Home > Fitness and Walking Grades.

Fitness, Walking Grades, Adventure walks, Challenge walks, Nordic and Power walking, Map Reading for walkers.

Will I be fit enough? How to choose an appropriate walk and an appropriate group.

Our walks are graded in difficulty and there will be walks available each day to suit your level of fitness and how you feel on the day.

All our walks will help you improve aerobic fitness, all-round bodily strength and endurance while also helping you to tone up and lose some weight.

Ironically the easier slower walks are most effective for losing weight while the moderate to hard walks are the best for improving aerobic fitness and powers of endurance.

The difficulty of the walks and how to estimate if you are fit enough to enjoy them.

An Easy Walk: These vary from walking on easy terrain for a minimum 6miles with not much uphill work to a maximum of 10miles with some gentle hills to climb. Time spent walking between 3 and 4 hours at a comfortable pace (always able to chat) with as many rests as required by the party. The remaining time in the day is spent relaxing or taking in the scene.

Your profile is you don't do much regular exercise but you want to either get started or make a comeback!.

Moderate Walk: A minimum of 8 miles with a maximum 12 miles over the hills, with some steady climbing involved, achieving one or two summits. Time spent walking between 4 and 6 hours. Your profile is you like to walk at a steady pace but aren't really interested in pushing along too hard and like to chat as you walk with the occasional rest stop. You will consider yourself to be of average fitness and will undertake some form of activity a couple of times a week or on some weekends.

Hard Walk: This will involve a mountain day involving a minimum of 10 miles to a maximum of 15miles over steep, sometimes rough terrain, to achieve a number of summits. Time spent walking will be between 5 and 7 hours. You will enjoy the exhilaration of walking at a good pace (maybe even a little jogging?) with not much breath left for talking and not many stops in the day.

Your profile? You will probably fit into one or more of these categories:

a) Committed to training working out in the gym or jogging, or other activity quite regularly.

b) You may be or have been a competitive sports person and fancy taking on the mountains.

c) Alternatively you may be an experienced mountain walker who fancies some company and appreciates having everything organised, with an experienced leader who knows the hills as a guarantee of safety and success.

What is an Adventure Walk?

These walks explore the rocky ridges and more precipitous paths that lead to the top of some of the highest mountains in England and Wales. Well known walks such as Crib Goch, the Snowdon Horseshoe in Wales and Striding Edge on Helvellyn in the Lake District are excellent examples. Hands as well as feet are often employed to get to the summit!.

These routes are not graded as climbs they are referred to as scrambles and are perfectly accessible to walkers who are happy walking and scrambling in exposed places, they are an excellent introduction to mountaineering.

To enjoy our Adventure walks you will need to be reasonably fit (At the upper limit of what is required to complete a moderate walk) and should be relaxed and confident in situations that involve some exposure to height. However please be assured there is nothing about an Adventure Walk that a fit and confident beginner couldn't do under our expert guidance.

What are WalkAbout Challenges?

The big ones involve completing well known and long established mountain journeys involving many miles and many feet of ascent within an established time.

In Snowdonia examples include:

A traverse of the three 1,000m+ peaks, Carnedd Llewellyn, Carnedd Dafydd and Snowdon as a one day event.
"The Welsh Threes" a traverse of all the 15 Welsh peaks which are over 3,000 feet high. They are all in Snowdonia and the traverse involves a total ascent of 12,250 feet over a distance of 26miles. A respectable time for a walker would be under 12 hours!

In the Lake District an example is:

"The Bob Graham Round" a circuit of 42 peaks starting and finishing from the market hall in Keswick in less than 24 hours. This involves a journey of 72 miles and 25,000 feet of ascent. This is perhaps the toughest of these challenges.

Other similar challenge walks are available in Wales, England, The French Alps and Spain. On our holidays we offer an option of a "challenge walk" to give any hard walkers or aspiring hard walkers the opportunity to get the feel of what these challenges involve.

How fit do you need to be to contemplate attempting to do one of these Challenges?

An excellent level of fitness is required and some previous mountain experience is useful but not essential. To succeed you will need to be able to maintain a speed over steep mountain terrain of about 3mph for many hours. That means being agile and fast with good powers of endurance. To succeed you need to have the motivation to do the training; and the ambition and will power to keep going no matter how hard it gets. And it will get hard!

How to take part in a challenge attempt.

If you want to try a challenge walk indicate your interest when you complete the provisional enquiry form.

We will put a group together and help you prepare for it with training advice and several key training weekends when you become familiar with the route and take part in tough training days in the hills.

We then agree a date (or choice of dates to allow for bad weather) and coordinate the group.

We provide all the necessary back up and transport as well as leadership on the hills for the attempt.

Improve your map reading skills: A holiday course for walkers.

We organize holidays in Snowdonia which are dedicated to teaching the rudiments of map reading to beginners and helping others to improve their navigation skills. We will involve you in 'reading the map', and for instance, show you quick easy ways to measure distance, height and how to work out your walking speed. This will help you calculate how long the walk will take and how to work out where you are on the map; a useful thing to know if you are a walker. This is combined with a full programme of walking and some orienteering. Competence at map reading is an essential skill for unaccompanied walkers and fun for clients on our escorted walks.

Fitness for walkers - Nordic Walking - Power Walking.

We organize holidays in Snowdonia which as well as a full programme of walking also includes workshops on Fitness and the ideas of Nordic and Power walking. We will discuss topics such as how to measure and improve fitness; how to work out from the map what level of fitness is necessary to do any particular walk. The pace and duration of the walk you can do depends on your fitness. If you want to improve fitness or lose weight, pace is critical. We also advise on clothing, equipment and other related matters, including the ideal food and drink to take on the walk.

Mountain Walking is a very effective way of improving all round endurance, strength, aerobic fitness and of losing weight. Improve your fitness and you can walk "further, higher and faster".