How To Maintain Mountaineering Fitness After A Big Expedition

In this episode, I explore a simple approach a mountaineer can use to help maintain their fitness, strength and endurance, even if they don't have another adventure in their calendar for quite a while.

​Episode Transcript:

[0:00] All right, hello, hello, ladies and gentlemen. So in today's episode, we are talking all about maintaining mountaineering fitness after a big climb or a big expedition.

[0:11] So to start with, let me paint you a picture. And I'm sure this situation I'm about to describe will sound very, very, very familiar to a lot of people. You had a big goal in your sights, a big expedition, a big climb, a big challenge that you set yourself for. In the months prior, you knew you needed to dial in your training. So you got in a good routine. You started fitting in the sessions, putting in the hard work. You build up your fitness, your strength, your skills. You got yourself into the position that you wanted leading into the trip. The date finally arrived. You went out, you flew out, you climbed out or whatever you did, and the expedition was finally here. You nailed it. You got through it. You had a great time. Your body held up well. You were on top of the world. You came home. You recovered physically and mentally. And then you realized you didn't actually have anything in the calendar for quite a while. Whether this was the end of the season, you're like, look, I don't actually have anything in the calendar for another nine months. Maybe this was just a really major life achievement and you didn't actually book anything in. Or maybe you just didn't know what was actually next up for you and you were a little bit of a loss.

[1:27] But you also realize that right now, now that you're recovered, now that you're home, you feel so, so, so good with your physical condition. You are fit. You are strong. You can hike all day. You can climb all day. You can carry a pack. You are in probably the best condition you've been in a long, long, long time. And you are so proud of all the hard work that you put in.

[1:52] And right now even though you don't have anything in your sights you don't want all that hard work to go to waste you don't want to fall back to maybe where you were before fall back into decondition fall back into average fitness or whatever may be right now you're in a spot where you want to maintain things what do you do well that's exactly what we're exploring today.

[2:18] What to do after a big expedition to help maintain your conditioning and your physical state as well as you can be even if you don't have anything in the calendar to really really aim towards for quite a long time now the reason why i want to talk about this today because it really does seem like a recurring question that comes up online all the time in the mountaineering community and it never really has great answers to it. I see it pop up in forums. I see it pop up in Facebook groups. I see it pop up on just general Q&As or whatever it may be. It seems like a pretty regular thing. But the responses I often see to this type of question, like, what should I do? They end up being things like, hey, just go back and repeat the training plan you did before.

[3:06] Or use the next six months to work on your aerobic base, or just set yourself up any routine and just do what you can, or whatever it may be. I've seen these three responses quite a number of times. And in all honesty, I don't love any of this advice. Because, you know, let's say option number one, just go out and repeat the training plan you did before. Like, technically, yeah, a lot of people could probably do this again. You could go back to the very beginnings of your training plan, just work through the basics, slowly build up over time and this and that. And technically, it can work for a lot of people. But mentally, oh my gosh, it can absolutely suck. And sometimes it can just feel like you're going so far backwards and you're just repeating the same things for no particular reason because you've got nothing in your sights. It's just not super enjoyable for a lot of people.

[3:58] Or if you're in the situation where you're like, you know what, I've got nothing going on. Maybe I'm going to strip things back. I'm going to really, really work on my foundations, my basics, build up my aerobic base as much as I can, maybe build up my muscle strength as much as I can.

[4:13] Again, technically, this can be pretty good. And technically, this can make a lot of sense. But it can often be a real bummer for a lot of people who, you know, build up all this specific fitness, things like being able to carry a pack, being able to go up and down hills all day, if you're having to climb all day, whatever it may be, and just feel like this slips through your fingers, because you've just spent months building up your capabilities to do this, and you go back to the basics and forget about all this stuff, sometimes it can be a bit of a bummer.

[4:42] And then number three, if you're just going into any old training routine, again, this can be a little bit of a waste. I don't really think any of these situations, like they're kind of okay and they do work for people, but I think, you know, for a lot of people, they may benefit from a slightly different approach. So today, what I'm going to be talking you through is a really, really simple approach to this type of situation. How you can maintain your fitness and your strength and condition over the long term, even if you don't have anything particular in your sights immediately. Now, there are a million and one ways to go about this. You know, this isn't the only approach. This isn't gospel or anything like that. But I think what I'm about to describe today is a pretty simple, pretty practical, and pretty effective way of doing things. And in all honesty, you don't really need a huge amount of training knowledge. You don't need a huge amount of programming knowledge. You don't need a huge amount of know-how in any situation to be able to follow this approach.

[5:34] So, we're going to break things down. Now, first things first, before we even get into the methods of this approach and how to go about this, we need to have a few things very, very, very crystal clear in our heads. Before we get to the planning, before we get to the specifics, we need to identify and be crystal clear about a few things. We need to identify your priorities during this maintenance period. We need to identify your expectations and we need to identify your timeline. So what I mean by that is priorities. your priorities are going to be the main areas of fitness that you want to try your best to maintain. Because we don't want to just go in with this sort of thing saying, hey, I want to keep fit and keep strong and have these vague, airy-fairy sort of ideas. Because yeah, technically that can help. But if it's just vague, quite often it won't be very motivational. And quite often it'll be very, very easy to miss certain things that you want to maintain and be like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I neglected that. It's all gone now, or whatever it may be.

[6:38] So for priorities, a few things you kind of want to have a think about here. Now, first and foremost, for every mountaineer coming off the back of a trip, every single person, in all honesty, is going to want to maintain aerobic capacity and muscle strength as much as possible, because these are the two big aspects of fitness that take a long time to develop.

[6:58] And also on top of that, they don't really have, you can't really overdo these things in the sense of a long-term thing yes you can overdo it by doing too much too soon but aerobic fitness you can keep on building this and building this and building this and building this for months and months and years and years and years so even if you are spending the next 12 months working on this it's not gonna be a short road to nowhere same thing with muscle strength you know we want it takes a long time to develop um but also we have a very very high ceiling of improvement here so realistically any mountaineer in this situation Those are two things they definitely want to maintain, if not improve.

[7:34] But on top of this, then we want to identify, okay, what are the other areas of fitness that we want to maintain? Looking specifically at mountaineering in this situation, we've just come off our expedition. We felt really, really good. Are there any specific aspects of mountaineering fitness that we kind of want to hold onto and cling to during this period? So it may be a case of saying, okay, actually, you know what? I got myself to a position where I was really comfortable carrying a 20 kilo pack. And I wouldn't actually mind maintaining that. So when I do get closer to a trip, I don't have to spend four months rebuilding that, but I can actually carry that still. Or maybe a case of elevation. Like, you know what? I was really happy with how my legs were handling going up and down steep climbs. I want to maintain that. Or maybe it was muscular endurance just in general. Like, you know, I like the ability of my muscles to be able to go and go and go and go. Or maybe the ability to sustain higher intensity cardio. Maybe during my training, I was doing some long intervals and I was like, you know what? I feel good being able to maintain these higher intensities for long periods and I want to maintain that. Or maybe it was even higher intensity and you're like, you know what? I was doing some sprint training and I felt really good with that. I want to maintain that. Or maybe it's my climbing ability or my skills or whatever may be on the climbing front, whatever it is. But just have a think about, okay, specific aspects of your mountaineering fitness, specific things that you want to hold onto. Make sure you list it down. Be very, very crystal clear right now what you want to maintain.

[8:59] Now, everyone is going to be a little bit different. Some people will want to focus on something, some people, others. Some people are like, oh my gosh, I carried a pack for six months. I'm sick of pack training. I don't want to touch it for a long time. And that's fine. You just identify what is important to you.

[9:15] And then finally, we want to look at the other qualities of fitness, which you've developed, which may not be mountaineering specific, but other things of fitness you've developed during this period that you still want to maintain. You don't want to fall back. So maybe examples like mobility or flexibility. You might be like, you know what, actually in the lead up, I spent a lot of time working on my hip mobility. I'm actually feeling better than ever in my hips or better than I've felt in the last 10 years. I want to maintain this. Or maybe balance. I've spent a lot of time improving that. Or maybe certain performance in the gym. Maybe I got to the stage where I could do a full pistol squat, or I could do a bunch of pull-ups, and I actually really enjoyed that. I want to be able to keep it going. Or some type of breathing performance, or whatever it may be. Whatever is important to you, whatever the priority is for you, write them down. So to recap, every single mountaineer should be maintaining aerobic capacity muscle strength. That's just a given. After that, look at your specific aspects of mountaineering fitness. After that, just look at your general qualities of fitness and have it all written down. Just so it's all there.

[10:16] Once we've got that, then we want to think about expectations. And essentially, expectations around what this maintaining fitness really means to you. Because I'll be 100% honest, it is an absolute fool's game to try and maintain your 100% peak fitness all year round. Whatever you are right now coming off the back of your expedition, if you don't have something coming up in the next six to eight to 12 weeks, it is a fool's game to try and maintain this element of fitness because it's just not doable all year round. If you're pushing, pushing, pushing, just trying to keep that absolute 100% capacity where you're at, you're just going to run yourself down mentally, physically. It's just not doable.

[10:56] It sounds good saying, hey, I'm at peak fitness all year round, but it's just not doable. Maybe if you're a full-time athlete, and even then they don't even maintain 100 it's just not realistic realistically what i typically tell my mountaineers as a long-term thing when we're coming off the back of an expedition what we are trying to do is have the expectation of maintaining maybe around about 80 of our peak fitness so we're not maintaining that 100 but about 80 the idea behind this is we're trying to keep ourselves at a point where we still feel good. We still feel fit. We still feel strong. We're not going all the way back to the couch. We're not going all the way back to where we're huffing or puffing going up hills or whatever may be. But that roundabout 80% is used as a jumping off point for next time. So we can maintain us just feeling good all year round. And then when we do get a little bit closer to another trip, when we get an opportunity come up or whatever may be, we're at that point where we can just jump off that 80%, rebuild that final peak of fitness relatively quickly.

[12:05] So if we can maintain this 80% for as long as we can, then it doesn't take too long to actually jump up to that peak fitness. Now, this whole concept, it's not exact. Like I'm not talking about like 80% of exactly what you're doing or 80% of your VO2 max or anything like that, but it's just a general concept to try to wrap your head around it. And hopefully that makes sense. Now, one note I will sort of say, and sometimes this does trip a few people up when I'm sort I'm talking about this, is when I say 80% of your peak fitness, one thing you need to be aware of is your potential and your actual potential for what your peak fitness is, it may change. Because as we said before, one of the beauties of aerobic capacity and muscular strength, when we spend long times developing these things, is they have a really, really high ceiling of improvement. And even if we're not training our heart out, even if not training 100% and absolutely going important trying to maintain our peak fitness, we may actually be improving these things. So month by month by month, if we're training diligently and smartly and consistently, our actual capacities and potential may actually be improving. And they can incrementally just improve years and years and years. So you may find that as a long-term thing, the 80% of where you are right now, what you're trying to maintain, may actually change. And you might be like, whoa, I'm doing 80% now, but I'm definitely not at that full peak fitness, but I'm way ahead where I was before. That can happen.

[13:28] As we said before, the main thing to keep in mind, this is we're just trying to maintain a jumping point where I feel fit, where I feel strong, where I feel good, but it's not taking over my life. It's not really stressful to maintain. And if I do book in another trip, then I can ramp up pretty quickly. The concept isn't exact, but you get the idea.

[13:47] And then finally, we want to talk about timeline.

[13:51] Do you know how long, even though you're in maintenance for a while, do you know how long you plan to be in maintenance for? If you have another expedition in your sights and you've actually got a rough date in your calendar, you can roughly say, you know what, I'm going to be in maintenance for anywhere from 12 to 24 weeks before the next trip, depending on how big the expedition is. What I mean by that is say you had a relatively, you know, challenging expedition, but it's not like the hardest thing in the world. You may sort of say, you know what, I'm going to do this maintenance plan.

[14:22] For the next nine months. And then three months before this trip, then I'm going to ramp things up. I'm going to hone things into that edge. I'm going to really, really, really, really pump things up or whatever it is. Or might be 16 weeks before or 20 weeks before or whatever maybe. If you have a rough idea, that's good to know. If you don't have a rough idea, it's fine. You can do this plan indefinitely. And that is why it's a jumping off point. But having a rough idea is useful.

[14:46] So with that being said, now we've identified those three things. We have got our priorities, we've got our expectations, and we may have a timeline. Now we want to talk about what we're doing here.

[14:57] I'm going to talk about what we can do with maintaining our aerobic conditioning, our strength and endurance, and our specific aspects of fitness. So let's start off with aerobic conditioning, aerobic capacity, all that good work we spent developing through our low-intensity cardio, our hiking, our running, our cycling, whatever it may be. How are we going to to maintain this? Well, as a long-term thing, typically what I recommend is just asking yourself the question, during this maintenance time, what is the priority type of exercise that I'm going to use for my aerobic conditioning? What's the main thing? I can use a bunch of things, but what's the one thing I kind of want to rely on the most? Is it going to be hiking? And I'm going to be doing lots of hours of hiking. Is it going to be running? Is it going to be cycling? Everyone's going to be a little bit different, but just prioritize, just identify one thing that it's going to be your main thing to aim for. Again, it's not the only thing you need to do, but it can be useful just to have one thing. And then from whatever you've chosen, then you want to essentially want to just give yourself a bit of a baseline in regards to performance on what you're going to maintain.

[16:02] Over this period? What is the baseline that you want to say, you know what, week by week and month by month and even year by year, I want to keep this as a baseline for whatever this is. So what I mean by that is say you chose hiking. You said, you know what, I'm going to use hiking as my main way of aerobic conditioning during this maintenance thing. That's what I'm going to use. And you know what, right now, I feel like right now I could go out and I could hike for eight hours with a 15 kilo pack on my back. And I could do that comfortably and I could really do that right now. But I'm not going to try and maintain all of that. I'm aware that that's just not super doable. But what I would like to maintain is maybe I can go out and do a six hour hike with a 10 kilo pack on my back. Maybe that's my baseline that I want to maintain or whatever it may be. Or maybe if it was running, you could just give yourself a distance goal and say, you know what, right now I could probably do X amount of running. But what I want to maintain is I want to be able to comfortably be able to do 10 kilometers whenever I want, whatever it is. Set yourself a little bit of a baseline on the aerobic conditioning and roughly what you want to maintain over a long period.

[17:08] And then from there, we want to have a think about, okay, how can I make sure I can still do this? Now, the first thought a lot of people will think here is like, well, you know what? If I have the goal that I want to do 10 kilometers running, I want to maintain that as a baseline. Maybe I'll just do that every single week. Maybe that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to do for the next 52 weeks, once a week, I'm going to do a 10 kilometers. And that can definitely work for some people, but for others, this may not be super exciting. It may get a bit repetitive, maybe a bit time-intensive. Maybe it'll just grind them up and you'll just be doing too much or whatever it may be. So this type of thing, you can do that, but as a longer-term maintenance, typically what I recommend for aerobic conditioning here is whatever baseline you've set yourself, whether it's a hike, whether it's a run, whether it's a cycle, whether it's a swim, whatever it may be. Set yourself the target that as a minimum, you want to hit this baseline once a month.

[18:00] We want it once every three weeks, once every two weeks. That's fine. But once a month is kind of a minimum. And then the other weeks in your month, you just want to fill in what you can with your aerobic conditioning in a logical manner.

[18:14] Ultimately, the main aim of the game is once a month, there's a long-term thing. You want to get exposure to this target. So for example, let's sort of say, keep on that running example. And we say, hey, we want to maintain 10 kilometers.

[18:25] Maybe in week one of each month, you'll sort of say, I'm going to do like a six to seven kilometer run. That's going to be my target. And then week two, I'll do like a seven to eight kilometer run. A little bit longer, but that's kind of okay. Then week three, I'll do an eight to nine kilometer run. And then week four, I'll do that 10 kilometer run. So once every four weeks, I'm going to hit that 10K. And then I'll drop back down and go back to the top and just cycle between that month by month by month. Now, this particular approach, it's probably not going to do a massive amount of like improving you over time because adding volume and getting longer is probably going to be a little bit better. But as a maintenance thing this can be really really effective it can give you enough variation to make sure it's just not the same 10 kilometers every single week it can give you enough variation where you can kind of plan this out around your social occasions and it can give you enough variation where sometimes you can go a bit quicker on the shorter ones sometimes you can a bit lower whatever it may be i think that works out pretty well or say for example you're using hiking, and you may say hey i want to maintain six hour hike with whatever amount of pack weight you may so to say, you know what, actually hiking, it's pretty time intensive. I can't do this every single week, especially as a long-term thing, but maybe I'm going to set myself the goal that I can do this once every two weeks. That's realistic what I can do. So, in a four-week block, then I might say, okay, once every four weeks, I'm going to do that six-hour hike with whatever pack weight.

[19:45] Maybe on the other time I hike in that four-week block, I'll just do like a three-hour hike. So, I'll still get out and I'll still get moving and it'll kind of be okay. And then the weeks in between. I'll just do what I can. Maybe I'll go for a run, maybe I'll go for a cycle or whatever it is.

[20:01] You know, you can kind of get the gist of it. If you go in with the attention that you just want to maintain this type of stuff, this can be really, really good. Just having that baseline, aiming to hit it once a month and just doing whatever you need to do with your training around that to make sure that that's doable and you're kind of bumping up. I wouldn't recommend sort of saying, hey, if I want to do 10 kilometers, I don't do any running in a month and just go out and do a 10 kilometer run once a month. That's probably not going to work. You do need a bit more consistency with your training, but hopefully you get the idea. you. So that's our aerobic conditioning, simple approach on round doing it. Last thing I will sort of say before I move on is if you did want to improve on this stuff during the off season, and you're like, hey, actually, I'm going to use this time to build up my running or build up my hiking and spend more time, that's totally fine too. Go ahead and do that. But that example I was using is mainly just looking at maintenance. So that's our aerobic conditioning, pretty straightforward.

[20:52] Next up is strength and endurance. Now, I'm not going to go too much into this topic today, because I have talked about this on maybe two or three podcasts pretty recently. But essentially, if we're looking at maintaining our strength and endurance, I wouldn't recommend people going through that traditional block periodization where you spend, four or eight or 12 weeks just working on strength, and then four or eight or 12 weeks working on endurance, and then doing that type of approach. I don't think that's really going to work so well in a maintenance situation. It can work, but I don't think it's very good in this situation. A better approach is following a concurrent method of periodization. And I'll briefly go over this for people who haven't listened to previous episodes. Basically, concurrent periodization is just a fancy way of saying structuring your workouts and structuring your strength workouts to work both strength and endurance at the same time. So we're not breaking them up over the months, but we're working them at the same time. So it's a really, really brief overview, very simple way of approaching it.

[21:52] Take whatever workouts you're doing with your strength training. Are you going to aim for two 60-minute sessions in a week? Are you going to aim for two 40-minute sessions in a week? Whatever may be. Take whatever you're planning to do with your workouts. Now, however long it takes you to warm up, take that out. So if you do a 60-minute workout and you're like, it takes me 10 minutes to warm up, let's just talk about 50 minutes. You take those 10 minutes out, we have 50 minutes remaining. Now, with those remaining time after your warm-up, you're essentially going to dedicate the first half of that workout to strength development. Meaning you're going to choose exercises and you're going to choose repetition and weights, which is a little bit heavier, doing slightly lower repetition ranges. So you may choose repetition ranges anywhere from 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, down to 3 if you wanted, really depending on your experience and your confidence with strength work. If you're experienced, you know what you're doing, maybe leaning towards 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, that works out pretty well. If you're a little bit more on the beginning side of things, maybe looking at 10, 9, 8, 7, maybe getting down to 6 or whatever it may be. But whatever it is, your first half of your strength stuff, just looking at that heavier, more difficult strength stuff. Then the remaining time of that workout, you're doing your endurance work. So you do whatever exercises you're doing, but do higher rep exercises, 15 reps, 16 reps, 18, 20, whatever may be. Essentially, you get half the workout at strength, half the workout endurance. Now, whatever workouts you choose, you repeat that same workout for about four to six weeks in a row.

[23:21] Each week you do it, you're going to just try to add a little extra weight where possible. You don't have to do it on every single exercise, every single week, but you should be getting stronger week by week. It should be getting easier. So you want to give yourself a bit more of a challenge, add a little extra weight. After the four to six weeks, however long you want to maintain that, then you basically just change the workout to different exercise variations. So if you were doing a goblet squat, maybe now you'll do a hack squat, or if you're doing a reverse lunge, maybe now you'll do a forward lunge or whatever it may be, or just different exercises. So if you were doing a deadlift before, maybe now you're going to do a glute bridge or whatever it is. So after the four to six weeks, you just change the exercises. And you can basically do this indefinitely. Having that workout structure, half strength, half endurance, following the same workout for four to six weeks, and then every four to six weeks, just cycling in new exercises or a new workout. You can do that for a long, long time, and that will go a long way for maintaining things. And you can also improve things pretty well with this approach as well. Now, if you did want to learn a little bit more about this approach, I think it's episode number 23 of this podcast. I think it's titled A Better Approach to Strength Training. We go into it a bit more detail and you can talk about that. But that's what I'd recommend with your strength and endurance work. Just following that approach, you can do that for a long, long time and it'll work out pretty well.

[24:40] Then next up, we want to talk about specific aspects of fitness. So we talked about maintaining aerobic conditioning. We talked about maintaining your strength and endurance. Now we want to talk about that specific stuff. because as we sort of said before sometimes we do want to maintain particular things we build up sometimes we do want to maintain particular qualities of fitness which are very very mountaineering specific because we know it just took so long to build it up we know we put so much effort into that we don't want to go back to square one so what i recommend here is because as i said everyone's going to be a little bit different here it's just have a think about what do you actually want to maintain.

[25:16] What are the aspects of fitness that you are kind of like, hey, I want to hold onto this. We want to identify these and list them out.

[25:24] And this may be one or two or three, depending on you, whatever it may be, but be very, very clear what you want to maintain. Then once we've listed them out, then we want to think about, okay, but each one of these we do, we want to basically look at a workout where we can get a bit of exposure to this type of thing. So we want to create workouts or come up with workouts where we can say this quality of fitness I want to maintain, this workout will help me maintain this. So a few simple examples here. If we're looking at maintaining pack conditioning, you're like, you know what, I'm feeling really good with a 20 kilo pack on my back. I want to maintain this. Then a simple way of doing this might be load of pack walking and literally just walking around the neighborhood or walking around the treadmill with a load of pack.

[26:05] Or maybe I want to keep my body in a condition where I can go up and down elevation pretty comfortably. Maybe maintain this with a stair hill session or doing a stair climber session or whatever may be. Maybe I want to maintain that ability of those legs just to grind out that heavy resistance with that endurance work. Maybe I want to do a sled session or a heavier pack climbing. Maybe I want to maintain that higher intensity cardio. Maybe you can do that with some quicker running and pushing those quicker runs. Maybe I want to do some bike intervals. Maybe I want to do some sprint training or whatever it may be. Or maybe climbing skills. Maybe there's some specific climbing skills I've built out. Maybe I want to Make sure I incorporate that in the week, whatever it is. Whatever aspects of fitness you identify, just come up with a simple workout options, which will just expose you to this type of thing. It doesn't have to be a full built-out workout, knowing which time and intensities and this and that, but what can you do just to expose the body to this type of thing?

[26:59] Then essentially, once we've got this and we've got some general workout ideas, then we just want to think about, okay, how can I incorporate this into my training so my body will get semi-regular exposure to this type of thing? My body will remember these stresses, will remember these challenges, will remember the specific demands of these types of things, and it will maintain this fitness. How can I get regular exposure to this? Now, if you've just got one type of specific fitness that you want to maintain, so you're always going to maintain that aerobic conditioning, You're always going to maintain that muscle strength. And you're like, you know what? There's just one type of fitness I want to improve. This is really simple. You can just sort of set yourself the target that in your training week, you are always going to have one short session per week, which gives you some exposure to this. So if it was the pack conditioning, you may say, you know what? Every single week, I'm going to dedicate 40 minutes to 60 minutes to some type of pack work. Maybe for four weeks, I'm going to do some flat pack walking, carrying that full pack weight where I just walk around the neighborhood, expose my body to that. Maybe after that, maybe I'll do four weeks of stair climbing. I'll get on a stepper, step machine or whatever it may be, and I'll do some stair climbing to keep the body used to that. Maybe after that, I'll do four weeks. Actually, I'm sick of the stair climbing. May I do four weeks on the treadmill and I'll do like a small incline and just expose to that. Maybe four weeks after that, I'll go back to flat pack hiking or whatever it may be. And you can just rotate around different workouts, which hit that.

[28:25] Or the example if you're just trying to maintain your elevation fitness you may say okay four weeks i'm going to do stair climbing going up and down stairs then four weeks i'm gonna do some hill climbing going up and down hills then four weeks maybe i'll do some step sessions where i'll go up and down on a box or a step and just rotate around that stuff so we're getting a variety of different ways where you can expose the body to that there's a million one one different workouts for each of these things but you get the gist so that's just one aspect fitness you want to improve maintain.

[28:53] Alternatively, if there's two aspects of fitness you want to maintain, so say you're like, I want to maintain that pack conditioning. I also want to maintain my high intensity cardio. Then you can either toss up whether you want to do two of these sessions in a week, and that can be doable. Like you can sort of say, hey, I'm going to do a pack session and an interval session each week. It's very, very technically doable, but realistically, if you're trying to maintain this for six to eight to nine months, it can get a little bit boring, a little bit dull or whatever it may be. So what I typically recommend in this situation is just basically taking the two things you want to maintain and just alternating between them each week. So one week you do a pack walking session, the next week you do a higher intensity bike session, and then back to pack walking, then back to bike, and you alternate between those. And essentially just go between those two things, works out pretty well. And if you're doing other types of cardio in your week, say you had another cardio session, just do whatever you want. Just enjoy yourself have fun with that cardio but just keep that one specific um thing there a specific mountaineering thing there.

[29:55] So that's two aspects of fitness, just alternate between the two. If it's three aspects of fitness, pretty much the same thing. You can just go one on one week, the next on the next week, the next on the next week, then to the start. And you can alternate them and get one exposure every three weeks. That works really well. The tricky thing comes up if there's four aspects of fitness. And say you're in the position where you're like, hey, I want to maintain my pack conditioning. I want to maintain my elevation. I want to maintain that higher intensity cardio. I want to maintain my climbing, something with my climbing. That does get a little bit trickier in that situation. So in here, you probably do need to dedicate two cardio days to a week to this specific stuff. As I said, it's not the most fun thing to do as a long-term thing, and you may drop out of it.

[30:38] Or the other situation is you can get a little bit creative, and you may end up combining stuff here. So you may take a cardio session, do 30 minutes of pack work, then 30 minutes of interval work. Or you may add interval stuff at the end of a strength workout. Or you may add elevation work at the end of a strength workout, or whatever it may be. You know, in this situation, sometimes get a bit creative. But as a general rule of thumb, if you haven't gathered already, what we're trying to do with this specific stuff is get at least one solid quality exposure to this quality of fitness at least once every three weeks. Three weeks as a maximum. If we're getting to once every four weeks with this type of stuff, it's not ideal. So once every three weeks is kind of what we want. So you can either do one aspect fitness every single week, you can rotate between two or three, or get a bit creative with four. I hope that makes sense.

[31:30] And then finally, the last thing we want to look at is just those other aspects of fitness we want to maintain, the stuff that isn't 100% mountaining related, but you're like, hey, I actually built this up during this time, I kind of want to keep this going. So realistically, for this type of stuff, we just want to think about what do we want to maintain and just how can we slip this into our other sessions? Because already the week's getting pretty full. We've got our aerobic conditioning. That's a bit time intensive. We got our strength and endurance stuff. And then we got that specific stuff as well. So if we were going to take these other things and fill out full sessions, it can end up being a pretty full on week. And we don't really want that.

[32:04] So what we can sort of look at here is like, okay, these other aspects of fitness, how do I just incorporate into the stuff I'm doing? If you're using the example of mobility or balance work that I used before, then just make sure you're slotting this into your strength workouts. Do it in your warmups. do it in your rest periods, do it at the end of your workout or whatever may be, simple way there. If you're looking at something performance related in the gym, say you wanted to do a pistol squat, maintain that, just make sure it's still in your gym programming somewhere. Or if you want to do a pull-up, make sure that's in there. And what you can do is just alternate between different variations, different way of doing these movements through your gym program. So for example, if we're using pull-ups, you may do four weeks of bodyweight pull-ups, however many you're doing right now then you may do four weeks of weighted chin-ups where you just add a little extra weight but you don't do quite as many reps then you may do four weeks of banded higher repetition pull-ups and as you can kind of see you kind of keep that thread of that same exercise but just vary it vary it vary it or whatever may be so just take whatever else you're trying to maintain and just make sure it's slipping into your other workouts somewhere there.

[33:09] So, there we have it. I hope that makes sense. Like, I know sometimes this stuff is a little bit tricky to kind of, like, take all in in the podcast format. But as a general rule of thumb, very, very simple. Identify what you want to prioritize. When you're looking at your aerobic conditioning, making sure we have a baseline, something we want to maintain, some target that we can say, hey, if I'm doing this, I'm succeeding. If I'm not doing this, I maybe need to work a little bit harder. Aim to hit that once a month. Build out your aerobic stuff around that. Strength and endurance, follow that concurrent periodization, that can be just done indefinitely. Specific mountaineering conditioning, identify what you want as, try to get a exposure to, an exposure I should say, to whatever you're trying to do at least once every three weeks and then the other stuff just fit in where you can.

[33:58] When you break it down like that, hopefully that is relatively simple, hopefully that helps some few people and hopefully that gives just a little bit direction around how to maintain these types of things. Because I know it can sometimes be tough when you come out the other end of these adventures and you're lost, you don't know what to do, and it can just be a bit confusing about how to go away. So, hopefully, this approach can help you feel good around maintaining things. Hopefully, this approach can just basically keep you in a good spot. So, when you do book something else in or you do have another date in the calendar, you can just be in shooting distance where you can ramp things up pretty quickly.

[34:31] Or, you know, you can ultimately just do this indefinitely. And in all honesty, this approach to training, even if you're never going to do another mountaineering climb again, this approach to training can be great just for general fitness, general strength, general health, general energy, general mood. It's all good. And you can still maintain that feeling of like, yeah, you know what, if I really wanted, I could go and do a mountain expedition, even if it just practically never happens again, which hopefully it doesn't. But, you know.

[35:00] You know, life goes. So, with that being said, I think I'll wrap this up here. It's been a pretty long episode. Hopefully, that does make sense. If there are any questions of this, feel free to reach out, flick me an email, come join one of my community groups or whatever it may be. Last thing I will say is that if anyone's in this situation, they're like, you know what, actually, I don't really have a trip coming up super soon, but I do like the idea of making sure my training is keeping me in a good spot. I do like the idea of maintaining my fitness. I do like the idea of just being in that jumping off point to step into whatever I want. But I do need some help putting this together. If you did want to have a bit of chat and see if and how we may be able to help you out with your 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 a video that talks through our online personal training for mountaineers around how we go about this, how we help mountaineers around the world. And if it is something you want to explore further, there's a link on that page where you can book a call with us. We can have a bit of a chat and see if and how we may be able to help you out. So if you did want to check that out, go to summitstrength.com.au slash mountaineer, and we can take it from there. But with that being said, thank you so much for listening today. Hope you've enjoyed it, and we'll talk to you very, very soon. Bye.

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