Scientists Weigh in on the Great Trekking Pole Debate - A new review sifts through the evidence for and against hiking with poles..
Partway through a late-summer backpacking trip a few months ago, I realized I had become a trekking pole guy again. I’ve flirted with the concept before: I took a pair of borrowed poles on a 10-day hike in the northern Rockies 15 years ago, and bought a knock-off Leki pole in Kathmandu before a three-week trek in the Himalaya. But I’ve always been lukewarm about them. They feel fine, but I really like having my hands free for snacking, picture-taking, map-reading, scrambling, and so on.
Trekking poles elicit mixed feelings.
Their boosters certainly love them, and not just in the backcountry. “People will still say, ‘Hey, you forgot your skis!’” an “urban poling” instructor
told CBC News a few years ago. “We’re going to change that. In Europe, they look at you kind of funny if you walk around
without poles.” On the other hand, the Switzerland-based International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation sounds a more skeptical tone,
suggesting that using poles too much will sap your balance and coordination, thus raising the risk of accidents in situations like crossing ridges that are too narrow for poles.
There have actually been quite a few studies investigating the pros and cons of pole use, and they’re summarized in
a new review article by Ashley Hawke and Randall Jensen in
Wilderness & Environmental Medicine. This isn’t a meta-analysis that aggregates the results of a bunch of studies into one big dataset, because the studies all tackle slightly different questions in slightly different contexts. But bringing all the studies together in one place allows us to extract some common themes.
Here are the highlights:
https://www.outsideonline.com/241803...=pocket-newtab
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