It’s a familiar scenario, especially among the athletes I coach: You’re far from a gym, yet you want to squeeze in a strength workout that will—at a minimum—help you maintain the strength you’ve been building over the previous weeks and months. Whether you’re in Yosemite or at a base camp in the Himalaya, the following no gear strength workout will fill that void. It is designed to be a general strength, full-body workout for a typical uphill athlete, such as a climber, who counts on her strength training as being a catalyst to enhance the effects of her endurance training.…
Author: Uphill Athlete
Athletes from all sports and activities have likely come across the terms endurance, stamina, and work capacity. But what do each of these really mean? Is there even a difference between them or are we using different words to classify the same things? The purpose of this article is to create a conversation among coaches from varying disciplines. What do these terms mean to different athlete populations, and how can you go about including them in your own training?When I really sit and think about it, I feel that at some point along the way I started to create a…
Core training after pregnancy demands patience and a back-to-the-fundamentals approach. This is because growing a baby changes your structure in major, long-lasting ways. Given these shifts to your alignment and anatomy, one of the best things you can do to support your return to athletic activity postpartum is to strengthen your core globally. Core training after pregnancy, and in general, isn’t about doing a million crunches to cultivate a six-pack. The goal is a functional core: a core that supports you as you eventually layer on more strenuous strength work and learn to move again with good postural and pelvic…
It blends together a wee bit, the three days. I remember damp, dark forests, a sense of always being closed in. After I put my wet weather gear on the first evening, I took it off only once or twice between then and Monday morning. It rained all three nights, and when it wasn’t raining, I was engulfed in low clouds and mist. Even the few moments it dried out, I kept my jacket on to shield myself from the mosquitoes—mosquitoes trying to bite me through my raincoat, mosquitoes the size of a normal fly.I hadn’t anticipated these conditions, but…
It was morning, full sun. I was on the second-to-last descent, just 20 kilometers from Courmayeur. There were 430 jagged kilometers behind me.Up to this point, I had successfully managed each transitory wave of pain, tiredness, and hunger. I’d handled frigid temperatures and tricky, middle-of-the-night navigation. I controlled what I could and accepted what I could not. Moving forward was what I did.After six days of rolling with it all, my body picked this moment to rebel—on a well-maintained trail in broad daylight super close to the finish. Suddenly the only stride I could muster was an inefficient jig-hop. I…
Assessing your Aerobic and Anaerobic Thresholds is important for every mountain athlete because that is how you will correctly define your training intensities for different workouts. This article summarizes the current best-practice recommendations for aerobic self-assessment. Embedded throughout you will find links to older articles—for those who want more information about a specific method.In our books Training for the New Alpinism and Training for the Uphill Athlete, as well on this site, we have devoted copious amounts of ink to helping athletes assess their fitness. In our efforts to cover all the angles, we’ve created a sprawling menu of options.…
One of the most important points to consider when designing a strength program is the overall load volume the athlete will experience. Load volume, for the uninitiated, is a simple calculation of the amount of weight on the bar multiplied by the amount of times the weight is lifted. For example, if an athlete squats 200 pounds for a single set of 10 reps, the load volume for that set is 2,000 pounds. If the athlete uses that same weight for three total sets of 10 reps, the load volume becomes 6,000 pounds (200 x 10 x 3). As you…
You’re two weeks out from the main event—the race, the climb, the big adventure. You’ve been training for months, stressing your body consistently and strategically to prepare yourself for the demands of your objective. Now what? For most athletes, it’s time to gradually reduce the overall volume—and in some cases intensity—of training. This is called tapering, and it will allow your body to recover from and adapt to all the work you have put in. When done correctly, it should leave you feeling fresh for the miles and elevation gain to come. The key is to invest your taper period…
Less than an hour into our Ptarmigan Traverse Fastest Known Time (FKT) attempt and I was wondering if we had picked the wrong day. It was wet, cold, low-visibility. Steven and I had just traded a well-worn trail for the start of what would be 25 miles of technical terrain.Oh boy, I thought. This is going to be a really long day.The weather in the North Cascades is fickle in late June and early July. Steven and I had been monitoring the conditions for a couple of weeks, waiting for a decent window. Three days out, we committed to going for…
In mountaineering there are no rules. Everybody can draw his or her line. My line, my style, is that I don’t use supplementary oxygen. I don’t enlist Sherpas to transport my equipment and supplies. I climb in as small a team as possible. It is in the harsh environment of high altitude—being exposed and vulnerable on a mountain—that I feel most alive.So far I have summited five 8,000-meter peaks without oxygen: Gasherbrum II, Broad Peak, Dhaulagiri, Lhotse, and Makalu. I came very close on K2 and Shishapangma. On Shishapangma, after a 13-hour single push from the base of the south…