How Mountaineers Can Progress Strength Training (Without Adding Weight)

​In this episode, I explore a few simple options a mountaineer can use to add extra challenge to their strength training, which doesn't involve just stacking on more weight. 

These ideas can be beneficial for mountaineers training at home with limited equipment, or for those who want a bit more variation for their gym workouts. 

​Episode Transcript: 

[0:00] All right. Hello, hello, ladies and gentlemen. So in today's episode, we are talking all about how a mountaineer can progress their strength training exercises without having to add extra weight.

[0:14] Now, this is a subject which came up just the other day. Someone was talking to me about this, and I thought it was a really, really, really valuable topic to cover because I know a lot of mountaineers out there who are doing strength training as part of their week and as part of their preparations. A lot of mountaineers out there, they're just training at home. They don't particularly love the gym environment, or maybe it's just more convenient to train at home or whatever may be.

[0:39] And I know for the majority of people out there who have home setups, maybe home gyms or just some equipment lying around, a lot of people don't have a huge access to a nice range of weights. And we may have some dumbbells, we may have some barbells or whatever may be, but we don't have a huge range of access like we would at a gym which is absolutely fair enough but for a lot of people this does come as a bit of a limitation in their training and if left to their own devices i know a lot of people kind of use this or have this causing you know a few issues with their progress because when it comes to seeing the best results possible through strength training and the best results of improving your strength and improving your endurance and ultimately helping you on the mountain, progressive overload is so, so, so important in the sense of slowly over time, giving the body more and more and more challenge so it'll continually get stronger, continually adapt, and continually improve.

[1:40] And if someone doesn't have a huge amount of weight options, they're a little bit limited on this. At first, it's not a big deal. They'll use their weights, they'll work through it, they'll push, they'll progress, but then they'll come to a point where they're kind of the limit of the weight they have, and they're using the heaviest weight available they can't add anything more on and they're at that limit and this really falls into two gets them falling into two different situations which i see all the time number one is no progression in the sense someone will have worked up their weights they're like hey i'm at a good level and they're just doing the same routine and the same weights over and over and over. And while this can be fine for general fitness and just maintaining strength, if you are actively trying to improve yourself for your mountaineering, you know, you want to see some progression and you want to see some improvements.

[2:33] The other situation, which is really common in the mountaineering community, and I can't tell you how many mountaineers I've talked to who fall into this, is essentially people will hit the limit of their weights. They want some extra challenge. They're aware they need to progress things. So what they'll do is they'll add a couple of extra reps. And one week they'll do 10 reps. They'll start to get a little bit easy. Then they'll do 11 the next week, 12 the next week, and keep on adding, adding, adding.

[3:00] And while this is technically still progressive overload, because technically we are still doing more work week by week by week, this is a little bit tricky because if we just keep on adding extra reps, this can change the emphasis of our strength training. And as we talked about in previous episodes, there are a lot of benefits for

[3:19] mountaineers to get exposures to the lower repetition, more challenging strength training. And if you just keep on adding extra reps, over time your training will just completely shift into an endurance work and there's nothing wrong with endurance work but we do want a bit of a spread of both so if you're a mountaineer and you are trying to get the best results possible through from your strength training to help you on the mountain you know neither of these situations are great so with that all out of the way you know what i'm going to be talking you through today is just a range of really really really simple options you can use to progress your strength training to make it more difficult to make it more challenging and keep you moving forward, which don't involve you adding extra weight. Now, if you're training a gym or you have lots of access to weights, you can use that and that is definitely a great option. But if you are a little bit limited or maybe you just want some different options, these can be really, really useful. So I'm gonna be talking you through six very simple options that anyone can apply without a huge amount of thought.

[4:18] Now, option number one for progressing your strength training is adding range of motion.

[4:25] So a really easy way of making an exercise a little bit more difficult is just increasing your range of motion and increasing how far you go in this motion. So to give you a really simple example, let's talk about a squat. You know, a squat for a lot of people will go down and we may go down to round about 90 degrees at our knees, a little bit lower, a little bit higher, whatever it may be. And we may do that for four weeks and we're like, hey, we want to get a bit more challenging. A very, very simple way of adding extra challenge is just going a little bit lower in the squat, going down an extra inch for every single repetition you do. That in itself is a very legitimate method of progression and can be very, very effective.

[5:06] Or if you were doing an upper body version, you may say push-ups. Okay, I usually do push-ups and I go down to the floor. Maybe to add a bit of extra range of motion, I'm going to put my hands on a couple of books. So I'm a little bit raised off the floor. My chest can go down a little bit further and therefore some extra range of motion. Or another mountaineer's favorite is the lunge. Like if you're doing a lunge, it's very, very easy to add range of motion by starting up on a step or a plate or a slight raise. So basically you're stepping off that onto the floor and it adds a little bit more. Adding range of motion, it's very, very simple, but very, very effective.

[5:45] Now, one thing I will say, you need to have a balance here because sometimes if we add too much range of motion, it can end up being too difficult and we can't actually load up that exercise. So for example, if you're doing step ups and you have a step, which is maybe three quarters up your shin and you're doing that and you're feeling good. And then all of a sudden you add an extra four inches to that, that's going to be a challenging movement. It will definitely be a progression in regards to that, but it may be too far that you can't actually add weight. You can't really have a huge amount of challenge because it's a bit too much. So you need to kind of find that balance if you're going down that route. But that's progression option number one.

[6:22] Now, progression option number two is slowing your lowering portion of your repetition or slowing the eccentric portion of a repetition. So what I mean by this is every single exercise or every single rep you do, there's kind of two different directions where you do. Number one, we have our concentric muscle contraction, where basically a muscle is contracting while it is shortening. This is typically the hard part of movement. So if you're thinking about a squat, the concentric muscle contraction is when you are pushing up from a squat. You're at the bottom and you're pushing up your quadriceps are getting shorter as you're going up if you're looking at a push-up again it's that pushing up motion and as you're going through there.

[7:06] Now, a really easy way to make an exercise a little bit more difficult is slowing the lowering portion or the eccentric portion of it. So if you're doing a squat on the way down, adding an extra second to each repetition you do. So you may usually do three seconds down, one second up and just do that over and over and over.

[7:28] If you change that to four seconds down, one second up, that will be significantly more challenging. And the good thing about this is this eccentric motion that is just as important for developing strength so adding extra challenge here by slowing it down can be really really beneficial so that's another option slowing slowing the lowering portion of your repetitions, option number three is adding pauses during an exercise if you want to make it harder you can add pauses at certain portions of the movement just to reduce your momentum and add some extra challenge. So in a squatting motion, you may add a pause at the bottom of each rep. Every single rep you do at the bottom, you may hold for half a second or a second or even two seconds. And if you're doing a set of six or eight or 10, that is significantly more challenging.

[8:22] Or if you were doing a push-up, again, you could hold at the bottom. Or if you were doing a glute bridge or a hip thrust, you could hold at the top and squeeze your glutes at the top. Even if you're doing like deadlifts, some people will pause halfway through the motion and go up halfway, have a little pause, and then go again. You can play around with this, but it's a very, very simple way of just adding some extra challenge.

[8:42] Option number four here is changing your weight placement. So this is an interesting one. Sometimes it works on certain exercises, sometimes it doesn't. But essentially what this involves is if you are limited on weights and you don't have a huge amount of options, sometimes just changing where you actually hold the weight and how you hold the weight is enough of a way to make it a little bit more difficult. So again, we'll use a squat as an example, and this is a really simple example.

[9:09] Typically, if someone's squatting, they may hold a dumbbell at their chest and they may do a goblet squat. And they get to a point, they're like, hey, that's pretty easy. So how can I make this a little bit more difficult? Well, maybe I will hold it on one shoulder. And I sort of have a bit of an offset squat. So I'm holding it up and it's a little bit higher, challenges the core, challenges the body in a bit of a different way. Or maybe I'm going to hold the weight straight above the head. This will make it significantly more difficult you know whether it's the best option or not it's not maybe the best example but it does just changing that weight placement will add different challenge or we can look at like the the step up and this is maybe a better example where typically if we're doing step ups we'll hold a dumbbell by our side and we'll just hold it by our side go up and down a way to make this more difficult is we can go into that goblet position so you do the same movement with the step ups but you hold the weight at your chest very very simple or if you want to change it again you could end up putting the dumbbells in a backpack and load up the backpack and go about that. Sometimes just changing the weight placement, you can use the same amount of weight, but it can change the emphasis of the exercise. It can change the challenge, can be pretty useful.

[10:20] The next option, and this is one I use a lot, and I quite use this pretty much every single month with every single one of my clients, is using a harder exercise variation.

[10:31] So this is kind of common sense. A lot of mountaineers will fall into this. But if you are doing an exercise and maybe you're doing it for four or five or six weeks and you've been progressing the weights, you've been increasing the weights, and it kind of gets to the point where you're like, well, can't really do too much more.

[10:45] What you can do is you can just basically take that exercise, change it to a slightly more difficult variation, which will still work the same muscles, still work the same movement pattern, but it's just a bit harder and therefore it is a progression. So to give you an example, let's sort of talk about the lunge movement and we can talk through a few options here. You know, you may start with a split squat where basically you've got one leg forward, one leg back, and you're going up and down, up and down, similar to a lunge, but you're just stationary. You may do that for four weeks. And then you're like, okay, I'm going to use a slightly harder variation. So then I could do a forward lunge. I basically just put a bit of a step into that. So I'm stepping forward and back, forward and back, forward and back. Simple variation makes it a little bit harder and that will work pretty well. Then you may progress to a Bulgarian split squat where basically you put one leg up on a bench and you go up and down, up and down, up and down. Again, significantly more challenging. Then you may say, all right, I want to go back to the forward lunge, but this time I'm going to use a bit of a raised thing. I'm going to do a deficit forward lunge, like we talked about before with adding that range of motion. So it's a harder variation. And you can just take whatever exercise you've been doing and slightly tweak it. By doing this, you can honestly have an indefinite amount of variations for any exercise, which can continually just keep you changing and moving forward. It can be very, very useful.

[12:06] And the final option, and this is a little bit of a bodybuilding one, it may not be the first one I would lean to, but can definitely work if you need, is just adding a bit of extra squeeze to the working muscles. And what I mean by that is when we are going through our exercises, quite often we'll do squats or step-ups or deadlifts or whatever it may be, and we'll just go through the motions and we'll do the exercise. It'll be challenging, the muscles get tired, but we kind of just go through the motions. If we actually pay attention to the muscles that are supposed to be working during a rep, and all through the repetition, we concentrate on actively engaging that muscle, getting a bit of squeeze, and actually really, really putting tension and pressure into it, this can actually make things a little bit more difficult. So to give you an example of this, we can use, let's talk about glute bridges. So glute bridges involve you lying on your back, feet close to your hips and you push your hips up to the sky. Now, if you just sit there and did that and you were literally going up and down, up and down, up and down, you could probably do a bunch of those with your body weight. It wouldn't be super difficult.

[13:11] But if you do that exercise and before you move anywhere, you feel like you're squeezing the glutes on and get a bit of tension there. And then as you push up, you really concentrate on squeezing the glutes. And at the top position, you have a little pause and again, concentrate on squeezing the glutes. And on the way down, again, you keep that tension in, you don't let it off and you keep it in. And then as you go to the next repetition, you don't let that muscle relax, but just go into the next repetition. So for the entire set, you've got that tension, got that squeeze, that makes it significantly more difficult. And even if you're super strong, if you do that, it can be a genuine challenge, even with body weight.

[13:52] Now, these are six different options on how you can make an exercise a little

[13:57] bit more difficult, even if you are limited with weights. Now, all of these options work. All of these are valid. All of these are useful. And if you're trying to improve things and move things forward over the long term, I would recommend using a bunch of these.

[14:12] Typically, the way that I work this with my clients and my mountaineers, how this sort of works phase by phase and month by month with the training is typically what I will get my mountaineers to do is I'll get them to do a workout or an exercise variation for four weeks in a row. Then I give them the option over the four weeks, as things start to feel a bit easier, I will say, hey, if you want to make it a bit more difficult, you can add that lower, you can add pauses, you can add the squeeze, or you can add weight. They're typically the ones I recommend for four weeks. Then after four weeks, they have the power to choose whatever they want and they can do that after the four weeks then we'll just use an exercise a harder variation so then we'll adjust things and then we'll do four weeks of that variation and again I'll say hey strip back the weight now build yourself back up use those options where we can increase things and then if we are a little bit limited and we're like hey when we don't really have a huge amount of time or options to do then we may say all right well we stick with the same exercise variation but phase by phase by phase we will change the tempo we'll add the pauses we'll slow the lower and will intentionally really, really focus on that as opposed to just saying, do it when you want. That's kind of how I approach things with my mountaineers. That is a way of.

[15:30] And it can work out pretty well. So I know today's episode's been a little bit more nitty-gritty on the strength side of things, but I do think this is valuable talking about because I know so many mountaineers out there are doing their strength training at home. And I know over the years, I've talked to so many people who kind of have got a bit stagnant with things. As I said before, maybe just doing the same routine with the same weights over

[15:51] and over and over, or maybe just fall into that trap of just adding reps week after week after week. And that stuff, it's fine. It's good for general fitness but if you really want to improve you want to be putting a bit more thought around this and hopefully the information today will just give you a few more tools in your tool belt to keep you moving forward get the most out of this type of training and ultimately help you be in the best possible position for your time in the mountains so with that being said i think this is probably enough on this topic today i hope it's been useful for a few people last thing i will say is you can apply this it doesn't have to be if you're training at home obviously if you're training in the gym you can do any of these options as well they're just as good in any environment so feel free to give that a whirl but with that being said thank you for listening today um as i always sort of say if anyone does need a little bit extra help with their training they're interested in learning a little bit about our personalized online personal training for mountaineers if you wanted to check that out you can go to summitstrength.com.au slash mountaineer video on that page will talk a little bit about our training how we go about things um and you can so to see if it may be something you want to explore.

[16:58] So if you want to check that out, go to summitstrength.com.au slash mountaineer and we can take it from there.

[17:04] So thank you so much for listening. Have a lovely day and we'll talk to you very, very soon. Bye.

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