Exercise of the Month
You don’t want to miss out on the thrills of adventure due to weak lungs, delicate and fragile legs, and heart condition. You need to strengthen your heart and blood vessels so you can keep up with the demands of the adventure and stay on top of your energy levels to accomplish the adventure and enjoy it to the fullest!
Stair climbing is one such exercise that helps you build your cardio endurance and stamina. It also helps you to maintain flexibility.
You can do stair climbing for easy to moderately difficult to highly difficult adventures. Stair climbing is particularly helpful for your lower half of the body. In every adventure it is mandatory that we use our leg power to pull off the adventure. Stair climbing particularly focuses on the Gastrocnemius muscle - commonly known as the calf muscle. Apart from this, it focuses on the overall muscle groups of the leg like Sartorius, Rectus Femoris, Gluteus Maximus and Medius, etc.
Apart from these, stair climbing keeps you in shape and controls your weight, keeping you healthy. It also regulates your blood pressure, increases the core pumping strength of your heart, and improves your immune system which protects you against regional diseases due to improper acclimatization. Since we use our stamina and our leg’s muscular strength during adventures like trekking, hiking, mountaineering, rock climbing, via ferrata and others, doing stair climbing from 5-8 weeks prior to your adventure could prove to be helpful.
5-8 weeks before your planned adventure, you can start with very basic stair climbing to boost your cardiovascular endurance and continue for 15-20 minutes. Continue this activity almost every day until 3-4 weeks prior to the adventure. By now your lower and upper leg muscles would have become stronger and your flexibility must have improved. So, you can increase the time for your stair climbing. Now you can do 20-25 minutes of stair climbing. A cool down process is also required to flex your muscles after you are done. Just before you start your adventure - 1-2 weeks earlier, you should increase the time of your stair climbing to 25-30 minutes. By now, the muscles that felt stiff and painful initially will be well-built and flexible and enable you to carry your body weight plus extra weight easily.
It is recommended to start your stair climbing practice with a light weight on your shoulders. You can increase the level of difficulty by increasing weight gradually. This will help in an overall improvement of muscular endurance and flexibility.
The adventures that you will embark on will not have well-graded stairs. They will have undulating topography, with gravels, screes, stones, etc., that can always cause injuries to your leg. Hence, stair climbing is an ideal exercise which helps your legs to stay fit and fine and deal with petty injuries easily.
Have we pumped enough enthusiasm in you to find your next adventure? Then quit thinking. Start exercising, pack your gear, and make the ultimate move - Cross the Line!
Till then, we will compile another curated assortment of the ideal stuff needed for you to collect critical information for your next outdoor adventure.