Hiking! What is it? It’s not a sport. If I travel too fast, I’m running. If I’m hiking through an urban area, then I am walking. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language defines Hiking as: “walking or marching a great distance, especially through rural areas, for pleasure, for military training, or the like.” Wikipedia gives us more of a modern definition describing it as “an outdoor activity which consists of walking in natural environments, often in mountainous or other scenic terrain.” So, in practice, the definition is pretty vast. Perhaps it’s a short hike in a wooded area when you walk your dog or maybe it’s the through-hike, which entails crossing an entire continent on foot. Furthermore, when taking the Wikipedia definition verbatim, the line between hiking and mountaineering is not a line at all, but a big gray area. The iportant point is when talking about physical conditioning for hiking, you should have specific goals in mind. Whether they are big or small, here are a few cardinal rules and ideas that may help.
Hiking is wonderful for your health. It really doesn’t matter what your favorite sport or activity is, adding a bit of hiking to your lifestyle is going to give you health and happiness that can be achieved no other way. There is an abundance of information out there on the physical and emotional benefits it will bring to your life.
Treat yourself to a good pair of running shoes. That’s right, running shoes, not boots. For hiking – aka walking – you need to think long term. So, unless you’re hiking in snow or ice, you want to strengthen your feet, as opposed to abusing them with sturdy boots. As you become a more accomplished hiker, all of the tendons, ligaments, bones, sinew, nerves, muscle and skin from the tip of your toes up through the small of your back will strengthen and become skilled. This is what the barefoot running fad stems from… less shoe is more. The important thing is not to go too big to soon.
The best training for hiking is: lots of walking. Nothing will be as effective. Because of the generally low intensity and high volume of this activity, you don’t need anything fancier than time and miles. If you don’t have time, then forget about it…or just make time. Start small – get up a half hour earlier in the morning, throw your shoes on and go for a quick hike around the neighborhood. Have kids and can’t do mornings? Fit lunch in after a nice big midday walk. Hiking on trails and dirt is better than pavement – which is more jarring on the joints – but go ahead and walk, even if you’re in the city. If you can do this several times a day, every single day, you will be strengthening joints, training movement posture and cleaning out your lungs. Whenever you have the time, take a 3+ hour walk and also throw in a couple rest days per week.
Hiking usually puts your heart rate at around 50 – 60% of your maximum heart rate. Your max heart rate, or VO2 max, is the maximum number of beats per minute your pulse can achieve through exercise. Generally, a hiking level of effort uses your fat stores as its dominant energy source as opposed to aerobic exercise, which uses your glycogen and glucose – or sugars. With aerobic exercise, your body typically runs out of its energy source, glycogen, in approximately 2.5 to 3 hours. If you’re trying to work towards a faster hiking pace, a pace you can keep all day, you can’t just push for a fast pace on your long hikes. You’ll continue to experience an energy crash at that 2.5 to 3 hour mark and eventually feel like a failure. You need to raise your VO2 max.
Raise your VO2 max. Once or twice a week, for 3 consecutive weeks, you need to have a workout where you push your heart rate to its limit in short anaerobic outbursts. This can be done by sprint training, running hills, stair master, etc. For each session, it’s imperative to start with a warm up. This means a light exercise that brings you to a sweat. For best results, get your heart rate up to aerobic levels for 30 minutes or so. Once you’ve achieved your warm-up, you can get to the meat of your workout – and here’s how that goes.
Whether you’re sprinting, using the Stairmaster or whatever other activity you might choose, you need to push yourself to maximum levels until you can’t push any more… don’t let up, keep pushing and hold and then let up. Some schools will say you need to keep a light jog going, others will say you need to rest. After 5 to 10 minutes, do this again. Then push for a 3rd time. Generally you’ll have about 3 reps of this. It’s important to know that it takes a good amount of time to recover from this kind of exercise. It’s the accumulative conditioning that’s important here. Eventually, after a few weeks, you’ll find your resting heart rate lowering and your base hiking speed increase.
Long distance exercise is an internal cleanse. One of the biggest health benefits to long distance, low level exercise is that it literally cleans your insides. Much of what we do in our day-to-day lives–the food we eat, short-term intensive exercise routines, long bouts of sitting around, etc.–leads to a buildup of by-product, sludge and a general lack of efficiency in our internal organs and systems. For example, short-term intense exercise will leave our blood stream and muscle full of lactic and uric acids; less-than-ideal eating habits leave us with excess starches; fats and blood sugars; while bouts of sedentary behavior allow it all to stagnate in our bodies like a desert watering hole. Our circulatory, digestive and endocrine systems probably suffer the most. Anytime we partake in low level fat burning exercise, all of that junk that’s been collecting in your body starts to move. Plaque in the blood starts breaking down, the backlog of gunk in your liver washes out and lets it resume filtering at a normal rate, large and small intestines eliminate as they should. Your body cleanses. Some very bright people believe this kind of cleanse is the best kind and actually keeps you younger and happier, adding years to your life.
I believe everyone can and should hike. It really doesn’t matter if you have ambition or big goals in your hiking career. If you do, that’s great – as long as they’re your goals. Whichever approach you have to hiking, it is available and accessible to you. It’s a magnificent way to experience the world and is one of the easiest avenues I can think of to keep your body and spirit physically fit.
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