Hi, folks, it’s Kelvin here. We Run coach for Leeds and surrounding areas, as well as online coaching.
In this little video, I’m going to share some thoughts on shorter hill reps.
What Are Short Hill Reps?
Shorter intervals where we run up a hill for a period of time or a distance and then usually jog back down. Sometimes at the end of a faster rep, it might be walk for a short period of time just while we catch our breath, and then jog the rest of it back down to the start.
Why Hill Reps Matter for All Runners
These reps are a really important part of training for those who are training for all distances. I would say from people training for 200 metres up to people training for 200 miles, so they are relevant to everybody.
Top-end speed is really important, and it becomes more important as we age because it’s something that we do lose more than anything else. We generally keep the endurance side of it, and then we do lose the speed side of it.
Even for endurance-based events, that will mean that we’re getting slower because we’re always working at a percentage of our top-end speed.
Hill reps are good because there’s less chance of injury than running on the flat, but we can incorporate them into a schedule that has some flat, shorter intervals as well.
Structuring a Hill Rep Workout
What we’re trying to work towards is something that’s probably upwards of eight times one minute hills. So that can be anything from eight to 20 times one minute, depending on the runner, their goals, their experience, and how mechanically sound they are.
It does not always have to be one minute. It can be something like working up to four or five sets of 90 seconds, 60 seconds, 30-second hills with jog down recovery, and then maybe three minutes, either stationary or walking, between sets.
The Benefits of Running Hills
When we’re running up hills at faster paces, we put the hip into a little bit more extension, and we have to produce quite a lot of force. So it helps with that range of motion.
It helps with running mechanics from a number of standpoints. It helps us to get the foot at the front of the gait cycle down to the ground quite quickly, and it helps that hip extension.
It is faster pace running, so to produce that amount of power, the brain has to fire the muscles in the right order. This helps us make better use of the muscles that we’ve already got.
As we extend these workouts out to the sort of 10 to 16 minutes worth of work range, it can be quite a strong VO2 max stimulus as well.
It also brings fast-twitch muscle fibres into the equation. These are the ones that we do not often use. For most endurance athletes, it might be only in the very late stages of very long races where those fast-twitch muscle fibres come into play, or for trail runners where we have to jump up and down off things within a race.
So it is also helping to develop those fast-twitch muscle fibres.
How to Add Hill Reps Into Your Training
The best way to do this is maybe book a call with a coach. This is something that’s quite interesting. It does not mean that you have to work with that coach every month.
It might be that you book a consultation with a coach, so someone like myself or Coach Alexa, just to chat through how to implement something like this into training.
If someone is not doing faster running at all, we would probably start with strides, which are very short duration hill repeats with a full recovery, so a walk down recovery.
We might start building some strides into someone’s training, then increase the number of strides. Then we might split the number of strides over two runs.
From there, one of those runs might start to stretch out the strides a little bit. Then we might decrease both lots of strides while adding a shorter hill but longer rep workout.
It is a little bit individual, and it also depends on what goals someone has. For guidance on how to incorporate this into your training, it might be worth booking an hour’s consultation with a coach.
Final Thoughts
I hope that makes some sort of sense. If you’ve got any questions, please pop them in the comments below.
For now, happy running.
