7 Things to Know for Walking & Jogging On an Incline
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Questions this Post Answers
- Does walking on an incline have additional benefits to walking on flat ground?
- Does jogging/ running on an incline have additional benefits to walking on flat ground?
- How about walking, jogging, or running downhill?
- What should I pay attention to when walking/ jogging on an incline/ decline?
- Should I perform all my workouts on an incline?
- What products can make walking/ jogging an incline easier on my body?
1) Walking or jogging on an incline DOES increase muscle strength and how hard your muscles have to work.
Ever notice how much harder your legs seem to work when they carry you uphill or up some stairs?
This is because your body is doing more “Work.” When I use the word “work” here, I’m not talking about us all getting in our cars and going to work so we can make a living. I’m talking about the term “Work” from Physics.
Before I lose you because you hated Physics as much as I did in high school, I’m going to make this super simple.
Work: The amount of effort you use to move a weighted object from a lower surface to a higher surface.
That’s it.
When you move a bag of groceries from the floor to the counter, you have done “Work.”
When you take a stack of dishes from the counter and put it into the cabinet, you have done “Work.”
When you have moved your body weight from the bottom of the stairs to the top of the stairs, you have done “Work.”
When you do something that requires this type of “Work”, the whole body has to help out.
The muscles are working harder and exerting more effort to carry you up the stairs.
2) Walking or jogging on an incline DOES increase cardiovascular effort.
Breaking down the word “cardiovascular”.
“Cardio” = having to do with the heart. People often use the words “cardio” and “cardiovascular” interchangeably. Exercise is “cardio” if it increases your heart rate/ is a good exercise to “strengthen” your heart.
“Vascular”= has to do with your blood vessels/ veins
You have probably noticed when you walk uphill or upstairs that you will breathe harder and get more “winded” than when walking on flat ground.
Why does this happen?
Have you ever wondered what our muscles use as fuel? Like if our muscles were a car, what kind of gas do they use? The answer is primarily oxygen. When we use our muscles, they need oxygen. When we do anything, whether that is lifting a coffee cup or pushing a heavy grocery cart, our muscles use oxygen to fuel them. The more difficult the task, the more oxygen we use.
This is why we breathe harder when we go uphill and upstairs. Our muscles are working harder, so they need more oxygen to help fuel them. So our heart and lungs increase our breathing rate so we can have the oxygen we need.
3) Walking on an incline increases stress on your muscles and your joints.
Because more work is being performed when you power yourself up an incline, your muscles are working harder. More muscular effort means greater forces and more force means more stress on your joints.
For this reason, anyone with a history of injury in the legs, should be aware that walking/ jogging inclines for exercise can make these old or new injuries feel worse. This is especially true at the knees. Even injury-free individuals can tell that inclines can result in an increased sensation of pressure in the knees. When this extra knee pressure becomes painful, we will call this anterior knee pain, Patellofemoral Pain.
Take Home Point. Walking inclines is good to strengthen your heart and lungs (strengthen your cardiovascular system) and your leg muscles, but can also cause stress to both the muscles and the joints that can stir up old injuries or result in new injury.
4) Walking on a decline ALSO increases stress to your muscles and your joints.
You are probably aware that walking downhill requires much less work than walking uphill. This is absolutely true.
BUT. It does not necessarily decrease stress to the joints and muscles. When you walk or jog downhill, your muscles/ body is working insanely hard to prevent you from falling.
Every step you take is basically your body stopping you from falling.
This is often why the legs feel even more pressure or discomfort when going downhill!
5) Quiet/ soft footsteps are best.
When you are walking/ jogging up or downhill, you should be striving to make as little noise as possible.
If you sound like a horse, clopping your feet down on the ground, you are forcing your joints to take all of that shock. This is primarily an issue when you are trekking downhill. Use your muscles as they were intended, to help decrease forces on the body!
The louder you are, the greater the shock.
When we walk, our footsteps are delivering a little more than our body weight’s worth in shock to the body weight. So if I weigh ~140 lbs, each one of my footsteps is ~170 lbs of shock to my body. If I run, it’s more like 2x my body weight, so ~280 lbs of shock to my body.
WITH EVERY STEP! Isn’t that fascinating?!
If you’re loud, you’re delivering even more with each step.
Take Home Message. Silence is golden.
6) How to Protect Your Back.
When we walk uphill, we must bend forward so that way we don’t feel like we are literally going to fall off the hill/ incline. Bending forward also helps our muscles generate more power to propel us upward.
This can spell disaster for people who have a history of low back pain.
So what should you do? Try and keep your back “straight” even though it is bent forward to protect your back.
7) Save Your Knee(s).
When Going Uphill:
- Use Both Legs Equally. Make sure that you are not always using the same knee (leg) to perform the biggest steps. If it feels awkward to use your other leg, the leg is probably a little weaker and could use the practice. If you have significant pain in that knee (greater than 4/10 pain on a scale from 0-10), then respect that knee pain and just use your “strong” side.
When Going Downhill:
- Quiet Please. Keeping your footsteps soft (as described above) will definitely help reduce stress.
- Take breaks. Walking down steep inclines can be a relentless amount of stress to the front of the knees and your knee caps. Take breaks here and there so they can get a chance to rest.
- Go Down Sideways/ Diagonal. The more directly you “face” downhill the greater the pressure at your knees. If you take a diagonal path or even side step down the incline where it’s really steep, you’ll decrease that knee stress.
- Smaller Steps. If you shorten your steps, you can also decrease the amount of impact/ force on the knee joints.
When Going Up or Downhill:
- Soft Bend in Your Knees at All Times. You should never really feel like your knees are “locked out”. Locking out your knees or intentionally squeezing them into a locked position will make it more difficult for your knees to help absorb shock and increase the pressure on your joint surfaces as well.
Wrapping It All Up
As a physical therapist, I would not recommend performing all your exercise on a steep incline intentionally due to the extra stress to your muscles and joints. If done over and over again, this stress ultimately leads to injury.
Examples of Appropriate Incline Training: If you live in a significantly hilly neighborhood and walk for 30-60 min 3-4 days per week without any joint or muscle pain. However, I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND jogging/ running inclines this frequently. I would instead advise someone to jog that 1x per week and find a flatter space for their 2-3 other workouts.
