MTI’s Mountain Athlete Programming Philosophy

By Rob Shaul, Founder

I founded Mountain Athlete in Jackson, Wyoming, in 2007, and made a lot of mistakes that first year. 

Professional, specific, strength and conditioning programming for mountain sports didn’t exist. I found programming that called itself “mountain-specific” but upon inspection, it was general athletic performance programming re-tread as “mountain.” 

Not realizing this at first, I tried it, and it failed. My first year of programming for dryland skiing my athletes hammered heavy back squats, heavy dead lifts, heavy bench pressing, sprints, thousands of sit ups and kettlebell swings, etc. 

We were all jonesing for the lift to open and I was right there skiing with them opening day. But … we could all barely make it down one groomer without stopping to rest. Legs and lungs were hammered. 

Why? The the primarly fitness demand for skiing is eccentric leg strength and strength endurance. As gravity bounces the skier down the hill, his legs must “brake” against each bounce. This muscle shortening strength is opposite of the concentric, muscle lengthing strength we built with all those back squats and dead lifts. 

I learned my lesson and from then on had an inherent distrust of all published mountain sport programming. 

In March I began training Rock Climbers for Spring Break trips to Moab. Prior I devoured and tested on myself all the established rock climb training books available, and quickly found the programming and progressions simply didn’t work. The primary fitness demand for Rock Climbing is finger and grip strength and strength endurance, and the exercises and techniques in the training books were nonsensical. 

So I went to bullding and testing my own exercises and protocols. No more wasted trips to the local climbing gym for top roping or bouldering. That place was built for fun and posing, not training. . We put up our own campus boards, a Moon Board, and multiple system boards. 

Time under tension became my primary programming tool for rock climbers, and from there we developed strength, work capacity and endurance exercises and progressions. 

From these mistakes came MTI’s programming method:

  1. Identify the fitness demands of the mission, event or sport.
  2. Identify the exercises that best train those demands.
  3. Define the end-state performance goals.
  4. Reverse-engineer progressions to achieve those goals.
  5. Test, assess, and refine through direct application.

This common-sense framework is how MTI approaches all programming for mountain athletes. 

Mountain Athlete Fitness Demands

High Relative Strength

Strength per Bodyweight – the ability to move one’s body and load efficiently. MTI’s military strength programming emphasizes the legs, hips, and core — the “mountain chassis.” Everything in the mountains begins with the leg.  Excess mass is a liability; functional strength is an asset.

Work Capacity

The ability to sustain short, high-intensity efforts under duress. When things are most dangerous in the mountains, it’s often the athlete’s work capacity that gets him to safety.

Stamina

The ability to recover and maintain performance across long events or repeated efforts. Stamina includes both physical recovery and what we call attitude stamina — the ability to keep moving, stay composed, and maintain tactical focus when physically depleted.

Endurance

Everything in the mountains starts with the legs and the lungs. Mountain endurance takes two primary forms – unloaded running and uphill movement under load. MTI’s “base fitness” (day-to-day) programming for mountain athletes has a mountain endurance emphasisi

Climbing Fitness

Rock Climbing specifically – and this boils down to finger and hand grip strength and grip strength endurance. Our Base Fitness programming includes climbing fitness maintenance. 

Durability

The best thing fitness programming can do to protect a mountain athlete from injury is to make him or her physically-fit for the mission-direct fitness demands of the sport. Injuries happen when the mission demands 4,000 feet of vertical climbing and descent with a 50-pound pack and the athlete hasn’t trained for it. MTI programming is engineered to prepare you for the specific fitness demands of your mountain sport or event, and in doing so, make you durable. Fitness = Armor. 

Mission-Direct Programming

MTI’s Mountain Athlete programming is mission-direct: built from the demands of the job, mission or sport backward.

Every session, circuit, and progression must transfer to performance outside the gym. We train for movement under load, performance under stress, and recovery under fatigue.

Strength is foundational. We build it with classic barbell lifts, strongman implements, bodyweight movements and sandbags. Core training is integrated, not isolated — developed through MTI’s Chassis Integrity methodology, which blends total-body, rotational, and anti-rotational strength from standing and kneeling positions.

Endurance and work capacity are treated as separate but complementary systems. Running, rucking, and loaded step ups are the cornerstone modes we deploy to build mountain endurance.

Our Fluid Periodization model allows multiple fitness attributes to be trained simultaneously for our base fitness programming. Strength, endurance, work capacity, chassis integrity and tactical agility are built and developed together, adjusted by operational season and training cycle. Random training has no place at MTI..

But not so for our mission or mountain-sport-specific fitness. Dryland Ski Training? Four days a week of leg blasters to build eccentric strength, touch/jump/touch intervals to build leg lactate tolerance and eccentric strength endurance, plus a little upper body and chassis integrity work thrown in for breaks between hammering the legs. This isn’t general fitness. The sport-specific programming is designed to be completed directly before the event or season and to “peak” the athlete’s sport/mission-specific fitness when the season starts. 

Research, Testing, and Evolution

MTI is a strength and conditioning research lab, not a commercial fitness brand.

Every plan we publish is tested in-house by MTI coaches and athletes before it reaches the field. We test what we write. We iterate on what we learn. Over one hundred in-house studies have been conducted measuring programming effectiveness and transfer to mission performance.

Field feedback from operators, units, and athletes informs every update. Many of our cornerstone plans — including the Dryland Ski Training Plan are now in their fourth or fifth version. Each iteration refines the programming, sharpens the method, and increases its direct applicability.

Programming at MTI is not fixed. It is an evolving craft — continually tested, revised, and improved.

The MTI Ethos

  • Mission first. Every rep must serve performance outside the gym.
  • Quiet professionalism.
  • Craftsmanship. Programming is built, tested, and refined, not copied.
  • Accountability. We test every plan ourselves.
  • Adaptation. If it doesn’t work, we change it.
Gym-Based Training Does Not Have a Strong Tradition in Mountain Sports. We’re Changing That

In nearly two decades of successful fitness programming for freeskiers, snowboarders, mountain guides, rock climbers, kayakers, ice climbers, snowmobile racers, backcountry hunters, ultra runners and many other mountain athletes, we’ve developed intense, progressed, sport-specific programming which successfully translates to mountain and river performance.

Until we came along, mountain athletes traditionally “did their sport” to train, and that was sufficient to excel. Those days are changing. Media exposure is attracting more and more people to these sports, including higher level team sport athletes who bring both more natural athletic talent, and a history of training in the gym for their sport. Competition is increasing, and the days of using the early weeks the ski hill opens to “get in shape” are no longer enough. Our athletes, through intense dryland training ahead of time, arrive at the mountain fit and ready to start their technical practice. Unfit athletes fall behind fast.

We say “gym based training” but don’t think all you’ll be doing is lifting barbells and jumping rope. These training sessions and training plans get “sport specific” to the fitness demands of the activity. Skiers train eccentric leg strength and leg lactate tolerance. Climbers are on system boards, campus boards and climbing walls training grip and finger strength, work capacity and stamina. Kayakers build upper body pushing and pulling strength in the gym, and sport-specific work capacity through hard paddling intervals on the river or lake. Mixed alpine climbers practice figure 4’s and long tech board intervals using tools, as well as step up intervals for the approach.

Questions? Need help choosing a plan? 
Don’t know where to Start? Looking for a specific plan or guidance for a goal? 
Email me directly, rob@mtntactical.com

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