Hill training

TakeTurns

Which do you reckon will give better training results?

Repeating a long hill 5 times at near max effort?
or
Repeating it 10 times at average effort?

My current hill training includes 10 repeats of a long-ish hill, with a bit of added effort on the last climb.

Trev The Rev

TakeTurns wrote:

Which do you reckon will give better training results?

Repeating a long hill 5 times at near max effort?
or
Repeating it 10 times at average effort?

My current hill training includes 10 repeats of a long-ish hill, with a bit of added effort on the last climb.

Old school training, riding up hills, pointless without a power meter, a Garmin & associated software. People used to do this in the old days, things have improved, now people know how to train properly with power and understand FTP, CTL & TSS they go much faster.

Tom Dean

FFS Trev.
If you have an issue with certain people's views, reply sarcastically to THOSE PEOPLE, leave the rest of us out of it.

OP, it depends. How long and how hard are you talking, and how does it fit in with the rest of your training.

SBezza

What are you training for is the first question?

TakeTurns

SBezza wrote:

What are you training for is the first question?

Well I started racing this year and stuck to mainly crits/flat courses because of my weakness on the long climbs (1km+/Av grade 8/9%). I'm not hopeless on climbs, however I doubt I'll be able to hold my position in a race.

Now that I'm in cat3, the races are going to be getting harder and hillier so I want to improve my climbing. Dedicating 1-2 days a week into hills will be my aim, but I don't know which sort of climbing would be most beneficial.

Tom Dean

It's all about training at the right power levels, whether you do that on a hill or on the flat is irrelevant. Figure out what kind of intervals you want to do and train on the hill if it is convenient.

Weight is obviously the other issue when racing uphill, you look skinny in your avatar so if you're ok in 3rd cat crits I wouldn't worry too much about struggling in road races.

SBezza

I am not so sure riding to the same power on the flat helps as much as doing that power up a hill, you tend to ride in a different position going up a hill, so I would say that if you want to get better at going up the hills, train specifically for that. Also if you were doing high power intervals on a flat road you would likely be going at quite a speed, and finding a suitable road to keep up the power and hence speed might be problematic for some. I know I resorted to doing Vo2Max intervals up a hill as doing them on a flat road was proving to be slightly difficult due to the roads I had available and the speed I was travelling at.

I would have thought that attacks would likely go on up the hills, so doing them at a higher power and doing less of them might be the better option, I suppose it also depends on how long the climbs generally last, I don't think you want to be doing 5-10 min climbs at threshold no matter how many you do of them, then again you wouldn't want to be doing 10min + climbs at Vo2Max effort either.

Trev The Rev

TakeTurns wrote:

SBezza wrote:

What are you training for is the first question?

Well I started racing this year and stuck to mainly crits/flat courses because of my weakness on the long climbs (1km+/Av grade 8/9%). I'm not hopeless on climbs, however I doubt I'll be able to hold my position in a race.

Now that I'm in cat3, the races are going to be getting harder and hillier so I want to improve my climbing. Dedicating 1-2 days a week into hills will be my aim, but I don't know which sort of climbing would be most beneficial.

Be specific, train on the gradients and length hills you expect to encounter in a race and try to use the same gearing. The best training for climbing is climbing. 300 watts is 300 watts, but 300 watts on the turbo at 90rpm will not be the best training for climbing steep hills in a different gear.

Cookie91

Im not an expert, but i believe they will both train two different things.
Doing the harder faster efforts will help raise your fast sprints and sustained speed, and the slower paced climbs will help with muscular endurance, (holding a certain speed for a period of time)