TRAINING RECOVERY: AN EXPERIMENT
By Rob Shaul, CSCS
Sean, Christian and Brenton fight through the "crux" of a 2-hour workout at Mountain Athlete
At Mountain Athlete we know we can use an intense, gym-based training program to prepare for challenging, long, single, 8+ hour mountain events. The problem comes the day after, when we are too sore and worked over to even think about heading into the hills for a second long day in a row.
In strength and conditioning terms, we've trained for the "event," but not our recovery. Our typical gym sessions last just one hour. So, what we've done is train our bodies to recover from one hour only of strenuous exercise. We've trained to complete the long day in the mountains, but undertrained the recovery from it.
During the height of the busy guiding season last summer, Dan Corn, an Exum Guide and coach at the gym, strung together over 10 long mountain days, including 4 trips guiding clients up the Grand Teton. How? During all those early season guiding trips beforehand he had trained his body to recover from long mountain days.
In strength and conditioning terms, Dan had "trained" his recovery through massive volumes of work.
Hence the problem. If you are not a mountain guide, but just a regular person with a regular, 8-5 job, your long mountain days are restricted to the few weekends you can spare from work, family and other obligations. Few of us have the time to put in the huge volume of training, like Dan did.
If we can use condensed, intense gym training to prepare for a long mountain event, is there a way we can use the gym to train our recovery from a long mountain event too? This is the question we are experimenting with at Mountain Athlete. Our typical training sessions is 60 full minutes of intense, hard work. For our "training recovery" experiment, we've doubled the session length to two hours.
Currently we have several athletes doing two 1-hour sessions, and one 2-hour session each week. Ultimately, we'll push this to three 2-hour sessions/week, then go out and test it by attempting two or more long mountain days in a row.
The ability to train recovery in the gym extends beyond recreational mountain athletes to soldiers set for deployment to Afghanistan. We have consulted several special forces personnel and others on the tip of the spear with orders for the war zone. Often these soldiers are deploying from flatland stateside locations at or near sea level to forward operating bases in Afghanistan at 8,000 feet and up in elevation. Right away their missions can take them on extended, multi-day, patrols through rugged mountainous terrain. The ability to deploy with their recovery already trained could be a huge mission advantage.
The clip below shows highlights of the most recent of our 2-hour long sessions. Marmot athlete Christian Santelices is one of the athletes filmed.
Learn more about Mountain Athlete at marmotpro.com.
