Posts Tagged ‘forestry work’

I grew up in the north of New Zealand. Many area’s in New Zealand are covered in large commercial pine forests. Pinus Radiata that soft timbered lovely smelling stuff. Up north work was thin on the ground so many teen agers and young men went to work in the forest. In New Zealand its simply known as forestry work, not being a lumberjack – nobody is referred to as a lumberjack.

The fact is that my mates working the forest were the fittest individuals I ever knew. Most of them had resting pulse rates around 40 bpm. Some of these guys were small and nimble but others were big like 300lbs and lean.

Seldom did they ever set hands upon an axe, that kind of work was done with a chainsaw.

So how did they get fit?

1. High Pruning

In this video the guy is doing it with a chain saw:

But everybody I knew normally did it only with the loppers because its too dangerous to do with a chain saw. Let me explain the procedure. You have an 8 or 12 foot ladder that hooks around the tree at the top. You take the bottom feet of the ladder & military press the whole thing above your head full stretch. You then haul your self up onto the ladder and climb to the top, standing on the top rung.

You then reach up as high as you can and begin cutting off branches with the loppers. If you drop the loppers you must climb back down & get them.

OK now these are not sticks & twigs, you are cutting off solid damn branches all day long with brute force & technique.

I tried it one summer’s day & my heart red lined all day long while the sweat came from every pore just like a sauna. I managed to prune 40 tree’s & quit never to try the job again.

The other guys were doing 80 trees in a day, some could do over 100.

That’s climbing from 20-30 feet up a tree then cutting off every branch by hand and they were able to do 100 in a day then come back the next day, and the next for a 40 hour week. Week after week.

These useless no hopers and bums were super athletes.

Another job was planting the seedlings & fertilizing them. How do you think that is done?

Well with a 40lb box of seedling or fertilizer is how, then you proceed in a dead straight line over hills gullies, dead fallen trees, whatever and you plant until empty. Then go back get more and continue, bending over, hauling and walking all day long.

I never tried it but some of them reckoned this was harder than the high pruning.

Now you can not get fitter than these guys. This is their job five days of the week.