Surly you have to just work up to a long distance walk gradually by building up your miles? William said
recent experience has shown me that strength exercises at home might make me feel a bit more powerful on a steep ascent but did little to reduce fatigue at the end of the day.
That rings so true to me. Nothing has prepared me for the activities/sports I've done than doing that activity/sport on a regular basis.
I never said that one can omit from walking when training for walking, albeit it might appear that way. Definitely the main sport one is training for is the one that needs to be done most frequently.
There are few things to take into consideration. If you're reasonably healthy and fit, without underlying issues, it's pretty straight forward to pick up a sport and start building gradually towards it. However, if there is a history of sprains, shin splints, metabolic syndrome, then often just doing to sport is not enough to enjoy it risk free. With sprains and strains, the joints are not supported well enough by connective tissue, so muscle needs to be built up to support them. Shin splints are often caused by muscles growing/swelling and fascial tissue not growing at the same speed thus being overly tight around the muscles causing pain. With metabolic syndrome, you need to slowly start pushing the mitochondria to multiply and work more efficiently to improve cellular energy production & utilisation.
Simple boxing analogy
If you want to box for four rounds, you will have needed to have box for four rounds on a regular basis. Strength work, bag work and time running will obviously help, but there is no substitute, than sparring for four rounds, because the other exercises won't help you stop feeling fatigued.
Running will surely help you stop feeling fatigued, that's why boxers do it. It also helps build up the cardiovascular conditioning, which is vital for being able to take a hit. Better and more efficient your vascular system is, quicker you recover from different things.
Strength training especially builds up capillaries at the outer perimeter of muscles which make the muscles work more optimised and using less energy when the oxygen and energy is flowing easily and more freely. It also increases the mitochondria and makes the body more efficient in energy production.
If I'm cycling I've got to build it up slowly from day one and steadily build up to stop the fatigue setting in.
Same goes for walking, I've got to keep it up, get the inclines in, keep my body used to it, long walks on weekends ect.
I've got a friend who was a competitive long distance runner/postman who gave up and started walking the hills. He couldn't believe how knackered he was because he was so fit, but soon adapted.
I know I'm putting this in very simple terms, but I wonder if there's a danger that we can over think it. I think science is great, for optimising performance, but nothing substitutes like hard work, consistency and just enjoying it, other wise it's just to much of a chore.
As I wrote in the previous post, if you build up your end range strength, the hills will be easier, up and down, because on day to day basis we tend to mostly use the midrange of our muscles. This is why this training will help in the long run, or should I say walk, when you get tired and your muscles are inflamed, and swollen up, filled with lactic acid, you can keep going better when you have that end range strength.
Your mate is a perfect example of this adaptation. Running and walking are very different movement bio-mechanically. The GPP (general physical preparedness) carries over well, but the kinetic energy systems are different. Even if your mate was running up hills, it's still a different movement to walking up hills. As a postie, he didn't need to use his end range strength of his leg muscles, as he was walking mostly on flat, even the hills are flat, they are just on an angle. He was knackered because he started using his full range of muscles more on stepping up while going hillwalking.
If you want to walk better, walk more. That goes without saying. However, everyone, regardless of the activity, benefit from having full range mobility (flexibility + strength/stability) . Most chronic soft tissue issues I see on my clinic are due to poor posture/alignment putting strain on some area or lack of mobility, which loads up the wrong area for the movement (ankle stiffness loads up the knees and/or hips too much etc).
I absolutely agree with you about the consistency and I think I mentioned in my earlier posts, that consistent effort in something makes the body adapt to that particular requirement. However, we still need the body to able to perform many other tasks too, which is why focusing on one thing too much can start causing issue while performing completely normal tasks. Some bodybuilders are unable to tie their own shoelaces due to lack of mobility. In the Spartan games, I mentioned earlier, the multiple ultra runner was unable to complete a workout of lifting some 20kg weight x amount times because his body had shed all the extra tissue to minimise the effort the muscles need to work to cover such long distances. And don't get me started on lack of progressions in training...
