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Other/Mixed Mountain Strong

Other strength modalities (e.g., Clubs), mixed strength modalities (e.g., combined kettlebell and barbell), other goals (flexibility)
Bier et steakfrites is a great option.

On another note I’ve been thinking of A&A plus a short Iron Cardio session as a way to address multiple fitness needs or maintain strength/power if I’m focusing on mostly endurance of late.

Addendum: This came from looking through my old programming from the past year. Lots of slow barbell grinds. Now gotta work on power via A+A or Q+D starting in October to see how that goes.
 
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A very interesting account from a former East German Judoka and a training camp which included a mountain bike ride thru the Austrian Alps. Reminded me of how I’ve thought of Mountain Strong and Combat Sport Strong in past events.

Given Mountain Athlete was one of my earliest inspirations for S&C this jumped out at me fifteen years later.
 
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Took my take on MTI’s Aerobic Base test (linked) where I ran for an hour and recorded distance covered whilst staying at Zone 2 heart rate (for me under 159 BPM).

I elected to use the Zone 2 metric versus MTI’s Maffetone method as I’ve been using Zone 2 governed training for most of the last year or so.

I wound up covering 4.3 miles/6.92 kilometers with an average HR of 137 BPM and a maximum HR of 155 BPM.

I intend to repeat the test every three months to gauge progress.
 
I would like to share my latest experience.

I've been inconsistently rotating between Q&D, KBSF C&J, plan 060, also I did some barbell work and some bodyweight work. Occasionally í did some step up protocols. And lot of walking with stroller.
Last week I went on my first mountain Search&Rescue training in Krkonoše mountains. We spend three days in mountains working hard.

Without any specific preparation I didn’t find any strength or endurance weakness. As a new guy, I carried more stuff(beers for others) to our hut, where we slept. I was lacking experiences with backpack setting, movement efficiency in deep snow etc. But my strength and endurance kept me fresh enough to keep up with more experienced guys and focused on all those drills and knowledge to learn. It proved me that SF can deliver great results and strength have a greater purpose.

0ae03b81-3dbc-4a1b-92ad-5c63238153f6.jpg
 
Dude, that’s awesome.

I’m likely gonna install a hangboard in my house in the near future for some finger and hand strength work for my jiujitsu/judo work.
 
Where I live there's a 65' high bridge with about a 5-degree slope. I'm thinking of adding purely aerobic hill (sub zone 2 threshold) repeats using running up and walking down the 'hill' as a way to train. Going uphill is about 400m (1312 feet) for one uphill.
 
Deleted member 5559 said:
I feel like climbing needs climbing and mountaineering needs cycling and grinds.
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offwidth said:
@Bro Mo
Spot on! I have trained for some pretty big mountaineering and alpine objectives (+20,000') by doing a lot of cycling.
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psmith said:
Ayo hol up, you guys are finding meaningful carryover from cycling to hiking weight uphill? What kind of weekly volume are you looking at? Intensity breakdown? Road vs dirt?
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offwidth said:
Yes I have; utilizing both road cycling and MTB. When I was training for big alpine climbs, it wasn't uncommon for me to be doing several hundred km/week on the road (mostly LED Z1-Z2) and at times up to 50km MTB. (at a higher intensity) A lot would depend on conditions...
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psmith said:
Now I think about it, I once spent, oh, 6-8 weeks or so doing 7-9h/week of easy Zone 1-2 volume on an Airdyne and a C2 erg to let a stress fracture heal before running Rob Shaul's 6-week Afghanistan program and then going off to work innawoods for a season. It was probably better than sitting on my a#@, certainly helped control bodyweight, and the main volume-limiting factors were boredom and saddle soreness rather than bone stress injuries, but I can't say I felt exceptionally aerobically fit.
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Necro bump. I spent a lot of time on the bike this offseason. Seems like it worked.

Lengthy details:

I work in the woods, evaluated on running, calisthenics, and hiking weight uphill. May-November is the busy season, everything else is the offseason. Historically I've gotten ready for the season using Rob Shaul's stuff for the first couple of years and moving towards a more Uphill Athlete-inspired approach as I started to reap the easy gains of specific familiarization. This included a brief period of personalized coaching, which went quite a bit worse than reading the books and doing my own programming, at a substantially higher cost. Sometimes you learn things the hard way. I was a recreational lifter before getting into this line of work, and I've never felt that my strength in less than the 20-rep range or so was a meaningful limiting factor, so I've been content to maintain my strength or accept a slow decline and mostly push my endurance performance, mostly using running and hiking as specific training modalities. It worked out okay. My fitness improved by dribs and drabs, say from a very hard ~29min 4mi in June 2020 to a 35:30 5.2mi with a ~200ft hill in June 2022 and about the same level in 2023. I had a lot of issues with injuries, tibial bone stress at first and knees after the first couple years, usually small initial dings that I made worse by continued training or work. I could never sustain much more than 7hr/week of easy running, less with any intensity, and that was right on the ragged edge of what I could do, and since that was most of my endurance work (maybe with the occasional long hike on the weekend) it amounted to pretty piddling volume by serious endurance standards.

By about November 2023, I was fairly over it as a whole. At the same time, I had been exposed to a critical mass of sources, mostly triathletes, swearing up and down that riding their bikes had helped their running. I decided I didn't care so much about holding what little I had that I wasn't willing to experiment, and I'd been a sporadic recreational cyclist for quite a while. In that spirit, I started the offseason with a ~1000mi tour over the course of 16 days or so in December and continued with right around 9hr of cycling a week plus a couple of weekend tours here and there. Target intensity was whatever--I paced myself with the rough idea that I didn't want to blow up on the ride, or be absolutely flat the next day or two, and most of my rides were pretty flat, but I stood up on such hills as there were, tried to maintain my speed into many a headwind, never really slowed down based on what my heart rate monitor read, etc. After the tour, I ran, but never more than 4.5hr/week or so, and most of it was done as 11min jog/1min walk. I probably had about 10 total intense running sessions over the entire offseason compared to 15-20 in previous offseasons.

By May, my knees felt better than they had in 5 years or so. I raced a 14.5mi trail run with ~2000ft of climbing at around an 8:30 average split, took my road slightly-more-than-5k from 21:05 to 20:14, 34:12 on the previously-mentioned 5mi, and as good a time as I've ever walked with gear on the local hill of reference, and felt generally quite sturdy at work. On one hand, there are still middle school girls faster than any of this, so feel free to disregard on that count. On the other hand, I'm pretty happy with it, and it's better in absolute performance terms (never mind the benefits of not constantly dealing with minor injuries) than I could do using mostly run/hike/TaCtiCAl approaches.

Some takeaways:
-After a few bad sessions on the bike early on, I got somewhat serious about carb intake and it helped a lot. I could ride the same course in 3hr without fueling or while taking in, say, 40-60g sugar/hr, and feel about the same during the ride, but it made a huge difference post-ride and the next day. I've started trying to be more aggressive about fuelling at work as well, at least during hard shifts and peri-workout. In retrospect, I think this limited my volume significantly--quite a few weekends that were supposed to be 4hr/4hr turned into 4hr/recovery walk before I figured this out.
-I never really felt like I got much from stretching or foam rolling until I started riding a bunch. I sure do now. Not sure whether that's something intrinsic to riding or I'm just doing more volume overall.
-Dirt is fun, but it's a lot easier to control output on the road, and I have a lot more pavement near me than I do dirt, so almost all of my work was on the road.
-I targeted paces above functional threshold for my running intensity work. In hindsight, this probably wasn't worth the recovery cost it imposed, at least not for every single session. I ran faster in the slightly-over-5k than I did at any point during the offseason, except strides, so I don't think specific pace work was a huge deal anyway. Next season, easier tempo work for the intensity sessions.
-I got away from single kettlebell clean and press for my strength training, and I think my hands became a bit of a limiting factor at work as a result.
-Additionally, I was less consistent with my strength work than I should have been, mostly out of a desire to do specific lifts that required equipment I didn't have at my house. In retrospect, "easy strength with a single kettlebell" 2-3x/week would probably have worked better than trying to trap bar deadlift.
-I had fun riding, and it scratches the itch to take the long way home that I previously satisfied with car and motorcycle. And, after all, if I wasn't having fun, I probably wouldn't be willing to do it for 9hr a week.
-I did one loaded hike as part of my training, and I don't think I really needed to do even that. YMMV on this, especially depending on experience.

So, yeah, there it is. I don't think I've seen anyone else but the quoted posts bring this up in the context of training for foot-borne endeavors, except to say that it doesn't work all that well, so let this be a data point.
 
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psmith said:
Necro bump. I spent a lot of time on the bike this offseason. Seems like it worked.

Lengthy details:

I work in the woods, evaluated on running, calisthenics, and hiking weight uphill. May-November is the busy season, everything else is the offseason. Historically I've gotten ready for the season using Rob Shaul's stuff for the first couple of years and moving towards a more Uphill Athlete-inspired approach as I started to reap the easy gains of specific familiarization. This included a brief period of personalized coaching, which went quite a bit worse than reading the books and doing my own programming, at a substantially higher cost. Sometimes you learn things the hard way. I was a recreational lifter before getting into this line of work, and I've never felt that my strength in less than the 20-rep range or so was a meaningful limiting factor, so I've been content to maintain my strength or accept a slow decline and mostly push my endurance performance, mostly using running and hiking as specific training modalities. It worked out okay. My fitness improved by dribs and drabs, say from a very hard ~29min 4mi in June 2020 to a 35:30 5.2mi with a ~200ft hill in June 2022 and about the same level in 2023. I had a lot of issues with injuries, tibial bone stress at first and knees after the first couple years, usually small initial dings that I made worse by continued training or work. I could never sustain much more than 7hr/week of easy running, less with any intensity, and that was right on the ragged edge of what I could do, and since that was most of my endurance work (maybe with the occasional long hike on the weekend) it amounted to pretty piddling volume by serious endurance standards.

By about November 2023, I was fairly over it as a whole. At the same time, I had been exposed to a critical mass of sources, mostly triathletes, swearing up and down that riding their bikes had helped their running. I decided I didn't care so much about holding what little I had that I wasn't willing to experiment, and I'd been a sporadic recreational cyclist for quite a while. In that spirit, I started the offseason with a ~1000mi tour over the course of 16 days or so in December and continued with right around 9hr of cycling a week plus a couple of weekend tours here and there. Target intensity was whatever--I paced myself with the rough idea that I didn't want to blow up on the ride, or be absolutely flat the next day or two, and most of my rides were pretty flat, but I stood up on such hills as there were, tried to maintain my speed into many a headwind, never really slowed down based on what my heart rate monitor read, etc. After the tour, I ran, but never more than 4.5hr/week or so, and most of it was done as 11min jog/1min walk. I probably had about 10 total intense running sessions over the entire offseason compared to 15-20 in previous offseasons.

By May, my knees felt better than they had in 5 years or so. I raced a 14.5mi trail run with ~2000ft of climbing at around an 8:30 average split, took my road slightly-more-than-5k from 21:05 to 20:14, 34:12 on the previously-mentioned 5mi, and as good a time as I've ever walked with gear on the local hill of reference, and felt generally quite sturdy at work. On one hand, there are still middle school girls faster than any of this, so feel free to disregard on that count. On the other hand, I'm pretty happy with it, and it's better in absolute performance terms (never mind the benefits of not constantly dealing with minor injuries) than I could do using mostly run/hike/TaCtiCAl approaches.

Some takeaways:
-After a few bad sessions on the bike early on, I got somewhat serious about carb intake and it helped a lot. I could ride the same course in 3hr without fueling or while taking in, say, 40-60g sugar/hr, and feel about the same during the ride, but it made a huge difference post-ride and the next day. I've started trying to be more aggressive about fuelling at work as well, at least during hard shifts and peri-workout. In retrospect, I think this limited my volume significantly--quite a few weekends that were supposed to be 4hr/4hr turned into 4hr/recovery walk before I figured this out.
-I never really felt like I got much from stretching or foam rolling until I started riding a bunch. I sure do now. Not sure whether that's something intrinsic to riding or I'm just doing more volume overall.
-Dirt is fun, but it's a lot easier to control output on the road, and I have a lot more pavement near me than I do dirt, so almost all of my work was on the road.
-I targeted paces above functional threshold for my running pace. In hindsight, this probably wasn't worth the recovery cost it imposed, at least not for every single session. I ran faster in the slightly-over-5k than I did at any point during the offseason, except strides, so I don't think specific pace work was a huge deal anyway.
-I got away from single kettlebell clean and press for my strength training, and I think my hands became a bit of a limiting factor at work as a result.
-Additionally, I was less consistent with my strength work than I should have been, mostly out of a desire to do specific lifts that required equipment I didn't have at my house. In retrospect, "easy strength with a single kettlebell" 2-3x/week would probably have worked better than trying to trap bar deadlift.
-I had fun riding, and it scratches the itch to take the long way home that I previously satisfied with car and motorcycle. And, after all, if I wasn't having fun, I probably wouldn't be willing to do it for 9hr a week.
-I did one loaded hike as part of my training, and I don't think I really needed to do even that. YMMV on this, especially depending on experience.

So, yeah, there it is. I don't think I've seen anyone else but the quoted posts bring this up in the context of training for foot-borne endeavors, except to say that it doesn't work all that well, so let this be a data point.
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Great write up and thanks for sharing! Do you mind me asking what line of work you’re in? Also - did you wear the spandex/lycra cyclists suits? Any hesitation there?
 
Every year I do a big Grand Canyon single day trip, some sort of fast paced hiking excursion with a group of guys. Hands down the ones that do the best with minimal hiking are the 3-4 guys I'm friends with that all do bike packing races. The bike packing group normally pulls ahead of the rest of the group in the last third of the hike, they simply have another gear. Plus they tend to recover faster.
 
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