By Rob Shaul, Founder
By Rob Shaul, Founder
MTI began as Mountain Athlete in 2007. That July, I sold my first company, and after a few weeks of intense twitchiness, I committed to a new career in strength and conditioning.
I’d always been a gym rat and had already been coaching strength and conditioning sessions in a gym in my small Wyoming hometown. I’d earned my CSCS from the National Strength & Conditioning Association. With my new CSCS, I applied for multiple internships at college weight rooms across the country, but no one would hire me—even for an internship. I was too old—37.
So, I turned my attention 70 miles north to Jackson, Wyoming, with the goal of coaching mountain athletes.
I’m not a high-level mountain athlete, but I had spent the last 10 years developing my mountain sport skills—multiple peak-bagging runs in the Bridger Wilderness, hunting, backcountry skiing, kayaking, Nordic skiing, and lots of mountain running.Jackson, with its steep vertical terrain and short approaches, was home to multiple high-level professional American alpinists, freeskiers, kayakers, and endurance athletes. It has multiple alpine guide companies and is a dynamic classroom for young, up-and-coming alpinists, freeskiers, and pro mountain athletes.In late 2007 and early 2008, I rented a warehouse, bought some used equipment, and named my company Mountain Athlete.
Immediately, I made programming mistakes. It turns out that heavy, college-weight-room-based strength training and short, gym-based CrossFit-esque work capacity efforts don’t transfer well to endurance-dominant alpinism, rock climbing, or skiing. I couldn’t find literature on any of this. There were no books on training for alpinism at the time, and the rock climbing books I found were light on programming and heavy on the soft mental skills of climbing. The little I could find on alpine skiing was in European research papers.
Starting with a blank page, I developed the thought process that has evolved into the First Principles of MTI’s programming approach:
- Identify the fitness demands of the sport or event.
- Identify the exercises to train those fitness demands.
- Decide the end-of-program or cycle goals for those exercises.
- Progress backward from those goals to develop the schedule, progressions, etc.
To train uphill endurance under load, I turned to loaded step-ups and started experimenting with progressions, loading, intervals, and standards. Training eccentric strength for downhill hiking and alpine skiing was a major challenge. Traditional weight room eccentric strength training involves slowly lowering heavy back squats, deadlifts, etc. Some national ski teams have special equipment to facilitate this, including machines that help raise the weight after each rep.
We tried using spotters, but this type of eccentric strength training was too complicated and didn’t meet the volume needed for mountain sports. Then I stumbled upon Leg Blasters—a simple complex of lower-body, bodyweight movements, many of which force the athlete to aggressively slow themselves on the drops. The “tell” of their effectiveness for training eccentric leg strength and leg strength endurance was how sore fit athletes would be after their first Leg Blaster session. Eccentric strength training is more intense than concentric strength, and Leg Blasters tackled it effectively.
I built Mountain Athlete’s rock climbing, ice climbing, and whitewater kayak training with the same approach. Uncomfortable with the loose, vague programming found in rock climbing training books, we put up system and campus boards and started applying assessments, intervals, and time-based progressions to develop rock- and ice-climbing-specific grip strength and strength endurance.
Whitewater kayaking is upper-body push and pull dominant, with significant core rotation and anti-rotation demands. Subsequently, my kayak lab rats were jacked at the end of their late-winter pre-season training—big, powerful chests, biceps, and ripped midsections. I’d take them down to the nearby Snake River in the cold early spring and make them do timed, threshold paddle intervals against the current to develop kayak-specific work capacity.
Mountain Athlete’s unique, sport-specific approach slowly gained notoriety and some national media coverage.
Then, in 2009, President Obama decided to surge troops into Afghanistan. The war was going poorly, violence was rising, and the Taliban was on the move. Obama’s surge added 30,000 troops to the already 68,000 downrange and pivoted to aggressive patrols and counterinsurgency operations in Kandahar and Helmand provinces.
Soon after, I started receiving emails from individual soldiers, Command Sergeants, and Commanding Officers downrange in Afghanistan or with deployment orders. Those already deployed reported their troops getting smoked on mountain patrols. Their pre-deployment fitness training did not prepare them for the steep Afghanistan terrain. Those with deployment orders asked for a mountain-specific training plan.
I’m a veteran and have a military background—but the Army. I graduated from the Coast Guard Academy and served five years of active duty as a deck officer on a buoy tender and after that, as a staffer in Alaska. In hindsight, this was an advantage, as I approached the tactical programming puzzle without institutional biases about how “it’s always been done.”
In response to the multiple requests for mountain fitness training, in 2010, I built the 6-week Afghanistan Pre-Deployment Training Plan based on what I’d learned about mountain-sport programming.This was a simple, focused, limited-equipment plan:
- Step-Ups
- Leg Blasters
- Bodyweight Upper Body Exercises
- Sandbag Get-Ups
- Rucking
- Shuttle Sprint Intervals to Train Movement Under Fire
Progressions were hard but doable. I built the plan so any committed squad leader, up to a brigade commander, could implement the programming with their soldiers or Marines.
We gave the plan away free to anyone with Afghanistan deployment orders. Thousands of individual US and NATO combatants asked for and received the plan, as did dozens of unit commanders, including 13 US Army and Marine Battalion Commanders.
By the end of 2010, more and more military requests came in for day-to-day programming, and I started the Operator Sessions. Soon, individuals with orders to Ranger School, SFAS, upcoming PFTs, etc., began requesting course-, PFT-, and selection-specific programming. For each new plan design, I fell back on those First Principles developed for mountain athlete programming.
By 2012, law enforcement personnel began asking for programming, followed soon by fire/rescue and wildland fire. Today, MTI is well-known and respected by all types of tactical athletes for professional, job-specific programming. Hundreds of individuals have used MTI programming successfully for Ranger School, special forces selections, PFTs, and specialized tactical courses and certifications. All of that programming has roots in the Tetons, in a tiny gym/laboratory where we began training professional mountain guides, pro mountain athletes, and mountain sport up-and-comers.
STAY UPDATED
Sign-up for our BETA newsletter. Training tips, research updates, videos and articles - and we’ll never sell your info.