Running hills are the run specific strength exercises as you are required to use strength while striding up an incline. Continue with your home strength exercises and run specific exercises. Strength exercises reinforce your body and help prepare you for hill workouts and faster intervals. Another way to use hills in training; return to fitness quickly. If you are getting back into running and are looking for a way to quickly build your fitness components; VO2max, VO2max speed, lactate threshold, economy, anaerobic contribution and speed, try hill workouts.
Hills may not be the most efficient way to improve each fitness component but they will give you a crash fitness program to get you ready for a race.
Longer hill repeats of 3 to 5 minutes uphill run at 5km effort will improve all of these components. Longer hill repeats will quickly prepare you for a race if you lost fitness from an injury. Once you have returned back to regular running you can optimize workouts by emphasizing the different components during different phases of race preparation to reach maximum fitness before a key event.
Adding hills to long runs will help improve your stride power and running economy. Moderate efforts uphill have shown to improve the running economy. A moderate effort is considered running at marathon pace or faster. This increased shortening greatly magnifies the net work per step performed by the calf muscles, and the same magnification of work output would occur in the hamstrings.
The increase in muscular work associated with incline running is linked with the activation of a greater number of calf-muscle fibres.
In fact, EMG data on the turkeys suggested that running up a 12deg. Interestingly enough, stance time did not increase during incline running, which indicates that the average rate of shortening of the calf muscle actually increased with inclination. The turkey data show that, at a specific speed, crucial running muscles like those of the calves actually contract more quickly on hills than they do on flat ground. Far from it: their calves actually produced the same amount of force at 12deg.
If this seems surprising to you, you must have forgotten about the time-honoured force-velocity properties of muscles: as the velocity of muscle contraction increases, force production decreases. If this concept is a little wild for you, just think how much more quickly you can lift a barbell with 10lb attached than one with lb!
The increased work required for hill climbing was accomplished not via greater force production but via faster, longer contractions of the calves. The Harvard-Northeastern scientists found that calf-muscle work per step increased on 12deg. What did change, of course, was d — the distance moved by the change in length accomplished by the calf muscle in its contractions during footstrike. With F unchanged and d spiked, work W increased significantly.
So, the calf muscles did more work by moving a greater distance during footstrike. In other words, on hills the calf muscles were learning to contract more quickly when the foot was on the ground. The calf muscles were not learning to generate more force — but to generate work at a higher rate. In short, they were learning to become more powerful. Power is just work divided by time; in our turkey case, time — footstrike time — stayed the same, but work increased dramatically, causing power output to rise.
On flat ground, this ability of the calf muscles to work more powerfully during footstrike should translate into shorter footstrike times and higher running speeds. Why shorter footstrike times? With the calf muscles reacting at a higher rate, the amount of work necessary to sustain a particular velocity could be performed in a shorter period of time, allowing toe-off to occur more rapidly. Naturally, the footstrike and stride-length pay-offs might occur simultaneously. On hills, key muscles like the calves learn to sustain force at high contraction speeds.
This defies the classic muscle force-velocity relationship principle, which states that muscles exert less force as their speed of action increases. Muscles accomplish this feat by recruiting extra fibres into action three times as many in this study , which means that hill running has a very broad strengthening effect in addition to its ability to boost power.
Football players, basketballers, rugby scrummers, cricket batsmen and fielders, and even runners — take note! Athletes can use hill training throughout the year, but it is best to delay emphasising it until you have already completed a circuit-training base to build overall body strength and coordination and until you have also become very familiar with running-specific strength training which mimics the movements required for running.
This progression will help to ensure that hill work does not increase the risk of injury and that hills are run with a high degree of coordination and at decent intensities.
During a hill-emphasis period, hill workouts can be completed times a week. Run at an intensity that feels rougher than 5k racing on your ascents, maintaining a rapid stride rate as you climb. Start with about four reps for your first session more if the hill is really short and gradually increase the number of reps over time.
Start with just two reps, building up to four as your power and overall fitness increase. You also want to do a ten to fifteen minute warm-up of light jogging before starting any hill workout. So what do you need to do if you need, or even want, to do hill repeats on a treadmill? Go to that scenic park with a good hill and get in some leg burning exercise!
Register for that race that goes through beautiful mountains! Most of all, have fun and run safe! Attend My Live Training Plan Workshop — Are you interested in learning how to build your own customized training plans? In my LIVE two-part interactive, workshop you will learn how to take control of your running and build a customized training program around your skill level, your race distance or your running goals.
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What are Hill Repeats? What are the Benefits of Running Hill Repeats? Increases Speed The muscles you use to run hills are the same you use when you do sprints.
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