In nine years of Austrian Alpine Police records covering 5,368 hiking accidents, 75% of the falls happened on the way down. The researchers list exhaustion from downhill walking as one likely contributor, though they call that a hypothesis for now.
Ask someone preparing for a trek what they’re working on and the answer is usually the climb: stairs, elevation gain, cardio. Downhill hiking training rarely gets its own line in the plan. It should, because the way down is where quads start to shake, knees ache and toes get jammed into the front of boots.
Why going down hurts more than going up
When you climb, your leg muscles shorten as they contract to lift you against gravity. Exercise scientists call this concentric work. It’s hard on your heart and lungs and comparatively easy on the muscle fibers themselves.
When you descend, your muscles work as brakes. With every downhill step your quads, glutes and calves lengthen under load to lower your body weight, plus your pack, onto the next foothold. This is eccentric contraction, and it causes far more muscle damage than the shortening kind.
It’s why your legs are wrecked the day after a big descent even though you “only walked downhill,” and it’s the main cause of the deep soreness that shows up a day or two later.
| Climbing | Descending | |
|---|---|---|
| Muscle action | Shortening (concentric) | Lengthening under load (eccentric) |
| What it taxes most | Heart and lungs | Muscle fibers and knees |
| When you feel it | During the climb | One to two days later |
| What trains it | Uphill walking, stairs, step-ups | Step-downs, slow lowering, real descents |
A single long descent can mean several thousand braking steps. On the Inca Trail, the downhill staircases are what wreck unprepared legs, more than the climbs. Sore muscles also brake less precisely, which fits the fall figures above.
Your knees are part of this too. Descending puts more load through the knee than level walking, and your quads are what absorb it. When they fade, the joint takes what the muscle no longer does. If your knees only hurt on downhills, this is usually why.
Why descent training gets skipped
It feels free at the time. Gravity is helping, your breathing is easy, and it doesn’t register as training. The soreness arrives a day later, so it’s easy to miss the connection.
Ordinary life has almost no sustained descending. You can be fit, run, cycle and take every staircase in your city, and still never have asked your legs to brake continuously for two hours.
The gym trains the other half of the movement. A lot of gym work emphasizes the lift and treats the lowering as rest between reps. Being gym strong and being mountain strong are different things, and the descent is where the difference shows first.
How quickly your legs adapt to descents
Eccentric strength adapts quickly. Researchers call it the repeated bout effect: after a single session of unaccustomed eccentric work, the muscle adapts so that the next similar session causes much less damage and soreness, and the protection lasts for weeks.
One study tested this on downhill walking directly. A group did just 5 minutes of downhill walking with a pack of 10% of body mass, one week before a 40 minute loaded descent. After the long descent, their strength loss and soreness were roughly half those of the group that hadn’t prepared. Five minutes of level walking gave no protection.
So the soreness that ruins the middle days of a trek is largely avoidable. A few eccentric sessions in the weeks before you leave do most of the work.
Downhill hiking training: what to do
- Slow step-downs. Stand on a low step, lower one foot to the floor over three to four seconds, touch down lightly and return. It’s downhill hiking reduced to one movement: one leg, braking under control. Start with body weight and a low step, for example 2 sets of 6 to 8 per leg, then add a higher step or a light pack. If you do only one exercise from this article, make it this one.
- Slow the lowering in your regular leg work. On squats, lunges and step-ups, take three to four seconds on the way down in every rep. The exercises stay the same. The effort moves to the half of the movement the trail tests.
- Rehearse real descents. Find the longest downhill available to you, whether that’s a hill, a mountain or a stairwell, and practice sustained descending. Begin with short descents and a light pack, then build both. If your area is flat, treadmill decline walking or slow, controlled stair descents work. A tall building does the job: walk down the stairs, take the elevator back up, repeat. The goal is time spent braking, so don’t hurry.
- Train the ankles too. Braking precision depends on the joints doing the braking, and ankles that are trained to handle uneven ground make every downhill step safer.
Descent technique: poles, steps and posture
- Use poles. Trekking poles shift part of the braking to your arms. A lab study of downhill walking measured lower knee joint forces with poles than without.
- Short steps, soft knees. Keep your steps short and your knees slightly bent so the muscles take the load before the joint does.
- Stay tall. Leaning back puts your weight behind your feet, which is how feet slide out on loose ground.
- Zigzag the steep sections where the trail allows. It lowers the gradient of each step.
- Retie your boots at the top. Snug lacing over the instep keeps your toes off the front of the boot.
When to start descent training
Start at least four to six weeks before your trek. The first one or two sessions will leave you sore, and that soreness is the adaptation getting underway, so keep those sessions short.
Don’t put your first hard descent session in the final week before you leave. You want that soreness gone before day one.
The same timing applies on the trek. Soreness from the first big descent usually peaks one to two days afterward, so expect the stiffest morning to come a day or two after the long downhill, and keep walking at an easy pace through it.
If you’d rather not build this yourself, our Trekking Fitness Plan includes step-downs with slow eccentric lowering from week 1.
