Strength training is critical for endurance and mountain sports. It is also easily misunderstood. What exercises to use, whether to push heavy weights or focus on high repetitions, how to add strength without adding bulk or mass—these are all important considerations for the mountain athlete. WHY TRAIN STRENGTH FOR MOUNTAIN SPORTS? People can and have summited mountains, raced ultras, blazed skimo races, and sent 5.13 without lifting a single weight in the gym. But strength training—everything from pull-ups and squats to focused muscular endurance work—is fundamental to becoming a well-rounded mountain athlete with a long, injury-free career. The Uphill…
Author: Uphill Athlete
Skimo racing is hands down the hardest aerobic work I’ve done in my endurance career. The full-body engagement and use of both legs and arms to propel myself uphill causes me to taste blood much quicker than in any running race I have ever participated in. I love that about the sport, and without a doubt it’s imperative to work hard on preparing your heart and lungs as best you can before your first (or 10th) skimo race season. With that said, you can have the world’s highest VO2max, but if you do not know how to do a quick…
Since we published Training for the New Alpinism, one question has come up more than any other: how do I balance work, family, and the rest of life with the desire to be fit for the mountains? The specifics vary—some people are constrained by location, some by energy, some by time—but the pattern is consistent. Most of these athletes are cramming a week’s worth of activity into one or two days, then wondering why they aren’t improving. There is nothing wrong with being a weekend warrior. For many people, getting out on Saturday and Sunday is what keeps them sane.…
Caveat: What follows is not a substitute for professional advice. These ideas have been accumulated over dozens of years of dealing with our own injuries and those of our athletes. Over those years we’ve developed some very general suggestions on the subject that we’d like to share. Every athlete and every injury is different, so making blanket recommendations is risky. We put forth these suggestions knowing that they help in most cases, but maybe not yours. Remember that there is no substitute for in-person, hands-on evaluation by a sports rehab professional.If you are a runner, skier, or climber, and especially…
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A common refrain we hear from amateur athletes is that they do not have time for high volumes of training. So they prefer high-intensity training sessions. When training is squeezed between family obligations, work, school, and life, time limitations can push it down the priority list. It is tempting to think you can shortchange workout duration and then make up for it by dialing up the intensity.Of course, adding intensity does improve your fitness quickly. However, without a well-trained aerobic base, high-intensity training simply will never allow you to maximize your fitness potential. To put it another way, the potential…
Overtraining syndrome is the most common reason endurance athletes fail to reach their potential, and the most preventable. It is not ordinary fatigue. It is a complex medical condition in which the body’s adaptation processes break down, and what was once a manageable training load becomes destructive stress. The earlier you recognize it, the less damage it does. The athletes quoted in this article — including Kilian Jornet, Krissy Moehl, Clare Gallagher, and Anton Krupicka — have all experienced it firsthand and share what they learned. Trail running training group join the community LEARN MORE How Does Overtraining Develop? Overtraining…
In The Matrix, Neo learns martial arts by downloading them directly into his brain. A cable, a button, instant mastery. It’s a compelling fantasy, and it maps perfectly onto how many people approach endurance training: the hope that some combination of intensity, technology, or willpower can compress years of development into weeks. It doesn’t work that way. In the field of endurance training, world-class athletes and their coaches know all the ingredients. The results they produce come from how they combine those ingredients over time, not from discovering a shortcut that nobody else has found. For uphill athletes, the path…
Given the recent proliferation of high-intensity, strength-based fitness programs with names like boot camp and SEALFIT, it would be easy to assume that all members of the military train this way: with heavy doses of strength and a token nod to aerobic training. It’s often true that the service branches pump up the importance of strength at the expense of large-volume, low-intensity base building—that essential foundation of any durable athlete. But not every tactical athlete bends to that one-track line of thinking.There’s a shift happening, small but powerful, with individuals like a recent graduate of the US Army Ranger School…
When I first started skimo racing, I started every race too fast. The gun would go off, I’d bolt forward, and for about 60 seconds I’d feel great. Then it was as if I was running through molasses. I’d have to slow way down, and the rest of the race felt horrible. When I dug into why this was happening, the answer was simple: my aerobic base was too small. My aerobic system couldn’t produce enough energy to sustain the pace I wanted, so my body was relying on the anaerobic (glycolytic) pathway to make up the difference. That reliance…