With reporting by Nicole Pajer.

Admit it: you wouldn't exactly mind joining the cast of the "Maze Runner" series, getting to spend your days fighting Cranks and chilling with Dylan O'Brien at craft services. But according to "Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials" stars Ki Hong Lee (Minho) and Dexter Darden (Frypan), there's a serious downside to living the glam life of a "Maze Runner" star -- shin splints.

"We had to do a lot of running up sand dunes in rehearsals and practice and training, because Albuquerque is a mile-high city, so it's 5200 feet above sea level," Darden told MTV News at a press day ahead of the film's release. "Doing all of that kind of training could tend to get difficult, so we trained for that stuff. When you see us running up the sand dunes, that's really us."

"There was a lot of going nowhere, because the sand would just go under our feet," Lee added. "That was pretty tough."

However, the stunt work on "Scorch Trials" wasn't all "Survivor"-esque -- Lee's badass martial arts moves, for example, made the whole thing worthwhile.

"Wes [Ball] said, 'I want to do this cool thing with you where you just run and knee some guy in the chest,'" Lee explained. "I was like, 'Okay, I'm ready to go.' We did a couple of takes where I used both knees, and a couple of takes where I just used one knee, and luckily it worked out and looked okay.'"

"Okay" isn't exactly how we'd word it, Ki Hong. More like "rad AF."

"Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials" is in theaters nationwide.