Strength Training for the Backcountry Athlete

The idea of movement competency is simple: can you consistently access a wide range of movement patterns without pain or compensation? If the answer is “no,” you are running the risk of injuring yourself in the backcountry (or just going about your everyday life).

This is one of the foundational pillars of strength and conditioning that far too many people gloss over. The result is an attempt to build strength and capacity on top of dysfunction, which is a recipe for disaster.

You probably know someone who has been strength training on and off for years who always starts off enthusiastic and excited to get stronger, only to be sidelined by injury, requiring them to stop training and lose most, if not all, of their “gains.” More often than not, this is the result of skipping a foundational phase in their training cycle.

As a backcountry athlete, you’ll need access to a wide variety of movement patterns. Though we may sometimes train in a controlled environment like a gym, our performance is tested in an uncontrollable environment: nature. We’re constantly being faced with a wide variety of unpredictable physical challenges and the more movement patterns you can reliably access, the more options you have for overcoming those challenges.

There are seven foundational movement patterns that every backcountry athlete needs to gain competency in:

1. Pushing
2. Pulling
3. Squatting
4. Lunging
5. Hinging
6. Rotating (and resisting rotating)
7. Locomotion (walking/running/crawling, often with a pack or carrying weight)

Not only do you need to display consistent competency in each of these seven movements individually, but you need to be able to reliably string them together and perform them in multiple planes of movement (forwards/backwards, side-to-side, at a diagonal, etc.) in order to perform in the backcountry.

Once you can reliably and consistently display competency in these movement patterns, you’re ready to shift your focus to building strength in them.

The principles that guide the building of strength are relatively simple. In theory: lift more today than you did the last time you performed the same exercise. This is the principle of progressive overload.

In practice, this simply means that at each strength training session, your goal should be to lift more total weight than in your previous session. This can mean moving a heavier weight for the same number of repetitions or lifting the same weight for more repetitions.

To effectively build muscle and strength, most people should complete anywhere from nine to 18 total sets per muscle group each week. Those sets should each consist of anywhere between six to 20 repetitions. The lower the reps, the more sets you should complete.

Some examples include:

• 4 sets of 6-7 repetitions
• 3 sets of 8-12 repetitions
• 2 sets of 15-20 repetitions

Each set should stop with one or two reps “left in the tank.” The rationale here is that physical adaptation happens when
we work near the edge of our current capacity, not beyond it. Ask any high-performance athlete how often they train to the point of true failure and they will all say the same thing: almost never.

If you find that after a few weeks, you are no longer able to add more weight or more reps, reduce your working volume for a week before ramping it back up again. This is what’s known as a deload. It’s kind of like making a small down-climb to a traverse in order to reach a spot where you can continue your ascent toward the summit.

A quick note regarding the one-to-five rep range: unless you’ve been consistently following a structured training plan for close to a year, you won’t need to use that range, and without that year-or-so of strength training under your belt, the risk of injury far outweighs the possible benefits.

At this point, you might be wondering how strong you need to be in order to set yourself up for success.

Well, the answer is: it depends on what your athletic endeavours include. A trail runner who seldom carries anything larger than a 15-litre pack containing nothing more than the essentials doesn’t need nearly as much strength as a multi-day backpacker who must be prepared to haul a heavy pack for long distances over rugged terrain.

With that said, all backcountry athletes should endeavour to achieve a minimum standard of relative strength (their strength relative to their body mass).

For example, being able to perform the following feats of strength with good technique is a solid benchmark:

• 25 goblet squats holding 50 per cent of your bodyweight
• Carry 75 per cent of your bodyweight (in your hands) for 90 seconds
• 5-8 chin-ups

If you can do all of these on demand, you have a solid foundation of strength to support your adventures. 

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