The secret to ultimate fitness isn’t all that complicated—just spend a month outside, hiking eight hours per day. Kyle Boelte breaks down how his body evolved into an efficient, fat-burning, testosterone-fueled machine over 29 days on the Colorado Trail.

This summer, my wife and I hiked the Colorado Trail, a 486-mile, high-altitude trek from Denver to Durango. While it’s a challenging hike (only about 150 people complete the trail each year), the Colorado Trail Foundation says many hikers finish in four to six weeks.

The hike ended up taking us 29 days, though two of those were zeros, as they’re called—rest days spent resupplying in town. That’s an average of 18 miles a day for the 27 days we hiked. Short days tended to be around 15 miles, which took us eight to ten hours, but we sometimes hiked as many as 25 miles in a day.

I was curious to know what hiking every day for a month would do to my body. Before we headed to Colorado, I weighed myself at home, monitored my pulse for several weeks with a Polar watch, had my doctor run blood tests, and completed a metabolic efficiency test to see how my body was utilizing fat and carbohydrates for fuel during exercise. When I got home from the hike, I ran the tests again. The differences in the results were pretty striking.

Basically, I had walked myself into a super-fit athlete’s body.

See the test results here…

The good news is you don’t need to be Sir Edmund Hillary to experience the Himalaya Mountains. In fact whatever your age, abilities or experience almost everyone can hike the Himalaya.

As the highest mountain range on the planet, the Himalaya have long been a draw for explorers heading to Nepal, India, Bhutan, Tibet, and Pakistan.

Furthermore, the countries the Himalayas span are exotic, with very different beliefs, languages, food, flora and fauna to Western countries.

While accessible to pretty much all, trekking in the mountains is not like a walk in the park. There are many things you can do to prepare yourself before you go; to improve your experience whether you go for full on trekking, easier hiking or just a walk in one of the many national parks.

Rocking up in the Himalayas without any prior preparation would be a recipe for disaster. Fitness goes hand in hand with enhancing your overall trekking experience. The fitter you are the more pleasurable your experience will be. Trekking in the Himalayas involves many days walking at a time, up to 8 hours, with distances upwards of 10km/day. The key is to build your endurance level over time.

Get the full list of tips for trekking in the Himalayas…