Hill Climb Training

supermurph09

Hi
I'll be entering a number of hill climbs this year and although it might be a bit late I was wondering what types of hill specific sessions others do to improve? I've practised Monsal today http://www.strava.com/segments/2533074 and the event is in 6 weeks time so I'm looking to focus my riding in that time.

I've begun incorporating hill repeats but I need to understand how to do these properly without them being counterproductive. By that I mean, if I ride up a 0.4 mile climb at average gradient of 10% once, the second time around I'm going to be weaker and slower, third time I'll be struggling even more etc. Does that matter or will the benefits come?

Cheers

mattclinton

Monsal is a strange one, with it being more of a sprint than a hill climb.

Ideally you want to do this climb, if you're doing repeats, to not go 100% on the first few efforts and take some time to recover between the the efforts eg. 5mins. (I'm not sure if you can turn left at the top and drop down again to the bottom of the climb further down the road)

supermurph09

Cheers Matt, you can indeed ride around but its quite a long drag and not a place to recover on. Also the climb is 20+ miles from my door so my plan was to find a similar climb (to simulate the effort required), nearer my house. I have quite a few to choose from. So what you'd suggest is probably to do the climb I find, but recover enough in between efforts to be able to attack, as opposed to riding up and down?

phreak

Do you need to do it on the climb itself? Say it will take 2 minutes to get up, then training for 2 minutes of hard effort seems like the best approach. Might even be able to do that on the turbo. Riding the climb itself is going to give you an idea about gearing and pacing, but aside from that I don't think you need to do your training on it.

supermurph09

Phreak, tbh training on the climb itself is not really an option, I'm off work today but would be unable to get there after work. I'll just try to simulate the effort with proper recovery in between and see how I do.

phreak

I don't know how much you can gain in the next few weeks in terms of performance, but I would think some experience with pacing yourself for the required duration would be a big help. Maybe try and replicate the all out effort for that length to see how far you can push yourself, what gears you want, whether the road surface is likely to be a bit slippery etc.

amaferanga

6 weeks is plenty long enough to see significant gains in power over a 90 second (or thereabouts) interval.

ric/rstsport

6 weeks is a good chunk of time to do lots of hill climb type intervals of between say 30-sec and 5-mins.

some efforts you should aim to ride flat out (get a feel for what race effort is and make sure you learn the art of pacing) and some should be easier (so that you can do 'many' of them). others can be ridden harder than race pace (but obviously for shorter efforts).

Ric

BigFatBloke

Ric/RSTSport wrote:

6 weeks is a good chunk of time to do lots of hill climb type intervals of between say 30-sec and 5-mins.

some efforts you should aim to ride flat out (get a feel for what race effort is and make sure you learn the art of pacing) and some should be easier (so that you can do 'many' of them). others can be ridden harder than race pace (but obviously for shorter efforts).

Ric

Without a power meter?

napoleond

BigFatBloke wrote:

Ric/RSTSport wrote:

6 weeks is a good chunk of time to do lots of hill climb type intervals of between say 30-sec and 5-mins.

some efforts you should aim to ride flat out (get a feel for what race effort is and make sure you learn the art of pacing) and some should be easier (so that you can do 'many' of them). others can be ridden harder than race pace (but obviously for shorter efforts).

Ric

Without a power meter?

He didn't mention power meter. Stop trolling.

ric/rstsport

Napoleon it's trev again

BigFatBloke

NapoleonD wrote:

BigFatBloke wrote:

Ric/RSTSport wrote:

6 weeks is a good chunk of time to do lots of hill climb type intervals of between say 30-sec and 5-mins.

some efforts you should aim to ride flat out (get a feel for what race effort is and make sure you learn the art of pacing) and some should be easier (so that you can do 'many' of them). others can be ridden harder than race pace (but obviously for shorter efforts).

Ric

Without a power meter?

He didn't mention power meter. Stop trolling.

He mentioned learning the art of pacing and feel. It is well known that Ric and other coaches argue using a power meter can help this.

BigFatBloke

Ric/RSTSport wrote:

Napoleon it's trev again

I'm Sparticus.

napoleond

BigFatBloke wrote:

NapoleonD wrote:

BigFatBloke wrote:

Ric/RSTSport wrote:

6 weeks is a good chunk of time to do lots of hill climb type intervals of between say 30-sec and 5-mins.

some efforts you should aim to ride flat out (get a feel for what race effort is and make sure you learn the art of pacing) and some should be easier (so that you can do 'many' of them). others can be ridden harder than race pace (but obviously for shorter efforts).

Ric

Without a power meter?

He didn't mention power meter. Stop trolling.

He mentioned learning the art of pacing and feel. It is well known that Ric and other coaches argue using a power meter can help this.

He didn't mention anything about a pm in this post. Stop trolling.

ric/rstsport

YAWN.

supermurph09

I believe amongst the handbags there is some advice! Thanks!

I don't have a powermeter btw.

mattclinton

Murph, go out and find a similar climb and do a (near enough) all out effort, take about 5mins or so before you repeat this again. From what I remember reading years ago, some guys would do the efforts until their times for the rep drops below 10% or something from the initial effort.

simon_e

http://cyclinginfo.co.uk/blog/5818/trai ... -training/

http://www.bikeradar.com/fitness/articl ... lls-23531/

supermurph09

Thanks for the links.

BigFatBloke

Ric/RSTSport wrote:

6 weeks is a good chunk of time to do lots of hill climb type intervals of between say 30-sec and 5-mins.

some efforts you should aim to ride flat out (get a feel for what race effort is and make sure you learn the art of pacing) and some should be easier (so that you can do 'many' of them). others can be ridden harder than race pace (but obviously for shorter efforts).

Ric

6 weeks is almost ideal for training up the anaerobic system. Find a hill or some hills with the same sort of gradient, or if you can't find anything steep enough go up what is available in a bigger gear. Get used to how hard and how long you can sustain hard efforts up hills and the sort of cadence / gearing suits you. Work out if you are faster out of the saddle or sitting.

In 6 weeks you can make some big improvements anaerobically even if there is not enough time to improve your sustainable one hour power (FTP) much.

I agree with Ric here - apologies for sidetracking with my little power meter dig...

napoleond

6 weeks is also a good short term goal to really lose weight too. You can sacrifice for that length of time with an end in sight.

BigFatBloke

NapoleonD wrote:

6 weeks is also a good short term goal to really lose weight too. You can sacrifice for that length of time with an end in sight.

True and weight loss would help in a hill climb but I would not advise trying to lose weight whist doing hard anaerobic training.