Building My Balance in the Beartooths
Fly Fishing, Natural Movement, and a Weekend in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness
Last weekend I took a few days to escape the current heat wave that’s been overtaking southwestern Montana this season and head to the hills, gaining a couple extra thousand feet in elevation in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness Area to do some casual car camping, exploring, and decompressing.
With drought conditions on some of our rivers, new hoot owl restriction alerts cropping up in my inbox most mornings, and suboptimal sleep leaving me a little less than cool, calm, and collected, I decided to steal away in search of some cold water to fish and a place where I could relax a little more, sweat a little less, and enjoy some of the last days in July.
High-output backpacking adventures and many miles on my boots weren’t on the agenda this time around. One night in a small National Forest campground and another at a dispersed spot overlooking Pilot and Index Peaks seemed perfectly sufficient. At nearly 10,000 feet, the wildflowers left every stretch of grass looking like a Jackson Pollock—dripping with white, yellow, purple, and red—my breathing immediately became clean and crispier, and it actually felt reasonable to toss a few logs on a fire each night.
I lugged my SUP along for the first time this season and secured my low-key plan to paddle, float, wander, maybe catch a few lake-bound brookies, all while eating well, sleeping well, and taking a break from work, screens, and pings.
This was my first opportunity to pull the paddle board out this season, and what I immediately remembered was: Oh yeah... this is definitely a challenge.
Being that I hadn’t stood on an inflatable board with the notorious Wyoming wind pushing me across the lake while trying to cast, paddle, and manage my balance, I had a momentary, semi-rude awakening while realizing that my body’s been absent from this type of movement for close to a years time. As always, it was a complete blast and solidified my continued love for fly fishing from small watercraft. It also asked for something very different of my body than the wade fishing and full size raft floating that I do far more frequently.
Given my background as a movement and mobility trainer, I can’t help but use moments like these to make even just a casual assessment. My quick mental inventory usually looks something like: Okay, how’s balance feeling today? What about coordination? How stable or unstable do I feel while moving up and down between standing, kneeling, and sitting? How does my nervous system feel? Do I feel confident or unsure of myself? Is my breathing steady or shortened and stressed?
Throughout the day I found myself regularly moving through many positions: standing, tall kneeling, deep kneeling, and several different seated variations. Every shift required me to adapt to what we call “perturbations” in the movement world—small changes or disturbances that require your body to quickly analyze, respond, and reorganize itself.
That meant plenty of stability demands, a good deal of joint mobility throughout my entire body, along with coordination, balance, and continuous problem solving. One of the things that I actually love most about fly fishing from my SUP is that is offers far more movement variability, with options to touch many different physical positions.
The following day, I spent a solid chunk of time fishing the mid-size creek that flows out of the lake.
Again, I was reminded of how physically demanding technical small-water wade fishing can be. And while I do explore these types of fisheries quite a bit closer to home, I’ve learned over time that each one has its own unique set of environmental nuances. This specific stream was littered with boulders of all sizes, slick vegetation, dicey footing, and countless opportunities to lose my balance if I stopped paying attention and being deliberate with my movement.
It opened up another opportunity to take stock of how my body was moving through these environments while noticing what felt solid, what felt more challenging, and places where there might be opportunities to continue improving. One of the things I love most about fly fishing is that it allows for me to assess my baseline movement capacity on any given day, and it also offers me a way to build better movement fluency and body awareness in real time.
I’m almost always paying attention—at least a little bit—to my physical experience while I’m fishing. I’m noticing how my body feels and how it’s interacting with the environment around me.
This has nothing to do with judging, overanalyzing, or comparing. It is, however, about using a physical practice like fly fishing to develop a greater relationship with my body itself. Especially given the fact that many of us exist in a fairly fast-paced world with countless distractions pulling our attention toward a more cerebral mode of operating, the opportunity to steer some awareness back to our bodies, our senses, and our felt experiences is something that I consider essential to our health and well-being.
While I’m out on the water, I also think about these experiences through the lens of natural movement.
I’m a MovNat Coach, and one of the core ideas behind the system is that human beings evolved while moving dynamically through natural environments. We lifted, carried, climbed, balanced, crawled, ran, jumped, threw, caught, swam, and navigated outdoor terrain as part of everyday life.
Being that I also hold a degree in Anthropology, it’s not surprising that I fell into styles of movement training that embody elements that center around ancient mankind and more traditional global cultures. I’m fascinated by how human beings have historically moved, and of course the implications of sedentary culture and the slow deterioration of our physical health and movement capacity post-industrial revolution.
On that note, today, many of us spend much of our time in relatively sterile and highly predictable environments, then having to recreate movement and physical stimulation inside a gym or studio setting in an attempt to reclaim capacities that used to be built naturally in our daily lives.
For me, fly fishing offers an outlet to essentially reverse that equation, where the outdoor environments we move through return to being a nature-based version of the “gym”, so to speak. It’s an opportunity to squat, lunge, hinge, climb, balance, move slowly, move swiftly, move skillfully, and allow our bodies to do the things they were biologically designed to do.
On this particular outing, while I had ample opportunity to do much of the above, what stood out most was the work and challenge around my balance. It reminded me of the simple, and maybe a little overused phrase we frequently hear in the fitness and mobility world: use it or lose it.
If I want to continue enjoying SUP fly fishing, then I need to keep doing it with some regularity, and I also need to continue training the physical prerequisites that make it possible when I’m off the water, too. The same principle is true for technical small creek wading.
The environments we choose to fish and the modes we use to travel through them become some of our best teachers, and in many ways they’re also some of our best training partners.
Next time you’re out, I encourage you to pay attention to how your own body is showing up for you, and how it is that you’d like to continue to move while maintaining your long-term relationship with fly fishing and the places it takes you. It’s never too late to make improvements, and tending to our bodies is always time and energy very well spent.
And if you’re interested in exploring movement and mobility training that hones in on very specific styles of fly fishing, stay tuned for the upcoming release of a handful of new Wade Well Method online programs. We’ll be taking a deep dive into use case protocols, destinations, and target species so that you have a clear and direct path to achieve your movement goals.