How to Finish Your Bucket List Hike or Race Healthy, Pain-Free and Feeling Strong
Planning for a big adventure but want to make sure you’re training the healthiest way possible?
While decreasing your risk of injury?
And making sure you feel great after the event, too?
Here’s your guide to the science-backed way to train for a big adventure.
Let’s go through the common questions, one by one!
How Soon in Advance Should I Prepare?
Timelines will vary depending on the total mileage and elevation you’re planning to tackle, but here are some general guidelines:
Your body can adapt to increases of 10% in mileage and elevation each week. If you start ramping up things more quickly than that, you run the risk of overworking things too quickly.
Why does that matter?
Well, the most common hiking injuries stem from tendon irritation —-which stems from doing too much too soon.
So, let’s avoid that for you, shall we?
Here’s an example of how this works:
I recently saw a client who has overcome their plantar fasciitis (woohoo!) and we’re now getting them ready to hike the Inca Trail.
They were at the point where they could hike 3-4 miles and cover about 1000ft of elevation without issues, so we put together a plan to help them start increasing this.
So, accounting for a 10% increase in mileage and elevation each week…that put them needing about 21-22 weeks, or 5-6 months, to prepare.
Here’s a snapshot of how this was calculated, so you can try this for your own next adventure! See how the numbers increase 10% each week? You can create your own version of this in Excel.
To make your own, start with the amount you’re doing currently and then see how many weeks it would take to reach your target mileage and/or elevation with increasing 10% a week.
If I Have an Injury, Can I Keep Training?
More often yes than no but it depends.
With injuries like tendonitis, your training plan can often be adapted to help you continue training. With other types of injuries, like bone stress injuries, your training would have to be halted.
If you’re being given general recommendations like “rest, take 6 weeks off and try again” I would bet that the person you’re seeing isn’t digging deep enough to find the true root cause.
Most of my clients are able to continue training with some tweaks to their plan. That might look like changing their form going downhill, choosing flatter routes temporarily, things like that.
How Many Days/Week Should I Train?
In general, 3 days/week is enough to prepare your body for the big event.
If you don’t have access to elevation where you live, a stairmaster or treadmill with an incline can help to mimic the training more.
Just be sure to train knee strength with strength training, since the Stairmaster and treadmill won’t work your knees like downhill hiking does.
We want you to feel good going up and down that mountain :)
What About Strength Training?
Generally, 2x/week is enough to support your strength but not fatigue your body to where your’re overdoing things.
The couple of weeks leading up to the big day, cut your reps for all of your exercises to keep moving but decrease the intensity. This will help you have more energy for the big adventure!
As far as what to focus on strength-wise, here are some tips:
With uphill hiking, our calves and hips are challenged much more.
With downhill hiking, your knees start taking on much more of the work.
Uphill hiking challenges these 3 muscles in your hips plus your calves much more.
So, having a strength training plan that focuses on hip, calf and knee strength can be beneficial to support your overall health when preparing.
Uphill strength exercise examples:
Step-ups
Glute bridges
Calf raises
Downhill strength exercises examples:
Step up and overs on a box
Single leg squats to a chair
Wall sits
I hope this helps take some of the guesswork out of how to prep for a big hiking adventure!
Comment below what adventure you’ll use this info for!
