Preparing the body for hiking and/or trail running

You do not have a running or hiking background, but you want to get into it next season. Amazing! How do you prepare your body to be able to handle longer days and higher impacts to reduce your chance of getting injured?

There are 4 main things to consider:

1. Cardiovascular Fitness + Muscular Endurance

2. Muscular Strength 

3. Tendon Health

4. Periodization

#1. Cardiovascular Fitness + Muscular Endurance

We do not touch on cardiovascular conditioning much here as we are primarily strength coaches, but getting your fitness up is the biggest thing you can do to help prepare yourself for longer days on the trails. If you have less fatigue, your mechanics will stay better for longer and your chance of injury less likely.

These days will also build muscular endurance so be sure to build volume slowly. Your cardiovascular system will recover faster than your musculoskeletal system, so even if you are eager to get out as much as possible, give time for your muscles to recover between exercise bouts especially if this is new to you. If you are brand new, leave at least 48 hours between exercise bouts to start and ensure the hikes/runs are short enough that you are not sore after.

The hikes/runs should be easy enough intensity wise that you are not out of breath the whole time. At the start, you should be moving slow enough that you can maintain a conversation. This can increase here and there as you go up hills, but in general the effort should be easy. If you are running, this may mean that you are walk/running, and that is totally fine!

As a general rule, you first want to increase the frequency of your outings, then increase the duration, and lastly increase the intensity. 

2. Muscular Strength

Running and hiking do not require a lot of strength, but working on strength can help by teaching more muscle fibres to be recruited and improve movement capabilities to reduce chance of injury. 

To improve strength, loading must be relatively high and is typically done with lifts like squats, deadlifts, lunges etc. You may need to learn to perform the exercise well first before being able to load it high enough, so this can take a few months. 

To improve movement capability, you need to focus on movement quality and choose exercises that are specific to hiking and running (we have SO many examples on our instagram page!). Load can be added and is beneficial, but only as long as movement quality is maintained.

3. Tendon Health

The best way to maintain tendon health is to add in your desired activity slowly. Tendons take longer to recover than muscle and the cardiovascular system, so in the beginning take a few days between bouts of a new activity. You can improve tendon health in the gym first, but nothing is as good as the loading given by the specific activity you want to do. 

If you want to work on tendon strength, the main two areas people have issues with hiking and running are the Achilles tendon and the patellar tendon. Heavy lifting will help to strengthen the tendon on its own. Heavy calf raises, squats and lunges (of course once you have built up to this!) will strengthen the tendon on their own. If hiking is the goal, your preparation may not need to be more than that. If running, you will want to gradually add in plyometrics prior to running. Start by keeping them small like skips, running drills, and low level pogos and then progress to larger forces like bigger skips, drills and pogos and other exercises like depth drops. 

#4. Periodization 

Periodization in this case is going to be about how you add load more than optimising peak performance. Even if we are not competing, we still need to think about how we build upon our training to get our body as prepared as possible for our goals. 

The periodization that will matter most is your specific training of course. This is outside of what we coach, but as a general rule if you are new to hiking/running, progress slower than you think you should, and therefore give yourself lots of time to build. Even if you are fit, you need to build specific capacity and the more time you leave to allow your body to adapt the lower your chance of injury.

We have spoken a lot about periodization and even have a blog post about it. First ensure you are moving well, then add intensity/load. Add enough load that you need to engage a lot of your muscle with each rep. If you are hiking you may stay here, working towards movements that are more specific to hiking like step ups, lunges, and farmer carries. If you are running, start adding in light hops and running drills. Progress these as you and your tendons get stronger into larger hops. Give lots of rest between these workouts, and give each stage a few months before moving on. 

Your strength periodization should be AHEAD of your specific periodization. For example if you are new to hiking and running, start working on movement capability before adding in much more hiking/running than what you are currently doing. Then add load when you start introducing hiking/run walking, but it is still new so you are not adding much yet. Then add in easy plyos when you are getting more consistent with your runs but are still keeping them relatively short. Then harder plyos a month or two before you move onto doing your goal volume.

Getting outside is a great way to improve mental and physical health! Putting in some work to ensure you can get out and stay out on the trails is well worth the effort!