Mountain Base Fitness Lab Trains grinding through loaded step up intervals – mission-direct, transferable programming for mountain professionals who’s mission set always included loaded uphill endurance.
By Rob Shaul
MTI has two types of programming: Base Fitness and Mission/Event-Specific Fitness.
Base Fitness is designed to address 90% of the mission-direct, real life, fitness demands of the athlete’s occupation. It is the day-to-day programming the athlete should be completing most of the time and is found in the Military Operator Sessions or Green Hero plans, the LE Patrol/Detective Sessions or Spirits Plans or the Greek Heroine Plans on the mountain sides.
He’ll drop out of Base Fitness programming for known events with specific fitness demands such as an upcoming ski season, military selection, or law enforcement fitness assessment – and complete the appropriate mission/event-specific plan in the weeks directly prior. After the event or season, he’ll drop back into base fitness programming.
Base Fitness programming is MTI’s most sophisticated, as it needs to concurrently train multiple fitness attributes (strength, work capacity, endurance, etc.) and do so without causing overtraining or becoming stale. More important, its goal isn’t gym performance – it’s mission performance. With that in mind, below are the high level intended Base Fitness programming outcomes.
More Horsepower
In the simplest terms, more horsepower means a larger engine in the same body. Through fitness training, we can replace the V4 engine in the athlete’s body with a V8—without adding significant body mass.
Increased relative strength combined with increased aerobic and anaerobic capacity allows the athlete to move faster, carry load more efficiently, recover quicker between efforts, and tolerate fatigue longer. MTI’s programming also builds mental fitness for physical effort, which compounds the horsepower effect. This isn’t self-help “mental toughness.” It’s the learned ability to push, pace, and stay useful under discomfort.
More horsepower shows quickly. The athlete moves faster, lifts more, recovers better, and performs with more margin. Mission performance improves. Recovery between missions improves.
Horsepower is not improved by focusing on only one fitness attribute. Increasing strength without increasing aerobic or anaerobic fitness results in a strong athlete who gasses fast. Similarly, increasing endurance without increasing strength results in an athlete with big lungs but not the strength to move under load or produce repeat sprint efforts in kit during movement under fire.
Horsepower is a multi-attribute outcome. You don’t build it by winning one category. MTI programming is multi-modal by design.
Higher Work Capacity
Work capacity is the ability to perform meaningful work at a high output, recover briefly, and then do it again. It is a key ingredient to increasing horsepower discussed above.
As an outcome, increased work capacity means the athlete can accomplish more in less time without a disproportionate drop in performance or decision-making. In practical terms, he can output harder, recover briefly, and output hard again—without performance collapsing. When things are most dangerous during tactical operations—especially movement under fire—work capacity is often the primary fitness demand.
Work capacity can be trained directly and progressed deliberately. Tactical environments demand repeated high-output efforts separated by incomplete recovery. Programming that ignores this reality leaves athletes unprepared for how work actually unfolds.
When work capacity improves, athletes are less likely to be overwhelmed by task density. They move, act, and recover with purpose instead of urgency-driven chaos.
Increased Endurance
Endurance, as an outcome, is the ability to sustain effort over time without catastrophic degradation in pace, mechanics, or judgment.
For tactical athletes, this is not abstract cardiovascular fitness. It is the capacity to remain functional through long-duration tasks, extended movements, and cumulative fatigue. Endurance shows up in patrols, searches, repeated movements under load, prolonged operations, and multi-day training courses.
For mountain athletes, mission-direct endurance demands are built around the legs and uphill movement under load.
Effective Base Fitness endurance programming produces endurance that transfers.
Endurance is mode-specific. If you want to improve rucking ability, you need to program rucking. Unloaded running, the elliptical, rowing, the assault bike—none of it transfers to rucking like rucking transfers to rucking.
Too often, tactical programming avoids training endurance in the mode that actually matters. This is especially common in military fitness culture, where rucking is treated as “dangerous,” even though rucking is exactly what military athletes do in combat and training—day after day, under load, and often when they’re already smoked.
On the mountain side, too few sponsored mountain athletes and mountain professionals train uphill endurance with intent and progression.
Is rucking with 60 pounds one to three times a week good for ankles, knees, hips, and low backs? No. Not by itself. Not if it’s thrown in randomly. Not if it’s treated like punishment.
But done progressively, with intent, and over time, rucking can be trained with relative safety—and it builds both rucking fitness and durability for rucking. It prepares the athlete not only to move under load, but to keep moving under load when it counts.
What is dangerous—and irresponsible—is sending military athletes into a ruck-intensive course like Ranger School, or onto deployment, without having them ruck heavy and long in training first. That decision doesn’t protect the athlete. It exposes him. It sends him into a physically dangerous environment unprepared and invites injury. Likewise, sending a mountain athlete on a peak bagging trip without prior training him for the uphill climbing involved is courting disaster. In the mountains, speed is safety – the less time exposed to the whims of the mountain, the less time a storm can roll in, lightening strike, or rockfall hit.
Endurance also matters in another way: long days and high volume.
Tactical selections, military courses and mountain expiditions are rarely a single hard effort. They are long strings of hard efforts stacked across days and weeks. MTI tactical selection programming includes multiple two-a-day sessions and long, multi-mode, multi-hour “mini-events” to build the athlete’s physical and mental tolerance for extended work, cumulative fatigue, and the grind of sustained output.
Endurance isn’t just the ability to “go long.” It’s the ability to remain effective after hours of effort, under load, when everything starts to degrade.
Increased Durability (Fitness as Armor)
Durability is one of the most misunderstood outcomes in tactical fitness and fitness in general.
There are two timelines to think about.
Durability in the long term results in operational readiness throughout one’s tactical or mountain professional career, and a functioning body in retirement. Fitness does not eliminate injury risk. Mountain Tactical work is inherently hard on the body. Wearing armor or a pack constantly, carrying weapons and equipment, operating under load, spending hours sitting in a patrol vehicle, bouncing around in a Humvee or skiing in avalanche terrain, and working in unpredictable environments carries unavoidable physical cost. No amount of training changes that reality.
What fitness does is change how the body absorbs that cost.
Durable athletes are harder to injure, less likely to suffer catastrophic breakdown, and more likely to recover quickly when injuries occur. Strength protects joints. Chassis integrity stabilizes movement under load. Work capacity and endurance reduce compensatory movement under fatigue.
This is not about making the occupation “safe.” Tactical and mountain professional occupations cannot be safe in the civilian sense. It is about building physical armor that allows the athlete to tolerate necessary exposure without premature breakdown. Durability is not achieved by avoiding stress. It is achieved by applying stress intelligently.
In the short term, the most effective way to make a tactical athlete or mountain professional more durable is to make him physically prepared for the mission-direct fitness demands of his job. Far too much time, energy, and money is spent on trendy “recovery” techniques, mobility/stretching fads, unproven supplements and soft “wellness” initiatives—often at the expense of hard, effective, mission-direct training.
These initiatives are not substitutes for mission-direct fitness. None of it matters if the athlete comes under fire and cannot sprint fast enough under load to make it to cover or ski fast enough to avoid the avanche. These jobs carry risk and impact the body. Durability matters—but so does the speed, capacity, and performance under stress to avoid the injury in the first place.
More Efficient Technical Practice
One of the clearest indicators of effective fitness programming is what it allows to happen outside the gym.
Mission-direct fitness enables athletes to participate fully in technical training. When conditioning is adequate, technical sessions can focus on skill acquisition, decision-making, and execution instead of survival.
A common failure mode illustrates this clearly: a tactical athlete attends a Close Quarters Battle course without having trained in kit, without lunging, sprinting, or moving under load. Day one physically smokes him. Days two and three he is so sore and fatigued that he struggles to participate, much less learn. The limitation was not tactical ability—it was fitness preparation.
Or a climbing guide candidate attended an AMGA rock climbing course unfit for rock climbing and spends the bulk of the course trying to survive instead of being present so he or she can learn and pass.
Good programming prevents fitness from becoming the limiter in technical learning environments. It protects training opportunities by ensuring athletes arrive physically capable of learning.
Better Performance
Ultimately, all of these outcomes serve one purpose: improved performance outside the gym.
Better performance means moving faster when speed matters, sustaining effort when time matters, and functioning under fatigue when clarity matters. It means completing tasks efficiently, recovering between efforts, and maintaining effectiveness over long periods.
For tactical athletes and mountain professionals, performance is not measured by gym metrics or competitive rankings. It is measured by mission execution, course completion, survivability, and career longevity.
Improved outside performance is the only meaningful measure of effective tactical and mountain professional fitness programming.