How to get “hill/mountain fit”
Walking up hill with load is arduous, the heavier and steeper the harder it is. If you want to be fit enough for your approaches not to knacker you or have the reserve to go day after day then identifying and training with the expected weight is just sensible.
I’ve talked about the benefits of barbell strength training plenty, tldr: Get strong AF and everything gets easier. This training will focus on the cardiovascular side. We want to build a big aerobic base, so being able to move up hill with a low heart rate with our expected load. As always, the simplest solution is to go hiking or climbing in the mountains a lot, however if you live in the lowlands then this becomes a lot of travel and you probably lack the time to get out 2-3 times a week.
The difficulty with lowlands is there is rarely good terrain to replicate constant uphill, even a big hill isn’t great as it’s usually a lot of up then a lot of down before you can repeat the effort. My preferred method is to alternate between a stepper (stair master) and a treadmill on max incline. I’ve tried using a plyo box or step, if it’s all you’ve got then it’ll do but if you’ve got these two machines it is vastly improved.
If I’m being social, I’m happy to forgo terrain “quality” if that means getting outside with friends for some training. On a damp and dark Tuesday evening trudging through sloppy mud by head-torch can be beneficial for HTFU effect (harden the fuck up) and you’ll be thankful for practicing night navigation under arduous conditions when you actually need it. However, especially initially, I’d focus on time and load in the correct heart rate zone.
We’re aiming for conversational pace, if you can’t speak in full sentences then you’re too fast for the incline and load. If you have a heart rate monitor this can become a bit more precise. Different monitors use different scales for the zones, I aim for MAF zone 2 (180-Age), this is between zone 2-3 on my Garmin, ‘Easy’ (60-70%) and ‘Aerobic’ (70-80%).
How heavy will depend on what you’re training for, the heavier you need the more time you might want to build up to it, remember heart rate comes before load or incline. I made up typical bags I’d take and weighed them. My base weight includes, rucksack, large dry bag, warm layer, food/water scaled to summer or winter. my scrambling and climbing gear is modern but I don’t have much if any specific lightweight. Use this as a quick guide for training bags but if you feel your set ups’ are much heavier or lighter you can always make your own table. I’ve left out camping as that gets far more complicated
| Summer | Winter | |
| Walking | 3.5kg | 6kg |
| Scrambling | 6.5kg | 9kg |
| Climbing | 9kg | 13kg |
You’re ready to go! find a podcast/audiobook/playlist to push you on and get stepping. I started on 15 minutes stepper, 15 minutes on 12% incline treadmill 3 times a week and alternated adding 5 minutes to each machine every week.
This has also been great for clients trying to lose weight but running is too heavy on their joints.
IBEX Performance 