One Overlooked Muscle For Mountaineers

When it comes to training for mountaineering, most mountaineers are familiar with training their 'big mover' muscles.

Muscles like their quadriceps, their glutes, their hamstring and their calves.

These guys get the majority of focus in a mountaineers strength training and for good reason!

They are definitely where you should be putting most of your work and attention. But around those big moving muscles, there are several smaller muscles which often get neglected by mountaineers.

When it comes to training for mountaineering, most mountaineers are familiar with training their 'big mover' muscles.

Muscles like their quadriceps, their glutes, their hamstring and their calves.

These guys get the majority of focus in a mountaineers strength training and for good reason!

They are definitely where you should be putting most of your work and attention. But around those big moving muscles, there are several smaller muscles which often get neglected by mountaineers.

Which, if trained correctly, can have some great benefits for both injury prevention and improving performance for mountaineers.

One of these is the hip flexors.

Located at the front of the hips, most of the attention going into this muscle group tend to go into mobility and flexibility.

Most people at some stage have been probably told they have 'tight hips', and if this is the case, it is definitely worth putting some mobility work there.

But it is also important to strengthen the hip flexors!

When it comes to mountaineering, the hip flexors do A LOT of work.

Every single step you take uphill, the hip flexors are helping to lift your leg. And when you have a heavy load on your back and going up a steep incline, they really take a lot of load. 

And because they often get neglected, many mountaineers will feel this area fatigued before anything else.

And this is never much fun...  

So a simple fix here is to put a small amount of attention into strengthening the hip flexors in your training!

You don't have to spend a tremendous amount of time here, but maybe doing one exercise a week, in amongst all your other strength training, could be a good inclusion for many mountaineers.

So how do you do it? 

Well, there are a number of ways you can go about this, but to make things easy for you, here are a couple of my favourites:

Hip Flexor March:

Plank Hip Flexor Hold:

Very simple exercises, but they definitely do the job!

So if you are already doing your strength training, and are looking to upgrade it very slightly, and get that extra 1% for the mountain, this might be an excellent place to look.

And if you do need help with this, and want a fully comprehensive program to get you in the best physical position for the mountain, you can find the Online Summit Program here:

https://www.summitstrength.com.au/online-mountaineer.html

Yours in adventure,

Rowan