Are you a time-crunched climber? Are you planning a 2-10 day mountaineering objective and have limited time to train? Will you be trekking through the Himalayas soon? Complete this plan and you will be prepared for peaks like Kilimanjaro, Mt. Rainier, Mt. Vinson, Colorado 14ers, or easier trekking peaks like Nepal’s Island Peak. Also makes a great trekking training plan.

This thoroughly updated plan progresses over 12 weeks and tops out at 7:40 hours of training in the final week. All the endurance workouts in this plan can be uploaded to your smartwatch to guide you step-by-step. It does not include a final easy week, so it is important to plan one very light week (such as travel) after completing the program and before tackling your main objective.

This plan began life as programming designed by a coach for a busy professional heading to Kilimanjaro and has been updated and refined over the years to become a finely tuned plan that fits a niche for many ambitious climbers and adventure travelers.

The focus of this plan is 100% on your aerobic fitness which is the limiting factor for most climbers with a busy schedule.

This plan is based on your RPE, or “Rate of Perceived Exertion,” where workout intensities are guided by how hard you are working based on your perception of effort (how hard the workout feels to you) rather than by heart rate. This plan is an adapted option for those who want to learn to calibrate their true effort levels in their workouts. For the HR-based version of this plan, click here.

Whether you use an RPE based or heart rate based training plan, we recommend that you use a chest-strap heart rate monitor and GPS watch to log all your training.