If you are getting ready for a hike with a lot of elevation gain or one where you're wearing a heavy overnight pack, you might have gotten the advice to just walk a lot in preparation for your trip.
Now, while walking is a very important part of being ready for any kind of long distance or overnight hike, there's an often overlooked aspect of training that you can use to be less sore and have more fun on your next adventure.
I'm going to let you in on the two phases we use here at WILDR to get folks ready for hikes.
These can range from someone's first hike to hiking something like the Tour de Mont Blanc.
The reason I'm sharing these tips is because I had a client who was walking up to four hours a day to get ready for a big hike she had coming up in the summer.
But every time she took that walking training to actual hiking trails or mountains with high elevation gain, she'd find that her quads were so sore she could hardly walk after.
When we adjusted her training, she felt not only more stable on these rocky, steep slopes, but she also was less sore at the end of her hikes.
And I won't lie, she was actually pretty resistant at first to making these changes!
Hiking is about endurance. We do want to have a strong heart, big lungs, and the ability to take oxygen everywhere in our body.
But in order to have endurance in each individual muscle, you need to have a base to build that endurance on top of.
I used a rep chart to explain this to her, so I'm going to show it to you too.
The amount of ways that you can lift 10 times or 20 times or 1,500 times when you're out hiking is relative to the total maximum amount of weight you can lift.
I'm not recommending you go and set some one rep maxes for step-ups or deadlifts or back squats to be ready for hiking.
I am saying that dedicating some time to building up the strength of your muscles, tendons, ligaments and bones is going to make every single step of your hike easier, especially if you're putting a heavy backpack on to do an overnight trip once again to build a foundation of strength.
Back to my client. Once she built a foundation of strength, she discovered two things.
First, she found that she could do her hikes easier and she was less sore afterwards.
And as she trained, we made her workouts progressively harder by adding weight or increasing the range of motion to make sure that we were still asking her body to make her stronger as she kept working out.
So you might be saying, that's great. I'm on board. Let's build some strength… How do you do it?
In our eight week hike ready program we start with doing compound lifts, using multiple joints working at once, through 6 to 8 reps at a time.
As the weeks go on, we focus on increasing our strength through our range of motion. So as our ability increases, we increase the depth of movement or the height of our step-ups.
We do things to continually make the workouts more demanding. At the same time, we're giving ourselves enough rest between sets so that we are fully recovered and able to do the same number of reps again.
But that's not where it ends, because once we build strength we want to build muscular endurance.
So how do you build muscular endurance?
Well again, four hours of walking outside is really good at building up your cardiovascular endurance but it takes something a little bit different to build up muscular endurance.
Muscular endurance is going to help you keep your hips stable on rocky terrain after hours of side hilling and it's going to help your knees feel great when you're going down a steep decline at the end of the day.
In this second phase, the goal is to increase the number of reps per set and reduce the rest period.
We do these combos in the hike ready program, where we start with a compound movement and then do an isolation exercise that works the same muscle.
These kinds of workouts are going to make you feel the burn and they're also short and effective.
By building strength in the muscles that surround the hip joint, you're going to be protecting your knees. This is because the strength load is shared between the muscles that surround the hips and knees for the duration of your hike.
Now, these two training blocks are part of our Adventure Ready Model of training.
A system that I developed by taking what I learned in university about strength and conditioning, and applying it to my life where I love skiing, hiking, climbing, biking, and just generally enjoying a whole bunch of different activities that help me squeeze more joy out of life.
I think our time in the gym should add to our life outside of it, whether that's exploring the world around you or helping a friend move a couch when they move out of their apartment.
But I can hear you asking, okay, now that I know the system, what exercises do I actually do?
A good starting point is to check out this video on my top six exercises for hike ready training.
But if you want to just focus on just executing the workouts, then join the waitlist for our eight week high ready program. I’ll do all the thinking and planning so you can maximize your time training and feel strong and confident for this hiking season!
I hope you have a WILDR Week.
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