Former Hawkeye Kluver Leads June Fitness Challenge

After losing significant weight after his football career, former long snapper is now helping others improve their diet and fitness.

Former Iowa long snapper and current "Washed Up Walk-on" Tyler Kluver is working as an online fitness and nutrition coach when he isn’t recording the popular Hawkeye podcast.

His methods aren’t always conventional.

“Every day for lunch in February I ate a pint of ice cream,” Kluver said. “That’s all I had. Then I just continued with normal dinners. I was having a pint of ice cream every day and that month I lost body fat and I lost weight to prove to people that it’s not about what you eat, it’s about how much you eat and when you eat.”

Kluver graduated from Iowa in 2018 with a degree in exercise science. His career as a Hawkeye football player ended Dec. 27, 2017 with Iowa’s 27-20 victory over Boston College in the Pinstripe Bowl.

Kluver trained after the season and put weight on for Iowa’s pro day, hoping to make an impression and get a chance in the NFL. Making it as a professional football player didn’t work out, and Kluver had weight to lose.

“I knew I was gonna be able to take the weight off fairly easily,” Kluver said. “Just because personally I’m interested in experimenting with my own fitness and exercise, of course being a part of (Iowa strength and condition coach Chris) Doyle’s program at Iowa you learn a lot. So I knew what to do, it was just, ‘How do we do it?’”

Kluver started fasting for 16 hours every day after dinner until lunch the next day. From May 2018 to October 2018, Kluver said he lost 40 pounds. Due to a knee surgery he had that summer, this weight loss occurred without Kluver working out.

Since then, he’s incorporated CrossFit training and other exercises into his routine and has lost an additional 20 pounds.

This month, Kluver is leading a 30-day challenge he created to help people lose weight. The challenge is intermittent fasting based, meaning there is an extended window during the day where the participant does not eat.

As part of the challenge, which 70 people signed up for, Kluver supplies recommend foods to eat and exercise programs to take part in.

“Essentially it is for people who are looking to lose weight but they haven’t found something that works for them, or they’ve been able to find things that do work but they’re not very sustainable,” Kluver said. “The idea was just to create something based off of my personal experience with fasting that was easy and simple and sustainable, and you didn’t have to give up any of your favorite foods or anything like that.”

Until the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Kluver was an in-person instructor for a gym in Waukee, Iowa. He was let go from that job as gyms were shut down across Iowa due to the pandemic.

That gave Kluver the idea to make the transition to online instructor and start his own program. In April, he launched his first 30-day challenge with 100 participants signed up.

“Those who went day one to day 30 the entire time had an average weight loss of 13 pounds,” Kluver said. “...Then there were a few stories that were on the really extreme end that was like, ‘Hey, you helped change my life.’ I got a couple people who lost over 20 pounds in 30 days and felt incredibly better. They were just blown away at how easy the lifestyle fit in with them.

“A lot of feedback and a lot of turnout that I never really expected. But it’s awesome and I’m using that momentum to grow and hopefully with this new challenge we get similar results.”

Kluver’s interest in fitness dates back to his time in high school. Much like other students at that age, Kluver said he didn’t know what he wanted to do in college. As a senior at Marshalltown High School, Kluver knew he was going to Iowa and that he would be walking onto the football team.

In the months leading up to his graduation, Kluver found CrossFit videos on YouTube.

“Once I started finding CrossFit and kind of researching more into that, I knew that maybe an exercise related field was what I wanted to get into,” Kluver said. “My idea was that if I could coach that, or if I owned my own CrossFit gym that would be great. The nutrition part of it grew through college. I took several nutrition classes.”

How Kluver expands his career as a fitness instructor in the coming months is still to be determined. He said he wants to continue to build the challenge and broaden its audience. Working individually with clients and creating programs with them is another area of interest.

Whatever he does, the lessons Kluver learned under Doyle and the other coaches at Iowa will stay with him now as an instructor.

“A huge part of diet and nutrition and exercise that people struggle with is just getting up and being consistent every day,” Kluver said. “And that’s one of the biggest things you learned as part of the Iowa program. There is no other choice when you’re in the Iowa program other than to be consistent and get up every day and do your job. It was burned into me. And now that is definitely paying dividends.”