13 February 2012
Hiking Requires Specialized Training
Posted by Jody under: Fitness .
If your members’ vacation plans call for hiking, your club can help them to prepare, but adequate training requires more than simply walking or running on a treadmill a few times a week.
According to the principle of specificity, conducting practice hikes is the best way to train for future hikes. However, most members don’t have enough time for practice hikes several times a week. Benjamin D. Levine, director of the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine at Presbyterian Hospital, Dallas, Texas, says that while health clubs can offer useful training tools for hiking, they are not set up for pre-trek training, so members need to be sure that their training is diversified.
There are several problems with solely training on treadmills for hiking. If the treadmill is kept flat, the user’s legs are simply keeping them moving at a particular speed. To train for uphills and downhills, hikers need to mimic the same movements. Colin Grissom of LDS Hospital, Salt Lake City, Utah, says that a treadmill can work for uphill training, but the grade needs to be high, even up to a 15 percent incline. Stair climbing machines can also be helpful for uphill training, although the steps will be more regular than trail terrain.
Levine suggests that weight training will be more useful to train for downhills than cardiovascular machines. He recommends leg exercises such as leg presses and squats, with a strong concentration on slowly lowering the weight. Levine points out that weight training is similar to hiking in many ways, because each step of a hike that pushes the body against gravity is, in fact, weight training.
By performing both cardiovascular and weight training, hikers build their slow-twitch and fast-twitch muscle fibers, which will offer both endurance and power on the trail.
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