Can Strength Training Make You Worse At Hiking?

In this episode, we explore the idea that 'incorrect' or 'inefficient' strength training can have a detrimental impact on your hiking. 

Episode Chapters:
​
0:10 
Introduction to Strength Training and Hiking
1:47 
Misconceptions About Strength Training
4:09 
When Strength Training Becomes Detrimental
6:16 
Debunking Myths of Muscle and Hiking
6:48 
The Importance of Proper Messaging
7:51 
Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Episode Transcript:

[0:00] All right, hello, hello, ladies and gentlemen. So in today's episode,

[0:04] we are answering the question, can strength training make you worse at hiking? Now, this episode was inspired by a bit of a strange post I saw the other day online. And this was coming from another hiking coach, which I just ran across into on the space. And in their particular post, they were kind of talking about strength training And essentially what they were saying is strength training can be really good for hikers for a bunch of different reasons. But if you don't do it in a particular way, it will make you worse at hiking. If you don't do it in a particular way, it will be detrimental to your hiking. And unless you're doing it in this way that's specific in quotation marks for hikers, it's not only going to be a waste of your time, it's actively going to take away from your performance and your comfort and ultimately your chance of success and enjoyment on the trail. Which I thought was very much a bit weird because I am all for making training a little bit more specific to the demands of hikers. I am all for taking strength training and getting people away from the typical approach of bodybuilding or HIIT or boot camp or whatever it may be and getting things a little bit more dialed in to the needs of hikers.

[1:27] However, this type of hyperbole, when people are phrasing this and saying stuff like this, I think it's just wrong. I think it's bad. I think it's going backwards. And I understand why people do it because they are trying to convince people to make a change.

[1:43] They're trying to convince people to ultimately go down their route and work with their service. But us in the hiking industry, in the hiking training industry, we kind of do need to do better, in all honesty. Because realistically.

[1:55] In 99% of situations, strength training, no matter how you do it, is not going to be detrimental to your hiking. Yes, there are better and worse ways of doing strength training. There are definitely ways where you can get more results for your hiking with less time and less effort, but it's never a case or it's very rarely a case of doing a certain type of strength training being detrimental. There's realistically only two ways your strength training will be detrimental to your hiking. Number one is if you only have a set amount of training time per week and a certain amount of hours and you do not have a huge amount of time and you're doing strength training in a way and doing it so much that it actually gets in the way of other things, meaning you don't have enough time to go out and do cardio work. You don't have enough time to go out and hike. And literally all your time or the majority of your time is spent strength training, then yeah, in that way, it will probably be detrimental. Not for the fact that the strength is bad that you're developing, but just because you're not focusing on other areas that are probably going to be more beneficial or at least just as beneficial in different ways.

[3:12] You could argue in the situation if you're doing strength training in a way which is so tough and so difficult that your legs are so sore you can barely walk the next day. That might be detrimental. And I guess that falls under the banner of it just getting in the way of other things. So that's number one. If you're doing strength training in a way that the time or intensity is getting in the way of your other training, that's number one. And number two the only other way strength training is going to be detrimental to your hiking is if you are doing it in a way which causes you pain in the sense of so many hikers struggle with pain and so many people for one reason or another do strength training and it causes them pain they do exercises and it hurts their knees they do this and it hurts their ankles and they end up just hobbling around afterwards and again it limits us in other areas in that situation,

[4:09] yeah, it's detrimental. You probably want to take a slightly different approach. But realistically, beyond those two things, even if you are doing the absolute ugliest strength training program in the world, or even if you are just literally following a bodybuilding program, or maybe you're literally doing one exercise per week.

[4:31] It's not going to be detrimental. Are there better ways of doing things? Yes, absolutely. There are absolutely 100% better ways of doing your strength training and worse ways of doing your strength training when we're looking at the hiking context. But even those things that I would consider absolutely at the worst end of the scale, as long as it's not putting in your pain, as long as it's not pulling you away from things, it's still going to be beneficial. And I know, I know, Some people might be thinking right now, okay, but what if I train in a way that I put on so much muscle that it just weighed me down on the trail and I was super slow out on the trail? And in all honesty, no one is going to do that. Even if you were the most intense, hardcore bodybuilder and you literally look like Arnie on the trail, you have so much muscle, that's not going to be detrimental. What's going to be detrimental in that situation is if you spent so much time building that muscle that you didn't have time to develop your aerobic capacity. You didn't have time to develop your muscular endurance. You didn't have time to do your basics of hiking. And the muscle that you're carrying inherently isn't bad. It will probably be beneficial as long as you have.

[5:50] Your other areas of training carried. You could argue in different situations if you were doing actual climbing and you were like you're literally climbing your body and doing alpinism or something like that. Yeah, body weight is a bit more of a factor, but as a hiker, even if you're carrying five, ten extra kilos of muscle, it's not going to be detrimental, even in that absolute extreme case, as long as you are nailing your other areas of training.

[6:17] So please, if you see some of this stuff online, just ignore it. If someone's saying strength will be detrimental, unless you do it in a way, a certain way, it doesn't matter. Oh no, I don't want to say it doesn't matter, but it's not true. Again, yes, you can tweak things and adjust things to get more for your hiking. And that is what this podcast is all about. I've shared so many tips over the years to help with that, but it's never a case of saying, if you don't follow the tips that I recommend, you're going to be worse off. It's going to send you backwards.

[6:49] So with that being said, I'm going to wrap things up here. I just felt like this is an important subject to talk about because I know the way social media works. If I have seen a post or a video that's saying this, typically the way things work is people just copy content out there. So if one coach is phrasing things in a way like this, more than likely we will see more and more and more people popping up saying pretty much the same things. So you may be at a risk of seeing this messaging again and again and again, and I don't want you to get the wrong idea. Again better and worse absolutely but detrimental very very rarely so if you're doing any type of strength training that is 100 better 100 better than nothing keep on doing it and if you want to get a little bit more from your hiking well then you can go down the specific route so with that being said last thing i will sort of say you know what i'm not even going to say it today i was about to talk about my online personal training for hiking and that's kind of going in the same thing I said at the start. Do it my way or else. So I'm not even going to say any more on that.

[7:50] I'm going to wrap things up here. So with that being said, thank you for listening today. Hope you've enjoyed today's episode. I hope it helps a few people. I hope it was a nice just awareness booster for a few people. And we'll talk to you soon. Bye.

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