Climbing training

wine9555

I s the best way to get better at riding hills to dedicate one or two bike rides a week to riding hills over and over for a hour or two or would that be overtraining.

blackhands

Not necessarily "overtraining" (which will cause chronic fatigue) but certainly if you ride hills 'over and over for an hour or two' your performance will drop off so that you get less and less benefit.

bigal.

Best way to get better at Hills is to ride them as much as possible. There are a couple of way you can do this by either picking short climbs and attacking them as fast as possible or going for the longer option and just finding a comfortable pace and climb as smoothly for as long as your legs can carry you.

I have a local climb which is approx 8 miles in length which on Saturday I parked at the bottom and just went up and down as many times as possible. Five and a half hours later I was suitably wrecked and ready for a pint. It is a bit boring but I reckon it's a great way to help you find your climbing legs. The bit I enjoyed the most was catching a guy on my last ascent and seeing his face when I told him how many times I had been up and down.

Toks

wine9555 wrote:

I s the best way to get better at riding hills to dedicate one or two bike rides a week to riding hills over and over for a hour or two or would that be overtraining.

That would be a good approach especially if you have a steady 15-30minute climb locally. Alternatively if your short on climbs you could opt for some threshold building sessions on the flat - partiularly good place to start if you're finding climbing demoralising. Riding on the flat at or close to one hour time trial pace in blocks of 2 x twenty minutes would see you make good gains.

Or indeed you could ride at a good brisk tempo, not quite TT intensity, for 60-120mins. Basically you need to improve your overall fitness levels to get better at cliombing and being faster on the bike generally. If you can incorporate some tempo workouts, threshold workouts and even an endurance ride into some kind of weekly training plan you'll see good gains in in 3-5 months time. Alternatively save youself the headache and get a coach to do it

nolf

Depends what kind of climbs you are training for.

If you are going for typical UK- that is- short and sharp.
Sprint training on hills will help. You're looking much more for explosive outbursts to fly you up the hill. So find a hill that takes about 5/10 mins to climb at tempo pace, then practice sprinting up it.

If you're looking for long gradual climbs like they have in the alps or just the long ones in the UK, then try sitting up into a headwind for 20/30 mins on the flat, or just practice going up and down long gradual hills at tempo pace. Because this is more endurance based rather than explosive power, you need to build the endurance muscles more.

Losing weight will help a lot, and repeatedly climbing hills will really help mentally. I find nowadays most of the hills around here don't phase me because I deliberately aim for them and therefore have got used to them and find them a welcome challenge.

If you're looking at racing there was a good article in C+ a while back talking about how to tackle the shorter climbs we have in the UK. It was along the lines of practice explosive power and so do sprint training, intervals and leg speed/power training generally. Practice going up the hill and getting faster as you reach the top. So when you crest you should be going max speed giving opposed to starting fast and slowing down. This was race conditions tho!