While hiking may be exciting and adventurous, it is also physically taxing and demands that you be in decent physical condition. You should give yourself somewhere between two and eight weeks to prepare your body for trekking, depending on your present fitness level and the complexity of the journey. In addition to being fit, you will need to consider other factors such as how much food and water to carry with you, what types of shelters to build, etc. The first thing you need to do is figure out what type of hike you are looking at doing. Some trips may only require a few hours of walking each day while others can last for several days. If you plan to go on a longer trip, then you should start preparing sooner rather than later. However, if you plan to do some short hikes during your vacation, then there's no reason why you can't start afterward as well. Once you know what type of hike you are looking at doing, find out about its difficulty level. There are five degree scale used by most guidebooks to describe the complexity of trails: easy, less difficult, more difficult, extreme, and death defying. Between these two categories lies the spectrum of difficulty.