Frequently asked questions

Train to Mountain is an adaptive training app for people with a real objective in the mountains: a peak, or a trek. On the trekking side you tell it your trek, your departure date and where you are starting from. It builds a personalised plan around the trek's stages and its longest day, then adapts that plan every week based on what your body actually did, not what an off-the-shelf hiking programme assumes.

We are also expanding TTM to support ongoing maintenance training between objectives, so the fitness you build does not have to start from zero every time.

The trekking side is built for people who have booked a multi-day trek that matters, Kilimanjaro, Everest Base Camp, the Inca Trail, the Tour du Mont Blanc, the Annapurna Circuit, the Walker's Haute Route and fourteen more, and want to arrive able to walk every stage, day after day, with legs that still work on the descent. If you have a date and you are taking it seriously, you are in the right place.

It is not built for day hikers without a multi-day objective, for thru-hikers, or for anyone expecting the app to replace a guide, a doctor or acclimatisation. Preparing for a peak instead? Use the switch in the header.

Your plan is built from three inputs: your trek (its stage profile: days, ascent, descent, hours, the longest day), your departure date (how many weeks until you go), and your starting fitness (assessed in onboarding and refined every week).

The algorithm uses a polarised 80/20 training distribution backed by endurance research, tunes load progression to your individual response, schedules the back-to-back long days a trek demands, and rebuilds next week's plan every Sunday based on what you completed and how you felt.

A great human coach is a real relationship. They know your patterns, push you when you need it, and adjust your plan as your life and your training move.

TTM is built to give you the structural side of that work, periodisation, weekly adaptation, honest readiness checks, in an app that costs less than hundreds of dollars a month. If you have access to a great coach, use one. If you do not, TTM is built to put the same training discipline within reach.

Three things, in the order that matters:

1. You arrive at your trek trained for that trek's stages, not for a generic hiking plan.
2. You stop guessing whether you are doing enough, doing too much, or doing the wrong thing.
3. You build the kind of confidence at the trailhead that comes only from knowing your body has done the work this itinerary actually demands.

Not a full gym, but you do need access to incline cardio equipment, a treadmill that goes to at least 12% or a Stairmaster, plus a small bit of floor space for bodyweight strength sessions. Outdoor vertical (stairs, hills, trails) covers a lot of the work too, and most trekkers train in flat country.

Living near real hills is the ideal setup; the terrain itself becomes part of the training plan. If you have a full gym, even better: we layer heavier strength sessions into your plan. If your access is limited to one piece of incline cardio plus bodyweight, the plan still works.

Within limits. The plan builds the aerobic base and the pacing discipline that make the walking easy enough for altitude to be the only hard thing, and it sizes the work to your trek's high point.

What no app can give you is acclimatisation. That is the itinerary's job: its rest days and its climb-high-sleep-low days. Our altitude acclimatisation guide covers what to expect and the warning signs.

It depends on your starting fitness, your trek, and how much time you have. As a rough rule, a trek at altitude such as Kilimanjaro (seven days) or Everest Base Camp (eleven) needs 12 to 16 weeks of structured training from a base of two or three sessions a week. The Inca Trail and the Tour du Mont Blanc need the same, for different reasons: stone steps and a big descent on one, eleven days with a full pack on the other.

The honest way to find out for your specific trek is Trek Check: tell it your trek, your current fitness and your departure date, and it names your biggest gap for the hardest day and the consecutive days, and where to start.

Every Sunday. At the end of each week, the algorithm looks at what you completed, how it went, and how your body responded. Then it rebuilds the next week's training to match.

The same adaptive engine handles real life too. When you have a trip, a busy work week, an injury niggle, or anything else that breaks the rhythm, the plan reshapes around it instead of pretending it did not happen. That responsiveness, training to what your week actually looks like, is the heart of what we mean by adaptive.

Weekly is the cadence the training science supports, and it is responsive enough to hold up against how people actually live.

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If your objective is consecutive walking days with a pack, a real descent and, usually, altitude, you are our audience.

Yes. TTM connects to the wearables most trekkers already own, including Garmin, Suunto, Coros, Polar, and Apple Health. Your training data flows in automatically, which gives the algorithm the signal it needs to adapt your plan precisely.

If you do not own a wearable, you can also log workouts and how they felt directly in the app.

Yes. TTM is built so anyone with a trek booked can start, whatever your current fitness level looks like. The plan meets you where you are and grows from there.

If you are newer to structured training, the first weeks focus on building your aerobic base safely before the load ramps up. If you already have a strong base, we move you into trek-specific work sooner. Either way, the early phase is about understanding your body so the plan can adapt to you, not the other way around.

Trek Check and the free tools are free. The personalised trekking plan is a subscription.

It opens on 5 November with 14 days free, no card. After that the plan freezes until you subscribe. Early bird pricing is from EUR 29 a month (EUR 249 a year) for the first trekking members, depending on the billing term you choose. Nothing is charged automatically.

What TTM stands on is its methodology: peer-reviewed endurance research (Seiler's polarised distribution, the Banister model, LaStayo's eccentric loading), a weekly Sunday adaptation cadence, and personalised plans built from your trek, your departure date and your starting fitness.

Trek plans in the app open to the waiting list first, with 14 days free and no card. Join the waiting list and judge it against your own trek before you pay.

Personalised trekking training is a training approach where the plan rebuilds week by week from what you actually did, instead of following a fixed programme. It is built on polarised intensity (Seiler & Kjerland, 2006) and the Banister fitness-fatigue model (Banister et al., 1975 & 1991), applied to the shape of a trek: consecutive days, a hardest day, a descent that arrives tired.

See the science behind the trekking plan for the research, the practice, and how it works at TTM.

Polarised 80/20 means roughly 80 percent of your weekly training is at low intensity (zones 1-2), and 20 percent is at high intensity (zones 4-5). The middle ground (zone 3) is intentionally minimised. The research base for this distribution comes from Seiler & Kjerland (2006), who showed it produced better endurance adaptations than evenly-distributed or middle-heavy schedules.

Trekkers benefit because the 80 percent builds the aerobic engine that five to ten hours of walking a day for a week demands, while the 20 percent develops the top-end fitness for the steep sections and the high passes. See our heart rate zones guide for the details.

Most of your training should be in zone 2 (60-70 percent of max heart rate): this is where the body builds capillary density, mitochondrial volume, and fat-burning capacity, and it is the intensity you will walk at on the trek. About 15-20 percent of training sits at zone 4-5 (threshold and VO2max work). Zone 3, the moderate-intensity grey zone, gets minimised because it costs you the recovery you need for both the long zone-2 work and the hard intervals.

We have a full guide that walks through how to calculate your zones and structure a week.

Three big differences. First, consecutive days: a trek is four to eleven walking days back to back on treks like Kilimanjaro or the Tour du Mont Blanc, each with hundreds of metres of ascent and descent, where a marathon is one flat morning. The durability that carries you through day four is built differently. Second, eccentric load: descents punish the legs with forces 4-6 times bodyweight (LaStayo et al., 2003), and on a trek the big descent arrives on tired legs. Third, altitude: many treks sleep above 4,000 m, where oxygen is about 60 percent of sea level.

TTM trains the first two and makes the third survivable, where a marathon plan trains none of them. See how the trekking plan works for the full picture.

The Banister training-impulse model (Banister et al., 1975 & 1991) describes how every training session leaves two opposite traces: fitness (slow to build, slow to decay) and fatigue (quick to build, quick to fade). Your readiness on any given day is fitness minus fatigue.

The model lets us predict when you will be peaked (high fitness, low fatigue) and when a deload week is needed. TTM uses Banister-derived calculations to time your taper to day one of the trek and decide each week whether to add load or back off. The full methodology page walks through this in depth.

For a week-long trek at altitude with a reasonable base, plan at least 12-16 weeks of structured training. The plan needs to build four things in parallel: an aerobic engine (zone 2 sessions, progressive long efforts), vertical capacity (incline cardio, stairs, hill repeats with your daypack), multi-day durability (back-to-back long days every weekend, the demand hiking plans miss), and eccentric descent loading.

Altitude itself is the itinerary's job; what training does is make each walking hour cost less, so you keep reserve for the thin air. See the trek pages for Kilimanjaro, Everest Base Camp, the Inca Trail, the Tour du Mont Blanc, the Annapurna Circuit, the Walker's Haute Route, the Alta Via 1, the Tour of Monte Rosa, the GR20, the Laugavegur Trail, the Toubkal Circuit, the Huayhuash Circuit, the Santa Cruz Trek, the Salkantay Trek, the Condor Trek, the Quilotoa Loop, the Inca Trail to Ingapirca, the Torres del Paine W Trek, the Torres del Paine O Circuit and the Michinoku Coastal Trail for the stage-by-stage version.

Three checks. First, consecutive days: two long hikes on a weekend, pack on, that leave you fine on Monday. If one long hike wrecks you for three days, you have a durability gap. Second, descent: a heavy descent day late in training reveals whether your legs can handle the eccentric load that the trek's longest day puts on them. Third, altitude: an itinerary that keeps its acclimatisation days in; no training replaces them.

Trek Check turns these checks into one report with your biggest gap for the hardest day and the consecutive days of your specific trek.

For the famous treks with ready-made profiles, Kilimanjaro, Everest Base Camp, the Inca Trail, the Tour du Mont Blanc, the Annapurna Circuit, the Walker's Haute Route and fourteen more, start 12-16 weeks out if you have a reasonable base of regular cardio. Less if you already hike long days regularly; more if you are starting from little. The hardest training weeks should land three to six weeks before you fly, with a two week taper after them.

The honest answer for your specific case lives in Trek Check: give it your trek, your departure date and your current fitness, and it names the gap.

The Physical Readiness score for a trek is a measurable score for whether your body has done the work your specific trek requires. It rolls six signals into one number: aerobic fitness, vertical capacity, the hardest day (can you walk its hours with a pack), consistency, descent readiness and multi-day durability (do your back-to-back days hold up).

Trek Check gives you one report with your biggest gap for the hardest day and the consecutive days. The score itself needs your real training data, which is what the app reads. Knowing this beats guessing, which is what most trekkers do.

Descent training is eccentric-load training: the muscles lengthen under load rather than shorten. LaStayo et al. (2003) showed eccentric work generates 4-6 times bodyweight in force at the knee, which is why descents destroy the underprepared, and why the knees are the most common complaint on treks with stone steps.

The plan layers progressive downhill repeats, controlled step-down sessions, weighted carry work on descents, and back-to-back days that mimic the cumulative fatigue of a multi-day trek. See our eccentric training guide for the full protocol.

Yes. TTM is built specifically for people whose training has to fit around a real life. The plan asks how many hours per week you have, then optimises within that. Most trekkers have four to six hours a week, mostly weekday evenings and one weekend day, and the plan puts the long walk and the midweek vertical where they do the most good.

The adaptive engine reshapes around busy weeks, travel, and illness instead of pretending they did not happen. The trade-off is timeline: four hours a week needs more total weeks than eight hours a week. Trek Check shows you what your hours can and cannot cover.