Endurance Or Strength Training When Short On Time? (For Mountaineers)

In this episode, I explore the question, "Is endurance or strength training best for mountaineering if short on time?" 

​Episode Trasncript:

[0:00] All right, hello, hello, ladies and gentlemen. So in today, we are answering the question, endurance or strength training, what is best for mountaineering if you are short on time?

[0:11] Now, this was a question that came through one of my clients. And one of my clients, Ali Pepper, is currently in a journey to tackle all the 8,000 meter plus mountains unassisted with oxygen. She's got a massive, massive, massive journey ahead for us, and she's incredibly inspiring in what she does. And we work together and I help her with her training, with her strength conditioning leading into this. And she put up a post or a question up on her Instagram, just asking for people if they had any questions about training. And this is one of the questions she got sent through. It went, endurance or strength training for mountaineer? What is best if you're short on time? Now, this is a funny one, because a lot of people will kind of go into training with this sort of mindset saying, hey, I don't have a huge amount of time. I can only really focus on one or two things. You know, I have to choose one thing or another.

[1:06] And realistically, if you wanted the simple answer, endurance training is always going to be the priority for mountaineers.

[1:14] Mountaineers, mountaineering is an endurance activity. So developing your endurance and your aerobic capacity and your aerobic fitness is always going to be number one priority because that is the single most important priority for mountaineering. However, saying that, it is never going to be a case of one or the other. It's never going to be a case of saying, I'm only going to do endurance stuff. I just don't have time. Because if you're short on time, you still want to be ticking off both. You still want to be ticking off all the right things in your week. You just want to get a little bit more creative in regards to how you fit things in. Because when we talk about strength training, a lot of people kind of have this perception, they're like, oh, they think about bodybuilding training, where they go into the gym, they spend an hour in the gym, they do like five or six or seven different exercises, and that's how they do it. And it ends up being a very, very big time commitment. And fair enough if that's what you're used to. But it's not necessary. There are so many different ways of going about strength training. And if you have all the time in the world, you can spend all the time in the world in the gym but if you're short on time just reduce things down, in all honesty you can get incredible results with your strength training even if you only do two 10 minute sessions in a week that may sound crazy.

[2:32] But bear with me and i'll explain it if you're really really short on time and say you could only train realistically two times a week and you could get out for two times a week for 60 minutes that's all i can fit in which is not ideal for a mountaineer in all honesty and if you're training for a big expedition you know this may sell you a bit short but let's just say hypothetical this is all you can do the majority of that you want to spend on endurance training so you may do 50 minutes of endurance work in each of those sessions, and you can just do like 10 minutes of strength at the start. Now, a 10-minute strength session, what might that look like? Well, you just want to choose two exercises, or maybe even three if you're ambitious. You want to choose one for your legs, one for your upper body, and if you're ambitious, maybe a core exercise or a calf exercise. And essentially what you do, very, very, very simple.

[3:26] First set of everything easy do the exercise in one way or another where it's very very easy it's kind of your warm-up you're just moving through going through the movement this and that, do your legs do your upper body do your core immediately go back to your legs this time make it a little bit harder then do your upper body make that a little bit harder do your core make that a little bit harder immediately go back to the top and do four rounds of this each time making it a little bit harder in the end you'll have one warm-up set one moderate set one set that's you know it's getting a little bit tough and then one set that can be quite difficult.

[4:06] That in itself will take you no more than 10 minutes and that in itself if you apply this consistently over time it can make a big difference to your strength it may not be as good as doing in full 60 minutes.

[4:20] But it can be really beneficial. So to put this into like context of how you may put this in a week, and I'm not saying you have to do 10 minute sessions.

[4:27] Like this is just an example of being creative and opening up your eyes around how to approach this. I will just sort of say that, but sort of say, let's stick with this two session a week example. And we've got 50 minutes of cardio on both of those days. We've got 10 minutes of strength on each of the days as well. Typically as with strength training, we want to kind of train the body in balance. So we want to make sure everything is kind of getting work. So in strength day number one, let's just say we're going to do two exercises. Well, let's say we'll do three exercises. First exercise is going to be a quad-based exercise. And maybe we can sort of say, hey, we're going to do some split squats. Then we might do some push-ups and then we might do some calf raises. So first set with the split squats, you might just do a split squat, bodyweight split squat, both legs on the floor, up and down, up and down, up and down for eight or 10 reps.

[5:15] Next set to make it a little bit harder, maybe I'm going to do a Bulgarian split squat. So what I'm going to do, instead of having both legs on the floor, I'm going to pop one leg up on a bench and do my split squats there. That's significantly harder, but if you're doing that with body weight, it should feel pretty doable. Next set, maybe I'm going to use a bit of weight. If I've got a couple of dumbbells lying around, I'll hold them, or if I've got a pack, I'll pop that on. And then next set, I'll just load on a little extra weight. I'll pop a little extra weight in the pack or hold some heavier dumbbells. There you go. Four sets. Easy, moderate, harder, harder. Boom. Happy days. You can do the same thing with your push-ups. You could do push-ups from your knees, push-ups from your toes, a weighted push-up, a weighted push-up. Four sets. Calf raises. Two-legged calf raises. One-legged calf raise. Calf raises with a pack on your back. Calf raises with a pack on your back. Boom. Happy days. That's a 10-minute workout. Bing, bang, bosh. You're done.

[6:06] Second strength session in the week. Okay, we've done our quads. With our push-ups, we've done our chest and our shoulders. With our calves, we've done our calves. Second session a week, we're like, all right, how do we balance this out? How do we sort of attack the back of the body? Well, we might choose back of the legs, hamstrings and glutes. Maybe I'll do a glute bridge. Back of the upper body, maybe I'll do a bent over row. And then maybe for the third one, I'll just do like a plank or something like that as core.

[6:36] For your glute bridges, it may be a case of, okay, first set, I'm going to do a single leg glute bridge. Do 10 of those in each leg. That's a decent warmup. Second set, I'm going to do a single leg hip thrust. So what I'm going to do instead of doing this on the floor, I'm going to pop my shoulders up on a bench or a couch and I'm going to do 10 of those. That's significantly harder, but it still shouldn't be outrageously strenuous in this example. Third set, add some weight. Fourth set, add some weight. Boom, a good workout again. As you can kind of see, like with this type of stuff, you can get really,

[7:06] really creative. That's only a really tiny commitment. You do need to be organized. You do need to be motivated. But even those four sets, of which only two sets are really hard, that can still be a good strength stimulus for someone who just doesn't have any time. And then depending on your actual schedule, you could play around with this. You could end up doing like, hey, I can only train 20 minutes a day. So maybe I'll do two 20-minute strength workouts and the rest cardio. Maybe I can do half an hour a day.

[7:34] So and build it up. Or maybe I'll sort of like just do one exercise each day. I'll do those split squats on Monday. I'll do the glute bridges on Tuesday. I'll do the pushups on Wednesday, so forth. There's a lot of good ways where you can be flexible with this. So I would sort of say, if you ever do find yourself in a situation where you're looking at your training for mountaineering and you're like, you know what? I know there's like five different things I kind of need to fit in. I need to fit in some type of strength work. I need to fit in some type of endurance work. I need to fit in some type of aerobic fitness. I want to fit in some type of higher intensity stuff.

[8:08] If it's looking tricky on how you can fit in around your schedule, just take a step back and just think about, okay, how can I get creative to fit this in? How can I still get some exposure to these things in a way that's going to challenge me around my time commitments? There is always a way, I promise you. You just maybe need to think a little bit outside the box and just change your approach slightly differently.

[8:33] So hopefully that opens a few people's eyes. I won't sort of say this type of approach is optimal by any means. I wouldn't sort of say this type of approach is ideal if you're training for a really big expedition where your physical requirements are going to be the difference between success and failure and safety and not safety or all of that. And if you're leading into big expeditions, maybe you need to prioritize a little bit more. But if you're in the situation where you've got something coming up and you're like, look, I just don't have a huge amount of time, but I still want to put in as much as I can, get creative. I promise you, there is always a way. So with that being said, if there are any mountaineers out there who's listening to this and you're like, you know what, Ron, you make a good point. I've been a little bit set in my ways and I know I'm missing out on certain things. And I am a little bit tight for time and I've got no idea how to figure this out for myself and plan this out over long term. If you did need help with this, I would love to chat with you. As I always say on these podcasts, if you did want to learn a little bit more about how I help mountaineers with their training, what I'd like you to do is go to summitstrength.com.au slash mountaineer. Now on that page, there's a bit of information around how we go about helping

[9:43] mountaineers with our online summit program and helping mountaineers all around the world. And if you did want to find out a little bit more, you can book a call with our team. We can organize a bit of a chat and take it from there. So with that being said, thank you for listening today. Hope you've enjoyed it. Hope it helps a few people, and we'll talk to you very, very soon. Bye.

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