Hills - What do they do?

They help with form which will help your longer endurance type runs. I like 40meter hill repeats.

They go up.

Lydiard has some really in depth explanations for the benefits of hills. Running over hilly route on a LR (increasing HR to sub-threshold levels throughout the run), hill sprints of 6-10secs work on alactic speed and help activate your IIB fibers that are for the most explosive movements (hard to activate thee on the flat in base training), hill reps are also used for general interval reps (form and knee drive have to be exaggerated, benefits sprint form later in the season), and exercises such as hill bounds and hills in general help strengthen hamstrings, tendons, etc.

Overall, hills should be used in every phase of training because of the benefits gained by every energy system.

do near max speed sprints that are like 10 seconds long for speed, power, explosiveness

do 20-40 sec hills at mile effort for speed maintenance and power

do 1-3 min hills at 3k-10k effort for strength and endurance

hillman wrote:

Whats a good length hill for hill sprints?

Also, my coach told me hills were for strength. How do hills improve endurance? I thought hills were for speed.

Hills put you in a similar position as you "should be" racing. Requiring you to push with your quads rather than pull with your hamstrings. Thus you can work on "racing strength" without the intensity of a track workout.

Length depends on your objective. Longer, less incline if you are looking for more strength endurance (early season), Shorter, steeper hills require more power (speed) (later in the season).

hillman wrote:

Whats a good length hill for hill sprints?

Also, my coach told me hills were for strength. How do hills improve endurance? I thought hills were for speed.

For an evening or a week, nothing beat hills. Food, fun, and fashion; hills have it all.

hillman wrote:

Whats a good length hill for hill sprints?

Also, my coach told me hills were for strength. How do hills improve endurance? I thought hills were for speed.

10s for max recruitment of muscle fibres, and for increasing power and reduce contact time. You recruit much more of the muscles (for instance the calves) and train them to generate more power in a short time which translates to increasing explosiveness on flat ground. Running economy is proven to increase.

30-60s for anaerobic power. I stop at 40s cause above the lactic acid inhibits high power, I think. You can go shorter than 30s but then I would reduce the rest.

Long hills, not sure they do much for someone racing flat. Research showed they gave a VO2max benefit, but not more than flat VO2max running, which is more specific for running economy. But for racing in hilly terrain very key for aerobic development in hills.

So I suggest that you do short hill sprints for power and form and 30-60s for anaerobic power

Hill sprints develop muscle. More muscle means that the work load is divided amongst more fibers, and your endurance (and power) is thus improved.

Stu...Stu Padaso wrote:

hillman wrote:

Whats a good length hill for hill sprints?

Also, my coach told me hills were for strength. How do hills improve endurance? I thought hills were for speed.

Hills put you in a similar position as you "should be" racing. Requiring you to push with your quads rather than pull with your hamstrings. Thus you can work on "racing strength" without the intensity of a track workout.

This. But if the hill is too steep, you'll be overworking your Achilles.

RyecorDone wrote:

Hill sprints develop muscle. More muscle means that the work load is divided amongst more fibers, and your endurance (and power) is thus improved.

More muscle = more weight. Too much weight = less power to weight ratio.

Ground contact time is increased when running uphill.

You post way too much broscience bro.

RyecorDone wrote:

Stu...Stu Padaso wrote:

Hills put you in a similar position as you "should be" racing. Requiring you to push with your quads rather than pull with your hamstrings. Thus you can work on "racing strength" without the intensity of a track workout.

This. But if the hill is too steep, you'll be overworking your Achilles.

On a very steep hill, your speed is very low. So how can you overwork your achilles?

probably contact time increases slightly when you do hill sprints, but require a lot more power and muscular activation. This basically increases the forces in approx the same time. The muscles become stronger and can give a higher force when running flat than before and this translates to longer strides and/or shorter contact time. Voila, your speed increases.

I have the references...I am not making it up

Broscience doesn't cut it wrote:

RyecorDone wrote:

This. But if the hill is too steep, you'll be overworking your Achilles.

On a very steep hill, your speed is very low. So how can you overwork your achilles?

Hills and especially if you cannot touch down with the heel gives high forces in the calves and so on. Not wrong, so progression is important

A study in 2013 investigated the effect of different hill repeat lengths over time.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258315513_Effects_of_Different_Uphill_Interval-Training_Programs_on_Running_Economy_and_Performance

The conclusions was not crystal clear so in general they could say: "The highest intensity was clearly optimal for running economy (improvement of 2.4% ± 1.4%) and for all neuromuscular measures, whereas other aerobic measures were optimal near the middle intensity."

Still these conclusions were backed by the data.

The highest intensity(group 1) was done as 2 workouts per week of hill sprints on 18% incline, progressing from 8x10s in week 1 to 24x12s in week 6.

Group 2 did 15% incline, 110% of VO2max speed, 8x30s -> 16x45s

Group 3 did 10%, 100% of VO2max speed, 5x2min -> 9x2:30min

Group 3 did 7%, 90% of VO2max speed, 4x4min -> 7x5min

Group 4 did 4%, 80% of VO2max speed, 2x10min -> 2x25min

So for running economy and power, hill sprints were the best. For VO2 max, etc, group 3 did best. I would guess that if they compared a group doing flat VO2max work like that they would have had the similar development.

Ingebrigtsens do 2x10x200m hill reps throughout the base training, at something like 1500m pace and jog down. Approx 35s. I believe this is beneficial as a strength workout and anaerobic power workout. moderate incline.

Hill sprints have several benefits for power. The neuromuscular demand is high in recruiting as much muscle fibre as possible, the same benefit as from heavy strength training. We get stronger just being able to recruit more muscle. Also the fibres are demanded to develop high forces in a relatively short time. Speed of muscle contraction is actually not connected to the contraction speed as such, even the slow fibres can contract fast, but contraction speed is in the situation limited by how much force can be developed in that moment. The more force the muscle can develop, the faster it can contract in a given situation. This is why heavy strength training makes you faster and hill sprints are in reality a strength excersize. This is also why training lower power turnover does not give much (other than neuromuscular benefits if done with good form)

This have a good explanation:

https://www.sportsperformancebulletin.com/endurance-training/high-intensity-training/speed-training-hill-running-will-make-athlete-faster/

It also pointed to research on turkeys running uphill to measure what happened. And they found that more muscle was activated uphill increasing the force and training the calves to be more powerful when running fast on flat. We would maybe expect the thighs had worked more uphill than the calves ? I guess they too work, but the calves get a good workout, so to speak

If you do not plan to run hilly races, long hill work is in my opinion not optimat training. The aerobic effect is good and some strength is gained, but the running economy is not specific for flat running. If you do plan hilly races it is needed to succeed.

Interesting article. Si ce it is paywalled, Ihad to focus mostly on the graphs. The study showed (at best) a few percentage point improvement in parameters of running economy for the moderate (10 - 15%) incline VO2max hill sprints, with 5k performance improvement based on pre and post test - which is a sketchy measure. Six weeks of hill sprint workouts gives you that improvement. Ok. So what would six weeks of flat running VO2max intervals get you. In other words, was there a control group?

my instinct has always been that short hill sprints have good value, but longer, slower hill sprints can be replaced with track reps. Unless used for cross country or hilly road races where they are useful for specificity to race conditions.

I still probably use them once or twice during track season just for a change of scenery and to get away from the dogma of the stopwatch. Or maybe just because the track is covered in snow and ice!

I take it back. It wasn't a paywalled paper, after all. From what I gleened from it, there were only a handfull of runners in each experimental group. That is a pathetic sample size. Anyone can take 10 experiments, each with small sample sizes, then pick out the experiment that confirms their bias, and ignore the other experiments.

At best, it serves as a possible indicator of there being an optimal hill steepness or running intensity for gaining running economy. Too bad it was such a puny experiment.

RyecorDone wrote:

I take it back. It wasn't a paywalled paper, after all. From what I gleened from it, there were only a handfull of runners in each experimental group. That is a pathetic sample size. Anyone can take 10 experiments, each with small sample sizes, then pick out the experiment that confirms their bias, and ignore the other experiments.

At best, it serves as a possible indicator of there being an optimal hill steepness or running intensity for gaining running economy. Too bad it was such a puny experiment.

Yes. I trust that the few conclusions can be trusted indicatively. I also think longer vo2max repeats should be as specific as possible. They had no control. Even with few in the groups they had in sum a bigger group doing hills in general. There should have been no problem to get a control group really.