These Physical Therapist-Approved Techniques Can Help You Hike Faster and Avoid Injury

Thru-hiking is simple, right? Just put one foot in front of the other and repeat about five million times. But as straightforward as that sounds, traversing mountain ranges with weight on your back is grueling work.

Saving energy and avoiding injury are top priorities for most thru-hikers — and that’s where it helps to refine your hiking technique, ensuring you use the correct muscles to hike faster while reducing the risk of injury.

To help explain the mechanics of hiking techniques and injury prevention, I talked to Dr. Morgan Brosnihan, a physical therapist specializing in injuries caused by long-distance hiking. Brosnihan is an accomplished hiker herself, having thru-hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, Long Trail, and Colorado Trail.

Brosnihan is the owner of Blaze Physio, a mobile and telehealth physical therapy practice catering to hikers and runners. Operating out of her converted cargo van, she’s been able to help over 2,000 thru-hikers achieve their dreams.

Pre-Trail Preparation

Technique on the trail is important, but so is what long-distance hikers do before taking the first steps. Thru-hikers have a higher success rate when they train beforehand. Having seen thousands of injuries from physically unprepared hikers, Brosnihan is an expert when it comes to injury prevention.

As she puts it, “weight training is the single best thing you can do because it’s the main thing that’s going to build tendon strength and bone density.” Specifically, she cites exercises like step-ups, lunges, single-leg presses, single-leg deadlifts, split squats, and heel raises as the best for minimizing your chances of injury on trail.

Hiking with a pack and in your trail shoes is helpful too. There’s no substitute for the real thing: conditioning your body to experience the same strain that you’ll feel on trail does far more than just walking or running normally.

Muscles and tendons engage in different ways when you’ve got a pack on. Simulating the feeling of walking with weight on your back and in your hiking shoes “changes what happens in your foot mechanics — like what the Achilles does,” says Brosnihan. 

Mind Your Gait

A thru-hike, on paper, is very simple. Walk all day. Stop to sleep every so often and stop to eat (a lot). But the technique of walking gets more nuanced when the path you’re following is filled with rocks, roots, and mountains that feel like they shouldn’t be there. Adjusting your stride can, at minimum, make you hike faster, and at maximum, save you from a trip-ending injury. 

Gait is the fancy word for exactly how you land on the ground as you step. Brosnihan emphasizes that everyone’s gait is a little different, and that’s OK.

A footstrike that could be injury-inducing for one person might be completely fine for someone else. “I’ve seen people with tons of overpronation, feet rolled out, and no problems ever,” she says. “But then I see a lot of people with that kind of gait that are super injured. And so it just comes down to what your body’s adapted to going in.” 

While variations in gait are normal, there are certain things that hikers can do to reduce the likelihood of injury. Ideally, each step should begin with a light landing on the heel, directly under your center of gravity. “Our heel has the type of padding and the type of bony structure to be able to take that kind of impact,” states Brosnihan. After that initial impact, the body weight should roll the length of the foot and propel off the big toe. 

Uphill Hiking Techniques

Ever find yourself bounding down the trail in big steps, fueled by a sudden, inexplicable burst of energy? It might feel like these long strides will get you to your destination faster, but in reality, they’re putting you at risk of injury.

Striding on the trail causes a hard slap-down with the heel on each footfall, resulting in a loss of balance and a heavier impact. Compounded over millions of steps, the chances of overuse and strain-based injuries increase drastically. Moral of the story: take smaller strides.

Lean in and Engage Your Glutes

Building on general techniques of proper stride, there are also specific methods of hiking well on steep terrain. On uphill sections, leaning forward is key. Brosnihan compares climbing a steep slope to standing up out of a chair. Sure, you can primarily use your leg muscles to get you up, but you’d be wasting your larger glute muscles, which are much more efficient.

Leaning forward and hinging at your hips makes climbing a lot easier. “The amount you need to lean forward,” Brosnihan says, “is about the same amount that you need to lean to get out of a chair. And the steeper the hill, you just think the lower the chair.”

These steep slopes are where people most often make the mistake of walking with overly long strides. A lengthy step means you aren’t utilizing your glutes efficiently. You also become more likely to overly heel strike, creating impact problems we talked about before. Instead, take faster but shorter steps to be more efficient.

Trekking Poles. Use Them.

Trekking poles, while famous for helping the most on downhill stretches, are also beneficial on the uphill. Loop your hands upwards through the straps, allowing you to use the pressure against your wrists to support your weight.

Whether going uphill or downhill, adjust the length of the poles so your elbows are at a 90-degree angle. Use them asymmetrically, planting your right pole just before stepping with your left foot and vice versa.

Downhill Hiking Techniques

Downhills, while easy on the cardiovascular system, are strenuous on joints. Descending is when the majority of injuries happen, so proper technique in these sections is imperative for safety.

Lean Forward, Not Backward

One of the most common issues hikers have on the downhill is taking a step and slipping out. Brosnihan notes that “if you feel like you’re always slipping, then you’re probably sitting too far backseat.”

Our natural tendency as humans is to lean back to keep from falling forward, but this backfires. It gets us off balance, moving our center of gravity behind us. This makes it so that only the heel of your shoes’ soles engage with the ground. That decreased surface area makes slipping more likely. Instead, lean a little bit forward, keeping weight above your entire foot.

Engage the Glutes

The knees can take a beating on the downhill, absorbing a large percentage of the impact on descents. It doesn’t have to be this way, though. Imagine sitting in a chair as you hike down. Initially, this may be difficult as you will use muscles in an unfamiliar way.

However, as you become stronger, you’ll find yourself absorbing impacts with your glutes, rather than your knees. This will also keep your mass closer to the ground, improving balance. Of course, even though you sit back, it’s still important to keep an athletic stance, leaning slightly forward to keep an optimal center of gravity.

This technique, in combination with trekking poles, greatly reduces the risk of knee injuries.

Rocky Trail Techniques

Even flat terrain can pose a technical challenge when covered in rocks. The Pennsylvania Appalachian Trail, for example, is one of the AT’s flattest states, but it consistently scores as hikers’ least favorite section in The Trek’s annual thru-hiker survey. But rocky terrain doesn’t have to be the bane of your existence — there are both physical and mental tricks that will help you to absolutely rock these types of trails. (Sorry.)

Choose Your Line

Humans have evolved to constantly look out for hazards. Before the comforts of a highly developed society, we would naturally pay attention to the tiger wanting to eat us rather than the lovely patch of flowers in the opposite direction.

Unfortunately, our monkey brains still have a hard time distinguishing between a tiger and a rocky hiking trail. Our eyes are drawn to the sharpest, most unforgiving rocks that we want to avoid. How can we find good places to put our feet when we’re only looking at the worst spots? As such, we should train our brains to look out for those safe, harboring dirt patches or hospitable flat-topped stones instead. 

Skiers and mountain bikers are familiar with the idea of choosing a line: looking not at the trees, but at the spaces in between. The saying “you’ll go where you look” applies as much for hiking as it does for action sports.

Similarly, it’s important to think one step ahead — literally. Looking for a spot to plant your foot as you’re already in the air is a recipe for disaster. Instead, look for a place a step ahead, and place your foot carefully but decisively.

Take Smaller Steps (Yes, Still)

The mental technique is only half the battle. On rocky trails, it’s very important to use a form that prioritizes good balance. Once again, Brosnihan emphasizes that you should take short steps, which facilitate precise foot placement. “If your arm is closer to you, you can hit a target more precisely than if you’re reaching way out and trying to hit something. And your feet are the same.” 

Short steps help reinforce good form on both uphill and downhill terrain. Avoiding long reaches and keeping your body centered over your feet is vital to balance on rocky terrain.

Thru-hikers may not realize it, but the act of walking is as much an art as it is a science. For the purposes of energy preservation and injury prevention, good hiking technique will make you faster and safer. One step may not have much impact, but compound that a few thousand or million times, and it makes a mountain of a difference. 

Featured image: Graphic design by Chris Helm.