Sand, Hills and Open Water — Why Unstable Ground Makes You Stronger
On holiday, without a gym, a lot of people write the fortnight off as a training loss. But the beach, the coast path and the sea are some of the best training surfaces there are, and they work you in ways a flat gym floor can't. The unstable surface can build strength and stability in areas you can’t hit on a stable surface
A gym floor is flat, predictable, and does half the stabilising for you. Sand, shingle, a grassy hillside and water are none of those things — every step asks dozens of small stabilising muscles to fire and correct, the ones that keep you upright on an icy pavement or stop a rolled ankle becoming a fall. Walk a soft beach for twenty minutes and your calves, ankles and feet do more work than an hour on a treadmill, because nothing underfoot is helping you. Unstable ground is resistance training you can't buy a machine for.
Each surface offers something specific, and none of it needs equipment. Soft sand makes walking and running far harder while being far kinder on the joints, so it's a way to get the heart and legs working without the pounding — your version of intervals is a barefoot beach walk that leaves you breathing. Hills load the legs going up and challenge control coming down, where most people are weakest. Open water is full-body, near weightless, and the cold itself is a mild stress the body adapts to. You don't need to make a programme of it. A morning walk on the beach, a climb up the coast path, a swim before breakfast — done at the right pace for you — and the fortnight becomes a training block in disguise.
One caveat. If you’re running start the first days of beach/trail running in small volume. In the same way a major change in footwear can cause shin splints (the pain in your shins you can get after running), changing surface can also cause this, if you start with a large amount of volume on this new surface. So the first few runs work on short intervals of running with longer periods of walking to ensure we taper in the volume.
If you'd like training that carries over to real, uneven, outdoor life, book a free, no-obligation 15-minute chat with Jeremy or Beth at crossfitchiltern.com — no hard sell, and most of us hadn't trained in years when we started.
