Most hikers are familiar with the feeling. You're an hour or two into a hike when, after turning a bend, a long climb appears up ahead. The calculations begin. Maybe it’s doable, but could empty the gas tank, and don’t forget, you need enough energy for the trek home. You slow down, or turn around, or finish the hike having spent the whole second half doing the math on your remaining energy instead of enjoying where you are.
Even the fittest athletes are familiar with this. As you make your way through a long hike, forces align to cause fatigue. And fatigue tends to win.
Why Am I So Tired?
Every hike has a first-mile price. The fourth mile costs more — in part because you've already done three miles and your muscles are feeling the burn, you might be taking smaller strides, and exerting more effort to tackle hills that had seemed easier earlier. Carrying a load, such as a heavy backpack, speeds all of this up. A 30-pound pack puts additional pressure on your lower back, hips, and knees, and can quickly feel heavier and heavier, until you start regretting the decision to take a pack at all. When the heaviness starts to kick in, it may be time to head back.
What this all means is that most hikers operate far below their ceiling, for good reason. They turn around not when they reach their actual limit, but when they worry they might be about to reach their limit. The hike you wanted to do becomes the hike you can safely do.
How Exoskeletons Work
The VIGX Pi Plus is an AI-powered exoskeleton that you wear around your waist and thighs. It can offload about 30 percent of your lower-body effort as you walk, providing up to 15 newton-meters of torque, adjustable from level 1 to 15 using buttons on the belt. The onboard AI learns your specific gait so the assist moves with you rather than against you.
It's easy to read a 30 percent figure, but what does that actually feel like in practice? Recently, I took it on a hike that lasted about two and a half hours. At first, I stuck to a blacktop path, but then I detoured onto a few side trails with genuine hills, including one steep climb that I otherwise never would have attempted. At the end of my hike, the battery still registered 67 percent, and I felt surprisingly good. Not just okay. Good, in the way you feel at the start of a hike rather than the end. That's a meaningful difference.
Carrying the Weight
One specific benefit goes to hikers who carry a full pack.
If you've ever finished a hike feeling like your legs were fine but everything else was destroyed, pack load likely plays a role. A heavy backpack doesn't just add fatigue. It changes how you move, shifting compressive load through your spine and into your lower body in a way that wears you down faster than walking without a pack does. The VIGX's lower-body support is highly valuable in exactly these conditions, because it reduces the demand on your legs when that demand is highest.
The Next Day
But for anyone who wants to hike more than once or twice a week, the least-discussed benefit is recovery.
The next morning I went for a long walk with none of the stiffness that occurs after a hard hike. For someone who hikes several times a week (weather permitting), the difference in recovery adds up throughout a season. The less a hike wears you out, the quicker you'll recover and the more hiking you'll be able to do.
How to Use It on a Hike
You don't have to think much about the device during normal hiking, but when you come to a steep hill, you can adjust the level of support delivered by the VIGX without breaking stride using the belt controls. On longer climbs, levels 8 to 12 make a noticeable difference. On the hardest sections, higher settings are available if you need them—all the way up to 15.
What about range anxiety? Non-existent. The batteries are hot-swappable, so you can change them out on the trail without powering down the device. That said, the life is rated at 24,000 steps with both batteries, which is more than enough for most hiking situations. Although in real-world use, I've come in far above that number.
The Bottom Line
All this is not to say that using the VIGX on a long hike makes the hike effortless. But you finish with more energy than you would otherwise, you recover faster, and the calculation that usually sends you home early changes. Hikes you would have turned around on become hikes you complete. Trails you've been avoiding because of one difficult climb become reasonable options.
If you hike regularly and consistently finish feeling like you left something out there, it's worth looking into.
Explore the VIGX Pi series at vigx.ai.
