Anyone who has planned a bucket-list trek in the Dolomites or the Alps knows the sting: the route looked gorgeous on the map, but the 6,000-foot climbs turned the trip into a slog. Fitness writer for Outside (originally on Backpacker) tells exactly that story, then gets a fix from Alexa Hasman, a mountain athlete and founder of Rise Ultra Coaching, whose point is blunt: American hills are rarely steep enough to prep you for European-scale vert, so you have to engineer the training yourself.
Her programme starts with an endurance base. Find your longest hill or crank a treadmill to max incline and climb steadily for 60 minutes wearing roughly ten percent of your bodyweight, adding 15 minutes each week. Weight can build too, about five pounds a week, capped at 20 percent of bodyweight, where injury risk starts to outpace the gains. The pace test is refreshingly simple: you should be able to speak three sentences without gasping. Crucially, Hasman wants two of these long climbs on back-to-back days each week, because multi-day treks demand hiking on already-tired legs, and that's as much mental conditioning as physical.
Once you can climb for 90 to 120 minutes with 15 to 20 percent of your weight, shift to power. Hill sprints come next: ten seconds of near-max effort up a steep slope, walk down, repeat four times, gradually stretching reps to three minutes. Descents deserve their own session, since downhills are what actually shred your quads. Flip the workout, charging downhill at speed while walking up to recover.
Then comes the least glamorous tool: wall sits, which Hasman calls her secret sauce for downhill strength. Start with one-minute holds a couple of times a week, progress to failure, add a weight plate on your lap, and eventually attempt single-leg holds. Thirty seconds of those, she says, puts you in beast territory. Round it out with twice-weekly gym work on glutes, quads, hamstrings, and core, with step-ups of 15 to 30 reps per leg as the non-negotiable, adding a set or five pounds weekly.
The timing guidance matters as much as the exercises. Build over three to six months, never train more than three days in a row, skip the trick of dumping water weight at the top of a climb (it robs you of downhill practice), and taper for three to four weeks before your trip so your legs arrive fresh. Hasman also prefers perceived effort over heart-rate zones: long climbs at four to six out of ten, hill repeats at eight or nine.
Why should a holidaymaker care? Because a few months of structured training is the difference between finishing that Dolomites loop and bailing to a bus with an expensive inn bill, as the author learned the hard way. If you've got a big trek booked for next summer, the work starts now.