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Training for Mountaineering: Strength
17.7k Plays1 year ago
In this episode of Training for Mountaineering, Steve House and Alyssa Clark are joined by veteran Uphill Athlete coach, Jason Antin. The trio open by discussing the role of strength in Jason, Steve and Alyssa’s athletic careers and the purpose of strength training in the mountains. They continue with defining strength, strength training and its role in helping athletes move efficiently and safely in mountain objectives. Jason and Steve break down the three periods of strength training including transition, max strength and muscular endurance. Jason discusses his favorite max strength exercises and how single leg strength is vital for mountain athletes. The three wrap up with exploring muscular endurance and the variations possible for those living in mountain towns to New York City. Join us for a lively discussion of strength in the mountains.
Thank you to Chase Clark for the intro/outro and Tim McClain for our sound engineering.
Visit us at uphillathlete.com or write to us at [email protected]
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the uphill athlete podcast, where our mission is to elevate and inspire all mountain athletes through education and celebration. My name is Steve House, and I will be your host today, along with Alyssa Clark. And we are thrilled to welcome for the first time, one of our longtime coaches, Jason Anton, onto the show. Today, we're going to talk about all things strength training and mountaineering.
00:00:31
Speaker
Jason has over 20 years of coaching experience as a professional mountain guide and takes on incredible mountain endurance challenges in his television series, Beat Monday. Jason, thanks for joining us for the show.
00:00:46
Speaker
Steve, thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure working as a coach for the uphill team.
Guiding Philosophy and Personal Journey
00:00:51
Speaker
And this is a great opportunity for me to talk about things that are very near and dear to my heart, which are playing in the mountains and getting ready for playing in the mountains. As you mentioned, these days I try to combine several different ways to connect with people, one being through inspiration to the Beat Monday show, two being through actually sharing that experience with them side by side in the mountains as a guide. And then of course, as it's most relevant here,
00:01:16
Speaker
helping them get ready mentally and physically for those endeavors as a coach. And so I'm really excited to dive into some of the topics we're going to discuss this morning. Jason, it's awesome to have you on the podcast. And I feel like I really scored on this one because Steve and I realized that you have not been on the podcast yet, which is
00:01:36
Speaker
Like what were we doing? So it's awesome that we're able to have your first interview on the Uppal Athlete podcast with us today. So before we dive into the actual, I guess, meat of our episode, can you give us a little bit about your background in mountain sports and what drew you to become a guide and a coach and also what brought you to work with Uppal Athlete?
00:02:04
Speaker
Yeah, great question, Alyssa. I'll try not to bore you all the tears with my response, but I grew up playing traditional sports, so baseball, football, all those things. And although I did have a lot of exposure to the outdoors with my family, we'd go hiking and skiing, snowboarding as kids.
00:02:20
Speaker
I really dedicated almost all of my energy from an athletic standpoint to football through the college level. And so that was really where I spent all of my time training and preparing. And up until my early 20s, that's really where I invested all of my time. And while I was in college, I was studying sports medicine and getting ready to
00:02:40
Speaker
potentially dive into a profession of coaching. And at the same time playing NCAA football, you know, it takes up a lot of time. I think they say about 60 hours a week for a college athlete. And then I graduated and I had all this energy and all this desire to not only continue to train myself and pursue an athletic endeavor, but I had no real outlet. And so I went back to the thing I could think of, which was,
00:03:08
Speaker
be in the outdoors and so i basically just put all that energy that i had spent the last you know decade playing traditional sports and transition into sports and that started with climbing and then moved into trail running and then i started playing the two and getting more into the alpine world and uh.
00:03:28
Speaker
So that's where kind of the, the, the fire was lit for, for being a, you know, one who pursues mountain sports and athletics myself from a coaching standpoint. You know, when I, when I was in the, I grew up in the Northeast and so I was coaching there. I had graduated from college. I was doing a lot of one-on-one training for folks of all, uh, ambitions, abilities. And then I moved to Colorado.
00:03:54
Speaker
And I reached out to a woman in Boulder named Connie Shalina who owns a small gym called, well at the time it was called Mountain Athlete and it's now called the Alpine Training Center. And I thought that was really unique because it was a way for me
00:04:08
Speaker
Uh, not only to, to work out myself surrounded by other mountain athletes, um, but to be a coach there in this gym is a place that provides, you know, hour long blocks of training for folks prepping for the mountains. And so when I moved to Colorado about 12 years ago, I started coaching there. And at the same time, I also.
00:04:25
Speaker
picked up, you know, the profession as a guide and started working towards and working down that path. And so for the last decade, I've really been pursuing those two ways of helping people get into the mountains and
Structured Training in Mountain Sports
00:04:39
Speaker
achieve their goals. One being coaching, the other being actually giving them the skills or sharing the experience with them side by side. That's amazing. Yeah, that's really interesting how you came to mountain sports through
00:04:52
Speaker
traditional sports which of course have that built-in structure of training for preparing for and coaching for the Performance or the games or whatever and you know, that's one of the things that I think We can probably all agree that mountain sports particularly mountaineering historically never had and that's kind of one of the things that That Scott and I set out to change with the original training for the new alpinism book which was to start to introduce a
00:05:21
Speaker
mountain athletes to this concept of structured training. And obviously, it's brought us to where we're at all that today. But I think that that's really interesting and makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah, Steve. I mean, one thing I think that was
00:05:39
Speaker
I'm sure you remember it certainly when you wrote the first book. But when I started getting really excited about mountain athletics and mountain sports, I wouldn't say it was certainly not common culture. It wasn't cool, per se. You talked to climbers 20 years ago. Training for climbing was just going and climbing.
00:05:59
Speaker
versus training for, you know, football, it's like, you know, you have regimented strength workouts, you have regimented conditioning workouts, you've got, uh, watching game film, reading play is actually practicing. It was, it's part of the culture. It's the norm. It's cool. When it comes to mountain sports, you know, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, even 10 years ago, it wasn't really the norm yet for most folks. And so it's been really fun to see that explode. Um, you know, I remember watching videos of, you know, Oodish deck training hard and it inspired me to go to the,
00:06:29
Speaker
the stairs at Harvard Stadium in Boston and just run laps of the pack, you know, um, but there, it took a while to encourage my fellow climbing buddies to do that with me. I certainly found a few, but it, uh, it wasn't the norm, you know, just a few years ago. Yeah. Yeah. That's very, very true. Tell us a little bit more about what it was like training for and playing college football at the NCAA level.
00:06:54
Speaker
Yeah, Steve, you know, I went to, I went to school at a small school in New York, St. Lawrence, and, uh, I loved it. I loved the, the challenge of having to prepare yourself mentally and physically day in, day out for that. I love the team component. Um, you know, for me,
Importance of Strength Training
00:07:10
Speaker
one thing that I think adds a unique perspective for mountain athletes is I'm not a small person. I'm not your typical build for a trail runner or rock climber, even even an alpinist. Um, you know, when I graduated,
00:07:22
Speaker
college, I was 265 pounds and I felt like I was pretty darn strong at the time. But I remember going to a bouldering gym just after I graduated and just completely shredding my hands up because I hadn't prepped myself for that type of movement. I was very heavy. My technique was quite poor back then.
00:07:43
Speaker
And so I think I have a pretty unique perspective on the transition from maybe a traditional sport like American football to mountain athletics. But I really enjoyed my time as a football player. And one of the biggest thing that stands out for that is the teamwork component and working with a team and training with a team. And I often am searching for that when I go out and play in the mountains. You know, I think that you've both heard me say this a lot, that one of the things that I really
00:08:12
Speaker
want to celebrate with the uphill athlete coaching team is that each of us has special superpowers and special unique backgrounds. And one of yours is strength training. I mean, you know, I grew up strength training as well. I think for me, it was more just something
00:08:31
Speaker
I don't know for I had a I had a really great friend group and we all thought it was kind of cool. I'm not sure why and none of us played football like we were all like cross country runners and skiers and stuff. But in I started in seventh grade and then I we had early bird
00:08:50
Speaker
classes in seventh and eighth grade, it was two days a week. But then when I got to high school, it was five days a week from seven a.m. to eight a.m. every day. And I did that all through high school. And we were in there with the football players and the football coach. And, you know, we learned a lot in hindsight. Like at the time, you're just kids and you're just goofing around and you're just
00:09:12
Speaker
it's just fun. And we had a lot of laughs and we thought we looked funny with all our, you know, we, of course we were like skinny little kids, you know, especially me, I was small. And so like I look, even though I looked like I looked pretty ripped, even though I wasn't that strong just cause, just cause I, you know, did a little bit of that kind of training. We just thought that was hilarious. You know, of course the girls didn't think that was so, so cute, but that's another story.
00:09:39
Speaker
I think that your background in that is super interesting. What were some of the things that you took away from those years of strength training just generally? What do you look back on that you learned there?
00:09:54
Speaker
There's so much that I look back and realize it gave me a good foundation for other things. One of the biggest ones, just time and consistency. I mean, we preach that as coaches at Uphill. And I spent just like you, Stevie, and said, at a very, very, very young age, you started training. And that volume accumulates over time. There's a significant impact of accumulated fitness. And I think it's very profound when it comes to strength.
00:10:19
Speaker
You know, I've had training blocks where I've focused my efforts on other things, like maybe spending time on the trails and spending a lot less time moving weight around. But man, that strength sticks with you for a long time if you're consistent and build it up. And so, you know, years, decades, literally of training, you know, that's shown me that that accumulated fitness is a real, is a real thing. The other thing is just movements, right? We talk about it uphill.
00:10:43
Speaker
technical capacity, right? That's a big focus of how we get folks ready for various objectives and how we train them and, you know, spending a lot of time working through compound movements, learning how to do exercise. That's also a skill that we know as coaches doesn't, doesn't come naturally to everybody. Um, and so it gives me an understanding that it's important to learn those movements and how to do them well. I'm writing that word there, that phrase down technical capacity. That's a great one.
00:11:13
Speaker
No, I think, again, it's kind of funny when you're a kid and you're just going along with having fun and working out and you don't realize what you're doing. I mean, kind of same thing. I went to a ski academy and we did strength and we did a lot of balance strength. And you look back at it and you go, thank you so much, whoever.
00:11:31
Speaker
decided to program this, and I thought it was fun, and here we are. So, yeah, similarly, I played lacrosse in college, so come from kind of the background, A of the ski academy, but then we lifted, you know, it's like two, three times a week, you were in the gym, and you had a strength coach who was standing there helping you with your technique, and I think that that foundation leads to athletes that are really durable, as we kind of have talked about a lot.
00:12:00
Speaker
But yeah, I agree 100%. Like you threw out the D word first. I mean, I think first off it's, it's lifting's fun. Like I've always enjoyed it. I grew up doing it. You know, I have had other athletes say, do I really need to spend this much time in the gym? And I'll kind of give them my, my scientific answer of what I think is reasonable. And then I also, Hey, like if you're enjoying it, you know, that's part of the process and keep doing it. And I personally think it's fun, which is why I've almost always included it in my own training. But then it's, then it's the D word, the durability factor, right? I think that.
00:12:29
Speaker
is a massive component to being successful in a long career or long lifespan of playing in the mountains. And the strength training really contributes to being able to do these things day in to out and have a fun time doing it. Yeah. And I wasn't going to get to this at this point, but it's in my notes and I'll make the bridge right now because I think that our joints are designed
00:12:57
Speaker
to work really well in a certain range of motion and in a certain biomechanical way. And what people, I think, don't realize, and this is one of the main reasons we strength train at uphill athlete, and we preach this so loudly, is to your
00:13:20
Speaker
fitness house needs a foundation and that foundation is literally strength because the muscles and the tendons and the bony connections are the things that hold our joints together. And it's one thing if we're like walking down a trail or you're running and everything's in line, but as soon as your foot slips or as soon as like you hit a little
00:13:43
Speaker
pit of wind slab while you're skiing, and it throws you forward. And there's these other forces. What holds your joints together is literally the strength of your muscles and your connective tissues. And this is so important for durability. And I can say, other than traumatic accidents from falling, I'm 52 years old. I've never, knock on wood, had an overuse injury in my life.
00:14:12
Speaker
And that's entirely because of strength training. I'm convinced. And, you know, I mean, every, all of my friends have had multiple knee surgeries and all of that. I've never even, never even had a problem. And I think it's because I've just stayed strong. Yeah, Steve, I agree with you. I, you know, I, uh, I still have plenty of time moving around to get myself in an overuse injury and things like that. But yeah, I believe heavily that.
00:14:38
Speaker
years of strength training have helped me stay more durable and injury free. Yeah, absolutely. Well, should we go back to our script a little bit perhaps and make sure we don't miss anything? Cause I know we have a lot of great information to cover today.
00:14:58
Speaker
Yeah, I think that we've I mean, this has been amazing of hearing this background. But I think really, what we should start with is we've been throwing around this word strength. But what is strength? Start with that. I want to start with a definition of strength because it's a
00:15:17
Speaker
misunderstood thing. And actually, I think what we're talking about most of the time when we talk about strength trainings, we're actually talking about power. And strength is your absolute ability to move a certain amount of force, lift a certain weight or whatever. But power is the ability to do that
00:15:37
Speaker
over a certain amount of time. And the shorter that amount of time is, the more power you have. That makes sense. And how that translates to endurance is that in endurance training, or endurance sports, we are
00:15:53
Speaker
using our muscles in a submaximal way over and over and over and over and over and over again for many, many, many repetitions. And the smaller the percentage of that is of what the power we can generate, the greater our endurance is. It's that simple. So if we can keep going
00:16:20
Speaker
at 5% of the absolute power that we can produce, which if you might think of is super easy, it is, it'd be like walking or something, then yeah, that's why you can walk for a really long time. And that's also why if you put on a 90 pound pack and you try to
00:16:36
Speaker
sprint up a hill, maybe you can do that a few times, but maybe you're at 99% of your power and you can only do that for like a couple of seconds and you're gonna be exhausted. And so I think it's important, particularly we're talking in this series about strength training for mountaineers. And mountaineers do have to carry a lot of weight unlike any other sport, honestly. Like I don't know any other sport.
00:17:03
Speaker
where you are moving around with 60 pounds, 70 pounds on your body. That is a real thing. The other thing I want to surface around this is that it's not that much lighter if you're smaller. Just because if you're 100 pounds and 5 foot 4, you're
00:17:24
Speaker
boots and packing rope and all that stuff that don't actually weigh that much less than Jason's. And Jason's got more muscle to do that.
00:17:34
Speaker
So that was a bit of a rambling answer, but I think I wanted to kind of try to connect the definition of strength as the ability to just create a force, power, the ability to create a force over a certain amount of time, hopefully a short amount of time, and then how that translates into the actual application of what we're doing and why it's important to have powerful, a powerful body so that you can
00:18:01
Speaker
have achieved great endurance. It's just, they just go together. Yeah. Yeah. See, I mean, I think you nailed it. It's like, we could dive into the nitty gritty of it as we will in a minute, but you know, from a guiding perspective, you know, folks kind of trained to the best of their ability. If they're, if they don't have some structured focus from something like an uphill athlete, um, you know, I think about clients going on right near for the first time, right? They, uh,
00:18:26
Speaker
They might go hiking or trail running. They might go to the gym. But for those that either have a tough time or potentially those that are unsuccessful due to fitness, it really comes down to carrying that 50-pound pack up to Camp 1 and then potentially carrying that 50-pound pack again the next day. People are not prepared for it. They don't realize how much of an important factor it is to being successful in the mountains.
00:18:51
Speaker
And, you know, once we, and we'll, we'll dive into this, but once we kind of dissect what went wrong and how we can prepare, it really comes down to making sure they can do the thing with weight on their back. And like you said, that, that weights can be the same for the a hundred pound athlete and the 200 pound athlete. Yeah. Definitely.
00:19:10
Speaker
So I feel like you already answered it, but just to really like, I guess, hit that home to make sure that we understand, I mean, why is it so important for mountain athletes to be strong? Why should we strength drain? Yeah, I think for mountaineers, it's because our sport is heavy and because it's the foundation that keeps us healthy and keeps us, gives us
00:19:37
Speaker
longevity as athletes. I think most uphill athletes are here because they want to be active and athletic in the mountains over a lifetime, not just for a few months. That's one of the best ways you can achieve that longevity.
00:19:53
Speaker
if I'm going to go down the rabbit hole a little bit more, as we age, sarcopenia is the name for the phenomenon that once you get past around 50 years old, you just start to lose a certain amount of muscle mass. You can keep that from happening through strength training. It's been proven in many studies and there's tons of information out there about how
00:20:20
Speaker
A lot of people will say, if you're over 15, you only do one thing, strength train. This is why it's to prevent sarcopenia and maintain muscle mass. That's actually connected to better health and across a lot of different ways. I think that there's a lot of compelling reasons to strength train.
00:20:42
Speaker
Yeah, just to add to that, sometimes on the mountains, you don't have a choice to carry the weight, right? We do certainly have mountain sports that are truly light and fast and carefree, maybe trail running shorter distances with support, or trail running any distance with support, or maybe an uphill ski mountaineering race that's supported. But when you're embarking on an alpine endeavor, mountaineering endeavor, you
00:21:07
Speaker
have to carry gear and speed is also a margin of safety. And so the faster you can move with weight on your back.
00:21:14
Speaker
the safer and more successful you're going to be in the mountains. And then just to kind of riff off what Steve said, like mountain, mountain athletics and mountain sports are sometimes linear until they're not.
Challenges of Mountaineering and Packing Strategies
00:21:25
Speaker
And so, you know, you get knocked off balance or as Steve said, you ski into a wind slab and get, you know, kicked off kilter. They're often nonlinear at times that you're not expecting and strength allows you to prepare for those moments. Yeah. And also if we take it to mountaineering and alpinism,
00:21:45
Speaker
the fact is that for the most part the more difficult the climbing gets the heavier everything becomes because you slow down so you need more food, you need more water, you need warmer clothes. It's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy in the wrong direction and it just makes it almost exponentially harder and this is you know
00:22:09
Speaker
I say this not to call out extreme alpinism so much as to say that everyone's skill level in the mountains exists on some sort of continuum from beginner to the most advanced. And the challenge that you're undertaking relative to where you are on that skill level continuum is going to dictate how much equipment you need. If climbing Rainier is really hard for you and you've never done it before and you're really intimidated,
00:22:39
Speaker
you're, I can guarantee that you're going to be packing too heavy because that's human nature. Like, and it should be like, I'm not, it's, there's nothing wrong with it. Like when I do something that is unknown for me, I, I also like, I'm not sure what those boundaries are. So I hedge a little bit on the safe side, which is probably going to mean like, Oh, I better have this other rope or I better bring a Juma rather than a Prasik or I better, you know, there's a few decisions and all of a sudden your pack weight is 10, 15% heavier. Where is your,
00:23:09
Speaker
doing an objective, like if Jason and I go climb Mount Rainier, we know exactly what we need. We know exactly what we don't need. And we can draw that line very precisely and get our packs down really light and have a fine time and have backpacks that weigh 20 pounds each. And that's totally different than if somebody's going to Rainier the first time. And it's not anything wrong with the person that's going
00:23:34
Speaker
terrain near the first time, it's just that we have way more experience relative to that objective. Yeah. No, Steve, you nailed it. And it's funny too, because, you know, we all, all three of us realize the significance of weight on your back and how it affects performance and movement and what's required. But, you know, this season I haven't been doing as much uphill inbounds skiing as I have in past years. I've been guiding a lot and I've been wearing my pack ski guiding and, you know, my backpack ski guiding is like,
00:24:02
Speaker
sometimes almost 40 pounds. I mean, it has a bag valve mask, full med kit, full repair kit, rescue sled, sometimes, you know, and this is, this is a non-technical pack, right? I've got light rope. And so I met my buddies to go up the resort on last Friday morning, just a few laps. And I had like an ear to ear grin, right? I'm having so much fun. Like, why is this so fun? You know, and I just realized it was the first time all year, the whole year that I haven't had a full pack with my skis on. And I just had like this moment of like, Oh man, wow.
00:24:32
Speaker
I can't believe how much more carefree and light I feel now and I know it, I just hadn't felt it yet this season. And it felt great but my whole point in telling that story is the pack is real and it's important to prepare for it. Yeah, absolutely real.
00:24:47
Speaker
There's a great term on kind of the backpacking world is that, and I mean, long distance trail running is you pack your fears. And I'm sure that applies to mountaineering alpinism and that pack and those fears weighs an awful lot. So, and it's, there's nothing wrong with that. I think it's just an important thing to realize that the, the more,
00:25:10
Speaker
certain you feel probably also the stronger you're going to be because you're used to being out there. So it's like they're very connected, the whole aspect of that. I also think it's very underrated. People do not realize weight on feet is so much harder. You put a heavy ski on, you put a mountaineering boot with a crampon, that's a lot of extra strength that's needed, especially if you're moving through deep snow or anything like that. Big time.
00:25:41
Speaker
Yeah, I always used the pneumatic-style crampons. I always climbed on gravel crampons. So even on Nangarpur, we had the plastic piece over the toe that comes up rather than the metal bale that goes into the... And people would always ask me, how can you have those? Their scene is something non-technical, right? And the answer is really simple. Each one was two ounces lighter.
00:26:09
Speaker
Wow. That's a massive difference over a long difference. And you go to 18,000 feet where you have half an atmosphere of pressure, or you go to 25,000 feet where you've got 30% of the sea level atmospheric pressure. And everything needs that much more energy to move. And so those little differences become really big. And I think that was whatever, almost 20 years ago now.
00:26:38
Speaker
Cures gotten a lot better and a lot lighter since, but these are important things that it goes back to that really cool project they did. I don't know when that was quite a while ago where they went and they climbed the Iger 1938 route with all original equipment. I think their concession was they used modern ropes, but that was it.
00:27:02
Speaker
Yeah. And it was so, and they were like, these are guys that had already climbed it like 20 times each, you know, they'd like to live at the base of the mountain. They knew it by the back of their hand. It just goes to show like these, these, that's an extreme example, but these, these extremes were achieved through small iterations and improvements over many, many, many years. So that makes a big difference. Anyway, we're getting way off topic as we tend to, but we're going to come, well, this is going to keep us on track.
00:27:31
Speaker
I'm gonna try my best. So with strength training, we focus on kind of a, I'll say a three part series of periodization. And we talked in the last episode about strength training in the base period, we and we didn't get too far into it because we knew
00:27:49
Speaker
we were going to have a great guest on for this episode.
Training Phases: Max Strength and Endurance
00:27:54
Speaker
But we want to go much further into what these three periods look like. So they are transition, max strength, and muscular endurance. And we're not going to go into hypertrophy because that's not really what we want to focus on. So Steve, I want to have you lead us off with defining
00:28:16
Speaker
these three terms, transition, max strength, and muscular endurance. And then Jason, if you want to follow up with what strength training in the transition period looks like, we will get ourselves right back on track. The strength training in the transition period is sometimes called the general strength training. And essentially, all it is
00:28:43
Speaker
gets you conditioned to be able to train. It's just a general conditioning. And in a sense, we don't have to worry too much about what happens during this period. Other than that, it needs to be consistent and well-rounded. The programming needs to be consistently executed and the exercises you're doing hit all the major
00:29:08
Speaker
muscle groups and ranges of motion that we need to address as mountaineers. The max strength period is the period where I think people have the most fun a lot of times because you're lifting heavy, high weight, low reps, and you're using the same motions
00:29:30
Speaker
repeatedly from week to week. And the reason for that is that we're really focusing on progressing those weights and increasing those weights a little bit every week so that you actually get stronger. And the purpose of the max strength period is actually counterintuitive. It doesn't actually necessarily make the muscle fibers any stronger. What is actually happening is a neurological adaptation.
00:29:58
Speaker
to teach your nervous system to fire more muscle fibers together and to coordinate those muscle fibers better. And I think this goes back to that, you know, decades of strength training, longevity as an athlete thing. It's also just from this, your muscles know how to coordinate and work together when there's a sudden large force on the joints. And this is what the max strength period does. And then we have the muscular endurance or sometimes called strength endurance. And I think in a
00:30:26
Speaker
the term strength endurance is maybe a little more intuitive to understand because you're combining strength and you're combining endurance. So what this means in mountaineering training most commonly is the weighted pack carries. So starting off with, say, a 40-pound pack and hiking up 30 minutes up a steep hill in mountain boots. Again, specificity is part of the equation here. We'll talk some more about that, but we're getting
00:30:54
Speaker
into the end of our training plan closer to the preparation for our objective. And we're just loading up a backpack and carrying it uphill at a pretty good clip.
00:31:05
Speaker
Yeah, Steve, great points. I mean, there's obviously the more traditional periodization that we probably have all learned as strength coaches. But as a list kick things off with, you know, at uphill athlete, we have the transition phase, we have the kind of max strength phase, and of course, muscular endurance or strength endurance, as you said, you know, for me, the transition phase is a time where folks really need to start to learn the motion, right? Because what if they don't have good
00:31:30
Speaker
fundamental movements if they're unclear on exactly how to do the exercises then we can't progress to the best of our abilities once we move on to either the muscular endurance or max strength phase so the transition phase for me is. Folks understanding first and foremost what the exercises are how to be done correctly.
00:31:50
Speaker
You know form off the courses of the utmost importance so that's just getting the body and mind prepared for the working low that's about to that's about to follow but the transition phase is pretty much all about laying the laying the foundation for the next two phases of strength that we're gonna have met up hill.
00:32:07
Speaker
Once we get past that, you know, as you said, Steve, we're diving right into the, into the max strength. And as you said, it's certainly fun because you're moving, uh, typically a lot more weight over less reps. And, uh, we're certainly trying to mimic, uh, muscle recruitment that we're going to be seeing in the mountains. And for a lot of folks, that's a fun phase. And of course, we're typically implementing that for, you know, usually, you know, up to eight weeks. Um, and we're kind of changing the amount of.
00:32:36
Speaker
of sets or rounds they're doing each week. And ultimately, our goal there is to increase the weight. But yeah, those are those are kind of the three fundamental strength components that we implemented uphill. And I think they complement mountain athlete athletics quite well.
00:32:52
Speaker
That's really helpful for our listeners to know. I think that a lot of people probably want to skip rate to max strength or muscular endurance and don't spend enough time in the transition period, which is super important for just understanding how to move your body. And I think we really touched on that with the episode with Pete, our physical therapist. But that's just so important for injury prevention. But
00:33:18
Speaker
Let's get to the sexy indoor lifting where you're throwing up big weight. No, I'm just kidding. We're not trying to be bodybuilders over here, but what is the max strength period? And again, we've talked about this quite a bit, but why is it so important? Because it seems
00:33:38
Speaker
honestly, from the outside opposite of what we should be trying to aim for. But what are we trying to do here? And what are some of the core exercises that we use in the max strength period? Yeah, I can start us off there because I think that I want to. First off, I want to go back to something you said about bodybuilders and one of the distinctions I want to make about why we as athletes are strength training
00:34:09
Speaker
versus why a bodybuilder may be strength training is we are trying to, our goal is to become better at our sport. Our goal is not to just lift more weight. That's gonna happen as part of this process, but that's actually not our goal. So one of the things with max strength, my favorite movement, and we're gonna talk, people, as soon as you start talking about strength training, they wanna know about which exercise or which movements you like.
00:34:38
Speaker
But I really like, for mountaineers, I really like one-legged movements. I really like the box step-ups. I think the biggest mistake people make with box step-up is they use too high of a box, or they use a box that is soft, like a weight bench, so their ankle isn't stable. I think that I also recommend people do these in a really flat, low, like a weightlifting-style shoe, something without too much cushion in it that
00:35:06
Speaker
makes it harder for you to stabilize. And the easiest thing is just to hold dumbbells in your hands and step up and down off the box. Of course, it's, let's say, better and harder if you put the weight on your shoulders or in a backpack and put it higher because the lever arm is greater and it's harder to maintain balance. And that's part of what we're trying to improve upon as trying to improve on our sport. But that's also just more. Sometimes you just need to
00:35:34
Speaker
get it done quickly so I tell people hey if you really want to get the weights higher just grab two dumbbells like kind of put them up in like a goblet squat sort of position holding them up in front of your chest or something and do the movements like that. I also tell people to try to do the movements
00:35:50
Speaker
relatively quickly. We're doing a max strength protocol. It's going to be something like three to four reps of 90% to 95% of your one rep max. And what I don't want to see people getting into from an athletic point of view, and this goes back to what I was talking about earlier with power, is I don't want people to be doing the movements slowly. I don't want them to be just straining against it and just barely taking three or four seconds to get the weight up.
00:36:18
Speaker
you know, from, you know, whether it's a back squat or whatever, I want people to be like somewhat explosive and relatively quick because power strength in a relative, you know, applied in a short amount of time is what we need as athletes. Okay. So, and this is again,
00:36:34
Speaker
Strength training, as we know from all the research, it's incredible how specifically our bodies adapt to the stimuli. And so we really want to make the stimuli look as much like the event as we can. And this is why I really prefer a box step up or a split squat or something like that that's heavy over a back squat.
00:36:58
Speaker
I do also for myself really love the deadlift because I think it's really good for my posture in my back. I think that that's actually getting a little bit away from what I was just saying, but I know for me as a climber, my shoulders are always forward and anything I can do to get
00:37:18
Speaker
stronger on the back of my body is good. Well, how about you, Jason? Yeah, apparently, Steve, we need to work out more together because you just named my regular go-tos. I do also enjoy doing deadlifts even if they're not super, super heavy. I think they do
00:37:39
Speaker
compliment a well-rounded program. And I enjoy doing them. But you nailed it with the single leg stuff. And the single leg stuff for me is quite important, as you mentioned. Single leg, box step ups, weighted box step ups, rear foot elevated, or as some folks know them as Bulgarian split squats. They're super important. And there's three reasons why, to me, the single leg stuff is so crucial to a well-rounded program.
00:38:07
Speaker
The first one is it's real, right? Like if we're used to doing traditional back squat, or traditional front squat, we're really we're working, you're certainly training your body to work together as one unit. But when you're in the mountains moving, you don't and you rarely have
00:38:23
Speaker
That ability you really have that luxury to have you know two two leg limbs that are completely linear doing the motion it's often one off balance or often one taking ninety percent of the load and so the first reason the single leg stuff is great is because it mimics real life.
00:38:40
Speaker
Second one is that it certainly promotes durability, right? We do see or I do see some athletes either at the Alpine Training Center or through uphill that, you know, they start to get maybe some hip issues. And that has to do with their inability to really operate with that single leg. They're so dependent, so compensating on other muscles that their hips and, you know, other joints become less stable because they're not focused on
00:39:10
Speaker
really making sure that they're stabilizing each leg at a time. And the last reason is just that recruitment, right? Because if you're doing thing as one leg and you're doing thing really isolating one limb, you are requiring it to learn how to recruit as many muscle groups as possible to complete that exercise as efficiently as it can. Whereas if you're used to doing kind of two-legged traditional exercises or two-legged squat, there's certainly gonna be some compensation. So it really comes down to muscle recruitment
00:39:39
Speaker
staying durable, and of course, mimicking real life movement in the mountains.
00:39:44
Speaker
I think those are excellent points. I was, I actually think about this a lot with ski touring is that you almost always, especially if you're on steep terrain, have one foot that's higher than the other. And so one leg is working an awful lot harder than the other one is. And if you don't have the ability to like, both legs are not very strong on their own, that is just going to be a suffer Fest. So that's an incredible point of just, you know, real life application.
00:40:12
Speaker
is always what we're trying to do. And I think that that can get lost for a lot of people where they're in a gym, they're not out in the mountains. It's like, no, but this helps you to do that better. So just always a good thing to be kind of in the back of your head. One caveat I think we should throw out for people that may be listening that have not done a lot of strength training in the past is that if it's your first time going through a max strength period,
00:40:42
Speaker
I would actually, if I was coaching someone, I would actually have them do that as a back squat probably. Just because I want them to start to form the foundation and I don't know if the chassis is really strong enough to allow heavy loading in a one-legged.
Restarting Training Post-Injury
00:41:00
Speaker
movement like a Bulgarian split squat or a block step up. So while the ideal is to do these single legged, there are certainly cases, especially if you're new to strength training where you'll want to learn with something or I would actually say front squat, honestly, because it's a safer exercise or a goblet squat where you're just holding a big kettlebell up to your chest and it's just so easy to dump it if you get scared or whatever.
00:41:29
Speaker
Um, I would really recommend those with, for people that are, that are relatively new to strength training. Yeah. I mean, that's often the crux, Steve, right? Is like newer athletes don't understand the kind of continuum of modification, right? And so if they just see on paper, you know, single leg pistol squat, which is certainly an advanced motion for everybody. Um, you know, you understand that you're listening out there, there's, there's a significant
00:41:57
Speaker
way to modify this from, as Steve mentioned, two legged goblet squat, holding a weight in front of you, uh, slowly progressing weight to finding ways to slowly transition weight to maybe one leg for the other. And, and you start with less range of motion and obviously build up to a greater range of motion. So just understand if you're listening, there's a huge continuum of progression here. Um, and yeah, I completely agree with Steve. Start, start with the basics, start with the foundations and go from there.
00:42:26
Speaker
Yeah. And I would also say Jason, like I can recall two times in my climbing career where I had to start over with the goblet squat because I was coming back from an injury or something. And so yeah, you, you over the life of an athlete, you're going to go through, you're going to go back to square one as a beginner multiple times. And you know, you're, it's always, you're always somewhere on this process, on this cyclical process.
00:42:48
Speaker
Yeah. And careful, Steve, with your tying beginner to goblet squat, um, folks at the Alpine training center know that they do plenty of, of single kettlebell goblet squats. I often program them into warmups and also for the max strength phase, just because, um, as an exercise as a whole, like you said, the weights in front of you, it's, there's not a huge commitment of having a barbell on your back, but it also really taxes, you know, the core and requires you to not only warm up your legs, but.
00:43:14
Speaker
Um, you know, maintain that good form while the weight gravity is kind of pulling you forward. So, um, I know Steve threw it in there as a, as a good progression, good start progression, but that's one of my favorite exercises probably is a, is a goblet squat. Great point. I think the other part too is that.
00:43:32
Speaker
when coming back from injury or quote unquote starting over, I think people get really discouraged by that. And I, I think it's really important to remember that you're never really starting over, you're always tapping into, you know, that muscular history, as we were talking about your neurological firing, like that comes back faster every time. And so even though it can feel like, Oh my gosh, I'm lifting so much less, or I feel so much less strong, you are not starting from
00:44:02
Speaker
Zero and it's the same thing with endurance training, you know, all of these are building that pyramid and even if you have to Shift down a little bit to shift back up, but that will come a lot faster So, you know not not being discouraged by having to to take a step back
00:44:21
Speaker
And I know that coming off of big races and seasons, it's like, Oh my gosh, how did I end up back here? Um, you know, barely being able to do a pushup and, and then it just comes back really quickly. So I think that's the beauty of consistency and durability is that you, you never, you're not starting from the absolute beginning, but before this, go ahead, Steve.
00:44:49
Speaker
Well, this connects to something that sort of philosophically we want to promote at a pill athlete where you have to look sort of inward and not outward for your comparison and realize that you're where you are on your
00:45:04
Speaker
journey and you may revisit a similar place in the future. You may have been here before and that's the process. We are in these bodies for our whole lives and so we're going to continue to get to know them and our bodies are going to continue to change.
00:45:22
Speaker
we're going to age or we're going to go through menopause or we're going to have an injury or we're going to go through a pregnancy if you're a woman. There's all kinds of things that our bodies are going to go through, go through running a hundred miles really fast or in my case really slow, but all of those things are going to
00:45:44
Speaker
we're going to need to kind of look inwardly and refocus and kind of assess where we're at. And that's one thing we haven't really talked about, but I think that is built into any of these progressions is the assessment and being honest about where you are. And that's one of the things I personally love about the weight gym is like, I think Henry Rollins said at a hundred pounds is always a hundred pounds. You could either, you know,
00:46:09
Speaker
do that or not. And it feels the way it feels on any given day. And I think that that's one of the beauties of it. It's super honest. Definitely.
00:46:19
Speaker
So going into muscular endurance or muscular strength, I think they're both great terms. What is the purpose of muscular endurance and how do you take the max strength, turn this into muscular endurance and really like why, where does this fit in the whole scheme of our strength periodization? So
00:46:44
Speaker
as we started things off, right? We've got the three phases at uphill, we've got transition, we've got max strength. And so the goal of the transition is to make sure that the fundamentals are there, make sure the foundation is laid for exercise movements, the body and mind are kind of ready to embark on a strength program. And then we go from there.
00:47:00
Speaker
Once we, once we kick off the max strength, it could range depending on who your coach is and what the programming is. But let's just call it maybe, you know, 6 to 8 weeks of max strength. We're really training kind of the power focus, really got low reps, high weight, really trying to recruit as many muscles as we can, given the prescribed muscle group, and see if we can move that weight kind of quickly and explosively in control.
00:47:24
Speaker
Once we have there we have a really good foundation that took off our muscular endurance and the goal of muscular endurance as steve started off this whole conversation with is we're looking to really maximize. Our ability to move submaximal weight over a very long period of time for mountaineer are any other mountain athlete that could be that could be ours right that could be that could be a day longer even longer endeavor running two hundred miles or your.
00:47:49
Speaker
climbing a big route where you're on the go. That's what we're prepping for. We're prepping to really tax the muscles, not so much tax the lungs because it uphill. We put so much effort into building that aerobic base.
00:48:01
Speaker
The goal is that when we embark on a muscular endurance phase, we have a decent aerobic base built, right? Our goal is to get our aerobic threshold pretty darn high. And then once we have that foundation, we kick off muscular endurance. Typically we're looking at doing one muscular endurance workout, or at least for me, I usually do one sometimes too, but usually one a week for six to 10 weeks, depending on the athlete.
00:48:28
Speaker
And the goal here is just make sure the muscles are burning well before the lungs. And that typically comes in an outdoor environment with an uphill weighted carry. And I typically start with maybe 10% of body weight in a pack and progress upwards to potentially 30, depending on what the athlete's getting into. And again, the goal here is maximizing muscle recruitment, getting the athlete ready to move uphill with weight, but really getting those muscles prepared for that sort of a workout.
00:48:57
Speaker
Jason, I think you really nailed it there. I mean, that's a great description of it. And others that you said, muscular strength earlier, I think you meant to say,
00:49:09
Speaker
strength endurance, muscular endurance and strength endurance. Yes, apologies. Strength endurance, yeah. I know somebody in the comments will call us out, but we want to be careful with our terms. And with strength endurance, that's one of the hallmarks of what we're looking for, to find out if the workout parameters are set correctly. Meaning when the parameters are
00:49:36
Speaker
pace, steepness of the grade, where I'm talking about uphill water carry or uphill rock carry, weighted pack carry, the pace, the steepness of the slope, and the weight of the pack. And so what you want is, as Jason correctly pointed out, you want to feel like the legs are the limiting factor, not the lungs. And I think the hardest thing, honestly, with this is to find the right slope.
00:50:03
Speaker
Honestly, I've lived in lots of mountain towns in my life and I've done these workouts for probably 30 years. Well, not 30 years, 20 years anyway. I've always struggled to find the right slope, but once you find it, it's like gold. You know exactly where to go and it's perfect.
00:50:25
Speaker
Trail or road they're never steep enough. You have to you have to go off trail typically You know, I think another good option is to do them on a really steep treadmill. I Recommend people do them in boots because your foot has to flex differently in a rigid boot your ankle range of motion is it can be a limiting factor that is much more specific to doing them and say running shoes and
00:50:50
Speaker
But finding a gym that's going to let you go in with a big pair of, I lost portiva mountaineering boots and put on a weight, grind for an hour, an hour and a half with a heavy pack on their treadmill that goes to 30 degrees, you may be asked to leave. There are some limiting. It is tricky. This is actually, I think, the part where people get the most discouraged is finding this place to do it.
00:51:20
Speaker
I want to encourage people to try to do the best. Don't worry if it's not perfect. We had in our last mountaineering training group someone doing them on the dirt embankment on the side of a freeway on-ramp. It wasn't very long.
00:51:37
Speaker
they were in Florida and that's what they had and they did it there and you know what like I think it was great like we obviously he didn't dump his weight out at the top of everyone but you know he would carry the weight back down but it was a good angle and it was kind of this gravelly soil and he was able to wear boots and he was able to go out there and just go up and down and
00:51:59
Speaker
Kudos to him for being able to do that for an hour and a half. He also did some good mental training. So I think that this is a piece that I just want to encourage people not to get discouraged on, but Jason did a great job of describing it.
00:52:14
Speaker
how we do these weighted pack carries and why. And I think that for Mountaineers, we've just seen time and time and time again that this has just been the key workout that's really helped people feel great on the mountain. And not just with Mountaineers actually, it's also people doing
00:52:35
Speaker
races, mount running races with a lot of vertical. For example, the tour de jambe, um, all of the athletes that we've coached and consulted with for the tour and that race has, I think you're trying to get into that aren't you Alyssa this year? That race has a lot. I have DNF'd it twice. Yep. Oh, that's me. Yeah. It's my, it's my greatest nemesis one day. Actually. Yeah.
00:53:01
Speaker
Well, we're good to get you on a good Emmy program and you'll be fine. But you know, I know that Will Weidman, one of our other coaches, he did that last year and that's one of the things I talked to him before that he said really helped him on that phrase was the Emmy program.
00:53:19
Speaker
weighted pack carries and it seems counterintuitive, right? But again, he was able to increase his strength endurance. And so when he was running without a backpack, he was able to use a lower percentage of the available strength endurance and thereby go longer. And that's a perfect working real world example of how this turns out and how it works.
00:53:45
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, Stephen, for me, the muscular endurance thing is when you're actually doing the workout for me, it what mimics the thing the most and in so many ways.
00:53:55
Speaker
You know, as we talked about earlier, you know, at uphill, we kind of have our four pillars of capacity building. We have the aerobic, we have strength and we have, um, sorry, aerobic and aerobic strength and technical. And then I add my fifth, which is the mental. And when it comes to the muscular endurance, you know, I'll often program for my athletes, uh, what I call like a benchmark day or a simulator day where they are typically.
00:54:20
Speaker
conducting an exercise that's going to have more vert or equal vert and more weight or equal weight to their actual actual objective. And I think anyone out there that's done mountain sports can probably relate that when that weight feels really heavy and you're going uphill, that can be one of the toughest mental struggles for folks and physical. And so
00:54:40
Speaker
For me, when I'm programming these Emmy workouts, you know, I'm really trying to mimic some of those harder times that folks are going to experience on the mountain. And that could be going up a long, never ending boot pack. That could be the sled drag on Denali. That could be as a first time Rainier climber, you know, just getting that 50 pound pack up to Camp Muir. I mean, this this is very often the some of the hardest parts of these mountaineering endeavors. And, you know, the muscular endurance work is going to
00:55:07
Speaker
is going to be the key component or one of the key components to really help folks be successful, both physically and mentally.
Mental Preparation Through Training
00:55:15
Speaker
Definitely. And I think that that's so important to be able to draw on that knowledge. Like I've done this before. I know I can do it. Here is the moment that I'm doing it and I'm not panicking because, you know, pull out of my mental toolbox. I'm ready. I can do this. And I think that that's a part that often
00:55:37
Speaker
people don't realize it is part of why we train is that the training is not just the physical capability, it's the mental capability to look back and say, I've got this, I know I can do it. And I've possibly even done harder. So I think that's an excellent point. So I think that we are just about wrapping up, which is so hard to believe. Steve, what Steve got his hand up. Go for it, Steve.
00:56:08
Speaker
Well, there's one final important point I want to call out about muscular endurance is that it is our most trainable capacity. And this is one of the reasons that people progress so quickly. And one of the things that makes it so fun is because it is so trainable. And these
00:56:27
Speaker
modalities and the structure that we've created, a pill athlete around this, is incredibly effective. And you can progress muscular endurance, especially the weighted pack carries I find for quite a while before people start to plateau. I mean, 12 to 16 weeks is not uncommon. I think I don't know exactly, of course, what
00:56:56
Speaker
is the differentiator. But what I look for is for whether or not somebody's plateauing. What you should be seeing is either the weight increasing each time, or the weight stays the same, but you actually do it faster. And there should be significant changes. And this is, you know, Jason mentioned one, sometimes one a week. One of the reasons that it is so important to have these
00:57:24
Speaker
long periods of rest in between workouts is so that you have time to adapt because there is a lot going on in your body in this workout and there's a lot your body has to adapt to and build and then you do it again. Sometimes I'll have people do it every 10 days and that's not that bad. I think the biggest danger with them that I would warn people about is to overindulge on this.
00:57:54
Speaker
Don't think, oh, wow, that was great. I want to do more. It's like a drug, right? Like, oh, that felt good. I want to give it to me again. No. Be really judicious in your application. Don't, because you can over train this really easily because it is such a big training load. You really need to program a lot of recovery, you know, aerobic days. You also just need to make sure you're maintaining your
00:58:20
Speaker
Aerobic capacity that you've built, you know your zone to fitness that you've built during this period You can't let if you do too much me training and not enough zone to you'll actually start to lose your your aerobic conditioning So you gotta kind of balance these two things? one em you work out every seven to ten days can you know continue to hit the super, you know consistency on your zone to runs or hikes and
00:58:47
Speaker
and just be patient. And if you have the time and can do this for 12, 14, 16 weeks, my experience is you'll continue to see gains and those will be signaled by those increased weights or drops in time on the wraps up the hill. I think that's an exciting thing to realize. I think the zone two training can sometimes be
00:59:13
Speaker
uh, monotonous in a way for a lot of people and feel like, Oh my gosh, I'm not making progress because it's so incremental. And so I think that it's nice to have something where people can see much more tangible results to keep them, you know, like motivated and kind of engaging with the process. Um, so yeah, I think that's, that's great. Well, Jason, is there anything else you would like to add? I feel like we need a part two. There's so many other questions I have in my head.
00:59:42
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I talk about the gym based Demi a little bit. Do you want to take that Jason? Yeah. Oh yeah. Let's jump on that.
00:59:49
Speaker
Yeah, so as Steve kinda mentioned, for a lot of us, it's fun to wait a pack, fun to throw some water, throw some weight in a pack and move uphill. Why? Because we're training for the mountains.
Indoor Training Alternatives and Tracking Progress
01:00:01
Speaker
And if we have that at our disposal, it's fun. We like being outside, we like moving uphill. That's why we're here, we're up with athletes. For folks that don't have that, of course you've got the StairMaster. But the goal of Muscular Endurance is really to
01:00:18
Speaker
train your body to create a high amount of power output for a long period of time. And that can be done through other modalities. And so Steve kind of asked me to think about different ways to create muscular endurance workouts, and that can also be gym-based, right? Like, so you're basically just taking any muscle group that you're trying to train to create
01:00:38
Speaker
high power output over lots and lots of reps long period of time. And that can be done with anything for a lot of our climbers often use an exercise like like a figure four right we're hanging off ice tools or rings and you're basically training your body not only your forearms but your shoulders and your core.
01:00:54
Speaker
to do a series of movements. So we might program somewhere to like 10 figure fours per side, maybe with a two to three minute rest. And we'll probably build up to like three to five rounds over time, kind of adding rounds or increasing the quickness and the power of each one of those repetitions. So basically, you know, Steve asked us to think about how do we translate this to the gym?
01:01:18
Speaker
You're trying to achieve the same goal. You're trying to maximize power output over a longer period of time. And that can be done with essentially any muscle group. And the goal here in the mountains is make it sports specific. Make sure you're training those muscles and training that recruitment that you're going to be using on that objective.
01:01:36
Speaker
That's great. And I think that's really helpful because so often we get the question, you know, can I train to climb Denali to climb Rainier, et cetera, in New York City, in Kansas? And the answer is yes. It might be very repetitive and not the most exciting, but you can absolutely do it and you can absolutely be in a position to do well. So I think that that's,
01:02:02
Speaker
hopefully inspiring and encouraging to people who live in vertically challenged places to make it happen. And post pandemic, so many more people have treadmills or stairmasters and stuff in their house than they used to. So I think that there's more resources at people's disposal than perhaps there was not too long ago.
01:02:27
Speaker
But I think that this is also super good training for technical climbers. I think that if I have someone who's more of a rock or an alpinist athlete, I will program them the gym-based ME and use exercises. And there's articles on the website about this as well, about how to use a figure four as an ME exercise and that kind of thing.
01:02:53
Speaker
Um, or we talked about the treadmill hand walking where you're in a plane kind of treadmill and you set it slow and you do that because you're actually what that is. It's mostly transverse of dominance because you're, you know, and shoulder because your, your hand is tracking.
01:03:10
Speaker
your body, your transverse abdominis, mostly, but a lot of other muscles as well, is holding the plank and then you're having to lift up and move. There's a lot of carryover, I feel like, too. Ice climbing, mixed climbing, hard rock climbing with some of these motions, because the core strength in this, especially in this lateral twisting way, is so important in hard and steep technical climbing.
01:03:40
Speaker
Yeah, I wish that people could have the visual on Steve doing the treadmill walking as we were recording the podcast. That was pretty good, yeah. Well, I'm not kidding when I say I think we could do a whole other podcast, which we definitely will on this. But anything either of you would like to wrap up with or add in to close this off?
01:04:06
Speaker
No, I mean, thanks for listening to you for having me. I love talking about strength training, especially as it pertains to getting ready for mountain objectives, and I completely agree with you. There's lots more to talk about. This is just the tip of the iceberg, and it was fun to riff on max strength and muscular endurance this morning. Yeah, super fun to have you here, Jason, and we'll definitely have to do this again and dive even deeper into some of these little rabbit holes that we can go down. It's going to be a lot of fun.
01:04:32
Speaker
Yeah, I shouldn't even bring this up, but how do you calculate using a StairMaster versus being outside? Are they the same? That's a question that I think a lot of people ask. So we will answer that later. Thank you. Or we can get to it now. I want to answer it now real quick because I think that this is
01:05:00
Speaker
really important point that I think goes back to what I said earlier about looking inwardly and not outwardly. The important thing is that you record it consistently for yourself. The important thing isn't that we all record it the same so that we can compare one another, right? Like if you put on your chest heart rate strap and you
01:05:23
Speaker
you use a fudge factor, whatever. We have these fudge factors on the website where to take a TSS score, the training piece is going to give you for a workout. And it's like, OK, if you're carrying every x amount of pounds, you add this many. The x amount of pounds carried for the x amount of time, you add this y many TSS points. And we can link to that article in the podcast notes, in the show notes.
01:05:48
Speaker
But the most important thing is actually just that you do it consistently for yourself over time so that you can track your own training. And there's no magic to these ratings. There's no magic. TSS is a made up number. It's a made up metric. And it's not
01:06:08
Speaker
People just need to try to realize that and understand that, that it's there to help them be consistent and measure their, assign a load to their training that is relatively the same each time they go in the gym or each time they go outside. And that's what helps us there, so.
01:06:31
Speaker
Oh, it's great. End it with a, with a nugget of wisdom. So thank you for listening to the uphill athlete podcast. If you can rate, review, and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, it really helps us to get our education and knowledge out in the world. You can also visit us on the uphill athlete website at uphillathlete.com or write into the coach at uphillathlete.com with any questions that you have.
01:07:02
Speaker
Thank you, Alisa. Thank you, Jason. Great episode today. Yeah, thanks, Steve. It's not just one, but a community. We are Bill Ashley.