Get in shape for hiking – get strong!

What attributes come to mind when you think about a “fit” hiker or backpacker – agility, flexibility, stamina?  “Strong” is probably not on your list!  However, improving basic strength will benefit both conditioning for hiking and overall health.  Too often people shy away from resistance training, thinking it means “bodybuilding” sessions in a gym but it doesn’t have to be like that!

This post looks at the benefits of strength training for hiking and how it is fundamental to conditioning for fitness for backpacking.

 Stronger muscles are more efficient

It is easier for stronger muscles to do the same tasks.  Imagine that you have 20 units of strength per muscle fibre; your weaker pal only has 10 units.  If it takes 2000 units of “strength” to climb a hill, your cardiovascular system will only have to support 100 fibres to get to the top, whereas your friend will need 200.

You get to the top feeling fine; he is out of breath because his cardiovascular system had to provide oxygen to fuel twice the number of muscle fibres.  When you are stronger, your heart and lungs don’t need to toil as hard to support the same amount of muscle-work: that hill will be less effort!

Stronger muscles protect you from injury.

There is another benefit.  Colin Gordon of Edinburgh Deep Tissue Massage  says that

“Lack of strength is a major contributing factor to the problems I see in many clients.  Lack of strength makes it difficult to maintain good posture, you tire more quickly, resulting in compensatory movements that put strain on other areas and increase the likelihood of injury; a stronger athlete is more injury-resistant.”

For example, balance is more than something in your inner ear: if your ankle muscles are weak and tire quickly then you will wobble! Your balance will be poor and an  injury more likely.

Getting Stronger – overload, adaptation and safe exercise

So how do we get stronger?  Two principles of exercise science apply: adaptation and overload.  Adaptation: muscles react to training loads imposed on them, by increasing their ability to cope.  Overload: muscles will increase in strength by working against gradually increased loads.

What exercises do we use?  We do not need to mimic the motion of hillwalking to improve the strength to walk.  Exercise choice should be based on safe movement, strengthening muscle without over-stressing the joints, and using exercises specifically to strengthen the areas most often injured, to minimize the chance or severity of an injury.