Keri Wallace – Mountain Leader, founder of Girls on Hills and mountain runner – shares her hill fitness hacks, tips on avoiding ‘weekend warrior’ traps, and the secrets of how to do more in the mountains with less
IT’S A FAMILIAR STORY. You love hillwalking but life keeps getting in the way. Your fitness isn’t what it used to be or perhaps you want to do more but have precious little time available. If this sounds like you, you may wonder whether there’s an easy way to improve and maintain your hill fitness whilst capitalising on your free time, doing more with less.
HILL FITNESS FOR LIFE
If your goal is fitness for life, ask yourself how sedentary you are in your daily routine. How much ‘time on feet’ do you have, day to day? Many of us have desk-based jobs and are inactive for hours at a time, cramming huge outdoor adventures into our weekends. Unfortunately, this ‘weekend warrior’ approach makes our bodies more vulnerable. Without the training effect of weight-bearing and regular exercise, the necessary strength and stability is simply not there to allow us to do the same dynamic movements we used to when we were younger, increasing the chance of slips and trips. By suddenly ramping up the mileage and metres climbed at the weekend, the body is also more vulnerable to over-use injuries like strains and sprains. And if we don’t raise our heart rate regularly, we’ll always feel out of puff on the hill.
To injury-proof your body and build the aerobic base you need to hike all day, start by taking a more holistic view of your routine. In an ideal world, everyone would exercise daily, building up gradually, using cross-training (mixing up disciplines like swimming, running or cycling) to help avoid niggles. If time is tight, don’t overlook the everyday stuff! Can you swap the lift for the stairs, walk or cycle to work, go to the gym at lunchtime or use a standing desk in the office? When it comes to building hill fitness, aim for specificity in the activities you do. Seek out rough and uneven terrain whenever you can to strengthen ankles. If you walk the dog, take a hillier route or carry your packed ‘hill bag’ to build relevant strength and fine-tune your balance when walking with a load. If you’re already a gym-goer, up the treadmill incline or embrace the StairMaster! Making small changes daily can make a big difference.
Whilst there’s nothing like time in the hills for improving stamina, regular hillwalking is not an option for those of us who live a long way from mountains. Thankfully, a targeted strength and conditioning (S&C) programme can prepare the body in a similar way. The best news? This can be done at home for free! The most useful S&C exercises will target the bigger leg muscles, including quads, hamstrings, glutes and
