What the Hill?

When you’re just starting to build up fitness for the season, it makes sense to start easy and work your way into harder and longer sessions. One of the principles in early training phases for my athletes is incorporating hill training. I’ve learned over the years that hill work is a great primer for the body as it prepares for more work and more intense work.

Preparation is Paramount

When runners first begin training they most worry about base, speed, and building ‘fitness’. The early workouts build slowly and often include hills or short strides - but why? A good bit of that has to do with your hamstring. Everytime your foot strikes the ground, your hamstring loads eccentricity (elongates). When we run, there is so much happening and there is a constant acceleration/ deceleration of muscles and tissues perfectly timed to propel you forward. When you first start bag to a more intense training regimen we have to make sure we don’t overload one system too much. Overloading the hamstrings will have you feeling a single workout for days after, and we want to limit workout fatigue and pain to a maximum of 24 hours.

Form, Function, and Rest

If we consider base work / easy aerobic runs as the foundation of training for longer aerobic events - hill training is the foundation of high aerobic/ high lactate work. Hills allow the athlete the opportunity to get in resistance work (thanks gravity!), form work, and by nature of hills - you are bound to a certain amount of recovery by very nature of the work. As athletes get more fit, they can jog the recovery down, to decrease the rest. Determining when to move an athlete from hill to speed work is simple- I normally move my athletes over when they are running a hill for the same duration that they would run 400-600m reps on a flat track at the same heart rate or intensity. ex. If the athlete can run 400m in 90 seconds, I’ll start to integrate true speed work when they are running hills for 60-90 seconds at a time.

Getting the Grade

Hills are beautiful training because of the number of variables you get to play with for a single workout - there is such a thing as a perfect hill and it all depends on what you’re trying to do and what you need to get out of the workout. I wrote this article back in 2017 that dives deep: Hill Training

However, training for ultra distance races often requires athletes to confidently train on long, steep grades that push far beyond 10% grade for significantly longer. Simply put training for an Ultra breaks down some of the distance training constructs. Ultra Runners need to build a specific machine and hills may be more of a daily part of training where road and track athletes use hill training early on to build strength and fitness and ultra runners use it as a more regular stimulus so they adapt to the physical demands of long climbs and descents. No matter what you’re training for intensity, duration, and rest will always rule your training - start slow and build up!

Find your hill

So it comes down to the simple question - what are you training for? Do you need to sprint? Do you need to build good economy (800m - Marathon!). It all comes down to grade, intensity and duration. This is the job of your coach/ training plan to define the right time and place to integrate hills. Every workout you do in your training should work towards building your fitness towards your biggest races of the season. Don’t be surprised if you see intensities in hill workouts that you may not see in your speed work.