by Larry Goldie
One of the most common questions our guides get on a regular basis is
“What do you do to stay in shape?”. The fact is, for most working guides,
just guiding keeps us in shape for the bulk of our mountain adventures. For
many of our guests however, the demands of a career, family, and other
pulls on your time, don’t allow for the ability to spend full days in the
mountains training or building fitness. Many of our guests spend a big part
of their year, thinking and dreaming about their climbing or skiing vacation
with NCMG, only to arrive and feel like they wish their fitness had been
better, so that they could have enjoyed it more. We don’t want our guests
to go home feeling like they need a vacation to recover from their vacation!
Both mountaineering and ski touring are considered endurance sports. By
this we mean that the event lasts for more than several hours. In fact, a lot
of our trips involve many consecutive 8 – 12 hour days in a row. To
adequately prepare yourself for this kind of event, you need to train like an
endurance athlete. As an endurance athlete somewhere between 80-95 %
of your training will be devoted to building your aerobic base. Essentially
this is your engine that you use to propel you for long days with vertical
gain through rugged terrain.
To understand training philosophy, it’s important to do a quick lesson in
physiology. Your body has two metabolic systems used to provide you with
energy. One is your aerobic system, and it primarily burns fat and relies on
oxygen to fuel you on longer, lower intensity efforts. The other is your
anaerobic system. It relies primarily on sugars from carbohydrates in your
body to give you energy for short duration efforts. While either of these
two systems can be trained, your body can only use one of them at a
time. Since even the leanest marathon runner has about 100,000 calories
of stored intramuscular fat on them, while its nearly impossible to store
more than about 3000 calories of sugar on our body, you can see why
having a well-trained aerobic system would be so beneficial for long days in
the mountains.
One of the most common training mistakes people make is to substitute
intensity with duration. As mentioned above, endurance sports last more
than a few hours. Thus, training at a higher intensity will only improve your
anaerobic metabolism, simultaneous detuning your aerobic system. This is
the exact opposite of the kind of training that you need to do in order to
improve your aerobic capacity. In a study of the long-term training journals
of a wide range of elite endurance athletes from cyclists to runners to X-C
skiers, between 85-90% of their training was made up of aerobic base
training, otherwise known as zone 2. Thus, for any successful endurance
athlete, this should make up the vast majority of your training. This training
should take place below your aerobic threshold, which when your body
shifts from its aerobic metabolism to the anaerobic metabolism. If you
haven’t trained this way, the pace that you can maintain below your aerobic
threshold is often discouragingly slow. Many people cannot even run or
climb a steep hill without crossing their aerobic threshold.
The good news is that this is an incredibly trainable adaptation. By
discovering your aerobic threshold and being disciplined about keeping
your heart rate below it while training, you will see an improvement in both
the pace that you can maintain while in zone 2, as well as raising the actual
heart rate where you cross over into your anaerobic metabolism. The
combination of these 2 adaptations will allow you to spend long days
moving at a reasonable pace while enjoying your favorite mountain
activities. While it seems incredible, elite marathon runners are staying
below their aerobic threshold during marathon winning performances! For
the mountain athlete, this means moving faster through the mountains, and
being able to recover better for day after day events, like a multi day
mountaineering trip or a week long backcountry ski trip.
So, what does training for the endurance athlete actually look like? Well, a
good training plan needs to be gradual, modulated and periodized.
Gradual means that it should start off easy and allow the body to adapt to
the training without unnecessary soreness, or worse, by risking injury.
Modulated means that a good plan with vary the training stimulus. Studies
show the body adapts best to training that has variety of training stimuli.
This is both during the week, with easier and harder days, as well as week
to week, with periodic recovery weeks that allow your body to heal, make
the adaptations that training triggers and to recruit muscle fibers to meet
the training demands. Finally, a good training program should be
periodized, meaning you will go through different phases of training.
Aerobic base training continues throughout, but strength training will vary
based on the phase of training you are in. Beginning with a general
strength and conditioning phase that allows your body to get used to the
demands of training, then moving to a max strength phase where you ask
your body to recruit more muscle fibers for your primary mover muscles,
and finishing with a muscular endurance phase where you develop the
endurance that these newly adapted muscles will utilize. Pairing some
strategic strength training with a large diet of aerobic training will make you
strong and fit for the long days of constant movement in the mountains.
What about HIIT style training that I see at my gym? Interval training can
give you an incredible boost in fitness, however, if this training is done
without an aerobic base, you will quickly see your performance gains
plateau and then start to decline. Intervals trigger a training response from
your body very quickly and that’s why so many people love doing them.
However, if they could work on their own, elite athletes wouldn’t spend 90%
of their training hours doing aerobic base training! I like to think of the
sandcastle analogy here. If you want to build a sandcastle as tall as
possible, you need the largest possible base of sand for it to sit on. If you
add a bit of water (interval training), you can get the sandcastle much,
much taller. But, if you add too much water, the sandcastle turns to mud
and slumps back down. If you only add water, well you see where this is
going…..
NCMG has partnered with Evoke Endurance, the leaders in the field of
endurance training for mountain athletes to help our guests make the most
out of their climbing and skiing adventures. Evoke offers everything from
free educational articles about training, a forum to ask questions, a podcast
series and book club, as well as training plans, custom plans and 1:1
coaching to help you meet your fitness goals. NCMG is pleased to offer a
discount on any training plan you purchase from Evoke and some of our
International ski trips come with a free training plan to help you get ready
for your adventure. If you have more questions, reach out to Larry Goldie,
who in addition to being a lead guide at NCMG is also a coach at Evoke,
helping everyday athletes achieve their goals in the mountains.