- Start training
- 8–12 weeks out
- Sessions per week
- 3–4
- Hardest day
- Day 2 — the 4,630 m pass
- Most underestimated
- The descent after it
- Trainable at home?
- Everything except the altitude
The Salkantay Trek is not technical. There is no rope, no scramble, nothing you need a skill for. What it asks is that you walk for five days without a rest day, cross a pass at 4,630 metres on the second of them, and then lose more than two thousand metres of altitude on your legs. Training for it is mostly about the third of those.
How long you actually need
Eight weeks if you already walk. Twelve if you do not. That is the honest range, and the difference between them is not fitness in the gym sense — it is how your legs behave on the third consecutive day of carrying something.
Three to four sessions a week is enough. More than that tends to produce injuries rather than readiness, and an injury four weeks out is far more expensive than a slightly lower ceiling.
What actually matters, in order
Consecutive days. One long hike a week teaches your body very little about what day four feels like. Two hikes on consecutive days teaches it almost everything. If you change one thing about how you were going to train, change this.
Time on feet, not speed. Nobody on this trek is in a hurry. A four-hour walk at a conversational pace is better preparation than a punishing hour.
Load. You will carry a daypack — water, layers, camera, snacks — while horses take the rest. Train with what you will actually carry, which is usually five to seven kilos, not the twenty a full expedition pack would be.
An eight-week shape
Not a prescription — a shape to bend around your own week.
Weeks 1–2. Three sessions: two of 45–60 minutes of anything that raises your heart rate and keeps it there, one walk of 90 minutes on the most uneven ground you can reach.
Weeks 3–5. Add the second weekend walk, so you are walking on two consecutive days. Push the longer of the two towards three hours. Start carrying the daypack you will actually bring.
Weeks 6–7. The peak. One weekend where you walk three to four hours on Saturday and two to three on Sunday, both with the pack, ideally with real elevation in them. This weekend is the whole plan — everything before it exists to make it possible.
Week 8. Halve everything. You cannot gain fitness in the last week, but you can absolutely arrive tired.
The part almost everyone skips
Ask people afterwards which day hurt and they say day two, the pass. Ask which day they felt the next morning and it is the descent. From the pass the trail drops through cloud forest towards Santa Teresa, and long sustained downhill loads the quadriceps eccentrically in a way that flat training never touches.
If your local terrain has a hill, walk down it deliberately, repeatedly, before you come. Add step-downs and slow lunges to whatever strength work you do. Bring poles and use them from the top, not from the point where your legs start complaining — by then the damage is done.
What training cannot fix
Altitude is not a fitness problem, and this is the single most common misconception we hear. Very fit people get altitude sickness. The only reliable preparation is time: two or three days in Cusco at 3,400 metres before you start walking, which every one of our itineraries is built around.
Read the altitude and acclimatization guide for how that works in practice, and how hard the trek is for the honest difficulty picture that this training plan is aimed at.
Common questions
How long do I need to train for the Salkantay Trek?
Eight to twelve weeks is the range most people need. If you already walk hills regularly, eight is enough. If you are starting from a desk, give yourself twelve — the limiting factor is usually how long your legs last on day three, not how fast you can climb on day one.
Do I need to train at altitude?
No, and almost nobody can. Altitude tolerance is not something you can build at sea level — it is bought with acclimatization days in Cusco, not with training. Train for the distance and the descents; let the two or three days in Cusco handle the air.
What is the hardest day physically?
Day two, over the 4,630 m pass — but the day that hurts most afterwards is usually the long descent that follows it. Downhill is what wrecks untrained quads and knees, and it is the part people forget to train for.
Can I do this trek if I have never hiked before?
Yes, with preparation. Every season we walk with people whose first real hike was this one. What separates the ones who enjoy it from the ones who endure it is almost always whether they did consecutive back-to-back days beforehand.