Ken Wall

Fitness Coach And Author, Hunting Beyond Limits

Pennsylvania whitetail mostly, with fall turkey and archery bear overlapping if the calendar cooperates. He was his father's bird dog before he was old enough to carry a gun, got into archery in 2008, and has taken two fall gobblers out of a deer stand on the logic that it was slow and worth trying. He has also passed on shots he could have made, because a tag ends the season and he wants more mornings in the tree.

Hunter Fitness Training
Training Over Forty
Injury Prevention
Personal Training Business
Business Exit

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About Ken Wall

Ken Wall is a thirty-year fitness industry professional from Pennsylvania who spent the last decade running a training business built almost entirely around clients over forty, and recently exited it. He is the author of Hunting Beyond Limits, which pairs hunter-specific training with his own hunting stories, and he is now planning the next iteration of the work.

What Ken built

Ken went to school for exercise and sports science after a run of injuries ended any athletic ambition, took a training job straight out of school, and has been at it ever since. The last ten years of that were his own business, serving mostly professionals forty and up, which he exited recently. What he built was deliberately small in one respect: he refused to be the owner who did not have a relationship with every client, whether they trained with him or with a team member, which put a ceiling on locations and headcount he was willing to accept. He has also written a couple of books, most recently Hunting Beyond Limits, a project he says he was not trying to make money on. The book walks a hunter through what to do to stay in the field with fewer aches, broken up with six or seven of his own hunting stories, and there is a resources page on the site with video for every exercise in it, since a written description of a movement is not much help if you have never seen it done.

Ken in the field

The woods in Pennsylvania with his dad, who is also his best friend, is the thread that runs through everything. Before he turned twelve and could carry a gun he was the dog, pushing rabbits and birds for his father, and the personal mission he names out loud is getting his dad more seasons. He says he would run cable to his dad's blind if it meant more time in it, while being clear that he does not want him to need any of that. He got into archery in 2008 and remembers the year, hunts whitetail with a rut-season bow and a December rifle, has taken two black bears and two fall gobblers with a bow out of a deer stand, and eats three or four deer a year. His biggest buck is a nine-pointer that went 140. Last season he finally bought a heated vest after years of calling it going soft, then bought a spare battery pack for it, because drawing a bow when you are cold is a losing proposition.

Why this conversation matters

The useful tension in this one is between maintenance and rescue. Ken keeps circling the same idea from different directions: how you live later is controlled entirely by how you live now, and nobody believes it until the thing is already gone. That applies to a back, to a shoulder wrecked by pulling a sixty-pound bow for the first time in eleven months, to time with kids, and to a business that quietly takes every hour you have. He is honest about being on the wrong side of it himself for years, telling clients to suck it up when they were already spent, chasing numbers while his daughters got older. The exit came out of a plain question, what do I value versus what do I think I should value, and the answer he gives when Sam asks him to define success takes about two seconds and has nothing to do with revenue. For anyone over forty who used to be in shape and has a business to run, this is a conversation about paying now instead of later.

“I just didn't want the season to be over yet.”

Ken Wall

Ken Wall on The Hunt for Success

Sam McGough's full conversation with Ken, available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Episode 19, 63 min

Hunting and Fitness After 40

Sam McGough talks with Ken Wall, a thirty-year fitness coach from Pennsylvania who got into the profession by getting hurt, over and over, every time he got slightly better than a marginally decent athlete. That was the late eighties, when nobody knew anything about injury prevention and the whole program was bigger, faster, stronger. He went to school for exercise and sports science, took a training job out of school, and, as he puts it, blinked and thirty years went by. He is about to turn fifty-three, which is the point, because the clients he serves are over forty and carrying a business or a job, kids in three directions, and a set of aches nobody warned them about. His argument is that you do not train easier as you get older, you train in a way that minimizes risk, since what you did at twenty-two was never good for you, you simply had the capacity to recover from it. He wrote Hunting Beyond Limits for the hunter who is never going twelve miles in to pack out an elk, the far larger group who want to get through an evening sit without their back killing them. Along the way there is a heated vest he swore he would never own and now carries a spare battery for, a mentor's rule about one mobility day a week for every decade you have been alive, a Finding Nemo costume, and a decision to leave a business he had spent ten years building.

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Key takeaways from Ken Wall

The ideas Ken left on the table in episode 19.

You don't train easier, you train smarter about risk.

Ken's whole framing after forty is risk and reward. In your twenties you could mix all kinds of alcohol on a Friday and be fine Saturday, which never meant it was good for you, only that you had a lot of capacity to recover. The same is true of how people trained back then. The adjustment now is not lowering effort, it is removing the parts of the work that are likely to hurt you.
The other twenty-three hours decide the two.

He has direct control of two to three hours a week with a client in person. Everything else, sleep, nutrition, and stress management, has to be accounted for or the training does not stick. He says stress is real, and jokes that the worst thing he ever did for his own fitness was open a fitness business. When someone shows up already wrung out, going back to basic work is the win, because their system cannot handle more.
Most hunters are not packing out an elk.

The rest of the hunter fitness space aims at the twelve-mile trek out west. Ken went the other direction, at the guys who want to sit an evening without their back killing them, who have to get around on uneven ground in boots they wore once last year, who need to be strong on a single leg. Rule one for him has always been getting people to move well. Everything else is built on top of that.
One mobility day a week for every decade alive.

The rule comes from Mike Boyle, a long-time mentor of his. In your twenties you do not think you need it, in your thirties you think maybe a little. Ken is nearly fifty-three and works flexibility and mobility every day, strength three days a week, with some aerobic work on the end of those sessions. There is no workout he does that he does not warm up for, so the mobility is simply built in.