There is so much advice online about getting fit for hiking that you can quite quickly find yourself with a 12-week strength programme, a heart-rate zone chart and the vague sense that you should not be allowed near a hill until you have transformed into an endurance athlete.
You can train in much more detail if you enjoy it or have a particular objective, but for most people who simply want hills to feel less brutal, the best starting point is wonderfully unexciting: walk more, include some hills and build the amount you do gradually enough that you can repeat it.
The best way to get better at walking uphill is still to walk uphill. Small hills count. Short walks count. The slope near your house that feels nothing like a mountain still asks your legs and lungs to do the same basic job, and repeated ordinary effort is what eventually makes that job feel more normal.
Walking uphill is a skill as well as fitness
When a climb feels hard, it is tempting to assume the only problem is fitness. Fitness matters, but people who spend a lot of time in the hills also get better at the practical skill of climbing: choosing a sustainable pace, shortening their stride, using flatter sections to recover and understanding how hard they can work without blowing up halfway to the top.
That is why somebody can be generally fit and still find their first steep hike surprisingly unpleasant. Running, cycling and gym work can give you excellent cardiovascular fitness and strength, but moving uphill for a sustained period on uneven ground is specific. Your calves, glutes and thighs are working differently, your balance is involved and you may be carrying a backpack.
The good news is that specificity works in your favour. You do not need to become brilliant at every form of exercise. If you want to feel better walking hills, give your body regular opportunities to practise walking hills.
Build time on your feet first
For somebody starting from relatively little hiking, I would build consistency before chasing huge elevation numbers. A few regular walks that leave you feeling capable of walking again within a sensible amount of time will usually do more for you than one heroic mountain day followed by a week of avoiding stairs.
Start with what you can comfortably manage now and increase one element at a time. That might mean making a familiar walk slightly longer, adding another climb or choosing a route with a little more ascent. You do not need every walk to be harder than the one before it; easier days are part of building the volume that makes longer days possible.
This also gives your feet, joints and connective tissues time to adapt alongside your cardiovascular fitness. Your lungs may feel ready to charge ahead before the rest of your body has caught up, particularly if you already do other exercise.
Train for the route you actually want to do
When I was training for my first trip to Everest Base Camp, I used to go to Moel Famau in North Wales and do reps up and down it with a heavy backpack. It was not glamorous or technically sophisticated. I was preparing for repeated days of walking uphill with weight, so I practised walking uphill with weight.
You can use the same principle without turning your local hill into a punishment device. Look at the objective you are preparing for. How long is it? How much ascent is involved? Is the climbing one sustained effort or repeated ups and downs? Will you carry a day pack or everything for several days? What is the terrain likely to be like?
A long, relatively flat trail needs more emphasis on time and distance on your feet. A mountain route with 1,000 metres of ascent needs you to become comfortable climbing. A multi-day hike asks you to recover and do it again the following morning. Training should gradually start to resemble the demand you are preparing for.
Do not make every training walk enormous
The temptation once you have a goal is to make every weekend the biggest walk you can manage, as though feeling completely destroyed afterwards proves the training worked. It mostly proves that you are tired.
You need some challenge to improve, but you also need enough recovery to repeat the work. A shorter walk with several purposeful climbs can be extremely useful without taking your entire day, and repeating a local hill gives you control over how much ascent you accumulate.
If your local area is flat, stairs, steep streets, a treadmill on an incline or repeated smaller slopes can all help. None is a perfect recreation of mountain terrain, but the body is refreshingly unconcerned about whether your uphill training has a summit selfie attached to it.
Learn to walk uphill slowly
One of the biggest changes I see in people as they become more experienced is that they stop attacking the bottom of every hill. Charging uphill until you are gasping, stopping completely, then charging again can make a climb feel far more dramatic than it needs to.
Try slowing down before the hill forces you to. Shorten your stride and aim for a pace at which your breathing is working but controlled. On a long climb, a steady pace you can maintain is usually more efficient than repeatedly surging and stopping.
There is no moral value attached to how quickly you climb. If somebody else walks uphill faster, they have simply reached that particular patch of ground sooner. The pace that matters is the one that lets you keep moving safely and still have enough energy for the rest of your route.
As you practise, you will become better at judging that pace. You will know when a climb is short enough to push a little harder and when the sensible response to a long ascent is to settle in and accept that you are going to be looking at the same hillside for a while.
Downhill needs training too
People focus so much on getting up hills that descents are often treated as the free part. They are not. Long or steep descents place a lot of load through your legs as your muscles control your movement, and if you are not used to them they can leave your quads complaining far more loudly than the climb did.
Practising on varied terrain helps you become more confident placing your feet, controlling your speed and moving over uneven ground. Build steep descents gradually in exactly the same way you build climbing rather than making your first experience a thousand metres of downhill at the end of an already exhausting day.
Walking poles can help some people with rhythm and balance and may reduce some of the load they feel on descents, but they are a tool rather than a substitute for gradually conditioning your legs and learning to move well over the terrain.
Use weight gradually
If your goal involves carrying a heavier backpack, train with one — but there is no need to fill it with bricks on your first outing. Start around the weight you already carry comfortably and increase it gradually as the rest of your training develops.
A loaded pack changes more than the work your legs are doing. It affects balance, posture, shoulders and how you move on descents, which is why wearing the actual pack you plan to use can also expose fit problems while you are still close to home.
For a normal day hike, do not deliberately train with a much heavier bag simply because heavier must mean better. Train for the load you expect to carry. If your target trip requires eight kilograms, becoming comfortable around that weight is useful; carrying 20 kilograms for no reason mostly makes your training less enjoyable.
Strength training can help, but it is not a prerequisite
If you enjoy the gym, strength work can be genuinely useful for hiking. Exercises that build strength through your legs, hips and core can support climbing, descending and carrying a pack, and stronger muscles can give you more capacity for the demands of uneven terrain.
You do not, however, need to complete a particular gym programme before you qualify to go hiking. Walking remains valuable training, and you can improve enormously by progressively increasing the walking you do.
If you want to add strength work, keep it simple enough that you will actually do it and appropriate to your own body and experience. If you have pain, an injury or a medical condition affecting exercise, get individual advice from an appropriate professional rather than trying to train through it because a hiking plan online told you to.
Recovery is part of getting fitter
Improvement happens between sessions as well as during them. If every walk leaves you so sore that you cannot comfortably move for days, your training may be progressing faster than your recovery can support.
Eat properly, hydrate, sleep and allow easier days. Pay attention to persistent pain rather than treating it as proof that you worked hard. Normal muscle fatigue after increasing your activity is one thing; pain that changes how you move or does not settle is something to take seriously.
This matters even more when you are preparing for a multi-day hike. The goal is not only to complete one big day. It is to be able to wake up and walk again, so back-to-back moderate walks can eventually become more specific training than a single enormous day followed by a week on the sofa.
Measure progress against yourself
Hills are particularly good at making people feel slow because somebody will nearly always pass you looking offensively comfortable. That does not tell you very much about whether you are improving.
Use your own walks as the benchmark. Perhaps you can now complete a familiar climb without stopping, recover more quickly at the top or finish a route with enough energy to enjoy the descent. Maybe a hill that once required three breaks now requires one, or you are comfortable carrying the pack that felt heavy two months ago.
Those are meaningful changes. Speed may improve as a consequence, but it does not have to be the main goal. Becoming a stronger hiker is about increasing what you can do comfortably and safely, not winning an imaginary race with everybody else on the path.
Keep enough enjoyment in the plan
If your training makes you dread every walk, it is going to be difficult to sustain. Not every outing needs to be a hill session, a distance target or a test of whether you are fitter than last week. Go somewhere beautiful, walk with friends, stop for lunch and occasionally choose the route because you want to do it rather than because its elevation profile looks appropriately punishing.
Consistency is much easier when hiking remains something you like doing. Build the challenge gradually, practise the terrain you want to become better at and learn to pace yourself instead of trying to defeat every hill in the first five minutes.
The hills will still be there next week. Keep turning up, give your body enough time to adapt and the climbs that currently feel enormous will start, almost without you noticing, to become part of an ordinary day out.