How To Run Hills For Endurance & Strength
Plus a sample workout and a quote to make you a smarter athlete
On Monday, I launched this tweet out.
Too many people replied with option 3, so this write up explains why you’d benefit from considering 1 and 2.
I also share a hill repeat workout for anyone who wants to push hard.
Let’s dive in.
A Change In Assumptions
Hills are a big unlock in the mental development of beginner endurance athletes for 1 key reason:
Beginners assume they know what to do.
And it’s usually the opposite of what they should do.
When I first started endurance training, I brought all my prior running assumptions with me:
run to lose weight
run faster to get faster
run up hills fast, or else you’re fat and slow
I quickly realized I was wrong about all of it.
I heard this quote and immediately changed my approach:
“Amateurs run fast uphill and take it easy on the way down. Pros do the opposite.”
Get More Fit, Stay Pain Free & Commit To Process
Here are the 3 main benefits of taking hills easy:
Maximize aerobic development
If you’re doing an aerobic/Z2 run, you get max fitness development by staying in Z2 the entire time.
If you don’t have a strong aerobic base, ANY surge into your anaerobic zones (Z3, Z4, Z5) might mean your body never clears lactate accumulated when you go anaerobic and you never return to Z2.
This past write up explains how fitness develops best by keeping easy runs easy:
Keep your knees and hips healthy
People who go too hard up hills usually go too easy on the way down.
When you go slow downhill, you maximize the ground contact time with each stride.
This sends a huge amount of impact force up the kinetic chain from your ankles to your knees, hips and lower back.
If you want to stay pain free, lean into downhills, use gravity to your advantage and let it rip a little!!
Pro tip: pick your feet up quickly to minimize ground contact time.
Check your ego and commit to process
When I first got into endurance, my gut instinct when training got hard was to push back with force.
Years in the gym taught me that if I wanted to finish a rep, I needed to PUSH!!!
Endurance is the opposite.
If you want to last in endurance, you must learn to accept discomfort, flow with it and carry on at a steady pace.
It takes significant mental discipline to check down your pacing on hills (possibly to a walk), but it’s likely best for your long term goals.
When Hard Hills Are Good For You
In the context of aerobic endurance training, you need to stay disciplined and manage your effort.
But hills done right are an important part of any run program.
High intensity hills can…
build run strength
build anaerobic fitness
make you feel accomplished
And a lot more
Here’s how to do them.
Sample Hill Repeat Workout
The best time to push hard up hills is during a hill repeat workout.
But “pushing hard” doesn’t mean just sprinting all out to the top of a hill.
Hill repeats are most effective when you focus on POWER and FORM.
You want to feel your legs powerfully pushing off the ground with each stride. Speed is secondary (and will come naturally).
Here’s a sample workout to try for yourself:
Total run time: 45 minutes
15-20 minute warmup into Z2
7 x 30 second hill repeats with 2 minutes recovery
10-15 minute easy cool down
Have any questions on hills? Shoot me a reply and I’ll help you out.
Thanks for the insights. I am fast on hills and my ego enjoys that fact, so I may have ruined one or the other Z2 training. Next time I'll take it easy :-D
Love the idea of speed being secondary to power and form. I have slowly been figuring that out on my own here recently.