Hill Running Benefits: Why You Need Hills In Your Training Program
Updated: Nov 19
Checking your schedule and seeing you have a hill session for the day is, for most runners, a horrible feeling. Knowing that your legs are going to be aching, breathing hard, and having to push is horrible enough, but for some reason, a lot of runners do not find hill sessions very satisfactory. I have an interesting theory as to why this is- most runners use any faster sessions to test where they are with their fitness and hills don't give the best indication of how fast you can run a 5k. However, there are a lot of benefits to hill running.
However, this is the biggest mistake runners make by far! Never use training to find out what shape you're in, instead get in the shape you want to be in by training.
"Training to failure is failure of training" - Arthur Lydiard
Whether you are running an interval session, a tempo run, or a hill session, you should always have a fair bit left at the end of your session, you should always be able to do a couple extra reps at the end if you had to.
The benefits of running hills
Running hills has many different benefits to your performance:
Better form: Running hills encourages you to run with better running form, and one of the main focuses you should have when running hills is to have good form. Running hills forces you to drive your knees higher, meaning you are going to be learning to run with a longer stride and will be developing your leg power. Hills also teach you to run with your hips in a better position, meaning your glutes will activate better and help you run more efficiently.
Increased strength: Due to the gradient of running up hills, you will improve the strength of your legs. This can help to prevent injuries from running and also help to develop your stride length to help you run faster.
Improve sprint speed: Due to the benefits of improving your form and the fact that you will be doing short reps, you will improve your sprint speed. Better sprint speed means that all your slower paces will feel much more comfortable.
Improve lactate threshold: The "burning" runners refer to in their legs is something that they often blame on lactic acid, however, it's actually the build up of Hydrogen Ions (H+). When we start to work harder and respire anaerobically, glucose is converted into lactate, and that starts to build up in our muscles. While lactate isn't responsible for the burning sensation, it is built up alongside the hydrogen ions, which leads to the aching in our muscles. (Lactic acid and exercise performance : culprit or friend?).
You are going to be building lactate and Hydrogen ions up in your legs when you run hills, so one of the main benefits of hill running which often goes overlooked is the fact that your body has to learn how to clear lactate faster. When you finish each rep and begin to jog down the hill, your body starts clearing the lactate whilst you are moving, this in turn will improve your body's ability to get rid of lactate acid efficiently.
Improve aerobic capacity: Hills are not an all-out session, but it is a continuous run because as soon as you finish a rep you start jogging down the hill for your recovery. These continuous hill sessions will benefit your aerobic capacity to help you maintain harder sessions later on down the line.
Overall, the benefits of running hills go on and on, running hills are a vital part of everyone runners preparation and hopefully, these benefits are going to make you more motivated to get out and do your hill sessions!
You may also like: Gym workouts for runners.
How to run a hill session
Hopefully, this explanation will also make you hate hill sessions less!!!
People hate hills because they see it as this horribly hard session with aching legs and all of that lactate acid. However, to get the true benefits of hill sessions you should not be running these too hard, instead, you should run with good form and should only push this session to about 85/90% effort. You should be able to do at least an extra few reps by the end of the session and it should feel very controlled all the way through.
You may have heard that the best and most efficient way to run hills is by shortening your stride and increasing your cadence. And this is true!!! However, for a hill session, you can get more benefits by running with a good stride length to increase your strength and improve your form. You should feel like you have a nice long and strong stride, but make sure you are not over-striding.
Example hill sessions
There are many different ways to run hills, but these 3 are going to be the most beneficial to your performance.
The classic hill session
This is where you do reps of 30-60 seconds reps up the hill and have a slow jog down as your recovery. I find this to be the most beneficial hill session, I usually do 2x 10x 30-second reps. For added benefits do 2-4x 15 seconds hill sprints at the end with a very slow and long recovery between reps (this is a vital part of the session for me and I personally highly recommend doing this). (1)
2x 10x 30 seconds
5x 60 second hills, 10x 30 second hills
Kenyan hills
The Kenyan hill session is very different from most. For these types of hill sessions, you run fast around a hill loop or run uphill fast and downhill fast. Running this type of hill session has the benefit of teaching you how to run downhill efficiently and develops your speed very well as you can run even faster downhill. This type of session works very well to develop your aerobic capacity as it is run at a continuously fast pace.
5x 5 minutes of continuously running up and down a 1-2 minute hill with 2 minutes recovery
5x 5 minutes of continuously running up and down a 1-2 minute hill with 3 minutes recovery
Arthur Lydiard Hill's session
This is a very unique hill session that was first introduced by the revolutionary coach Arthur Lydiard who coached some of the best to ever do it such as Peter Snell.
This session is much longer but it can be made shorter by doing fewer reps. What Lydiard's athletes used to do it run a 2-mile hill loop 4 times. The loop goes as follows:
800m uphill (200m hill bounding, 400m running normally up the hill, and then 200m hill springing, which is similar to bounding but you focus more on pushing up than forward)
800m flat at the top, this is easy to recover
800m downhill fast, this used to be running very fast by Lydiard's athletes (Snell ran 1:50 for this)
800m run along the bottom of the circuit (this is broken up into 50m leg speed drills which focus on turning the legs over as fast as possible)
This is an amazing hill session as it develops power, improves form, and increases endurance better than any other hill session, but it is just harder to run a session this long or find the right spot to do it.
Lydiard coached a lot of athletes and never once had an athlete with Achilles tendonitis or hamstring tendonitis, he puts that down to the fact his athletes used to run these hill sessions.
Learn more about Lydiard hills: The Lydiard Hill Training Method.
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