It sounds like you are trying to convince yourself/ If you believe it don't do the hills.
http://www.scienceofrunning.com/2009/05/sprint-training-part-2.html
It sounds like you are trying to convince yourself/ If you believe it don't do the hills.
http://www.scienceofrunning.com/2009/05/sprint-training-part-2.html
Well said, I wish more posts were like this on here. I see where you're coming from and while I believe there is a huge benifit in static stretching you make a great point and one worth investigating.
One thing I have always wondered is the benifit of a warm-up at championship events that keep athletes in a staging area. What kind of effect does this have when doing a dynamic warm-up?
Running uphill does. Sorry. When coaches like Hadd, Bowerman, Vigil, Cerutty, Kellogg, Lydiard, Canova (I think Canova), Rosa and many others all have the same findings, I tend to agree with them. I will take their perspective over an anonymous poster on a website, of course.
Hills are vital, if you are trying to convince yourself of otherwise then have at 'er.
My last comment on the subject in this thread.
redux wrote:
I agree with the OP. If you want to run faster just run faster. Stop limiting your speed by working on it. Start increasing your speed by doing it. It's quite simple.
Speed athletes do all sorts of resistance work (parachutes, pulling sleds, and yes hills) to improve speed.
He wasn't a track athlete, but Jerry Rice was famous for running hills, and he was incredibly fast through all four quarters and also overtimes in tough games. (for you youngsters, Jerry Rice is arguably the best NFL wide receiver to ever play the game)
As for mid-distance, on the BBC documentary 'Super Milers', Filbert Bayi (the guy who broke Jim Ryun's mile WR) said "hills are my weight training."
Coe also did 100m sprint hills.
Ok I lied, one more post.
...replying to myself too...
Anyway, here is this article is a good, short bit on using a hill phase:
Just want to add this video of Jerry Rice talking about 'The Hill':
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftmVLvQyZAs
I'll trust Rice's opinion on how to get speed.
percent calculator wrote:
Just want to add this video of Jerry Rice talking about 'The Hill':
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftmVLvQyZAsI'll trust Rice's opinion on how to get speed.
Walter Payton also had a Hill:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqmxWZ8Rbwc&feature=relatedYou have it all wrong. If you want to run faster then you run faster. The reason no one has broken the 2-hour-athon is that no one wants to. Not because they aren't working hard enough. 2 hours is an arbitrary line in the sand and we know we can break it. We just don't see a point in proving we can do it.
Haha sorry redux, I was in a hurry and didn't see that your earlier post (which I replied to) was sarcastic and actually quite funny and appropriate.
Hills are cool as support training in the same way that base prepares you for speed later. I doubt anyone could get as fast as they can doing nothing but hills, but conversely if someone did nothing but track workouts he would still be a one fast mofo. The best combination is probably some hills that doesn't interfere with doing the bread and butter speed. I've never heard of a hilly trail runner remark that he's going to go do some track workouts to get slower because his favorite hills are making him too fast.
*finger guns*
i've always wondered how useful hill running is for developing powerful glutes. to me it seems easier to activate my glutes when i'm doing exercises when my hips are in an extended position (as they are during push-off when sprinting) on a machine such as this:
as opposed to doing parallel squats, lunges, or box step-ups, all of which puts your hips in a flexed position when using your glutes. Yet everyone always says "squats/lunges/step-ups are the best exercise for building powerful glutes".
extending this to hill running, when you run uphill, your hips are in a "more flexed" position when pushing off the ground as opposed to when you are running on the track. thus it seems that it would be harder to fully activate your glutes (in other words, hill running is more like a squat/lunge/step-up than a glute extension machine).
so wouldn't it make sense to get faster by doing flat running + resistance (sled, parachute, etc.) instead of running hills since the former puts your hips in a better position (extended) to work your glutes harder?
Because Haile said so.
Glute activation (as a general term, because there are three of them and they all do different things) is certainly important. I think that you are slightly off base in your squats/lunges assessment, though. Dead lifts are how you develop that posterior kinetic chain. You are performing a hip extension to raise the bar up and really fire that glute max. RDL (Romanian Dead Lift) is even a more hip specific version of a true dead lift, since you have very little knee motion and almost entirely hip motion.
I have recently been performing weighted hip extensions, myself, after being showed by a colleague of mine. You sit on the ground with a barbell over your hips and your back supported against a bench. You then, keeping your back as tight and straight as possible, fire through your heels to raise your butt and the bar off the ground in a powerful hip thrust motion. Your knees should be over your feet, toes off the ground, and your back as parallel with the floor as possible. I do this with somewhere between 135 and 225 pounds, while my sprinting friend can get upwards of 400. This is done as a warm up for hang cleans, an olympic lift that stresses triple extension (ankle, knee, hip) to move a weight powerfully into the air in order to catch it on the chest.
pr100 wrote:
So how do you "approach flexibility properly" without stretching?
good posture, strong core and hip flexors, massage, myofascial release, conscious relaxation, and most of all, spend enough time warming up, not an 800 meter jog. Identify any back and nerve problems too.
Range of motion adapts to activity, that's what I like about sprint drills. Even the basic drills are much better than jogging as a warmup.
Pretty much every great distance runner would disagree with this. The East Africans swear by hills. Coe was famous for his hill workouts. Henry Rono's great 'da heeeeeel' quote. I'm willing to bet a fair amount that more great runners trained on hills than didn't and that's good enough for me.
As to why they help, does it matter? I think the actual physiological reason is to do with the fact the muscles have to contract faster due to them being lengthened from the angle of the hill. Your calf is stretched further running up a hill than on the the flat so the muscles have to work significantly harder to create the same force. You use and recruit way more muscle fibres when running uphill compared to the flat.
http://www.pponline.co.uk/encyc/speed-training-how-hill-running-will-make-an-athlete-faster-265
Going through extra range of motion doesn't mean a muscle's working harder. In this case it means it's taking longer to produce the same acceleration by deliberately doing so in the most inefficient way possible. If a hill run produces takeoff velocity equivalent to or less than a flat run, then the contraction would actually involve less force applied over a longer time. Logically that should adapt you to running with your calves overextended and with low cadence.
If the extra muscle fibers recruited on hills aren't recruited in flat-ground running, it's silly to expect any improvement in flat-ground running by developing them.
Bwahahahahahahaha
Bad Wigins wrote:
So does riding an exercise bike at your local gym.
Nope. Not the sport-specific stimulus that is needed
I agree with OP. Hill work may develop power, but in the end, no more than running fast does, and it's a power tailored for slogging up hills, not running fast. I don't believe it's less wear and tear either, just wear and tear on different spots.
To develop good power for speed, do the usual sprint drills, a-skips, bounds, buttkicks, etc. And, of course, sprint.
Do hills if you're gonna be racing up a hill.
The principles and benefits of resistance training -- sport specific resistance training have been proven beyond all question. If you dont feel like doing them, thats your perogative. But dont make the common mistake of trying to turn your preferences into some faux physiology.. Skipping is no substitute for hills
