Is Cycling The Secret to Lumberjacking Success?
Winning a Lumberjack World Championships title may not be on your cycling bucket list, but if you’re ever interested in chopping wood as off-season cross training, the current world champ Dave Jewett might be able to give you some sage advice. He’s already figured out how to do the opposite—he uses cycling to train for lumberjack events—with a high rate of success.
While Jewett started his athletic career in bike racing, a new sport caught his eye after high school. “A lot of colleges have woodsmen’s teams, and that’s how I got into it,” Jewett says. The woodsmen urged him to try out for their team, and he soon went from skinny teenager to muscular, wood-chopping machine.
The best competitions in the US are found along the East Coast, Jewett says, specifically the Northeast. The World Championships held in Wisconsin this past July also showcased another hotbed of US brawn, though Jewett says the best lumberjacks in the world hail from Australia and New Zealand (“They either get into sheep shearing or wood chopping,” he laughs).
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Being a good lumberjack—not unlike being a good mountain biker—requires a high degree of hand-eye coordination. Of course, in wood chopping, you’re swinging an axe or wielding a saw instead of steering a bike, but some of the same skills apply. “It’s also about physicality,” Jewett adds. “I bike raced in our local circuits growing up so I was one of the fitter lumberjacks. It’s a lot about explosive reps, though: 10 or 20 seconds. So being fit and used to competition from racing was a big help."
Similarly, chopping is all about technique, which Jewett says he’s actually excelled in by using his biking. He explains that he’s developed an entirely new way of sawing—one of the primary competitive events for lumberjacks—and that it uses his biking fitness and techniques. “I’m ranked as the best sawyer in the world right now,” he says. “I created this hybrid style of sawing where you use the saw, piston-ing it with your arms but at a lower level, and using your lower body to help move it. I won that way, and it’s a technique that not many other competitors use.
“I try to match my riding cadence to my sawing cadence when I ride now!” he says, laughing. Biking also helps maintain his stamina for competitions, where there are 10 different events within an hour. Jewett needs the fitness and recovery ability to get his heart rate and blood pressure back down so he can go into each event ready to roll (or saw, or chop). “If you can’t recover, you go to the next event still shaking,” he explains. “You need to be able to recover."
But biking hasn’t just been about fitness for Jewett: He also used it to come back and get stronger than ever after a kidney transplant eight years ago. “I was one of the best lumberjacks in the world but I started going downhill, and the doctors didn’t know what was wrong with me,” he says. They eventually figured out he needed a kidney, which his father donated. “After the transplant, I had lost 60 pounds and all of my strength,” Jewett says. “But I had a Trek, and after the surgery, I started riding like crazy hoping to build up stamina again. I used it every day to recover."
Jewett is ostensibly recovered, but he still rides nearly every day he’s not chopping wood or doing lumberjack-specific workouts. And his on-bike intervals sound pretty damn tough: “I ride constantly to get my legs programmed to piston at the right rate for when I’m sawing,” he says. And since sawing competitions are under 20 seconds and go from a standstill to full-on sprinting, that’s a pretty high cadence. “I ride as hard as I can go for an hour,” he says, “I end totally wasted. I just go out time-trial style, put my head down, and push my legs as hard as I can."
For someone thinking about getting in an off-season workout that will get your muscles burning and heat your home, Jewett recommends lumberjacking. “Chopping is legs and arms and core. Sawing is all thighs and legs. You really feel both.”
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