This Needs To Stop

​Exploring something which drives me a bit mental in the hiking community!

Episode Transcript: 

[0:00] So, in today's episode, we are

[0:01] talking about a subject which admittedly gets me a little bit fired up. And this seems to be a podcast episode that I end up making every four, five, six months or whatever it may be. So, for the long-time listeners, I apologize if you've heard this rant before, but it needs to be said. Now, this episode was inspired by a recent post I put up on social media. And I put up a post and it was all about talking about breathing on uphills and essentially it was just telling a bit of a story about hey you know I struggle at times with breathing on uphills it gets really uncomfortable I know a lot of hikers struggle with this but also I know that there are really really good methods of training for uphill hiking and I know because I've tried these I've tested these I've used these on hikers years and years and years and I personally believe that I've come up with one of the best if not the best way of improving breathing on uphill hiking That's kind of the gist of the post. Pretty standard. I got one response. I always get funny responses on these things, but I got one response from someone. And what they said was the best way to get better at uphill hiking is to hike up hills every day.

[1:16] These responses, they just drive me mental. There's so many people out there who like to say these things. There's so many people out there who like to hype up with these types of words and it's the same thing of sort of saying hey the best way to get ready for the mountains is to go live in the mountains or the best way to hike is just to hike every day or the best way to run a marathon is just to get ready for a marathon is just go out and do 20 kilometers every day or whatever it may be or it's the same thing of like hey you know the best way to to save money is just don't buy anything which is a necessity or the best way to lose weight is just eat one meal a day or whatever and like yeah all of this stuff technically it might be true.

[2:04] Realistically, it's just not going to happen for 99% of the people. And it just makes me laugh. It makes me cry. It makes me get angry. It's just a rollercoaster of emotions when I see all this stuff. And in all honesty, when it comes down to these things, I never try to argue with these people. I never try to convince these people or whatever it may be, because the people who say these types of things, they're a bit of a lost cause. They are so narrow-sighted. You know, I'm absolutely under no illusions that I could ever convince them otherwise or ever open their eyes to whatever may be. But with that as being an inspiration, it does bring up an interesting point in which I want to talk about, which I think can be pretty valuable.

[2:46] Because I do admittedly say in a lot of my content, videos, podcasts, articles, whatever may be, I often talk about the best way to do something, the best way to improve your breathing on uphills, the best way to protect your knees on downhills, the best way to train out your training hikes or whatever it may be. And I'll often use this word best.

[3:11] But the question is, what is considered the best? Because what I talk about, I'm not talking about the technical best. I'm not talking about this situation where, okay, the best way to save your knees on downhill hiking is just not do downhill hiking. Or the best way to recover from an injury is just sit in bed for six months or whatever may be.

[3:34] Technically, this stuff, yeah, but that's not what I talk about. When I talk about the best, and I think this is worthwhile keeping in perspective, when I talk about the best, typically there's a few factors involved and where I'm coming from with this. Usually what I'm trying to think of when I'm making recommendations around stuff like this, is I'm talking about the best being the best results for the least amount of time. So it's not if you had infinite time to invest, but the best results for someone who may have to fit training in around a full life.

[4:10] The best results, least amount of time. That's paired with whatever I'm recommending, trying to be relatively accessible and relatively applicable to most people. And what I mean by that is relatively accessible. If we're preparing for the mountains, maybe the best way to prepare for the mountains is to live near a mountain and climb up and one down every day. That's not very accessible for a lot of people, but I may talk about going up and down a hill or a set of stairs. Again, not everyone will have access to that, but it's relatively accessible and applicable to most people. And also number three, to go with all of this, is when I talk about the best, we want to find something which has a low risk of things going wrong.

[4:57] Because while technically the best way to prepare for a marathon is to run 20 kilometers every day, well, that has a massive risk of flaring up overuse injuries. Or if the best way of improving your speed on downhill hiking is to every single day find a super steep hill and try to beat that time going down every single day, well, that has a pretty high risk of things going wrong. So all of these things we kind of want to keep in mind when we're looking at this in quotation marks best.

[5:28] And to give you like you know back to the original kind of inspiration when i'm talking about improving uphill hiking my personal belief of the best approach to this is a combination of strength training targeted cardio training so things like doing interval training stair hip or hill or step sessions and getting out on the trail combining those three types of training together.

[5:56] Combined with playing around with factors like pacing and breathing control and fueling right i personally believe if you can kind of nail all those things that is probably the best approach which may sound like a lot but i really do personally believe this approach to be much much much more very very effective and much much more time efficient than just going up and down a hill every day even if you're spending 40 minutes minutes a day going up and down a hill If you give me 40 minutes a day to do this stuff, you'd get way better results. Or if you had spent 40 minutes going up and down a hill each day and you gave me 30 minutes a day to do this stuff, I personally believe I could get better results. I personally believe that this approach is a bit more accessible for most people. You don't really need super long or super steep hills to train on. Yes, there may be some outliers where it gets a little bit tricky. You can't find any hills, but most people can find something which has a little bit of incline.

[6:55] I believe this approach probably provides enough variation to reduce the risk of picking up overuse injuries or getting demotivated. So overuse injuries will happen from just doing the same thing over and over and over and over and just overloading a certain area of the body and demotivated a lot of people if you're just doing the same thing every day you just get boring and drop out of it we don't want that.

[7:16] And on top of that i personally believe you know even outside of this is this combination of things in this context there's going to be so much more carryover for this just to help you in everyday general life and in other situations on the trail that is personally like going into it why i believe this approach, which I recommend and this and that, is the best.

[7:36] And the whole point of this episode is not so much me toot my own horn, be like, oh, yeah, I'm the best and follow my way or the highway or whatever may be. But I would like you, as my listener who listens to my stuff and who's obviously interested in training for hiking, to use this as a bit of perspective for your own decisions with your own training. And when you are looking at the best approach to your personal training, whether you are trying to improve specific aspects of fitness to help with your hiking, if you're trying to improve your breathing on heels or your knee pain or your foot pain or whatever it may be, or if you're just generally, just generally as a whole trying to improve your fitness for the trail, use this idea as a bit of a perspective. Look at a workout or look at an approach and look at a strategy and ask yourself, is this approach, which I'm reading, even if technically it may be really really really good is this going to realistically fit around my current time availability is this approach even though technically it makes a lot of sense is this approach accessible for me and relevant to me and is this approach even though yes there's a lot of people who've seen success with it am i confident that this approach won't put me at an unnecessary or major risk of things going wrong.

[8:59] If you ask yourself these questions and you're like, you know what, I'm happy with all of these. It's good. It's not a worry at all. Then great. That's probably a really good approach for you, if not the best approach for you. But if you answer no to any of these and you look at something like, ah, that's not going to fit around my life. That's not accessible to me. Or you know what? That makes me nervous about hurting X, Y, and Z, then maybe this type of training, while technically it may be a great option, might not be right for you.

[9:29] So give that a go next time you see something and you're curious or next time you see that headline or that video pop up or whatever it may be. It might be an interesting perspective to look through and it may really help you with the decision-making process. And then one final thing just to wrap this episode up, I just realized I haven't

[9:50] said this, just if I haven't made myself clear. If you ever do see someone giving advice online and they're giving that advice saying the the best way to get up hills is to just climb hills, or the best way to get ready for hiking is just to go out and hike, or the best way to prepare for a pack is just carry a pack every day. And given those broad, generic, kind of not very useful statements, yeah, you can probably ignore them. They're probably not a great place to seek advice, and you can just tune that out and focus on somewhere else. So with that being said, I hope this is useful for some few people. Keep those questions in mind and use that as a little bit of a perspective for when you are looking at new approaches, new information, whatever it may be. And I think it may be quite useful to a lot of people. So thank you for listening. I hope this is helpful. I hope a few people can use this and I hope it can make a little bit of a difference for people further down the line. So thanks for listening and we'll talk to you very, very soon. Bye.

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