Training for Mountaineering

What Is This About?

I thought I'd go into some detail and give you an idea of how I train for mountaineering trips. This easily applies to any other hiking or trekking trip.

If you fancy a whole book on the matter, have a look at this one:

Training for the New Alpinism
This is easily the best book out there by far with very detailed explanations about anatomy, muscles, etc down to equally detailed training plans etc.

Please also have a look at my diet. Exercise and diet go hand in hand when you want to stay fit and healthy and get the best results in your adventures.

If you're on a Low-Carb/Paleo diet like me, there are two books I've read and can recommend:
The Low Carb Athlete
The Paleo Diet For Athletes

What Do I Need to Achieve?

So, what do I really need to be well prepared for any kind of mountaineering or hiking adventure? Here is a brief list of the most essential things (IMHO)

• "Breath": The big E: Endurance! Exercising at altitude with roughly half the oxygen compared to sea level. Add the cold and you're doing highly exhausting activities for hours and hours on consecutive days over weeks.
• Strong core: This is especially important when you're scrambling or climbing while carrying your backpack. You need to be able to keep your balance, move into different positions and always be safe.

The above two are the absolute essential things to train my body for and thusly make up 90% of my training. The last 10% are:

• Some muscle: Arms and legs along with the mentioned core need to have some muscle to heave you up the tricky bit.

So to sum it up: I need to be lean and strong with plenty of endurance. How the heck do I get to this point then???

Training Outline

Schedule

I've read a lot about endurance training and special training for mountaineering and it comes down to training at least(!!!) 4-5 days per week about 6 months prior to the trip with a cardio, cardio, cardio and some strength exercises towards the end of the training period. Ouch. So this is basically what I am doing.

If you're interested in sample training schedules have a look here:

Training for Denali

Physical Conditioning for Mountaineering Expeditions

12 Week Mountaineering Fitness Plan

The Science of Endurance Training

I've got myself SportTracks and the Training Load plugin and learned so much, just from trying to understand my performance chart.

Fitness, fatigue and ultimately form

The one stat you're after is form (the green line). You want this to be as high as possible when you're heading up the mountain. Not before, not after. 

Form is fitness (blue) minus fatigue (red). Train more and your fitness rises, but so does your fatigue. So you might be very fit, but also very tired. You need to watch how hard you train and plan some recovery days to avoid over-training.

Roughly 1-2 weeks before the event you're training for, you need to get that green form line where you want it. This is called Tapering. A good article on how to do this can be found here.
There are a few different ways to do this, but according to research the best one seems to be to cut down on training volume, but do high intensity interval training.

A good indicator of your fitness is the Lactate Threshold, which is basically the exercise intensity (heart rate) at which lactate (more specifically, lactic acid) starts to accumulate in the blood stream.

Mine is 152 at the moment. Training around that heart rate will increase my fitness. 

Exercises

Endurance is everything!!! Before big trips I do a phased training plan over 12 weeks with a recovery week at the end of each phase. Each phase I add more training volume to help my body cope with multiple sessions of exercise per day. This worked a treat for my Singapore trip where I attended 3 Muay Thai sessions per day! Here is what my training is generally based on:

• Krav Maga: Great for core strength, balance, agility and general fitness. 2-3x/week
• Cardio: 5k, 10k or even a 15k here and here, some cycling (20-30mi) depending on weather
• Strength Endurance: Heavy bag workouts and conditioning like skipping rope, push/pull exercises etc. 1hr full on session

Here is my training plan for Aconcagua:

What about Circuit Training/Tabata/HIIT
I've tried training in short intervals with maximum intensity and it is a fun workout that burns a lot of calories. But you get what you train for. After half a year of 3-4 of those workouts per week, I was pretty good at short intense blasts of power. Didn't help me a wee bit in getting up the hill any faster. Walking with a heavy pack for 1.5hrs at max speed possible. That's something totally different.

Bottom line: Circuit Training etc is good for general fitness, but rubbish when training for multiple 8-10hr days of steady uphill walking. What you need is endurance, endurance endurance!!! And you will only get that when you train it.