Improving Strength For Mountaineers

​In this episode, I explore an important consideration a mountaineer needs to understand if they want to best develop strength to help them in the mountains. 

​Episode Transcript:

[0:00] Right, hello, hello, ladies and gentlemen. And in today's episode,

[0:03] we are talking all about getting a strength stimulus for a mountaineer. And we're diving into strength development and what you do need to keep in mind to get the best benefits out of strength. Now, this episode was inspired by a question I just got the other day asking about the possibility of training both strength and aerobic capacity simultaneously. And this particular mountaineer was inquiring that, Look, if I put on a heavy pack and I went and climbed up some really steep incline, and if I did this at a pace which kept my heart rate in zone two, would this be able to accomplish both things? Would it give me an aerobic capacity stimulus? And would it also help develop strength?

[0:46] And this is a type of question that I do get pretty regularly from my mountaineers, from my hikers, and it comes up pretty often. Because strength is definitely an incredibly beneficial quality of fitness for mountaineers. It is something that I see there's so many potential benefits for, from performance, from injury and pain reduction, from confidence, from a bunch of different things, and developing strength is really, really valuable. But saying this, a lot of mountaineers out there, they're pretty tight for time in their lives. And the thought of being able to combine sessions where we're developing multiple aspects of fitness can be pretty appealing. And on top of that, a lot of mountaineers out there don't particularly love strength training. Most mountaineers would prefer to be out in the hills or about in the mountains

[1:32] or out on the trail and going out and doing a session. And the thought of being able to just do your strength work out on the trail, you know, that is pretty appealing.

[1:40] And on the very, very surface level, I completely understand where people are coming from with this because it does make sense. Because if you do load up a pack with a lot of weight and you add all that resistance on your back and then you go up some really, really steep incline, then yeah, absolutely, it can be tough. It can be a genuine challenge for your muscles. You can get a really good burn and over time you can overload it. So on the surface, it does make sense.

[2:06] But in reality if we are looking at trying to develop strength and get the best benefits from this maximal strength from our muscles it doesn't quite line up with what we need now to put this into context and explain this let's look at traditional strength training when you're going into the gym or you're lifting some weights or you're doing body weight training or whatever may be we know there is a body of evidence that this can be incredibly effective at improving muscular strength if you do the right things. And typically, if we are trying to improve muscular strength through strength training, typically when we go into the gym or lift a weight or whatever it may be, we want to find a level of resistance or an amount of weight or an amount of challenge, which we can do an exercise. And we will reach muscular fatigue, meaning our muscles will be tired. They won't really want to do any more. And we'll reach that fatigue after doing anywhere from three to 10 repetitions. You do three repetitions, then you're tired, you need a rest, or you do five, or you do six, or you do 10, or whatever it may be. And technically, if you're really looking at serious strength development, it's probably anywhere from one to six repetitions. But in practice, most people are floating anywhere from three to 10. And after that, we need a rest. That is a typical strength prescription.

[3:27] And if we time this out and we look at this and we sort of say okay then three to ten repetitions and let's assume each repetition you do this will vary a little bit but let's just assume each repetition you do it takes one second to do the hard portion and maybe four seconds to do that the easier portion so if we're looking at say a pull-up one second pulling up and then maybe four seconds on the way down so it's about five seconds per rep roughly and if we're doing our strength training and we're looking at maybe three to ten repetitions and each repetition is taking about five seconds that means each set will take you between about 15 to 50 seconds and after that you will need a significant rest after that your muscles will not want to keep on going after that you will be tired and you'll need a rest before you can produce this force again that's pretty much it after 50 seconds as a maximum you're tired now if you go back to pack work even if you have an outrageously heavy pack and an outrageously steep ascent, you're probably not going to be fatiguing after a minute. You're probably going to be going for five minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, or whatever it may be.

[4:38] So it doesn't quite line up. So we can absolutely safely say that packwork, no matter how heavy it's going to be, is probably going to fall into the muscular endurance category, as opposed to muscular strength. Now, muscular endurance is absolutely beneficial for mountaineers, and doing heavy packwork is absolutely beneficial for mountaineers, but it's not the same thing as strength development. And yes, if you want to get technical, you could probably say, look, if you only ended up doing endurance work, there probably is some development for your strength. Absolutely. But it's probably not a super effective stimulus for this quality of fitness.

[5:16] Now, in a similar vein, which makes a bit more sense, and this is another popular thing in the world of mountaineering, is the approach of hill sprints. And I know uphill athlete used to recommend these, or at least it was in their original book. I'm not sure if it's still a thing for them or not. But they used to use these as an alternative for the heavier strength sessions if people didn't love strength training or whatever it may be, or at the very least it complemented it. And what they used to recommend was you'd find a really steep hill and you'd do an absolute all-out sprint for like eight to 10 seconds and then rest for two minutes and repeat that. And timing-wise, this definitely makes a bit more sense because we're doing short periods of really, really, really high force output, and then resting quite a bit. Timing-wise, this kind of lines up a little bit more with traditional strength training. Now, personally, I don't know if this is still going to be an amazing approach

[6:09] to develop your strength. I think it's a great session. I think it'd be really useful for different people in different contexts, but I don't think it's really a replacement for strength training.

[6:19] But you can kind of see, in theory, it kind of lines up a little bit more. So realistically, you know, coming back to the original question, if you're a mountaineer who's trying to develop strength, try and develop maximal strength and unlock all those benefits that can be so useful in a variety of different contexts for you, for helping reduce the risk of pain and injury, for helping improve your ability to carry a pack, for helping improve your performance when you get into your muscular endurance sessions and all of that other things, strength training and the more traditional approach to strength training is probably going to be necessary. Now, saying that, there are a million ways you can approach the more traditional, in quotation marks, strength training. You could do free weights with dumbbells or barbells. You could use gym machines. You could do body weight or calisthenics. You could use bands, whatever. There's so many different approaches, but we probably do need to get the right sort of approach to get that strength stimulus.

[7:13] Now, coming out the other end of this is obviously I'm not trying to say, hey, you shouldn't be doing pack work or you shouldn't be doing this. On top of this, a mountaineer definitely does want to be developing endurance and aerobic capacity and all those other qualities of strength or fitness,

[7:26] I should say, that a mountaineer needs. But just try to keep in mind, if you are trying to develop things, make sure you are getting the right stimulus for that particular quality of fitness. And just don't go down the route of tricking yourself into thinking you're developing something because it feels hard, because it feels good, when it may not quite line up with exactly what your goal there is. So long story short, if you're a mountaineer and you're wanting to develop strength, just make sure you're doing the right things.

[7:52] Packwork's great, but it's probably not a replacement for more traditional strength training.

[7:58] So with that being said, that will probably do me for today. I hope that makes sense. I hope it helps a few people and I hope it helps a few people avoid you know this potential mistake in regards to their training. Now as I always say in these episodes if anyone does need a little bit of help with their training if you're a mountaineer and you're like okay cool that makes sense I know how to do pack work but maybe it doesn't line up with my strength but I have no idea how to get started with this or how to plan this or how to make sure I get the balance of all those qualities of fitness. If you do need help with this I would love to chat with you. If you want to learn a little bit about our online personal training for Mountaineers, you can go to summitstrength.com.au slash Mountaineer. On that page, there's a big video which talks through a little bit about our program, how we go about things. And if it does sound like something you'd like to explore, you can book a quick call with our team. We can have a bit of a chat and see if and how we may be able to help you. So if you want to learn a bit more, go to summitstrength.com.au slash Mountaineer, and we can take it from there. So with that being said, thank you so much for listening. Hope you've enjoyed it. Hope you got a bit out of it, and we'll talk to you very, very soon. Bye.

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