If you’re looking for a fun and engaging way to shed some extra pounds and boost your fitness levels, hiking may be the perfect activity. Unlike gym workouts that can sometimes feel monotonous, hiking offers a great opportunity to connect with nature while you work toward your weight loss goals. Hiking also engages multiple muscle groups, helps you burn calories, and improves your well-being.
Can You Lose Weight by Hiking?
Hiking is an excellent cardio exercise that can help you burn a high amount of calories, even if you hike at a slow pace. A person weighing 155 pounds can burn around 430 to 550 calories per hour hiking on moderate terrain. This moderate-intensity exercise elevates your heart rate to the optimal fat-burning zone, which is about 70 to 80% of your maximum heart rate.
Unlike jogging or running, hiking is a low-impact way to decrease your overall body weight. This makes it easier to do longer hikes rather than short bursts of high-intensity exercises, which may be hard on your joints. Hiking is beginner-friendly (depending on the trail) and allows you to set your own pace. You can burn up to 250 calories per hour walking at a speed of just 2.5 miles per hour.
Tips for Hiking to Lose Weight
There are some steps to follow if you’re just getting started with hiking for weight loss:
- Choose a beginner’s trail: If you’re new to hiking, don’t start with an advanced trail. Rather, choose a route under five miles that isn’t very steep. You’ll want to be able to finish your first few hikes and enjoy the process before you attempt more challenging terrain.
- Get the right equipment: Always wear moisture-wicking long pants and long-sleeved tops to ensure your comfort. Choose a good pair of shoes that are ideally waterproof. You’ll also want to invest in a sturdy backpack for all your essentials.
- Choose a good pair of hiking poles: Hiking poles can engage your upper body muscles, increasing the overall intensity of your hike and helping you burn more calories. These can help anybody on their hike - whether it’s your goal to lose weight or simply get fit - especially when navigating uneven terrain.
- Set goals: Choose a sustainable weight loss goal to work toward. This will keep you motivated. An example of a realistic goal could be losing 5% of your body weight within 6 months of hiking.
- Use slopes to your advantage: Try hiking uphill often if you want to lose weight. Although hiking isn’t a race, regularly exerting yourself will help you burn more calories.
- Do exercises during your hike: To burn even more calories while hiking, consider incorporating mini workouts while on your trail, like lunges or pushups.
- Plan regular hikes: Although even one hike a week can help you lose weight, you should aim to hike at least three times a week to create a consistent exercise routine that promotes weight loss. Of course, the possibility of this depends on your individual schedule.
- Incorporate other forms of exercise: Add other activities to your exercise routine on the days you’re unable to hike.
- Hike at the right pace: Keep a brisk and steady pace to maintain an elevated heart rate, which helps burn more calories. Use a fitness tracker to monitor your pace and heart rate to ensure you get the most out of your hiking and are doing it in a safe manner.
The Benefits of Hiking
Other than weight loss, there are both mental health and physical benefits of hiking, including:
Read also: Comprehensive Hiking Guide
- Lowering blood pressure: Many people have high blood pressure - referred to as hypertension - without even knowing it. Hiking is a form of aerobic exercise that increases your heart rate and improves circulation in the body. Regular physical activity like hiking also strengthens the heart, helping it to pump blood more efficiently. This can lower blood pressure over time.
- Reducing your risk of heart disease: The workout you get while hiking can help reduce your risk of developing heart disease. As mentioned above, hiking strengthens the heart and improves cardiovascular fitness. Regular aerobic exercises, like hiking, improve the heart’s efficiency in pumping blood, which helps protect against heart disease. Hiking can also improve cholesterol levels by raising the amount of good cholesterol - high-density lipoprotein (HDL) in the body. It lowers the amount of bad cholesterol - low-density lipoprotein (LDL) in the blood. Balanced cholesterol levels decrease plaque buildup in the arteries, lowering the chances of heart disease.
- Lowering the risk of diabetes: Regular hikes can enhance a mechanism in the body called insulin sensitivity. This means your body’s cells are more responsive to insulin, allowing for better blood sugar regulation. Improved insulin sensitivity reduces the risk of developing insulin resistance, which can lead to type 2 diabetes. Losing weight through hiking can also help reduce the risk of developing diabetes, as being overweight or obese can lead to this condition. Finally, hiking builds strong muscles, and increased muscle mass improves glucose uptake by the muscles, which helps to lower blood sugar levels and the risk of diabetes.
- Reducing depression and anxiety: Physical activities like hiking stimulate the release of natural chemicals like endorphins in the brain. Endorphins promote feelings of happiness and can reduce sensations of pain. This can help alleviate symptoms of depression and anxiety. Exercise also reduces the stress hormones in the body, such as adrenaline and cortisol. Lowering these hormones can help reduce anxiety and improve your mood. Hiking with friends, family, or groups provides social interaction and support, which can be crucial for individuals living with depression and anxiety. Social connections can provide a sense of belonging and reduce feelings of isolation.
- Improving sleep: Hiking is a sustained physical activity that helps tire the body out. This physical exertion increases the body’s need for restorative sleep, making it easier to fall and stay asleep at night. Regular physical activity also helps to reset the body’s internal clock, known as circadian rhythm. A well-regulated circadian rhythm promotes a consistent sleep-wake cycle, leading to better sleep patterns. Hiking can improve the quality of your sleep by increasing the amount of deep sleep you get. Deep sleep is the most restorative phase that leaves you feeling well-rested and rejuvenated the next morning.
- Building strong muscles: Hiking works a wide range of muscles, particularly in the legs. Hiking on uneven terrain engages the core muscles that you need for stability and balance. This helps to strengthen your muscles. The varying inclines and declines of hiking trails engage different muscle groups, making them work harder. For example, hiking uphill strengthens the glutes and calves, while downhill hiking engages the hamstrings and stabilizing muscles. Hiking is a weight-bearing exercise, meaning you carry your body weight as you move. This type of activity helps burn calories, and build muscle mass and strength.
- Supporting bone health: As mentioned before, hiking is a weight-bearing exercise, which means your muscles and bones work against gravity. This type of activity stimulates bone-forming cells called osteoblasts, which help build and strengthen bones. Regular hiking can boost and preserve bone density, potentially reducing the risk of osteoporosis and fractures. The consistent impact of your feet striking the ground creates a force that promotes bone strength. Hiking also helps maintain joint health by stimulating the production of synovial fluid, which lubricates the joints. Lubricated, healthy joints support better movement and reduce the risk of joint-related issues that can affect bone health.
- Improving balance: Hiking, especially on uneven terrain, engages your core muscles, which are essential for maintaining stability. This makes hiking an excellent activity for improving balance. As mentioned earlier, hiking also works the muscles in the legs, which is necessary for better support and stability, enhancing balance. Hiking often involves walking on rocks, roots, inclines, and declines. Navigating different terrains forces your body to constantly adjust, improving your ability to maintain balance on different surfaces.
- Enhancing respiratory function and lung capacity: Hiking is a type of exercise that requires increased oxygen intake. This boosts the efficiency of your respiratory system, as your lungs must work harder to supply oxygen to your muscles. The physical demands of hiking strengthen the diaphragm and the muscles between the ribs - referred to as the intercostal muscles - which are essential for better breathing.
Hiking vs. Walking vs. Running: Calorie Burn Comparison
Hiking is a highly beneficial physical activity that can help you burn calories. The number of calories you burn depends on factors like your weight and the steepness of the trail. Hiking is an excellent way to stay physically active while enjoying the sights and sounds of nature.
You may wonder how many calories hiking burns, especially compared with other forms of exercise like walking or running. The number of calories you can expect to burn hiking depends on a variety of factors, particularly your body weight and trail grade (the steepness of the path).
A grade of 1% to 5% is mild, while 6% to 15% ranges from medium to steep. Some trails may have a grade as high as 35%, which would burn even more calories. You can get an idea of how different grades feel by gradually raising the incline on a treadmill.
Other factors that influence the number of calories burned include your age, sex, body size, and body composition.
Calories Burned Walking
While some walking terrain may be hilly, it’s generally flat. Thus, you’re likely to burn fewer calories when walking - even at a brisk pace - than when hiking. Hiking burns more calories because trails are generally steeper and more uneven than walking paths, neighborhood roads, or sidewalks. Still, if you don’t have access to trails, walking on steep sidewalks may be comparable to hiking.
Read also: Nature's Workout: Hiking
Calories Burned Running
Like walking, running tends to occur on mostly flat terrain. The calories you burn depend on your body weight and running speed, among other factors. As you can see, running burns roughly double the calories as hiking per half an hour. Still, keep in mind that many people hike for longer periods than they run. Thus, a hike’s total calories burned may be comparable to - or even higher than - a run’s.
In general, hiking burns fewer calories than running but more than walking.
Mental Health Benefits of Hiking
Trail hiking may offer additional benefits that you can’t experience from walking on a treadmill. One 2022 review found that outdoor mountain hiking improved mood, feelings of calmness, and anxiety. A 2024 review shows similar results. It suggests that exercising outdoors in natural settings may lead to greater improvements in mental health than indoor physical activity.
Practical Tips for Enhancing Your Hiking Experience for Weight Loss
- Compression Clothing: Trading your sweats for compression tights can help you melt even more fat. The tight-fitting fabric creates pressure in blood vessels that improves circulation and increases the flow of blood to the muscles. Studies show that compression clothing revs calorie burn by 30 percent. Even as temperatures climb, stick to pants over shorts: You’ll reap the metabolism-boosting benefits, plus protect your legs from hazards like ticks, sharp sticks and poison ivy.
- Snacks and Hydration: If you’re hiking in a remote location or trekking farther than 3 miles, you’ll want to bring along snacks like nuts to keep you fueled. Water is also key for speedier slimming. As long as you’re hydrated, your kidneys are going to be the primary organ taking care of flushing toxins and waste from the body-and that’s going to free up the liver to burn fat. Drink a large bottle of water the morning of your hike, then taking a small one with you out on the trail.
- Hiking Poles: For women just getting started, bring along a pair of hiking poles. They help support the body’s weight, which can keep you stable on the trail. Studies show poles can reduce pressure on the joints by 25 percent, making hikes feel easier while actually boosting calorie burn by 40 percent. Poles will really work out your arms-especially the biceps and triceps-and that’s going to eliminate pesky bat wings and sculpt sexy definition.
- Mindfulness: Quieting your mind will help you get the most cortisol-reducing benefits from your nature strolls. The very first thing you do when you get out on the trail is take a big breath and try to listen to the sounds around you. Tuning into the subtle sights, smells and sounds is going to expand your sensory experience by a hundredfold.
- Safety First: Charting a course on unfamiliar trails can seem daunting-especially if you’re on your own. Carry a small basic first-aid kit with bandages and antiseptic ointment in case of slips or run-ins with prickly branches. Always alert someone who isn’t hiking with you to where you’ll be and when you expect to be back. A long-range whistle can signal to others in the area that you need help should you roll your ankle or encounter other issues. If hiking alone seems too intimidating, there are thousands of groups that meet up to hike together.
The Altitude Advantage
New science found that Americans living well above sea level in places like Colorado or West Virginia were four to five times less likely to be overweight than those living closest to sea level. That’s because high altitudes trigger a surge in leptin, a hormone that improves satiety and fuels metabolism. Previous research suggests that you can get the perks of the mountain air in as little as one week: Overweight subjects who spent seven days at 8,700 feet eating whatever they wanted and avoiding exercise unconsciously consumed 734 fewer calories per day and lost an average of 31⁄2 pounds-and they kept the weight off even after returning to their normal lives.
Making Hiking Accessible
You don’t need to climb a mountain or drive hours to the nearest state park to jump-start your slimdown. Walking in any natural environment will do. That can mean exploring the woods in your backyard, strolling in a tree-lined park near your house or roaming through a local field looking for wildflowers.
Read also: Fueling Your Hike
Personal Experiences and Testimonials
Kayla Rusch watched her two-year-old son toddle around the floor and was suddenly filled with a new parenting fear: I won’t be able to keep up with him before too long, she realized. Kayla, who was a single mother, knew the weight that filled her size 4X shirts was slowing her down from being her best parenting self. “I didn’t enjoy doing anything,” she reveals. “I wasn’t happy.” So as her son worked on walking and potty training, Kayla began working on herself-improving her habits with the help of ShapeFit.com and walking on a treadmill for a few minutes at a time. “It got easier and easier,” says Kayla, who built up stamina to hike on nearby hills. “The trail was really pretty. Those steps paid off! Kayla walked off two to three pounds per week for the first 2 months and traded her size 22 pants for size 6s. Though her goal was simply to dip below 180 on the scale, Kayla is now 30 pounds under her dream weight! “There are times when I don’t believe it myself,” she raves. Along the way, Kayla reaped other rewards. Her energy level and mood soared and she no longer needs her asthma inhaler. She even became a personal trainer.
Thru-Hiking and Weight Loss: A Word of Caution
Thru-hiker forums (and, let’s be honest, the internet at large) love a before-and-after photo. Scan through a few threads and you’ll notice that the most popular photos tend to fall into two categories: massive beard growth and massive weight loss.
The latter isn’t surprising. We live in a society obsessed with thinness, and most folks are drawn to anything that seems like a quick fix-even if “quick” means a five-month hike across an entire nation. When I interviewed Registered Dietician Stefan Schuster about packing the right amount of food for a hike last month, he told me that he sees a lot of people set out on backpacking trips with a goal of losing weight.
According to The Trek’s 2024 Appalachian Trail Thru-Hiker Survey, which interviewed nearly 400 thru-hikers, about 75 percent lost a modest amount of weight on the trail. A significant percentage maintained their weight. Some even gained weight. More women than men reported weight maintenance, even though the majority of the survey respondents were male. That’s likely because women have a higher body-fat percentage than men and more hormonal mechanisms for protecting that extra weight. Your post-thru-hike body composition doesn’t tend to stick around, either. It’s tough to readjust to a civilian exercise routine, and hiker hunger can last for weeks after you get off the trail. Many backpackers also struggle with the post-hike blues, which can trigger emotional eating. All this is extremely normal. Plus, your body is hungry after a big backpacking trip. You’ve just put it through the wringer. It needs time (and nutrients) to recover, and it’s often healthy to fill back out once a trip is done.
If you’re rapidly losing weight on the trail, you’re likely losing fat-but you’re probably losing muscle tissue, too. Fat does tend to go first, but your body won’t wait til every last speck of fat is gone before it starts chewing on your muscles-and later your organs and bones.
Backpacking is amazing-but not because of how it makes you look. Hiking is one of the most pure and intimate ways to explore this vast, beautiful world we call home. It’s a precious privilege and an opportunity for wild adventure. It’s a container for profound realizations, deep belly-laughs, and life-changing connection with a world beyond the ordinary. If you want to revel in that experience-and I mean really revel in it-you need to be present, fueled, and ready for anything.
life is about more than a number on the scale. Backpacking is incontrovertible proof of that. Plus, it’s supposed to be fun. So, bring the extra snacks. Eat the Nutella out of the jar. Have a Snickers before bed. You don’t need to eat the exact perfect right amount, and you don’t need to come home lighter than you left. Your body does amazing things for you, and eating more than you “need” just means you’re giving it a little extra buffer to protect it against injury and help it recover for another day of adventure. So don’t overthink it. And don’t compare your body to a body it’s not.
Quantifying Water Loss During Hiking: A Personal Experiment
There is talk of bodily functions - my bodily functions - in this post. If you do not want to read about that, kindly skip over this post. I’ve often been in the situation where after a long hot day, I feel particularly dehydrated. I’ll stand on a bathroom weight scale morbidly curious, and find that my body weight seems a little low and chalk it up to sweating - like, really sweating - throughout the day. This past week, I decided to see if I could more consciously calculate and quantify how much water I’m drinking and how much water weight I’m losing, to confirm my suspicions and get a better idea on how to better prepare myself in the future. Am I really losing as much water weight as I think I am, or is it just my imagination?
I mapped out a “strenuous hike”. For me, that means laps on local Green Mountain, why not? I wanted to do the test on terrain I’m likely to actually be on, rather than a treadmill, something I haven’t ever ran on. The forecast was seeing highs in the low 90’s. That’s about the limit of what I’ll handle outside, being the delicate flower I am. I’d also kept track of the amount of urine I peed out, and potentially how much I defecated. With that information, I could later figure out the weight and volume of my consumables (nutrition, water), as well as how much I was perspiring out compared to how much I was urinating/etc out. There would be some weight loss due to glycogen use/fat use during my hike, but that would be something I would have to roughly calculate, as there is no way for me to figure out calorie expenditure directly via something like amount of CO2 being exhaled. I didn’t know what to expect, so I didn’t form a solid hypothesis, but I assumed I would lose a few pounds of bodyweight, and go through a few liters of water. I assumed I’d piss out a good margin of the water. It really all depends on how hot things got.
And at 6:30am, I started up my first lap of Green Mountain from the bus station with a ~35lb pack, consisting of food, water, various scales (including stealing the bathroom’s), sunscreen - the usual hiking accoutrements. I’ve done Green Mountain almost 700 times now, I knew it well. I hadn’t had any breakfast, except for a coffee drink I drank on the bus ride to the start that touted 150 calories and 300mg of caffeine - yum! And at 6:20pm, I reached the bus station once again, feeling very tired, very depleted. I had gone through all my water and a good portion of my food. I completed the three laps I had planned of Green Mountain, totaling ~27 miles of trail, ~7800′ of elevation gain/loss. “Strenuous” as they say. Highs were in the 90s, and I felt cooked.
What were the results? I drank all 7 Liters of water. If I had more, I’d have drank it too, as I felt like I was rationing my water the last few hours. 7 liters is 7kg of course, or 15.4 pounds of water. That seems like an astounding amount of water to drink in 12 hours! Averaged 0.54 Liters/18.26 ounces/hour.
In 12 hours, I ate approximately 2500 calories, made up of mostly powdered maltodextrin. The nutrition did also contain some sodium (and other trace minerals, vitamins), being formulating for endurance sports. Total sodium consumption came out to approx. 3 grams.
In total, I peed out 825ml - less than a Liter of the SEVEN I drank! By far my biggest relief came after consuming the morning coffee.
In the 12 hours I was out, I need the call on the trail (which I packed out). Totaled 350 grams/.77lb. I only mention this as we’re calculated weight loss soon and this contributes a non-trivial amount.
The newly created hiking calculator that seems to have been made by Very Smart People comes out to approx. 5,210 calories burned, with a weight loss of .68kg/1.49lbs. That seems fairly unrealistic, but I don’t have a better idea on how to calculate calories burned, so we’ll run with it on this little experiment.
My starting weight was 86.9kg/191.58lbs (I am not a small man) and I ended the hike weighing 81.28kg/179.18lbs. I was floored when I calculated all this out.
There is also loss of water from exhalation. “Bodyweight” is a funny thing, as we’re weighing food that hasn’t yet been consumed, food that’s awaiting disposal down the line, and this very malleable item: water your body is retaining.
Being chronically dehydrated seems like a really bad thing - I’m not a sports scientist, so if you are: please chime in. It would seem to be beneficial to weigh oneself before and after a hard workout to roughly estimate how much water to drink to bring you back to the morning’s baseline, then check if the water was taken up the next morning. After a while, you may get a sense of how much water to consume without needing to do the weigh-ins/weigh-outs. I may be of the opinion that I am at least: very bad at instinctively sensing this. On my long distance adventures and FKTs I’m planning now to drink more water in general and drink more often than I have, as I feel I chronically under-hydrate over many days which could lead to real problems with dehydration. Knowing that I need approx. I feel the data I collected was relatively accurate using the tools I brought: a bathroom scale, a fishing scale, and a kitchen scale. My only wish was that I could have weighed myself more often, but finding a level, flat hard surface to weigh myself on proved difficult on the trail. The first and last weight measurements were done on perfectly level, hard concrete and on the exact same location, so I’m confident of both their relative accuracy. In the future, I could use a more robust hanging scale like the kind used for shipping and tie that to a tree branch, then grab ahold to lift myself up and take the measurement that way.
This was hardly a scientific study - more of a casual survey. I don’t claim to be a biologist, a sport scientist, a health, fitness, or performance coach - a nutritionist or dietitian. The sample size was one, repeated one time in an incredibly varied, non-controlled environment. My pack weight fluctuated mostly downward as my water and food were consumed. The temperature changed throughout the day. My route was sometimes steep, sometimes not so steep. I could go on. This is only to highlight the weaknesses in my assessment, but doesn’t discount how much utility I find in my day’s walk.
I am interested in how taking in more/less salt would contribute to the amount of water perspired or held on. I do find the amount I urinated quite low, and how that may suggest my starting… saltiness. The large amount of caffeine - 300mg - seems like it also contributed to the highest amount I peed out at the beginning of the experiment. I don’t think my little study could help with coming to a suggested salt consumption number - a more controlled salt study would be beneficial. Considering salt lost per Liter can vary wildly across different individuals from roughly 200mg - 2000mg, it’s hard to say if additional salt supplementation would be appropriate.
As I’ve noted, I am not a small man, even though I partake in many different endurance outings, from Everesting the same hill I did this experiment on, to summiting the highest peaks in the State self-powered in a summer. How I can hold onto so much lean mass as well as fat % - I’m probably 15%-20% body fat without actually getting a DEXA - is probably down to my diet and to a small degree my cold weather, woolly mammoth subsistence hunter farmer genetics.