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What is Fit for Hiking?
Where fitness and outdoors meet. In this space we chat all things hiking, exercise, wellness, adventure, motherhood, and metabolic health from a female perspective! Get ready to learn + be inspired to live your fullest, most adventurous life!
Hi, my name is Brady and I'm a longtime fitness professional in Midwest girl turned mountain living hiking addict. In combining my knowledge of fitness and passion for hiking, I've helped hundreds of women get lean and strong for the trails. Think of this as your one stop shop for both education and inspiration on all things female wellness trail talk and adventure, hiking, female metabolism, motherhood, nutrition, travel and fitness are all topics you'll hear discussed here. If you are outdoorsy and active. Looking to level up your health, unlock your potential and become inspired to live your most vibrant life. You're in the right place. You're listening to the Fit for Hiking podcast. 1s Hello and welcome back to the Fit for Hiking podcast, you guys. Today we are going to be talking about how to structure a weekly workout schedule. If hiking performance is a goal of yours. I think that sometimes workout schedules and what to do for your workouts can just feel a bit overwhelming because we want to make sure that what we're doing is effective and we're making the most of our time. But if you don't have a big background of exercise, this can be really overwhelming. So I want to kind of just break down a couple specific terms that you might hear around exercise programming. What you will want to include some sample workout structures. And if you are really wanting to kind of get into the nitty gritty of this, you might want to have a notebook out so you can take some notes about what these specific day to day weekly workout structure could look like, because I have a couple different options for you based on how much you're wanting to work out and some different ones that you can kind of rotate through. So first of all, if you're training for a big hike, there's a couple different terms that you're going to want to understand. And honestly, just even in general, if you're wanting to get into working out, even if you're not a hiker, just standard workout terms. So when someone says a strength workout, you can kind of assume that that's going to be using some sort of resistance training, a standard rep range. So the amount of repetitions that you're going to do of that specific exercise are going to range from 6 to 10 reps, 3 to 4 times through. So sets is the word for that 3 to 4 sets. So when you're doing a strength workout, you're going to emphasize more pushing muscles to failure with less reps. You're going to need a little bit more load and you're going to want more rest because obviously, if you're really challenging your muscles, you're going to need more rest between your sets in order to recuperate. Otherwise you're probably not going to be able to keep pushing that same heavier amount of tension. So strength workouts, I think can kind of get misconstrued. Sometimes we hear strength thrown around with like, you know, really fast paced workout classes and, you know, hit style things. Strength is going to be definitely a lot slower and a lot heavier than the standard type of workout classes that you might think of that are more circuit style and you're just going really fast with weight. So we'll kind of get into what that actually looks like as far as what type of stimulus we're trying to create. So strength stimulus, we definitely want lower rep and we want higher tension. You're going to want a good amount of volume. So 3 to 4 sets and you're going to want more rest. All right. The next term is hypertrophy. So this is really just emphasis on muscle growth. So I would say that before you ever get into a big strength push, you're going to want to focus on hypertrophy because hypertrophy is kind of building that foundation with before you go super super heavy lower rep. So hypertrophy is going to look more like 8 to 12, maybe a little bit more reps and about 3 to 4 sets. So really you're just working a little bit higher in the rep range and the weights going to be moderate. So you're maybe not feeling like totally exhausted, like you're not necessarily reaching muscular failure the same way that you would with strength. So these are two different type of stimuli. Okay. So that's another one. The next is muscular endurance. So that's going to be higher rep, lower weight. So I think like 2 to 3 sets, 12 to 20 reps. So you're doing a lot of repetitions, but maybe you're doing more like body weight or super light weights where you feel like you could go on and on and on. This is more of a muscular endurance thing than a strength thing. So it's important to kind of differentiate between the two because if you go to like a, you know, a circuit workout class or something like that, you're most likely going to be more so focusing on muscular endurance than strength or hypertrophy because the weights are usually lower. You don't have a ton of rest, so you're just naturally not able to push your weights as much because you're just gassed from a cardiovascular standpoint and you're probably going to be doing lots and lots of repetitions. So that's more of muscular endurance, a little bit less rest on that as well. The next is steady state cardio. So this is going to be cardiovascular type of activities such as jogging incline walking, hiking, swimming, biking, elliptical, stair climber. And these are going to be done at a six out of ten effort. So I think oftentimes when we think of cardio, we think of like being totally winded, like going all out really sweaty, really, really hard. And the reality is proper steady state cardio, if we're really trying to build an aerobic base, we want to actually be working in more of a moderate intensity range where we're able to breathe in and out through our nose. We're not necessarily mouth breathing the entire time, and it's not the hardest effort that we've ever done. So this is very much like what we're doing with hiking, right? Most of the time when you're hiking, you should be able to be conversational. You're probably not super gassed, literally the whole hike. There might be areas where it's a little bit more steep, more intense, but for the most part it's going to be pretty steady state. So when you're. Maybe doing some sort of cardio type of workout. Think about trying to imitate what you're doing on a hike. You're not going to go as hard as you can because you really want to build that same aerobic base that's going to translate to your hikes intervals. So often, you know, coined as hit intervals are kind of the ebb and flow of hard effort to rest and easy effort ratio. So think about imitating like the hard stretches of a hike. So if you're really pushing up like the final summit or a really steep section and then after that, it kind of levels out and you're getting a little bit more recovery, your heart rate's coming down a bit. That's kind of what you want to be doing with your intervals. All right. So a couple sample weekly formats that you can take into your own workout schedule. I definitely recommend jotting these down if you want some practical application for how to, you know, just translate this to your own workouts. And just to note something, it's important to know that you're going to want to repeat these cycles 3 to 4 times. At least one common mistake in the workout world is just never wanting to ever repeat a workout. Always doing these randomized things that don't really have any structure. There's no progressive progression built in, so it's really hard to actually ever see progress, to ever really nail the movements. And while it might be more fun or less boring, it's not always the most effective. So if we're looking for effectiveness, then I definitely would recommend repeating through these and then moving on to a new training cycle. All right. So the first sample here for a weekly schedule for hiking performance is Monday. We're going to do a full body strength or hypertrophy day. So if you're not super well versed in strength yet, you don't really know what weights to use for like really pushing your muscles. If you're new to weightlifting, I definitely would focus more on that hypertrophy range. So three sets of 8 to 12 reps. Keep it simple. Moderate weights, moderate rest. That's going to be a full body day. Okay. Not Tuesday. You're going to take a rest day and go for a walk. Wednesday, Full body, muscular endurance. We want a bit of a lower body emphasis just because, you know, we're using our legs a lot when we hike. We want to make sure that our legs are ready. From a muscular endurance standpoint of going through a lot of the strain of hiking where you're just going, going, going, it's kind of repetitive. So we want to build up that muscular endurance as well as the strength. Thursday, we're going to do a steady state cardio training day. So that's just going to be kind of a moderate cardio workout, 30 to 40 minutes and nothing crazy. Then Friday, we're going to do a core and back focused workout. The core and back are so important when we are hiking, we want to make sure our core and back are strong so that our posture is good so we're not hurting our back in any way, especially as you add weight to your pack. So moderate weight on those Saturday, we're going to do a long hike if possible and or a long incline workout. So don't have access to go for a hike or if it's off season, maybe it's winter. You can do a longer incline walking workout on a treadmill or a Stairmaster. I recommend for that. Doing a cadence of three minutes, moderate intensity, one minute hard intensity and one minute of recovery. And you can repeat this cycle for 30 to 45 minutes, depending on kind of your level of fitness when you first get started. And then Sunday, we're going to take a rest and just go for a walk. So we want movement every day. That's why even on the rest days, we're still going for walks. So as you can see, this workout structure has a lot of good, like full body strength. You get some rest days, you get a little bit of cardio. So it's a pretty good balance. So this is a really nice workout structure. If you tend to enjoy more full body workouts, you're kind of more of a beginner. This is a good place. All right. So another idea and this is also something where you could go from this training phase for a month or two into the next one that I'm about to go over. So it's good to kind of like undulate. These go from one to the next instead of just doing the exact same thing for months and months on end. While we don't want to just do randomized workouts every day, we also do want to vary the stimuli. So that's why it's helpful to undulate as you go through each training cycle. All right. So the next one Monday, we're going to do an upper pole, lower push hypertrophy or strength emphasis again, kind of depending on where you're coming into this from. If you haven't, have a lot of good experience with strength. So when I say upper pole, lower push, what this means is that we're going to be working the upper body pulling muscles. So those are going to be your biceps and back. So those are the muscles that aid in pulling and then lower body push muscles. So those are going to be your quads. Quads are the ones that push think about like when you're going from the bottom of a squat to the top of a squat, you're pushing through the quads. So we want to do upper body back and biceps, lower body quads. That's a really nice way to get still, get some full body, but you're really starting to kind of hone in on some specific muscle groups so that you're not always hitting all of your muscle groups. I would say that this is a bit more of an advanced strategy. Okay. So Upper Bowl, lower push on Monday, Tuesday, we're going to do steady state cardio. Wednesday we're going to do core. So just kind of focusing. This doesn't have to be super long, but, you know, 20, 30 minutes on some good core training. Thursday, we're going to do upper push lower pole. So now the upper body push muscles are going to be chest triceps and shoulders. So think about like pushing something overhead that's using your shoulders, right? So these are our pushing muscles. And then lower body pull muscles are going to be your hamstrings and your glutes. Okay. So that's how we'll break it up on that Thursday for hypertrophy and or strength Friday, we're going to do intervals, so we want to work in some intervals. It's not something that we need to do every single training cycle, but I would say every few training cycles it's helpful to work that in. So you're really getting some of that anaerobic cardio practice. Like I said, that does come in handy on the trail sometimes. And then Saturday we're going to do a long hike if possible. Or again, doing that in long incline walking workout. Three minutes. Moderate one minute. Hard one minute. Recover for 45 minutes Sunday, take a rest. So I would say that that structure is if you have a little bit more time to devote to training and you're a bit more advanced because as you could see, there's only one rest day on that one. So if you are just getting into this or maybe you're in a season that's super busy, I wouldn't recommend that training cycle for you right now. Like I know that I would not have the time to do all of that. Like it's just not feasible. I'm only working out about 3 to 4 times a week, so that probably won't be the training cycle for me. So again, use some discretion here as to what's going to work best for you. Okay. Another example, and this is more of a good like beginner if you only have a couple days a week to work out, this is the one that I would recommend for you. Monday we're going to do full body strength hypertrophy slash heavy so you can kind of progress as you get really strong in that 8 to 12 rep range, you can start to lower the reps and focus more on that strength stimulus. But again, you want to start with hypertrophy first, make sure you have some sort of knowledge of, okay, what is a really hard weight for me, for a chest press for 6 to 8 reps, right? You really kind of need to build up some experience and some strength before you're going to know that Tuesday. We're just going to go for a walk Wednesday, steady state, cardio and core. So we're just kind of combining those because if you can't work out every single day, it's kind of helped helpful to condense it. So maybe just 20 minutes of steady state cardio, 20 minutes of core. Thursday, we're going to do a walk and Friday we're going to work on full body muscular endurance. So that's that 12 to 20 rep range, still working all the different major muscle groups. But we're working a different rep range than we did on that Monday because it's more of a muscular endurance focus. And then Saturday long hike or that incline walking workout. Sunday. Rest. Go for a walk if it feels good. So if you only have 3 to 4 days to commit each week, that's a really good schedule for you. You can also, like I said, kind of rotate through these based on your energy levels, the ability to show up for workouts that you have during different seasons. It's helpful to have seasons where you're kind of pushing it a little more and then backing off in other seasons to give your a central nervous system and your muscles a bit of recovery. So some general workout notes. You always want to include one hinge exercise, a squat exercise, a single leg step, exercise a pulling with your upper body, exercise, push with your upper body and a core exercise. So those are kind of the basics you really need for your full body workouts. One of those in every single full body workout. Those are going to be the foundational things that no matter how advanced you get, those are always going to apply. It's just going to kind of vary as far as what variation you're choosing for those and the difficulty level at which you're performing them as you increase your weights and get stronger. For hikers particularly, you do want to focus on good single leg movements. This makes such a difference with balance and making sure that you're strong in that single leg movement pattern, since that's what you're doing when you're hiking and climbing a mountain. You also want to focus on back and core exercises. As I mentioned, that's going to be huge for injury prevention and just feeling good, especially if you're big into backpacking or carrying heavier packs for long distances. Strength should be the foundation of any program that you're doing to make sure that you're really optimizing what you're doing and feeling good. I think oftentimes in the past, especially, it was skewed way too far or the other direction where women were just focused on cardio, no strength. And now we've kind of moved towards more strength, which is awesome. I think that the word is getting out that strength is not just going to make you bulk up immediately and that it's so beneficial for your basal metabolic rate, for shaping your body, for feeling good, for keeping your bone density strong and just for functionality as we age. So very, very important to make that the foundation and then sprinkling in some aerobic conditioning is going to especially become increasingly important as you approach bigger or longer duration hikes or events. So for me personally, during the winter, I'm a lot more focused on just strength. That's mostly what I'm doing with my workouts. I'm not doing nearly as much cardiovascular work as it gets into spring and early summer. I know that I'm going to be starting to do more hiking in the summer and fall, so I want to have a better base for my aerobic capacity on the trails. So that's when I start to focus a bit more heavily on sprinkling in more cardio. So that's a good way to kind of phase it so that you're not always feeling like you have to do all this cardio. Honestly, if you're lifting and walking quite a bit, that's going to do wonders for your physique and just overall health. Cardiovascular work is mostly going to come in handy from a performance standpoint. As you get closer to the hikes you want to do. Okay. So ultimately we really want to find ways to incorporate strength, cardio, muscular endurance and core work, but in ways that are fun for you. It's really important that you somewhat at least enjoy your form of movement because if you hate what you're doing, you are so much less likely to be compliant on an ongoing basis. We just don't do what we don't want to do consistently as human beings. So if you can find some ways to move that you somewhat enjoy, at least most of the time, you might not always, but at least most of the time that's going to be massive for your compliance and adherence to the program. So that's why I kind of suggest undulating the format of the program from month to month to keep things interesting. So some months we're more focused on adding in some muscular endurance. Some months we focus on intervals. We always have that foundation of strength and building muscle and a little bit of steady state cardio, and we kind of mix in the other things as we want to break it up, make it a little bit more exciting and fun. 1s So what happens if you have other goals, such as fat losses, Usually a big one with the clients that I talked to while also wanting to get in shape for hikes. So this is going to largely depend on the quantity of your food and your total daily energy expenditure. Think a lot of times we put way too much emphasis in our workouts for fat loss when in reality you can lose fat not moving at all. You can lose fat laying in a hospital bed if you're in an energy deficit. However, workouts obviously shape your body. They help you maintain your muscle, help you stay in good overall shape. They're so beneficial for your health, but they're not necessarily going to be the biggest needle mover as far as fat loss. So it's important to know that, like you could do the exact same program and have a goal of losing weight and someone else could do your same program and have a goal of gaining weight and it could work both ways depending on the amount of food you're eating. Okay. So really, food is what's going to be the biggest. Determinant of weight loss or weight gain. So we want to make sure if. Weight loss is your goal, you can do this program structure the exact same way, but you're going to want to make sure that you're really dialed in with your food quantity. Oftentimes I hear people say that they eat super healthy. They're not really sure why they're not losing weight. And the reality is you can eat a super healthy diet, but if it's too much food for you, if you're in an energy surplus still at the end of the day, you can still gain weight eating all whole foods. Yes, it's much healthier than if you were to just eat a bunch of junk, but you want to make sure that the numbers are right for you. And that's why we're working with a coach definitely can help. You also want to focus on your total daily energy expenditure. So getting steps in outside of your workouts, if all we're doing is working out and then just kind of sitting the rest of the day, it's going to be a lot harder to lose weight, especially over time as your body adapts to the workouts that you're doing. That's just kind of what our bodies do. They're very adaptive, so we want to make sure that we are still staying active on top of our workouts. So if you've been trying for a very long time to successfully lose fat and feel like you're doing all the things still not making progress, I do definitely recommend applying for mountain metabolic coaching. This is a very high level coaching service that my team provides and we're able to take a really deeper dive into some higher level strategies, look for any underlying metabolic or hormonal components that could be affecting things because sometimes it's just not as black and white, especially if you've been having a history of dieting. You've been trying all these different things for a long time and you're not seeing progress. There could be something going on, and that's what we want to take a look at. I definitely think it can do a disservice to women if we just say, Oh, you just need to eat less. Like that could be the case or there could be something else going on that we really need to address and look at in order for you to have success with this. So you can always apply for that at the link in the show notes. Mountain Metabolic coaching. We occasionally are taking new clients just kind of depending on our level of fullness and we'd love to chat with you about the program. I hope that this has been helpful if you are wanting to level up your hiking performance. Hopefully these just sample workout structures can be of help to you. If you have any questions about how to do this in your own life, definitely shoot me a DM at the fit Underscore for hiking Instagram page. You can also try a free week of workouts. I'll link that in the show notes as well. A free week of workouts for my standard fit for hiking program. This is going to be gym and at home workouts that help you get in shape for the trail. So if you just want like to take the guesswork out of it, you don't want to have to worry about what the heck to do, how to structure this, how to figure out what exercises to do within this format. That's going to be an amazing place to start. It's a really cheap monthly membership and it's really helpful for hiking performance and just getting you on a really good structure, a plan that makes sense for your goals. So check that out in the show notes as well. I hope that this has been helpful and I will see you guys in the next episode. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Fit for Hiking podcast. As always, I hope it leaves you feeling inspired and informed on how to take your health and adventure into your own hands for more content like this. Be sure to follow along with my daily posts at Ponytail underscore on a trail that's ponytail underscore on a trail. You can also stay up to date on my new episodes being released at Fit Underscore for hiking and find more free resources at ponytail on a trail happy and healthy trails.