at your second 3K foot ascent of the day.

Strengthen your quads, hams, glutes, and calves. You can do a lot of work just with your own body weight with body-weight squats and single foot toe lifts, which can be done anywhere without a gym. I do bodyweight squats and toe lifts at work. You can get a ton of leg work done 5 minutes here and 5 minutes there.

Stretch your hips and calves/Achilles.

Workout your treking pole ascent muscles by doing the same type of exercise required to ascend.

And cardio sucks, but you have to do it for the mountains.

But even more importantly you need to get your lungs and heart in tip top shape as well as your legs.

If you do that, it won't be a big problem.

But 10lbs. a month is quite a bit if you aren't overweight now. You will need to be careful and decrease muscle.

First off, he said above that he was 245 lbs. He is not 6'8" tall.

I absolutely disagree with you if you're saying that he needs to avoid losing weight fast. Sheep season is just over 3 months away. That's just flat out wrong.

I don't know how tall he is, how obese he is or isn't or how active he is or isn't. That being the case I'll stand by my statement.

The "don't lose weight fast" myth that has been recycled over and over in America is just nonsense. It's always the right time to not be obese.

You may start to see less gains from a starvation diet when you lose weight fast, but that's it and that's the only reason to lose weight slowly, or the generally-accepted 1-2 lbs/month. There is no long-term study/data that says losing weight "fast," for purposes of this discussion, 10 lbs a month, is bad for you when you are obese/have a high body-fat %.

What we do have is gobs of data that show that people have less cancer, hypertension, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease (heart attacks and strokes) when they decrease their body fat % and overall size.

Also, his hunt is in just over 3 months. He needs to lose at least, if not more than 10 lbs per month to be in optimum shape for a sheep hunt. It's not bad for him to do it and it's only going to help him on his hunt and for his general health.

You can stand by your incorrect opinion, but it doesn't make it correct or save you face. Everyday I go to work, I have to work to break down ridiculous health myths from the general population and I do it here as well because belief in them (and there are many) is ubiquitous and ridiculous.

Total faith in seeing pics of a dead ram. Killers kill !

When I drew the tag I was about 215lbs. I’m about 6’2 and was in okish shape. I changed my diet literally the day my cc got charged. I hit some trails near town with a pack and did a bunch of other physical training.

The thing that helped me the most was buying a bike. I rode my bike each night after work, and had one goal- to ride further than the day before. My first ride was 3 miles- it opened my eyes and reminded me how out of shape I was. The last bike ride (day before season opened) was 52 miles. I felt great, and super confident I would have the endurance required for my hunt.

The one thing I wish I would have done more and trained for was the weight of my pack. 65 lbs when I left the truck with the plan of camping for 7 nights. The weight slowed my hiking down tremendously. For reference the trail I hiked took 6.5 hours with my pack loaded, and when I hiked it with empty pack took 2.5 hrs.

Hope this helps! Feel free to DM if you want more.

Lance

Next stop drinking hard liquor. Beer and wine is ok in moderation but cut out the hard stuff.

Next, watch what you eat. Smaller portions and less carbs. Everything in moderation is best if you simply can’t do without something.

Good luck, S9 is a hard unit for sure but a great one for so many reasons.

1- Don't lose the same pound twice ( no cheating!)

2- If it goes in (my mouth/eating), it goes on as pounds.

Be strict and consistent and you will be just fine.

S9 certainly is a tough hunt man.

Good luck, Robb

I find that if I can walk up and down the stadium steps at the HS with ease while carrying a 55# pack, then I know I’m on the right track.

I hope that I’m right on this years plan with it being somewhat focused on getting to about 195-200#, build ascending cardio with treadmill set to 15 grade and additionally doing stadium workouts. I’ll also add outdoor hikes to build “time on feet” conditioning too.

For me I don’t want any burst movement type exercises as the risk of injury is too great. I’ll hunt at my own pace which keeps the hunt fun and productive.

Stay within yourself and get to the mountains healthy. One step in front of the other is the way to go.

Good luck! Once you get to the opener the rest of the stuff is behind you and you just have to do the best with who you are on that given day.

There’s no need for calorie counting if you aren’t eating processed food. Eat every 4 hours or so and no carbs from anything except veggies. That means a lot of veggies. It will melt off you.

Your quads need to be both buff and toned. I'm still skinny-legged, but my quads are now much bigger than they used to be by doing body-weight squats year-round and walking backwards down the stair-stepper.

I'm not a big fan of deadlifts and other quad exercises involving weights because I believe the risk to your back and knees is not worth it.

The good thing is you live here, getting in shape should be easy. Mid week hit the closest hills hard, weekends, either scout the unit, or hit those high altitude lakes you always wanted to fish.

I'm pretty sure you're significantly taller than Forest though, so 245 on you is not 245 on Forest, although I could be wrong on that.

Look, Forest knows as well as I do that he's not new to the mountains - he's in the mountains all autumn. He's already started losing weight. I'm just urging him on and giving him exercises that have helped me and my legs.

I'm not saying you need to be a stick-figure like me to hunt sheep. But it sure helps and whatever you lose is going to help. I know I get around a lot better when I cut even a small amount of weight from my pack and I've yet to see a "big guy" that can keep up with me. I'm certainly not saying any specific person cant, but there is no denying that weight makes a huge difference.

So I think Forest having a goal of hitting 200 is not only doable, but will help him out a lot.

And to the two guys up above that think it's not advisable for a middle aged man to lose 45 lbs in a little over 3 months, you are dead wrong. Losing weight at that speed is not ideal, but it is not a problem in order to get in shape for an OIL tag/hunt.

I’ve hunted the mountains at every 10 lb weight bracket between 170 and 250 and I can honestly say 250 was humiliatingly terrible where 210 was not bad.

Make progress every day, get stronger and have the right outlook. Take it from a guy who wishes he could have a redo on his Colorado sheep tag.

the gym is the place to build strength, squats, deadlifts, and benchpress are the base to build everything else off of, I do 6 weeks of max strength, 2-3X a week, 6-7 sets of 3 reps, heavy weights, then switch to an endurance phase, take the max weights you were lifting and cut them 50%, 4 sets, 20, 15, 13,10 reps, 6 weeks and you should be pretty much ready to go. walking or really low heart rate running is the fastest way to drop pounds, just watch for planar fasciitis if you suddenly take up running. sounds like you have diet pretty well in hand, if you arent supplementing creatine I'd start, you may hold on to some water but the increased recovery is well worth it.

I’ve hit a plateau, but I think I know why. :(

Keep up the great work.

I did a high country hunt last year and felt as strong or stronger than when I was 25. I just turned 62. Push your workouts as hard as you can. Off season, I run daily and do the Murphy at least once a week. Getting closer to the big hunts, I do more rucking with 40-50# in the hills.

Diet is important as well. I'm convinced that if we all gave up sugar and gluten, which is worse than sugar, we would all slim down. When my wife found out that she was gluten intolerant, and we removed all forms of gluten from our diets, we both felt better and lost weight. My constant heartburn went away as well. The gluten we eat today is completely different from what we ate 30 years ago.

Good luck on your journey.

You’re gonna need a whole new wardrobe at the pace you’re going.

Keep up the great work!

“Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor” -Alexis Carrel