Incline Treadmill Walking

My "secret weapon" for maintaining elite levels of conditioning without getting banged up

BLUF: My recommendation for incline treadmill walking:

Parameters: 3-4mph 5-15% grade x 45-60min daily

Frequency: Up to daily, easily integrated with 2/day workouts where 1 workout is incline treadmill walking and the other is resistance training.

Progression: Start at 3mph and 5% incline, gradually adjust incline to achieve heart rate of 120-150bpm. Attempt to keep HR in this range x 45min. If incline is 15% and HR is <130, you can begin increasing speed up to 4mph.

Note: No holding on to the freaking hand rails! Let your arms swing naturally. This is very important!

Note 2: You can do a little bit lower intensity and it still works great, but higher intensity for this duration will be counterproductive for tactical athletes, especially those that need to improve strength. If you find that your resistance training efforts are diminished due to lack of energy, decrease intensity. This should ultimately give you increased energy once the physiological adaptations targeted have stabilized.

In addition to performance benefits, burning an extra 600-1200 kcal/day makes it easier to stay lean

As a young infantryman I was totally convinced that everyone wanting to maximize performance as a tactical athlete or combat sports enthusiast should just do high intensity interval training (HIIT) exclusively while shunning boring, catabolic low to moderate intensity continuous training (cardio) to build optimal health and performance. Now I understand that like most things, it depends on a lot of different variables. How old are you? How heavy are you? Do you have orthopedic issues? How much time do you have? What are your training goals? How proficient is your running technique? You get the idea. Now that I’ve matured a bit, accrued a variety of musculoskeletal injuries, and experienced unparalleled improvements in performance first hand, I think for most people, including incline treadmill walking into your fitness program will provide an astonishing return on investment.

Oh yeah? Why don’t you astonish me shitface?

Tons of people have independently discovered how effective it can be to incorporate incline treadmill walking into a fitness routine. Since I never shut up about it, people forward me articles and videos from across the interwebs giving very similar recommendations. Since you’re here, I’ll tell you my story of how I discovered the glorious fitness training modality that is incline treadmill walking and why my recommended parameters are the best for tactical athletes.

For the first few years of my Army career I ran a lot. At first, it felt fine, but being 260-280lbs throughout this time frame began to take its toll after years of 20-30 mile weeks. When I moved out of the infantry for the first and last time I was very excited to get to focus on lifting weights, get back into martial arts, and finally make some gains after being unable to progress in terms of strength and hypertrophy parallel to all that running. I thought I would be able to maintain a high level of conditioning with some occasional hill sprints, but that turned out to be an unsupported assumption. After a surprise 10-mile officer run with my battalion commander (which I didn’t fall out of, but wasn’t pleasant) I reasoned that consistent, low impact cardio might keep me perpetually prepared for such a threat. Further motivation was our commanding general’s insistence that we all “volunteer” for the yearly Great Aloha Run, which was only 8 miles at a snails pace, but something there was no way I was going to risk being physically unprepared for in terms of unforeseen contingencies such as cramping.

Enter incline treadmill walking. I went onto craigslist and bought a nasty used treadmill for $40, cleaned it up, then built myself a desk over the top of it using some filing cabinets from office max and a plank of wood over the top. I then hooked up my trusty xbox and proceeded to spend about an hour/day playing video games while walking on the treadmill. I found out very quickly that my APFT run time improved tremendously with almost no conscious effort. I went from barely passing to under 14 minutes in just a couple months. It wasn’t until I took a DA photo a year or so later that I realized how much weight I had lost. I went from around 290lbs to 250-260lbs (the weight I maintain to this day with daily incline treadmill walking).

Being somewhat obsessed with fitness optimization I spent a lot of my free time watching fitness videos. While I owe my excellent education in exercise physiology in PT school to the master professor Dr. Doug Christie, it wasn’t until I stumbled upon Joe Rogan’s interview with Pavel Tsatsouline that I finally realized the best application of exercise science to what I was already doing. This 10 minute clip from that interview convinced me I should try keeping HR in the optimal range for maximizing stoke volume (even though this is a little more intense than what I was used to). The result was that in less than a month my resting HR was around 45bpm and I was able to max both the Sprint Drag Carry (SDC) and 2-mile run events in the ACFT with absolutely no running, or even HIIT.

Before moving on let me just elaborate on some other physiological benefits of regular incline treadmill walking.

1. Many people struggle with running uphill portions of 2-mile run courses or the RPFT run course. Incline treadmill walking increases the efficiency of the musculature to propel you uphill resulting in decreased relative exertion that you will recover from more quickly once the course flattens out.

2. Back pained individuals can benefit greatly from incline treadmill walking for active recovery of the spine and surrounding trunk musculature. This is why letting your arms swing is important - it reduces spine compression load to lower than what it is when you stand or sit. Additionally for those with back issues other low impact cardio options/endurance training machines present causes for concern i.e. rower (repeated flexion under load), bike (sustained lumbar flexion), and even elliptical (requires a lot of hip motion that will be transferred to the lumbar spine in individuals with stiff/immobile hips).

3. Active Recovery. Especially at the lower rates of perceived exertion you may find that incline walking can improve soreness in the legs just as well as a foam rolling session. I think the advantage goes to the incline walking here because in the 10min you spent foam rolling, you could have burned over 100 calories already on the treadmill.

4. Maintaining energy balance. I’m growing increasingly convinced that one of if not THE most significant variable that you can control impacting your overall health is energy balance. Having a chronic energy surplus is associated with a huge variety of disease processes including hypertension, atherosclerosis, diabetes, sleep apnea, and looking and feeling like shit. Regular incline treadmill walking gives you a lot more flexibility with respect to how disciplined you need to be with your nutritional intake in a world filled with hyper-palatable foods that we have not evolved to be able to consume in moderation.

5. Reliance on a central pattern generator (CPG). Many alternative cardio options require cortical involvement (you have to think about it). This makes it more difficult to fully enjoy a book on tape, video game, podcast, or writing an article like this concomitantly. Tying any of these enjoyable activities with daily cardio is a means by which you can establish a habit that requires very little effort to reinforce. In fact, after about 3 weeks you may find that you feel intrinsically motivated to get up and perform your incline treadmill walk as a part of your daily ritual.

Keep in mind your mileage may vary, especially in terms of ACFT performance. I’ve been lifting weights for over 20 years and the relatively light loads used in the SDC make it easier for me to max and recover from this event (another benefit of resistance training that is underappreciated). Also my time in the infantry has programmed motor engrams into my running gait supported by the mitochondrial density built there with untold numbers of sprints and high rep leg workouts.

With that caveat in mind, I will close with my recommendations for individuals that want to maximize their ACFT performance with a less robust training history:

Supplement with 400m sprints 1-2x/week. Perform 3-5 iterations at maximum effort. Rest until fully recovered (up to 5min) between iterations to ensure intensity is maximized. If you’d like to work on hand release push-up or leg tucks in the same workout, you can perform a set of each between 400m intervals. If you are a civilian reading this I would recommend a set of push ups and a set of rows, because why not use every opportunity you can to get more jacked? Since these exercises use different muscles this represents an excellent application of training economy. Finally, if you are interested in altering your running technique this represents an excellent model to increase mitochondrial density in the muscles used to support the new technique you are targeting (whether that be a 180bpm cadence or some other objective).

Targeting increased stroke volume and relevant skeletal muscle mitochondrial density with the combination of incline treadmill walking and 400m sprints is the ultimate hack for optimizing cardiorespiratory performance in the tactical athlete. If you’re intrigued and give it a try, let me know how it goes!