Training for Mountaineering: Strength

00:05.71
Steve
Welcome to the Uphill Athlete podcast where our mission is to elevate and inspire all mountain athletes through education and celebration. My name is Steve House and I will be your host today along with Alyssa Clark. We are thrilled to welcome for the first time one of our longtime coaches, Jason Anton onto the show today. We’re going to talk about all things strength training and mountaineering. Jason has over 20 years of coaching experience as a professional mountain guide and takes on incredible mountain endurance challenges in his television series, Beat Monday. Jason thanks for joining us for the show.

00:51.72
Jason Antin
Steve thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure working as a coach for the Uphill team and this is a great opportunity for me to talk about things that are very near and dear to my heart which are playing in the mountains and getting ready for playing in the mountains. As you mentioned, these days I try to combine several different ways to connect with people. One being through inspiration to the Beat Monday show to actually sharing that experience with them side by side and the mountains as a guide. Then of course as it’s most relevant here helping them get ready mentally and physically for those endeavors as a coach and so I’m really excited to dive into some of the topics we’re going to discuss this morning.

02:30.14
Alyssa
It’s awesome to have you on the podcast and I feel like we really scored on this one because Steve and I realized that you have not been on the podcast yet which is like what were we doing? So it’s awesome that we’re able to have your first interview on the Uphill Athlete podcast with us today. Before we dive into the actual meat of our episode, can you give us a little bit about your background in mountain sports and what drew you to become a guide and a coach and also what brought you to work with uphill athlete?

03:13.34
Jason Antin
Yeah, great question. I’ll try not to bore you all to tears with my response. But I grew up playing traditional sports so baseball, football, all those things. Although I did have a lot of exposure to the outdoors with my family. We’d go hiking and skiing and snowboarding as kids. I really dedicated almost all of my energy from an athletic standpoint to football through the college level and so that was really where I spent all of my time training and preparing and you know up until my early 20s that’s really where I invested all of my time. While I was in college I was studying sports medicine and getting ready to potentially dive into the profession of coaching  and at the same time playing NCAA football. That takes up a lot of time. I think they say about 60 hours a week for a college athlete. Then I graduated and I had all this energy and all this desire to not only continue to train myself and pursue an athletic endeavor but I had no real outlet and so I went back to the thing I could think of which was being outdoors. I basically just put all that energy that I had spent the last decade playing traditional sports and transitioned it into mountain sports. That started with climbing and then moved into trail running and then I started blending the two and getting more into the alpine world. So that’s where kind of the fire was lit for being one who pursues mountain sports and athletics myself from a coaching standpoint.

04:48.31
Jason Antin
I grew up in the northeast and so I was coaching there. I had graduated from college and I was doing a lot of one on one training for folks of all ambitions, abilities and then I moved to Colorado. I reached out to a woman in Boulder named Connie Chaina who owns a small gym called, well at the time it was called mountain athlete and it’s now called the alpine training center. I thought that was really unique because it was a way for me not only to work out myself surrounded by other mountain athletes but to be a coach there. This gym is a place that provides hour-long blocks of training for folks prepping for the mountains and so when I moved to Colorado about twelve years ago I started coaching there. At the same time I also picked up the profession as a guide and started working towards that path. So for the last decade I’ve really been pursuing those two ways of helping people get into the mountains and achieve their goals. One being coaching, the other being actually giving them the skills or sharing the experience with them side-by-side.

05:56.97
Alyssa
That’s amazing.

06:44.66
Jason Antin
I mean one thing I think, I’m sure you remember it certainly when you wrote the first book but when I started getting really excited about Mountain Athletics and mountain sports it was certainly not common culture. It wasn’t cool per se right? You talked to climbers twenty years ago like training for climbing was just going and climbing versus training for you know football. It’s like you have regimented strength workouts you have regimented conditioning workouts. You’ve got to watch game films, read plays, and actually practice. It’s part of the culture. It’s the norm. It’s cool when it comes to mountain sports. Twenty years ago, fifteen years ago even ten years ago it wasn’t really the norm yet for most folks and so it’s been really fun to see that explode. I remember watching videos of Ueli Steck training hard and it inspired me to go to the stairs at Harvard Stadium in Boston and just run laps with a pack. But it took a while to encourage my fellow climbing buddies to do that with me. I certainly found a few but it wasn’t the norm just a few years ago

08:02.64
Jason Antin
I went to school at a small school in New York, St Lawrence and I loved it. I loved the challenge of having to prepare yourself mentally and physically day in day out. I love the team component. For me one thing that I think adds a unique perspective for mountain athletes is I’m not a small person, I’m not your typical build for a trail runner, rock climber, or even an alpinist. When I graduated college I was two hundred and sixty five pounds and I felt like I was pretty darn strong at the time. But I remember going to a bouldering gym just after I graduated and just completely shredding my hands up because I hadn’t prepared myself for that type of movement. I was very heavy. My technique was quite poor back then and so I think I have a pretty unique perspective on the transition from maybe a traditional sport like american football to mountain athletics but I really enjoyed my time as a football player and one of the biggest thing that stands out for that is the teamwork component and working with a team and training with a team and I often am searching for that when I go out and play in the mountains.

08:32.00
Steve
Yeah, that’s really interesting how you came to Mountain sports through traditional sports which of course have that built-in structure of training for preparing for and coaching for the performance or the games or whatever. That’s one of the things that I think we can probably all agree that mountain sports, particularly mountaineering, historically never had and that’s kind of one of the things that Scott and I set out to change with the original training for the new alpinism book which was to start to introduce mountain athletes to this concept of of structured training. Obviously it’s brought us to where we’re at today. But I think that’s really interesting and makes a lot of sense to me.

Tell us a little bit more about what it was like training for and playing college football at the NCAA level.

11:00.58
Jason Antin
Yeah I mean I think there’s so much that I look back and realize it gave me a good foundation for other things. One of the biggest ones was just time and consistency. I mean we preach that as coaches at uphill and I spent just like you Steve and at a very very very young age you started training and you know that that volume accumulates over time. There’s a significant impact of accumulated fitness. I think that it’s very profound when it comes to strength. I’ve had training blocks where I’ve focused my efforts on other things like maybe spending time on the trails and spending a lot less time moving weight around but man that strength sticks with you for a long time if you’re consistent and build it up. Its years and decades literally of training. That shows me that accumulated fitness is a real thing.  The other thing is just movement right? We talk about that at uphill. It’s technical capacity right? That’s a big focus of how we get folks ready for various objectives and how we train them. Spending a lot of time working through compound movements learning how to do exercises. That’s also a skill that we know as coaches doesn’t doesn’t come naturally to everybody? So it gives me an understanding that it’s important to learn those movements and how to do them well.

11:52.52
Steve
I think that you’ve both heard me say this a lot that one of the things I really want to celebrate with the uphill athlete coaching team is that each of us has special superpowers and special unique backgrounds and one of yours is strength training. I grew up strength training as well I think for me, it was more just something I had a really great friend group and we all thought it was kind of cool. I’m not sure why and none of us played football like we were all like cross-country runners and skiers and stuff.

12:18.85
Jason Antin
Yeah.

12:30.43
Steve
But I started in seventh grade and then we had early bird classes in seventh and eighth grade. It was two days a week but then when I got to high school. It was five days a week from 7am to 8am every day.

12:46.81
Steve
And I did that all through high school and we were in there with the football players and the football coach and we learned a lot in hindsight like at the time you’re just kids and you’re just goofing around and it’s just fun and we we had a lot of laughs and we thought we looked funny we of course we were like skinny little kids. You know, especially me, I was small and so I looked pretty ripped even though I wasn’t that strong just because I did a little bit of that kind of training. We just thought that was hilarious.

13:20.79
Steve
Course the girls didn’t think that was so cute. But that’s another story. But yeah I think that your background in that is super interesting. What were some of the things that you took away from those years of strength training just generally, what do you look back on that you learned there?

12:16.31
Alyssa
I’m writing that phrase down, technical capacity. That’s a great one now. It’s kind of funny when you’re a kid and you’re just going along with having fun and working out and you don’t realize what you’re doing. I mean kind of the same thing for me. I went to a Ski Academy and we did strength and we did a lot of balance strength and you look back at it and you go thank you so much whoever decided to program this. I thought it was fun and here we are so yeah similarly I played lacrosse in college so I come from kind of the background of the ski academy but then we lifted. It’s like 2 or 3 times a week you were in the gym and you had a strength coach who was standing there helping you with your technique. I think that that foundation leads to athletes that are really durable as we kind of have talked about a lot.

13:09.56
Jason Antin
Yeah I agree 100% like you threw out the dword first I mean I think first off, it’s lifting’s fun like I’ve always enjoyed it I grew up doing it. I have had other athletes say, do I really need to spend this much time in the gym and I’ll kind of give them my scientific answer of what I think is reasonable then I all say hey like if you’re enjoying it, it’s part of the process and keep doing it. I personally think it’s fun which is why I’ve almost always included it in my own training. But then it’s the dword. The durability factor right? I think that is a massive component to being successful in a long career or long lifespan of playing in the mountains. The strength training really contributes to being able to do these things day in and out and have a fun time doing it.

16:32.19
Steve
Yeah and I wasn’t going to get to this at this point but it’s in my notes and I’ll make the bridge right now because I think that our joints are designed to work really well in a certain range of motion. And in a certain biomechanical way and what people I think don’t realize and this is one of the main reasons we strength train at uphill athlete. We preach so loudly that your fitness house needs a foundation and that foundation is literally strength because the muscles and the tendons and the bony connections are the things that hold our joints together and it’s one thing if we’re walking down a trail or you’re running and everything’s in line. But as soon as your foot slips or as soon as you hit a little bit of wind slab while you’re skiing it throws you forward and there’s these other forces. What holds your joints together is literally the strength of your muscles and your connective tissues. And this is so important for durability and I can say other than like traumatic accidents from falling, in my 52 years old I’ve never, knock on wood, had an overuse injury in my life and that’s entirely because of strength training I’m convinced. All my friends have had multiple knee surgeries and all of that. I’ve never even had a problem and I think it’s because I’ve just stayed strong.

15:38.30
Jason Antin
Yeah Steve I agree with you. I still have plenty of time moving around to get myself in an overuse injury and things like that, but I believe heavily that years of strength training have helped me stay more durable and injury free.

16:11.49
Alyssa
Yeah I think this has been amazing hearing this background. But I think really what we should start with is we’ve been throwing around this word strength but what is strength? 

16:26.60
Alyssa
Either Jason or Steve go for it.

18:30.83
Steve
Yeah, absolutely well should we go back to our script a little bit perhaps and make sure we don’t miss anything because I know we have a lot of great information to cover today.

19:00.56
Steve
Yeah I can take a shot at that and I think that it’s important for athletes to understand. So I want to start with a definition of strength because it’s a misunderstood thing. Actually I think what we’re talking about most of the time when we talk about strength training is we’re actually talking about power. Strength is your absolute ability to create a certain amount of force to lift a certain weight or whatever but power is the ability to do that over a certain amount of time and the shorter that amount of time is the more power you have. And also how that translates to endurance is that in endurance training or endurance sports we are using our muscles in a submaximal way over and over and over and over and over again for many many many repetitions. The smaller the percentage of that is the power we can generate, the greater our endurance is. It’s that simple.

19:30.62
Jason Antin
Steve I mean I think you nailed it. It’s like we could dive into the nitty gritty of it as we will in a minute but from a guiding perspective, folks kind of train to the best of their ability if they don’t have some structured focus from something like an uphill athlete.

19:48.39
Jason Antin
I think about clients going on Rainier for the first time right? They might go hiking or trail running they might go to the gym, but for those that either have a tough time or potentially those that are unsuccessful due to fitness it really comes down to carrying that 50 pound pack up to camp one and then potentially carrying that 50 pound pack again the next day. It’s just that people are not prepared for it. They don’t realize how much of an important factor it is to be successful in the mountains. We’ll dive into this, but once we kind of dissect what went wrong and how we can prepare it really comes down to making sure they can do the thing with weight on their back and and like you said that weight can be the same for the the hundred pound athlete and the two hundred pound athlete.

20:34.57
Steve
And that’s also why if you put on a ninety pound pack and you try to sprint up a hill, maybe you can do that a few times but maybe you’re 99% of your power and you can only do that for like a couple of seconds. You’re going to be exhausted. I think it’s important particularly because we’re talking in this series about strength training for mountaineers. Mountaineers do have to carry a lot of weight unlike any other sport honestly like I don’t know any other sport where you are moving around with 60 and 70 pounds on your body. The other thing I want to surface around this is that it’s not that much lighter if you’re smaller just because you’re a hundred pounds and five foot four, your boots and pack and rope and all that stuff don’t actually weigh that much less than Jason and Jason has more muscle to do that so that was a bit of a rambling answer. But I think I wanted to kind of try to connect the definition of strength as the ability to just create a force power. The ability to create a force over a certain amount of time hopefully is a short amount of time. And then how that translates into the actual application of what we’re doing and why it’s important to have a powerful body so that you can achieve great endurance. They just go together.

22:10.57
Jason Antin
Yeah, just to add to that, sometimes in the mountains you don’t have a choice to carry the weight right? We do certainly have mountain sports that are truly light and fast and carefree. Maybe a trail runner running shorter distances, with support or trail running any distance with supporters. Maybe an uphill ski mountaineering race that’s supported but when you’re embarking on an alpine endeavor, a mountaineer endeavor like you have to carry gear and speed is also a margin of safety and so the faster you can move with wind in the back on your back, the safer and more successful you’re going to be in the mountains.

20:34.58
Alyssa
Definitely so I mean you feel like you already answered it, but just to really like I guess hit that home, to make sure that we understand, why is it so important for mountain athletes to be strong? Why should we strength train?

22:45.21
Jason Antin
Just to kind of riff off what Steve said like mountain athletics and mountain sports are sometimes linear until they’re not and so you know you get knocked off balance or as Steve said you ski into a wind slab and get kicked off kilter, they’re often nonlinear at times that you’re not expecting and strength allows you to prepare for those moments.

23:27.57
Steve
Yeah I think for mountaineers it’s because our sport is heavy and because it’s the foundation that keeps us healthy and gives us longevity as athletes and I think most uphill athletes are here because they want to be active and athletic in the mountains over a lifetime not just for a few months and that’s one of the best ways you can achieve that longevity. If I’m going to go down the rabbit hole a little bit more you know as we age sarcopenia is the name for the phenomenon that once you get past around fifty years old you just start to lose a certain amount of muscle mass and you can keep that from happening through strength training. It’s been proven in many studies and there’s tons of information out there about how good a lot of people will say if you’re over fifty and you only do one thing, strength train and this is why. It’s to prevent sarcopenia and maintain muscle mass and that’s actually connected to better health and across a lot of different ways. But I think there’s a lot of compelling reasons to strength train.

25:07.84
Jason Antin
Yeah, Steve you nailed it. It’s funny too because all three of us realize the significance of it in your back and how it affects performance and movement and what’s required. But you know this season I haven’t been doing as much uphill inbounds skiing as I have in past years.

25:24.65
Jason Antin
I’ve been guiding a lot and I’ve been wearing my pack ski guiding and my backpack ski guiding is sometimes almost 40 pounds. I mean it has a bag valve, full medkit, full repair kit, rescue sleds sometimes and this is a non-technical pack right? I’ve got a light rope. So I met my buddies to go up to the resort on Friday morning. Just a few laps and I had an ear to ear grin. I’m having so much fun like why is this so fun? I just realized it was the first time the whole year that I haven’t had a full pack with my skis on. I just had this moment of like oh man. I can’t believe how much more carefree and light I feel now and I know it. I just hadn’t felt it yet this season. It felt great, but my whole point in telling that story is the pack. The pack is real and it’s important to prepare for it.

25:42.54
Steve
Yeah, and also if we take it to mountaineering and alpinism the fact is that for the most part the more difficult the climbing gets, the heavier everything becomes because you slow down so you need more food. You need more water, you need warmer clothes.

26:01.13
Steve
It’s sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy in the wrong direction. And it just makes it almost exponentially harder and this is you know I say this not to call out extreme Alpinism so much as to say that.

26:19.99
Steve
Everyone’s skill level in the mountains exists on some sort of continuum from beginner to the most advanced and the challenge that you’re undertaking relative to where you are on that skill level continuum is going to dictate how much equipment you need.

26:12.30
Alyssa
Yeah, there’s a great term of the backpacking world and long distance trail running is you pack your fears and I’m sure that applies to mountaineering, alpinism and that pack and those fears weigh an awful lot.

26:28.61
Alyssa
So there’s nothing wrong with that. I think it’s just an important thing to realize that the more certain you feel probably also the stronger you’re going to be because you’re used to being out there. So they’re very connected. The whole aspect of that. 

26:38.32
Steve
If climbing Rainier is really hard for you and you’ve never done it before and you’re really intimidated I can guarantee that you’re going to be packing too heavy because that’s human nature and it should be, there’s nothing wrong with it. When I do something that is unknown to me I also like I’m not sure what those boundaries are so I hedge a little bit on the safe side which is probably going to mean I better have this other rope or I better bring a jumar rather than a prussick. There’s a few decisions and all of a sudden your pack weight is ten, fifteen percent heavier where if you’re doing an objective like if Jason and I go climb Mount Rainier we know exactly what we need. We know exactly what we don’t need and we can draw that line very precisely and get our packs down really light and have a fine time and have backpacks that weigh 20 pounds each. That’s totally different than if somebody’s going to Ranier the first time and it’s not anything wrong with the person that’s going to Rainier the first time it’s just that we have way more experience relative to that objective.

26:47.32
Alyssa
Also, I think it’s very underrated. People do not realize weight on feet is so much harder, like you put a heavy ski on you put a mountaineering boot with a crampon that’s a lot of extra strength that’s needed, especially if you’re moving through deep snow or anything like that. 

Steve
Yeah I always used the Newmatic style crampons. I always climbed on Gravel Crampons. So even on Nanga Parbat we had the plastic piece over the toe that comes up rather than the metal bail thing.

30:03.79
Steve
This goes into what people would always ask me like how can you have those? They’re seen as something non-technical and the answer is really simple. Each one was two ounces lighter like that’s a massive difference over a long difference and you go to eighteen thousand feet where you have half an atmosphere of pressure or you go to twenty five thousand feet where you’ve gone to the 30% of atmospheric pressure and everything needs that much more energy to move and so those little differences become really big and I think that was almost twenty years ago now so that has gotten a lot better and a lot lighter since. But these are important things that go back to that really cool project they did. I don’t know when that was quite a while ago where they went and they climbed the Eiger 1938 route with all original equipment I think. The concession was they used modern ropes, but that was it and they were like these are guys that had already climbed it like 20 times each. They lived at the base of the mountain. They knew it like the back of their hand. It just goes to show and that’s an extreme example, but these extremes were achieved through small iterations and improvements over many many many years so that makes a big difference. Anyway, we’re getting way off topic as we tend to but we’re going to come Alyssa is going to keep us on track.

29:10.13
Alyssa
So I’m going to try my best. With strength training we focus on kind of I’ll say a 3 part series of periodization. And we talked in the last episode about strength training in the base period and we didn’t get too far into it because we knew we were going to have a great guest on for this episode. But we want to go much further into what these three periods look like. So they are transition, max strength and muscular endurance and we’re not going to go into hypertrophy because that’s not really what we want to focus on. Steve I want to have you lead us off with defining these 3 terms, transition, max strength and muscular endurance.

29:48.36
Alyssa
And then Jason if you want to follow up with what strength training in the transition period looks like we will get ourselves right back on track.

32:36.78
Steve
Okay, the strength training in the transition period is sometimes called the general strength training and essentially all it is is to get you conditioned to be able to train. It’s just general conditioning and in a sense we don’t have to worry too much about what happens during this period. Other than that it needs to be consistent and well-rounded, the programming needs to be consistently executed and the exercises you’re doing hit all the major muscle groups and ranges of motion that we need to address as mountaineers. The max strength period is the period where I think people have the most fun a lot of times because you’re lifting heavy high weight low reps.

33:01.67
Alyssa
No, that was great if. Jason wants to jump in with what transition looks like. What is that? What is that strength period?

33:08.17
Jason Antin
Yeah, no, totally like I’ll just riff off what Steve said. Steve great points I mean there’s obviously the more traditional periodization that we probably have all learned as strength coaches. But as a list to kick things off with you know at Uphill Athlete. We have the transition phase. We have the kind of max strength phase and of course muscular endurance or strength endurance. As you said for me the transition phase is a time where folks really need to start to learn the motion because if they don’t have good fundamental movements if they’re unclear on.

33:31.54
Steve
And you’re using the same motions repeatedly you know from week to week. And the reason for that is that we’re really focusing on progressing those weights and increasing those weights a little bit every week so that you actually get stronger and the purpose of the max strength period is actually counterintuitive. It doesn’t actually necessarily make the muscle fibers any stronger. What is actually happening is a neurological adaptation to teach your nervous system to fire more muscle fibers together and to coordinate those muscle fibers better.

33:42.46
Jason Antin
And exactly how to do the exercises then we can’t progress to the best of our abilities once we move on to either the muscular endurance or max strength phase. So the transition phase for me is folks understanding first and foremost what the exercises are, how to be done correctly, the form of course is of the utmost importance.

34:01.93
Jason Antin
Some of it’s just getting the body in mind prepared for the working load that’s about to follow.  But the transition phase is pretty much all about laying the foundation for the next two phases of strength that we’re going to implement at uphill.

34:10.32
Steve
And I think this goes back to that you know decades of strength training longevity as an athlete. It’s also just from this your muscles know how to coordinate and work together when there’s a sudden large force on the joints and this is what the max strength period does then the muscular endurance period. It’s exactly what it sounds like you have to take. You have to take it. Then we have muscular endurance or sometimes called strength endurance. 

34:15.96
Jason Antin
Once we get past that as you said Steve we’re diving right into the max strength and as you said it’s certainly fun because you’re typically moving a lot more weight over less reps and we’re certainly trying to mimic muscle recruitment that we’re going to be seeing in the mountains and for a lot of folks that’s a fun phase and of course we’re typically implementing that for usually up to eight weeks and we’re kind of changing the amount of of sets or rounds they’re doing each week and ultimately our goal there is to increase the weight.

34:48.40
Steve
The term strength endurance is maybe a little more intuitive to understand because you’re combining strength and you’re combining endurance. So what this means in mountaineering training most commonly is the weighted pack carries. So starting off with say a 40 pound pack and hiking up. 30 minutes up a steep hill in mountain boots. You know again specificity is part of the equation here. We’ll talk some more about that. But we’re getting you know into the end of our training plan closer to the preparation for our objective and we’re just loading up a backpack and carrying it uphill at a pretty good clip.

34:50.82
Jason Antin
Yeah, those are those are kind of the 3 fundamental strength components that we implemented at uphill and and I think they compliment mountain athlete athletics quite well.

35:03.18
Alyssa
Excellent That’s really helpful for our listeners to know. I think that a lot of people probably want to skip right to max strength or Muscular endurance and don’t spend enough time in the transition period which is super important for just understanding how to move your body. I think we really touched on that with the episode with Pete, our physical therapist, but that’s just so important for injury prevention. But let’s get to the quote unquote you know sexy indoor lifting where you’re throwing up big weight now just kidding. We’re not trying to be bodybuilders over here. But what is the max strength period and again, we’ve talked about this quite a bit but why is this so important? Because it honestly seems from the outside opposite of what we should be trying to aim for. But what are we trying to do here and what are some of the core exercises that we use in the max strength period.

35:29.29
Steve
Jason did you want to add anything to those definitions or should I have done those definitions one at a time. Maybe I don’t know how.

38:46.63
Steve
Yeah I can start off there because I think I want to go back to something you said about bodybuilders and one of the distinctions I want to make about why we as athletes are strength training versus why a bodybuilder maybe be strength training is we are trying to our goal is to become better at our sport. Our goal is not to just lift more weight, that’s going to happen as part of this process but that’s actually not our goal. So one of the things with max strength is my favorite movement and we’re going to talk get people as soon as you start talking about strength training. They want to know about which exercise or which movements you like but I really like for mountaineers. I really like one-legged movements. I really like the box step ups. I think the biggest mistake people make with box step ups is they use too high of a box or they use a box that is soft or like a weight bench. So their ankle isn’t isn’t stable. I also recommend people do these in like a really flat low weightlifting style shoe. You know something without too much cushion in it that makes it harder for you to stabilize and you just know the easiest thing is just to hold dumbbells in your hands and step up and down off the box. Of course it’s better and harder if you put the weight on your shoulders or in a backpack and put it higher because the lever arm is greater and it’s harder to maintain balance and that’s part of what we’re trying to improve upon as trying to improve on our sport. But that’s also just more sometimes you just need to like get it done quickly. So I’d tell people hey if you really want to get the weights higher just grab 2 dumbbells like kind of put them up in like a goblet squat sort of position holding them up in front of your chest or something and do the movements like that. I also tell people to try to do the movements relatively quickly. 

I mean we’re doing you know a max strength protocol is going to be something like 3 to 4 reps of you know, 90%, 95% of your 1 rep max and what I don’t want to see people getting into from an athletic point of view and this goes back to what I was talking about earlier with power is I don’t want people to be doing the movements slowly.

I don’t want them to be just like straining against it and just barely taking like 3 or 4 seconds to get the weight up. You know whether it’s a back squat or whatever, I want people to be somewhat explosive and relatively quick because power and strength and you know applied in a short amount of time is what we need as athletes.

Okay, so this is again strength training as we know from all the research it’s incredible. How specifically our bodies adapt to these stimuli and so we really want to make the stimuli look as much like the event as we can. And this is why I really prefer a box step up or a split squat or something like that’s heavy over a back squat. I also for myself really love the deadlift because I think it’s really good for my posture or my back.

I think that’s actually getting a little bit away from what I was just saying but I know for me as a climber my shoulders are always forward and anything I can do to get stronger on the back of my body is good. So how about you Jason? What exercises do you love?

39:43.55
Jason Antin
Yeah, apparently Steve we need to work out more together because you just named my regular go to’s. I also enjoy doing deadlifts even if they’re not super heavy. I think they complement a well-rounded program.

40:01.41
Jason Antin
I enjoy doing them but you nailed it with the single leg stuff and the single leg stuff for me is quite important as you mentioned single leg box step ups, weighted box step ups, rear foot elevated or some folks know them as bulgarian split squat. They’re super important and there’s kind of 3 reasons why.

40:19.73
Jason Antin
To me the single leg stuff is so crucial to a well-rounded program and the first one is it’s real right? Like if we’re used to doing a traditional back squat or traditional front squat. You’re certainly training your body to work together as one unit.

40:38.17
Jason Antin
But when you’re in the mountains moving you rarely have that ability. You really have that luxury to have 2 leg limbs that are completely linear doing the motion. It’s often one off balance or often one taking 90% of the load and so the first reason the single leg stuff is great is because it mimics real life. Second one is that it certainly promotes durability, right? I do see some athletes either at the alpine training center or through uphill that they start to get maybe some hip issues and that has to do with their inability to really operate with that single leg. They’re so dependent, so compensating on other muscles that their hips and other joints become less stable because they’re not focused on really making sure that they’re stabilizing each leg at a time. The last reason is just that recruitment, right? Because if you’re doing things as one leg and you’re doing things really isolating one limb you are requiring it to learn how to recruit as many muscle groups as possible to complete that exercise as efficiently as it can.

41:48.88
Jason Antin
Whereas if you’re used to doing kind of two legged traditional exercises or two-legged squats, there’s certainly going to be some compensation so it really comes down to muscle recruitment staying durable and of course mimicking real life movement in the mountains.

42:01.35
Alyssa
I think those are excellent points. I was actually thinking about this a lot with ski touring, that you almost always, especially if you’re on steep terrain, have one foot that’s higher than the other and so one leg is working an awful lot harder than the other one is. And if you don’t have the ability to use both legs and they are not very strong on their own, that is just going to be a suffer fest. So that’s an incredible point of just you know real life application is always what we’re trying to do and I think that can get lost for a lot of people when they’re in a gym. They’re not out in the mountains. This helps you to do that better. So just always a good thing to be kind of in the back of your head. 

43:53.59
Jason Antin
Yeah I mean that’s often the crux Steve right is like newer athletes don’t understand the kind of continuum of modification right? And so if they just see on paper a single leg pistol squat which is certainly an advanced motion for everybody. You understand if you’re listening out there. There’s a significant way to modify this from as Steve mentioned two-legged goblet squat holding a weight in front of you slowly progressing weight to finding ways to slowly transition weight to maybe one leg for the other and and you start with less range of motion and obviously build up to a greater range of motion. So just understand if you’re listening. There’s a huge continuum of progression here. And yeah I completely agree with Steve start with the basics start with the foundations and and go from there.

45:06.96
Jason Antin
Yeah, and and careful Steve with tying beginner to goblet squat. Folks at the alpine training center know that they do plenty of single Kettlebell squats. I often program them into warmups and also for the max strength phase just because as an exercise as a whole like you said the weights in front of you. There’s not a huge commitment of having a barbell on your back, but it also really taxes the core and requires you to not only warm up your legs but maintain that good form while the weight gravity is kind of pulling you forward. So I know Steve threw it in there as a good progression. Good start progression but that’s one of my favorite exercises probably is a goblet squat.

45:20.70
Steve
One caveat I think we should throw out for people that may be listening that have not done a lot of strength training in the past is that it’s absolutely if it’s your first time going through a max strength period I would actually if I was coaching someone I would actually have them do that as a back squat probably just because I want them to start to form the foundation. I don’t know if the chassis is really strong enough to allow heavy loading in a one-legged movement like a bulgarian split squat or a box step up. 

45:45.66
Alyssa
I think the other part too is that when coming back from injury or quote unquote starting over I think people get really discouraged by that and I think it’s really important to remember that you’re never really starting over. You’re always tapping into that muscular history as we were talking about your neurological firing, that comes back faster every time. So even though it can feel like oh my gosh I’m lifting so much less or I feel so much less strong. You are not starting from zero and it’s the same thing with endurance training. You know all of these are building that pyramid and even if you have to shift down a little bit to shift back up, that will come a lot faster. So you know not being discouraged by having to take a step back? I know that coming off of big races and seasons. It’s like oh my gosh. How did I end up back here? Barely being able to do a pushup and then it just comes back really quickly. So I think that the beauty of consistency and durability is that you’re not starting from the absolute beginning but before going ahead Steve.

46:00.75
Steve
While the ideal is to do these single-legged. There are certainly cases especially if you’re new to strength training where you’ll want to learn with something or I would actually say front squat honestly because it’s a safer exercise or a goblet squat where you’re just holding a big Kettle Bell up to your chest and it’s just so easy to drop it if you get scared or whatever. I would really recommend those for people that are relatively new to strength training.

47:18.96
Steve
Yeah, and I would also say Jason like I can recall two times in my climbing career where I had to start over with the goblet squat because I was coming back from an injury or something and so you may over the life of an athlete you’re going to go back to square one as a beginner multiple times and you’re always somewhere on this process on this cyclical process. 

48:38.37
Alyssa
Definitely so going into muscular endurance or muscular strength I think they’re both great terms. What is the purpose of muscular endurance and how do you take the max strength. Turn this into muscular endurance and really where does this fit in the whole scheme of our strength periodization? Jason, go for it. 

49:04.98
Jason Antin
We’ve got the 3 phases uphill. We’ve got transition. We’ve got max strength and so the goal of the transition is to make sure that the fundamentals are there and make sure the foundation is laid. For exercise movements the body and mind are kind of ready to embark on a strength program and then we go from there once we kick off the max strength it could range depending on who your coach is and what the programming is but let’s just call it. Maybe you know 6 to eight weeks of max strength. We’re really training kind of the power focus. We’ve got low reps and high weight really trying to recruit as many muscles as we can given the prescribed muscle group.  And see if we can move that weight kind of quickly and explosively in control.

49:39.13
Steve
Yeah, and this well this connects to something that sort of philosophically we want to promote at uphill athlete where you have to look sort of inward and not outward for your comparison and realize that where you are on your journey and you may revisit a similar place in the future. You may have been here before and that’s the process like we are in these bodies for our whole lives and so we’re going to continue to get to know them and our bodies are going to continue to change and.

We’re going to age or we’re going to go through menopause or we’re going to have an injury or I mean all kinds. We’re going to go through a pregnancy if you’re a woman. I mean there’s all kinds of things that our bodies are going to go through. Running one hundred miles really fast or in my case, really slow. All of those things are going to need to kind of look inwardly and refocus and kind of assess where we are at and that’s something we haven’t really talked about but I think that is built into any of these progressions is the assessment and being honest about where you are. That’s one of the things I personally love about the gym is like I think Henry Rawlins said it a hundred pounds is always a hundred pounds and you could either do that or not and it feels the way it feels on any given day and I think that’s one of the beauties of it. It’s super honest.

49:49.45
Jason Antin
Then once we have there we have a really good foundation to kick off our muscular endurance and the goal of muscular endurance as Steve started off this whole conversation with is we’re looking to really maximize our ability to move sub-maximal weight over a very long period of time and for a mountaineer or any other mountain athlete that could be hours right? That could be a day long or even longer endeavor. If you’re running two hundred miles or you’re climbing a big route or you’re on the go. That’s what we’re prepping for. We’re prepping to really tax the muscles. Not so much attack the lungs because at uphill we put so much effort into building that aerobic base. The goal is that when we embark on a muscular endurance phase. We have a decent aerobic base built our goal is to get our aerobic threshold pretty darn high and then once we have that foundation we kick off Muscular endurance.

50:40.88
Jason Antin
Typically we’re looking at doing one muscular endurance workout or at least for me I usually do one sometimes two but usually one a week for six to ten weeks depending on the athlete and the goal here is just make sure the muscles are burning well before the lungs.

50:57.11
Jason Antin
And that typically comes in an outdoor environment with an uphill weighted carry and I typically start with maybe 10% of body weight in a pack and progress upwards to potentially 30 depending on what the athlete’s getting into. The goal here is maximizing muscle recruitment.

51:14.42
Jason Antin
Getting the athlete ready to move uphill with weight but really getting those muscles prepared for that sort of a workout.

53:58.90
Steve
Jason I think you really nailed it there. I mean that’s a great description of it and others say you said muscular strength earlier and I think you meant to say strength endurance, muscular endurance and strength endurance.

54:16.92
Steve
Just I know somebody in the comments will call us out but we want to be careful with our terms and with strength and endurance. That’s one of the hallmarks of what we’re looking for to find out if the workout parameters are set correctly. Meaning is the pack and the parameters are pace steepness of the grade where I’m talking about uphill water carry or a hill rock carry, weighted back carry. The pace, the steepness of the slope and the weight of the pack. And so what you want is as Jason correctly pointed out, you want to feel like the legs are the limiting factor. Not the lungs and I think the hardest thing honestly with this is to find the right slope. I’ve lived in lots of mountain towns in my life and I’ve done these workouts for probably 30 years and well not thirty years but twenty years. I’ve always struggled to find the right slope. But once you find it, it’s like gold. You know exactly where to go and it’s perfect. But you know.

55:28.90
Steve
Ah, trail or road. They’re never steep enough. You have to go off trail typically. I think another good option is to do them on a really steep treadmill. I recommend people do them in boots because your foot has to flex differently in a rigid boot. Range of motion can be a limiting factor that is much more specific to doing them and say running shoes but finding a gym that’s going to let you go in with like a big pair of la sportiva mountaineering boots and put on a weight and like grind for an hour and a half with a heavy pack on their treadmill. You may be asked to leave so there are some limitations. It is tricky and this is actually I think the part where people get the most discouraged is finding this place to do it and so. Want to encourage people to try to do their best. Don’t worry if it’s not perfect.  I’ve had people we had in our last mountaineering training group, someone doing them on the embankment. The dirt embankment on the side of a freeway on-ramp  and it wasn’t very long but they were in Florida and that’s what they had and they did it there. I think it was great because obviously he didn’t drop his weight out at the top of everyone but he would carry the weight back down.

But it was a good angle and it was kind of this gravelly soil and he was able to wear boots and he was able to go out there and just go up and down and kudos to him for being able to do that for an hour. He also did some good mental training. So I think that this is a piece that I just want to encourage people not to get discouraged. But Jason did a great job of describing it. How we do these weighted pack carries and why and I think that for mountaineers we’ve just seen time and time and time again that this has just been like the key workout. It helped people feel great on the mountain and not just with mountains actually also people doing races in the mountains. Running races with a lot of vertical. For example, the tour des geants, all the athletes that we’ve coached and consulted with for the tour.

56:10.53
Jason Antin
Yeah I mean Steve for me the muscular endurance thing is when you’re actually doing the workout. It is what mimics the thing the most and in so many ways and as we talked about earlier at uphill we kind of have our four pillars, the capacity building. We have the aerobic, we have strength, and we have sorry aerobic, anaerobic, strength and technical. Then I add my fifth which is the mental and when it comes to muscular endurance I’ll often program for my athletes. What I call a benchmark day or a simulator day where they are typically. Conducting an exercise that’s going to have more vert or equal vert and more weight or equal weight to their actual actual objective and I think anyone out there that’s done mountain sports can probably relate that when that weight feels really heavy and you’re going uphill that can be 1 of the toughest mental struggles for folks and physical and so.

57:06.86
Jason Antin
For me when I’m programming these ME workouts I’m really trying to mimic some of those harder times that folks are going to experience on the mountain and that could be going up a long never ending boot pack. It could be the sled drag on Denali. It could be as a first time Rainier climber you know, just getting that 50 pound pack up to camp muir.

57:26.43
Jason Antin
I mean this very often is some of the hardest parts of these mountaineering endeavors and the muscular endurance work is going to be the key component, one of the key components to really help folks be successful, both physically and mentally.

57:41.74
Alyssa
Definitely and I think that’s so important to be able to draw on that knowledge like I’ve done before. I know I can do it. Here is the moment that I’m doing it and I’m not panicking because I can pull that out of my mental toolbox.

57:48.68
Steve
That race I think you’re trying to get into that, aren’t you Alyssa this year? That race has a lot of vertical or have you done it. 

55:14.27
Alyssa
Oh I have dnfed it twice. It’s my greatest nemesis one day. It’s a long term goal.

57:59.70

Alyssa
I’m ready I can do this and I think that that’s a part that often people don’t realize. It is part of why we train is that the training is not just the physical capability. It’s the mental capability to look back and say I’ve got this I know I can do it.

58:02.19
Steve
Well, we’re good to get you on our good ME program. A good ME program and you’ll be fine, but you know I know that for Will Weidmen and one of our other coaches. He did that last year and that’s one of the things he talked about when I talked to him before that he said really helped him on that.

58:18.35
Alyssa
And I’ve possibly even done harder. So I think that’s an excellent point. I think that we are just about wrapping up which is so hard to believe. Steve has his hand up. Go for it Steve.

58:20.65
Steve
Race was the ME weighted pack carries and it seems counterintuitive right? But again he was able to increase his strength endurance and so when he was running without a backpack. He was able to use a lower percentage of the available strength endurance and thereby go longer and that’s a perfect working real-world example of how this turns out and how it works.

01:01:09.14
Steve
Well, there’s one final important point I want to call out about muscular endurance is that it is our most trainable capacity and this is one of the reasons that people progress so quickly and one of the things that makes it so fun is because it is so trainable. These modalities and the structure that we’ve created at uphill athlete around this is incredibly effective and you can progress muscular endurance, especially the weighted pack carries I find for you know.

01:01:34.94
Alyssa
I think that’s an exciting thing to realize. I think the zone 2 training can sometimes be monotonous in a way for a lot of people and feel like oh my gosh I’m not making progress because it’s so incremental.

01:01:47.60
Steve
For quite a while before people start to plateau I mean twelve to sixteen weeks is not uncommon. But I think I don’t know exactly of course what is the differentiator but what I look for is for whether or not somebody’s plateauing. 

01:01:51.19
Alyssa
And so I think that it’s nice to have something where people can see much more tangible results to keep them motivated and kind of engaging with the process. I think that’s great. Well Jason is there anything else.

01:02:05.20
Steve
What you should be seeing is either weight increasing each time or the weight say it’s the same but you actually do it faster and there should be significant changes. This is what Jason mentioned sometime once a week. 

01:02:05.70
Alyssa
You would like to add I feel like we need a part two. There’s so many other questions I have in my head.

01:02:09.75
Jason Antin
Yeah I mean of course. Yeah so as Steve kind of mentioned for a lot of us. It’s fun to hike with a weighted pack. It’s fun to throw some water, throw some weight in a pack and move uphill..

01:02:14.30
Alyssa
Oh yeah, let’s jump on that.

01:02:22.34
Steve
It is so important to have these long periods of rest in between workouts so that you have time to adapt because there is a lot going on in your body in this workout and there’s a lot your body has to adapt to. 

01:02:29.50
Jason Antin
Because we’re training for the mountains and if we have that at our disposal, it’s fun. We like being outside, we like moving uphill, that’s why we’re here. We’re uphill athletes. For folks that don’t have that of course you’ve got the stair master. But the goal of Muscular endurance is really to.

01:02:40.91
Steve
Build and then you do it again. Sometimes I’ll have people do it every 10 days and that’s not that bad like it is. I think the biggest danger with them that I would warn people about is to overindulge on this. Don’t think oh wow that was great.

01:02:47.45
Jason Antin
Train your body to create a high amount of power output for a long period of time and that can be done through other modalities and so Steve kind of asked me to think about different ways to create muscular endurance workouts and that can also be gym-based right? 

01:02:59.91
Steve
Want to do more. It’s like a drug right? Like oh that felt good I want to give it to me again. Now be really judicious in your application. Don’t because you can overtrain this really easily because it is such a big training load. You really need to program a lot of recovery. You know aerobic days you.

01:03:03.52
Jason Antin
You’re basically just taking any muscle group that you’re trying to train to create high power output over lots and lots of reps and a long period of time and that can be done with anything for a lot of our climbers often use an exercise like a figure 4 where you’re hanging off ice tools or rings and you’re basically training your body not only your forearms but your shoulders.

01:03:19.34
Steve
Also just need to make sure you’re maintaining your aerobic capacity that you’ve built. Your zone 2 fitness that you’ve built during this period and you can’t if you do too much training and not enough zone 2. You’ll actually start to lose your aerobic conditioning so you got to.

01:03:23.00
Jason Antin
To do a series of movements. So we might program somewhere to like 10 figure fours per side. Maybe with a 2 to 3 minute rest and we’ll probably build up to like 3 to 5 rounds over time kind of adding rounds or increasing the the quickness and the power of each one of those repetitions. 

01:03:37.71
Steve
Kind of balance these two things 1 ME workout every 7 to 10 days. Can you continue to hit the super consistency on your zone 2 runs or hikes and just be patient and if you have the time and can do this for twelve, fourteen, sixteen weeks.

01:03:42.81
Jason Antin
Basically Steve asked us to think about how we translate this to the gym you’re trying to achieve the same goal. You’re trying to maximize power output over a longer period of time and that can be done with essentially any muscle group and the goal here in the mountains is to make it sports specific and make sure you’re training those muscles.

01:03:57.41
Steve
You know my experience is you’ll continue to see gains and and those will be signaled by those increased weights or drops in time on the reps up the hill.

01:04:00.74
Jason Antin
And training that recruitment that you’re going to be using on that objective.

01:04:06.66
Alyssa
That’s great and I think that’s really hopeful because so often we get the question, can I train to climb Denali to climb Rainier et cetera in New York City, in Kansas and the answer is yes. It might be very repetitive and not the most exciting but you can absolutely do it and you can absolutely be in a position to do well. So I think that that’s hopefully inspiring and encouraging to people who are.

01:04:37.71
Alyssa
Live in vertically challenged places to make it happen.

01:04:46.54
Steve
Could we talk about the gym based ME a little bit if you want to take that Jason.

01:06:12.29
Alyssa
Yeah, yeah, I wish that people could see Steve doing the treadmill walking as we were regarding the podcast. It was pretty good. Yeah well I’m not kidding when I say I think we could do a whole other podcast which we definitely will on this. But anything either of you would like to wrap up with or add in to close this off.

01:06:35.99
Jason Antin
No, I mean thanks to Steve for having me. I love talking about strength training especially as it pertains to getting ready for mountain objectives and I completely agree with you. There’s lots more to talk about. This is just the tip of the iceberg and it was fun to riff on max strength and muscular endurance this morning.

01:07:04.40
Alyssa
Yeah, like I shouldn’t even bring this up. But how do you calculate using a stairmaster versus being outside are they the same. That’s a question that I think a lot of people ask so we will answer that later.

01:07:16.51
Steve
And post pandemic, how many more people have treadmills or stairmasters and stuff in their house than they used to. So I think that there’s more resources at people’s disposal than perhaps there was not too long ago.

01:07:23.84
Alyssa
Can get to it now we’ll leave it. Ok, go for it.

01:07:34.51
Steve
But I think that this is also super good training for technical climbers. I think that if I have someone who’s more of a rock or an alpinist athlete. I will program them this gym-based ME. And use exercises and there’s articles on the website about this as well about how to use a figure 4 as an ME exercise and then that kind of thing because we talked about the treadmill handwalking where you’re in a plank on a treadmill and you set it slow and you do that. Because you’re actually what it is. It’s mostly transverse of dominance because you know the end shoulder because your hand is tracking your body. Your transverse abdominals mostly but a lot of other muscles as well is like holding the plank and then you’re having to like lift up and move. There’s a lot of carryover. I feel like ice climbing, mixed climbing, hard rock climbing with some of these motions because in their core strength in this especially in this lateral twisting way is so important in hard and steep technical climbing.

01:09:31.00
Steve
Yeah, super fun to have you here Jason and we’ll definitely have to do this again and dive even deeper into some of these little rabbit holes that we can go down. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

01:09:39.63
Jason Antin
Yeah, thanks! Steve.

01:09:42.84
Alyssa
Go for it.

01:10:03.27
Steve
Well I want to answer it now really quickly because I think this is a really important point that I think goes back to what I said earlier about looking inwardly and not outwardly.

01:10:18.30
Steve
The important thing is that you record it consistently for yourself. The important thing isn’t that we all record it the same so that we can compare one another right? If you put on your chest heart rate strap and you use a fudge factor. You know we have these fudge factors on the website where you know to take a tss score the training piece is going to give you for a workout and it’s like okay if you’re carrying for every you know x amount of pounds you add this many you know x amount of pounds carried for x amount of time. Yeah that’s why many Tss points and we can link to that article in the show notes. But the most important thing is actually just that you do it consistently for yourself over time so that you can track your own training and there’s no magic to these ratings. There’s no magic tss is a made up number. It’s a made up metric and what it’s not, people just need to try to realize that and understand that it’s there to help them be consistent and measure their assigned load to their training. tRelatively the same each time they go in the gym or each time they go outside and that’s what helps us there. 

01:09:05.00
Alyssa
Great to end it with a nugget of wisdom. So thank you for listening to the Uphill Athlete podcast if you can rate review and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. It really helps us to get our education and knowledge out in the world. You can also visit us on the uphill athlete website at uphillathlete.com or write into the coach@uphillathlete.com with any questions that you have.

01:12:12.20
Steve
Thank you Alyssa, thank you Jason, great episode today.

01:12:24.25
Steve
It’s not just one, but a community. We are Uphill Athlete.