Hill walking is easy with these tips. Get advice on backpacking, hiking, and the great outdoors in this video.
Pace yourself properly
Keep a light spring in your step
Use walking sticks for braking
Stretch out muscles
John Flaherty has a great love for the outdoors. In 2003, John and his wife started Central Coast Outdoors in northern California. His company provides hiking, kayaking, and biking services for those wanting to be closer to nature. John has traveled all around the world through his love of hiking.
JOHN FLAHERTY: Hi, my name is John and today we are going to talk about hill walking, going up and then coming back down without hurting yourself. Usually most hikes that start out end up going up first maybe up to a mountain top or up a canyon or a steep ravine. When you are hiking uphill, there are a couple of really important things to think about. The first is to pace yourself properly. Do not hike too hard and too fast just because you think like you have to get somewhere. When you are hiking uphill, you are going to be slowing down. You might be going only one or two miles an hour compared to two or three miles an hour on more moderate or level terrain. When you are hiking up, I like to think about a couple of things and the first is to keep a nice light spring in my step. So I might think about really using my calves as a push off when I go hiking up like this and keep things nice and light rather than just plodding and keeping things like that. If you are going up a very steep hill and you keep plodding and keeping your heel in contact, it is going to really stretch out your calf. Take that pressure off your calf by making it nice, light and bouncy like that. Another thing to think about when you are going uphill is you might want to have some walking sticks. Walking sticks can really help. You can use your arms like this to actually give you a little bit of a push and obviously your legs are doing most of work but just that little bit with the arm might take the pressure off the legs and alleviate soreness that you might have from hiking uphill. Downhill is an entirely different animal. Again keep your speed under control. A lot of people might just get going too fast downhill and crash off the trail. The steeper it is, make sure your speed is under control. Step lightly. Again get a nice little spring in your step. Walk more on the balls of your feet or on your toes and kind of come down gently. If you have walking sticks, again you can use those to help you as breaks then go out in front and help slow you down as your are climbing down a hill. Now another thing to think about when you are doing a lot of hill walking is that your muscles are going to be a lot more sore after a big hilly hike than they are in a level hike. So to take care of things, make sure that after you warmed up maybe part way through the hike you stretch out your muscles, stretch out your calf muscles and then maybe your big muscles, the quads and the hams here. And then after you hike, very important to spend a lot of time stretching out those muscles. If you do not stretch out after you hike, you are in a higher risk of having a very sore leg muscles the next day. So those are my tips for hill walking. If you follow them, I hope that you have an enjoyable experience out there going up and then coming back down.
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