Rickard Gustafsson | Saturday, 12 July 2025
When going on a fishing trip it is a good idea to practice the specific casting you’ll be doing on the trip. Preparing your fitness for the kind of challenges you’ll meet in your trip is also a good idea. If you are honest with yourself you’ll probably know if you are somewhat in a reasonable state. One thing is sure, you could probably always benefit to be a little bit stronger than you are at the moment. It’s like Mark Rippetoe says, stronger people are in general more useful and harder to kill. And that includes yourself.
Balance is both task specific and general. It is also gives an indication on the status of your fast twitch muscle status. Strength is also dependent on your fast twitch muscles. Wading in a river is a quite specific test on your fitness. I think that strong legs and glutes are very good to have when wading. It helps you control your legs so they don’t flail away beneath you when you need them the most wading in a heavy current. And a wading staff is also good when doing some stupid wading. Here strong arms helps to get the staff down and not drifted away by the current. Add some core strength also so we can connect all parts of your body, strong legs aren’t very useful if they aren’t connected to a strong foundation.
See stronger makes it harder to kill yourself.
If you frequent the gym you probably already are in a good situation, just keep doing your workouts and never quit. But I’ll share some ideas that can help you improve later in the article.
For you that doesn’t have a gym membership you can easily get started at home and improve before your next trip. Even if it is very soon. Some preparation is better than no preparation. A very simple workout is hip thrusts and push up position plank. Get down on the floor on your back, pull your feet towards you so your shins are vertical and rains your pelvis as high as you can towards the ceiling. Do that and try to collect 25 repetitions, you can split the repetitions up in sets and take some rest.
When you are done, flip over to your stomach and get into the top position of a push up. Here we want maximum tension in the whole body. Straying from your toes, really dig them into the floor. Extend your legs hard. Brace your gut as you were about to get punched in the stomach. Brace your whole body as you were about to tackle someone. Squeeze your armpits like you are holding the stupid phone book from dated casting instructions. Push the floor away hard with your arms. Try to do that for 30 seconds.
Do that a couple times per week and you probably notice that things are better on your next fishing trip.
If you want to add a bit more, we add some lunges. This can be something to add for you that already have some strength training going. Unilateral leg training will work your strength and balance at the same time. When you start out with these it can be an idea to start with holding on to something that assists you with the balance and then working on removing the assistance.
Something quite advanced to look into for you that goes to the gym regularly is the overhead squat. It is a hard test on balance, body coordination, strength and mobility. I know a physio that uses this exercise as a fix for everything.
At the moment I’m away up “north” fishing and wading. North is relative in a long country. I think I’m quite far up north and have barely passed half of Sweden. I’m on the west side though which makes quite the difference. Going a both north and west gives a feeling of really going up north. Going north and east and I wouldn’t notice much difference in geography.
Arriving yesterday evening to the cabin I didn’t get any fishing done. But I got to meet the river monster. I went and checked the water quickly. Saw some small wakes and started to head back to the cabin I got a teas from the big one. A big splash behind me that scared me a bit. That was something big. Bigger than I thought existed here. So I’m quite happy with my last minute decision to pack the 7wt and some extra big streamers.
Cheers, Rickard.
PoD: View from the cabin.