How To Get In Shape For Your Hikes

In this episode I deep dive into my methods and workout strategies that have been proven to get you trail-ready. Whether you are just starting out with your fitness journey, or are a long-time fitness lover, like me, these tips are sure to help!

To try a free week of my signature Fit for Hiking program to get you fit from the trails (gym AND at-home options) start HERE. 

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For next level fat loss strategies, hormone/gut health help, serious performance goals and unparalleled support, apply for Mountain Metabolic coaching. Learn more HERE.

For more free wellness resources, hiking/travel guides, and other blog posts, check out my website HERE. 

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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!

welcome back to another episode of the Fit for Hiking podcast. This is your host, Brady. You may know me as Ponytail on a trail in the Instagram world and I am really excited to dig into this topic of how to get in shape for your hikes. This is my bread and butter. This is my favorite topic because I am a personal trainer, holistic, health coach. I've been working in fitness in person and online training with my own business now for the past decade. I have a lot of experience in the fitness realm. That is my first passion. And then along came my passion for hiking and the outdoors. And I've been able to merge the two over the years because there really is a gap in the fitness market for women who want to not only get in shape in the gym, to feel good, look good, whatever it may be, but also to actually perform in our outdoor activities on our hikes. And so that's why I want to talk about this today. How can we use what we're doing in the gym or even at home if we're working out from home to really support our bodies on the trails in our outdoor adventures? So we're going to dig into just kind of the basics of getting in shape for our hikes, what that looks like tangibly, how you can start doing that today, and some just easy to implement tips. So, a little bit of my back story. Like I mentioned, I've been working in fitness for a very long time. I've been exercising as long as I can remember, but when I first moved to Colorado, I think I was 23. So this was about seven years ago. 1s And I started to dabble into some hiking. I found myself struggling. I was feeling sluggish, slow, constantly winded. I just didn't feel like confident showing up to the trails. I remember one backpacking trip in particular. It was one of my first backpacking trips, and I went with a big group. And I was really embarrassed because despite working out all the time and actually working in fitness, I was in the back of the group. I was feeling so winded and out of breath, going up into higher altitudes on this hike and carrying a big pack that I literally thought I was going to throw up or pass out. But I didn't feel like I could be honest about how much I was struggling because I just felt really embarrassed. And I remember that was just kind of a turning point in my mind. And I was like, you know, don't want to feel like this on hikes. I want to go and soak up the scenery and enjoy the experience and feel confident that I can show up and do this hike and actually. 1s Make it the fullest experience it possibly can be. And that was definitely one of the catalysts that helped me discover this method, the fit for hiking method that I use now with the people who do my program. 1s So anyways, that was a really frustrating and humbling moment all at the same time. And it really made me realize, okay, need for hiking is different than just going to the gym and doing these standard workouts. I need to change my method. If I really want to perform well on the trails, I can't just do what I've always been doing. I really need to find the right combination of strength training, making sure I'm working the proper muscles in my workouts, as well as implementing the proper amount of aerobic training. So that's kind of what I'm going to get into today. And obviously, this is kind of for people who are going out and hiking, especially in really mountainous areas. If you live somewhere where it's a little bit flatter and you're going for hikes in the woods and it's not super strenuous, you're probably thinking, what is wrong with you? Why do you need to alter your fitness for hiking? But what I'm talking about is where you're out in the mountains, you're doing a lot of elevation gain, really steep terrain. These hikes are no joke. And if you've ever attempted to do a really tall summit 12,000ft, 13,000ft, or the classic 14 ers, which we have a lot out here in Colorado, or long backpacking trucks where you have 30 plus pounds on your back for multiple days, you'll know, you need to be strong and you need to have a good aerobic base for these attempts. Otherwise, yes, you might get through it, but you might not enjoy it to the fullest. So my goal is that with these takeaways, you will be able to head out on your next big hiking attempt and feel confident, feel amazing, thrive, and finish feeling like, wow, I was prepared for that. Okay, so let's get into some practical tips for what you can implement in your workouts to help you show up to the trails a little bit more prepared. So one would be implementing some single leg exercises. Okay, so this is going to be things. I'm just going to spitfire some exercise names. So this would be things like single leg, deadlifts split squats, lunge variations, step ups, step downs, curtsies pistol squats, Bulgarian split squats, things like this. Okay, so single leg exercises are huge. Not only for that strength, because when you are hiking, when you're walking, you are performing a single leg exercise, but especially as you start to go onto some harder terrain where you're taking massive steps up and down. You want to feel confident in your single leg strength, your stability, your ankle stability, and just know that your legs are going to be able to carry you through some of these more challenging pursuits. So strengthening your legs and making sure both legs are equally as strong as well, since we do tend to favor one side. So if you're always doing double leg exercises, you might find that you actually do favor one side and you want to make sure you're evening that out strength wise. Okay? So implementing single leg exercises is going to be really crucial, and that's something I definitely implement with my programs, the Fit for Hiking programs. We're doing a lot of single leg stuff to get those legs strong and evenly stable. The next is going to be glute and hip strengthening. So our glutes and hips are really the powerhouse when we're taking those big strides, when we're taking those big steps. That is what is going to protect your knees from taking the brunt of the impact and really make sure that you are feeling powerful and strong, especially if you're carrying a big heavy pack. Okay, so we want to focus on exercises like the glute thrust, single leg glute thrust, hip raises, and Deadlifts. And obviously the single leg exercises usually are going to also really be helpful for glute and hip strength, but we also want to really do exercises that do more. So isolate the glutes and hips like the glute and hip thrusts especially. I love a good hip thrust with the barbell back, elevated hip thrusts if you're like. Oh, my gosh. This is like speaking another language. Don't worry, I do have a free resource for you at the end of the episode. So hang tight. I will help you out. If you're a total newbie in the gym and you have no idea what the heck I'm saying right now with these exercises. 1s The next is implementing back exercises. This is important for a bunch of reasons. One being that we are a very forward, rounded society. We sit in a not great posture most of the day, right? We're sitting on our desk or sitting on the couch, looking at our phones, looking at our laptops, and we're most likely not sitting with great postural alignment of the day. So already that's going to create a weakness in the back. So we really want to work on strengthening those postural muscles, posterior chain muscles being the back side of the body. Another reason for this specifically for hiking is if you are carrying a big heavy pack and you have poor posture because your back is not strong enough and so your shoulders are kind of rounded forward, then that's going to just place excess pain on your low back. It's just not going to work out well when you're doing long hikes with that added weight on your back if you don't have the strength to support it. Okay? So we want to make sure that we are not neglecting our back when we are doing our workouts. So doing things like rows, whether that's double arm rows, single arm rows, you can do those with cables, TRX, dumbbells, barbells, and then also lat pull downs with cables and then pull ups. And those can be assisted, those can be unassisted. But we want to be doing those pulling exercises to really activate the back muscles. 1s So the next tip I have for you is to vary your strength stimulus and if you're like okay, I again have no idea what you're talking about here. Really? What that means is we want to vary the amount of reps that we're doing and the amount of volume that we're doing at a certain weight range. And we want to make sure that we're not just doing the same thing on repeat. Okay, so one practical way to look at this would be during certain workouts each week, you want to really push it heavy. So I'm talking about like maybe three to four sets. So three to four times that you're going through the exercises at more like six to eight reps. So if you're doing six to eight reps of something, you really need that weight to be quite challenging. You need to have enough mechanical load on your muscles for you to feel fatigued by that final 8th rep. If you're doing a very light weight for eight reps, that's going to be the easiest workout you've ever done. So you really need to make sure that you're picking something up that you don't feel like you could go beyond eight reps with. Okay, so doing that at least once a week to really get a good heavy strength stimulus sent to your muscles. And then another day focusing more so on muscular endurance. So that's going to be higher volume. So maybe three to four sets of twelve plus reps. So you're gonna obviously want to use a very different weight for twelve to 20 reps than you would for six to eight reps. So that's what I mean by varying the stimulus. It's going to be a different signal sent to your body. So you really want to focus on heavy strength some days and then more muscular endurance the other days because you are going to have moments where you really need to pull from some serious power and strength on the trails. And then you're also going to have days where you're kind of just doing this low key hard trail where you're just needing a lot of repetition and muscular endurance to keep going up 1s at the same pace. So really working both strength stimuli is going to be super helpful. Again, this is a tactic that I use in the fit for hiking membership workouts. Super helpful for making sure that you show up prepared with your strength. So the next part is going to be building an aerobic base. This is huge because hiking is an aerobic activity meaning you're using your aerobic energy system when you're hiking. It's not something where you are typically unless you're in a really hard part of a hike you're probably not going to be like. Sucking wind, dying out of breath the whole time, the same way that you would if you were performing a hill sprint or doing a really hard effort, a hip workout, something like that, that's going to be more anaerobic. So aerobic is more of that steady state cardio. That's definitely a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in the fitness world. Steady state cardio. Okay, so that's a lower intensity. It's something that's very high repetition and you're just doing the same. Move it over and over again at a lower to moderate intensity. I like to say think about doing it at about a six out of ten. And if you feel like you're reaching a point where you are mouth breathing or starting to suck wind, then you probably no longer are doing an aerobic activity. Okay? So most of the time when we're hiking, you're probably able to maintain a conversation. You're probably able to breathe in and out through your nose if you concentrated on it, unless you get to that really hard part where then you're pulling from more of that strength and aerobic energy system. So all of that fancy talk to say it's really important to get some steady state cardio in to really imitate what you're going to be doing on the trails and build up your aerobic base so that you're not super winded the whole time. You want to be able to go and remain conversational as you're starting to gradually go uphill and feel good about it. Right? So this could look like doing 30 minutes a couple of times a week of an activity, like incline walking on a treadmill, doing a stair climber, like a StairMaster at the gym. Doing a stationary bike, doing an elliptical, doing a low intensity jog again, where you're able to maintain a conversational breathing pattern and you're not super, super out of breath. So doing something like that a couple times a week is just going to ensure that your lungs are ready. And when you show up to the trail, you're not just gassed the entire time because you can come really, really strong. You're hit in the gym lifting weights all the time. But if you haven't worked up your aerobic capacity at all, then you still might kind of struggle on hikes. So it's really helpful to have that hybrid of working multiple strength stimuli, getting your single leg exercises, your glute and hip strengthening exercises, back exercises, but really also getting that aerobic capacity down as well, doing your steady state cardio so that you feel prepared in all regards. Another really simple tip here, and this doesn't even feel like working out, but just building your walking base. Because if you struggle to just go for a standard walk for 5 miles, maybe with a little backpack on or whatever it may be, then you're probably going to really struggle to do that on an incline with tougher terrain, carrying a heavy pack. So make sure that you are building up and able to go for some longer walks just on flat ground and make sure that you feel good doing that. And you're having comfortable shoes that feel good. You're not feeling achy in your joints or anything like that. Because if that's the case, then you're probably going to want to start with maybe lower mileage as you get out onto the trails. So those are just some very quick practical tips for what you can implement in your workouts to start to make some changes. Like with any fitness changes, things are not going to happen overnight. So I definitely do recommend, like if you have a big backpacking trip or a big summit that you're wanting to attempt, then make sure that you give yourself a few months of really working up to this. Obviously, yes, if you're like a super active person and you spend a lot of time hiking in the mountains, you might be totally fine and you might not need to be really strategic in this way. But I think for a lot of people, a lot of my clients, a lot of people that I talk to all the time, do get frustrated when they show up for hikes. And they're like, I'm working out, but I'm still struggling and I'm embarrassed and I want to feel better doing these activities. If that sounds like you, you are definitely not alone. That's really common. And I think it's awesome that we can kind of approach fitness from this place of not just killing ourselves for a desired physique result or trying to get skinnier or have have this bang and bod. But we're really focused on how can I thrive in the activities that I love. That for me has been such a helpful mindset shift to really enjoy my workouts. Because when I'm going for incline walks, jogs, going and lifting weights, doing my workouts, I'm thinking like, okay, this is going to benefit me when I'm doing this hike in a few weeks or when I go on this. Trip that really motivates me in a much healthier way than, like, wow, I just want to burn a lot of calories and be, like, a thinner version of myself. So I think that this movement of really wanting to use our workouts as females to be able to perform better, to be able to do more instead of be less, is huge and I love being a part of it. So I hope that this has been helpful. And as promised, I want to share a resource with you. If you are wanting to get into hiking or you're already a hiker and you really want to use your workouts to support what you're doing in the outdoors, then you should absolutely grab my free week of Fit for hiking. It is my program that helps women, like I've been talking about, get in shape. It basically takes the guest workout, so everything that we've been talking about, it implements all of it into one really easy to follow monthly plan. There are gym and at home versions, which is awesome, so you can go back and forth. It really works for whatever your preference is for workouts, and you get at least five to six workouts a week, and you can do as many of those as fits your schedule. You also do get a little bit of nutrition support with monthly recipes, so it's an awesome resource for a pretty cheap price if you really want to make some changes and feel your best heading into hiking season. So if you want to check out that free week and just see what some of these things look like in practical application, then you can head to Ponytailontrail.com. 2s Free week trial. So again, that's Ponytailonatrail.com FreeWeek trial, and that is going to take you to a page where all you got to do is put in your email and you are good to go. To get a full week of workout sent to you, you can kind of check those out, see how you like them, and go from there. If you have any questions, you can always feel free to reach out to me on Instagram. I am detail underscore on a Trail and my website is Ponytail on a trail.com, so I hope that this has been helpful and you're feeling motivated to crush it on your workout so you can crush it on the trails and I will see you for the next one.