A Simple Hiking Workout

Today, I want to share with you a simple workout you can use to 'spice up' your walking and hiking.

It is called 'Fartlek Training'.

Fartlek, which means 'speed play' in Swedish, is a common training method for runners that can be just as useful for hikers. It involes varying your pace throughout your exercise, giving you exposure to brief periods of higher intensity/quicker pace.

For a hiker, this could be as simple as occasionally choosing a landmark in the distance (e.g. a tree) and pushing your pace a bit quicker until you reach it. Once you reach it, you drop your pace to normal until you recover and repeat the same thing.

The beauty of this workout is that it doesn't require much thinking or worrying about using a stopwatch or timer (which many people find annoying when hiking), and it can be a valuable method to give your walking or hiking workouts a little extra challenge.

A couple of important notes on this workout:

1. When increasing your speed, you don't have to turn it into a full-blown 'power walk' (if you don't want to). As long as you increase the speed above your normal/comfortable pace, that will work well enough.
   
   
2. If doing this on a hike, you don't have to do it on the entire hike (as this can sometimes suck out some of the 'fun' of a day on the trail). Instead, choose the number of repeats you want to do (e.g. 10). Get those repeats done at some stage in the hike. Then, finish the rest of the hike at your normal pace. 

When it comes to workouts, it doesn't get much more straightforward than this. But it can be very effective!

So, if you are looking for a new way to challenge your walking or hiking sessions, I definitely encourage you to give this a go!

And if you need some extra help with your training for hiking, you can check out the Online Summit Program here: 

https://www.summitstrength.com.au/online.html

Yours in trekking,

Rowan