7 Exercises to Help You Move Pain-Free On Outdoor Adventures, According to a Physical Therapist

Maybe your upper back aches after cycling. Or your knees bark whenever you hike uphill or hit the trails for a run. Perhaps your neck twinges every time you swing your pack over your shoulder. In other words, pain accompanies movement. Even if it’s not always debilitating, it still sucks.

Many factors can cause your body to ache as you move, but for outdoor athletes or people who exercise, it often happens when your muscles, tendons, and other tissues get overloaded, says Tom Walters , an orthopedic physical therapist and author of Rehab Science: How to Overcome Pain and Heal from Injury .

Take trail running or hiking, for example. Those aren’t high-load activities, after all, you’re not moving super heavy weights as you stride, but outdoor athletes often do these activities in a really high volume, tackling dozens of miles a week. Your tissues need to be strong enough to handle all that endurance work, Walters explains, and when they’re not , pain and injury can crop up.

Fortunately, doing certain strength exercises can mitigate this discomfort by increasing your tissue capacity, which refers to how much your tissues and muscles can withstand force or impact without being injured. Stretches can help too by boosting overall mobility and promoting recovery in fatigued muscles.

We asked Walters for a roundup of strength moves and stretches to help you enjoy your usual activities with less pain in seven key areas of the body, as well as the red flags that warrant a call to a physical therapist (PT) or another doctor.

The following exercises and stretches are for mild pain, not severe or acute pain. If, on a scale of 1-10, your pain is a 3-4 or below, that is considered mild pain. If it’s a 5 or above, that’s moderate to severe pain, and these exercises are not for you; you should consult your doctor or PT. Also, if you’ve just suffered an acute injury where pain came on suddenly, you should see a doctor, Walters says. You should also see a PT if your pain doesn’t improve after two to three weeks, worsens at any time, or is accompanied by other symptoms such as numbness, tingling, or incontinence (poor bladder or bowel control).

If you’re currently experiencing mild pain, do these moves every day, Walters suggests. They work great sprinkled into a warm-up before exercise, he says, but you can also do them separately from your workouts. Even if you’re not currently experiencing pain, these exercises are great to do one to two times a week to help reduce your chances of aches and injuries cropping up in the future, he adds.

Lower back pain is incredibly common, with most people experiencing it at some point in their lives. Cyclists, in particular, can be especially prone to it, since the forward-leaning posture they adopt on the bike (which involves flexing the lower back for long periods) can contribute to stiffness and pain in the area.

This exercise helps reduce lower back pain in two ways. The first way: doing the bird dog moves the lower back into extension (the opposite of flexion), which improves overall mobility. The second way: the bird dog also gently activates and strengthens the lower back muscles, which can help reduce pain from prolonged flexion.

(FYI: flexion means bending a joint, and extension means extending it. So, if you bend your knee, that’s flexion. If you straighten your leg, that’s extension.)

“It’s a good exercise for so many back pain issues,” Walters says. “Almost everyone could start with that and feel better.”

Upper back pain can crop up when that part of the spine is held in a rounded position for long periods. For example, when you’re hunched over the saddlebars on a long ride, or staring at the ground while running or hiking a technical trail.

In those scenarios, taking the thoracic spine (the technical term for the mid and upper back) into the opposite position (extension) “is one of the most helpful things you can do to reduce pain,” Walters says. This foam roller-assisted stretch does exactly that.

Your rotator cuff is made up of four muscles, which help keep the shoulder joint in its normal, neutral alignment, Walters explains. When these muscles have a strength or endurance deficit, they’re not able to do their job as effectively, and other nearby structures, such as the labrum, shoulder joint capsule, or other tendons, can take on extra stress as a result, triggering shoulder pain, he says. In the outdoor world, shoulder pain can be especially common among swimmers, rowers, and racquet sports players, Walters says.

This exercise targets two of the rotator cuff muscles and is one of the top moves that “can reduce lots of different types of shoulder pain,” Walters says.

It’s OK if your range of motion is limited with this exercise at first. Focus on working in a range that doesn’t cause pain, and over time, gradually increase that range.

Most of us use our neck extensors (muscles on the back of the neck) a lot, especially when we crane our heads forward while cycling or look at the ground while hiking or running, but we neglect our neck flexors (muscles on the front of the neck). And weakness in the neck flexors can increase your chances of generalized neck pain, Walters says.

The neck flexor isometric curl takes the neck out of extension, altering the stress on the neck and targeting the neck flexors to improve the neck’s strength capacity, he explains. Both of those benefits can reduce neck pain.

In people without neck pain, the average hold time is about 40 seconds, but if you have pain, you may only be able to hold for five to 10 seconds initially, which is perfectly fine.

Knee pain can be really common among hikers, runners, and cyclists. Strengthening the quads and glutes can help reduce discomfort, as these muscle groups help stabilize the knee joint and protect it from excessive stress. The Lateral Step-Down exercise targets both the quads and glutes.

As you do it, make sure your pain stays in the mild range, which Walters describes as a 3 or 4 on a scale of 1 to 10. To stay in this range, you may not be able to complete the move with a full range of motion, and that’s OK, he says. Work within a range that feels comfortable, and then gradually increase over time as your symptoms improve.

Many outdoor athletes experience plantar fasciitis, which involves irritation and degeneration of the thick band of tissue (called the plantar fascia) on the bottom of the foot. Calf tightness is one of the top factors that predispose people to plantar fasciitis, Walters says. That’s because tight calves limit your ankle dorsiflexion (ability to pull your toes towards your nose), which in turn places more force on the plantar fascia.

This stretch helps lengthen tight calves, which can reduce strain on the plantar fascia.

Many runners and hikers who come to Walters’s clinic have Achilles tendon pain, which can occur when the tendon is overloaded by propelling them up miles of trail.

Single-leg calf raises help strengthen the calves and Achilles tendons, increasing the capacity of those tissues to handle load. In fact, calf raises are “probably the best single exercise you could do for pain in the ankle region,” Walters says. If single-leg calf raises are too intense, start with double-leg calf raises and then progress to weighted double-leg calf raises.