Techniques For Ascending Steep Hills

Hi there! 👋

I hope your training has been going well over the last month. It’s been a busy one here, with lots of fun low-key racing and some adventures in the hills! I’ve also been recovering from a successful Bob Graham Round in July. 🎉 

This month, I wanted to talk about different techniques for ascending steep hills.

For every runner, there will come a point where the gradient gets so steep that it’s more efficient to walk rather than run. In other words, you can move at essentially the same speed walking as running, but with less effort. This run/walk transition point will be different for every runner, depending on fitness and running economy. 

It will also depend on how long your run or race is. For example if you’re just running 5km, then you can afford to go harder on the hills (i.e. keep running rather than walking), without burning all your matches before the end of the 5km. Whereas if you’re doing a 50-mile ultra, it’s important to keep the intensity reigned-in so that you limit muscle damage and muscle glycogen depletion, which are the key contributors to fatigue in long events. 

Many runners will have strong opinions on the ‘best’ walking technique… Should you go for hands on thighs, to get extra leverage from your arms? Or perhaps a nice upright posture to better fill your lungs?

I wanted to wade in with some thoughts on the pros and cons of a couple of key techniques, and some suggestions on when different strategies might suit you best. 

Method 1: Hands-On-Thighs

This is a very popular approach, where you lean your upper body forward into the hill, with hands on thighs, pushing down with your arms so that they can assist your legs with each step. 

Usually your cadence will be quite low with this technique, and your stride length quite large, which makes this a very ‘strength-focussed’ method. Each step places a large load on your leg muscles (particularly your quads). The demands on your cardiovascular system (e.g. breathing and heart rate) are comparatively lower. 

With this climbing approach, you’ll usually feel most limited by the ability of your muscles to keep producing high forces, rather than your breathing or heart rate, for example. 

If I’m using this technique, I personally like to really lean into the hill a lot, so that I’m almost in a squat position, which helps get the glutes more involved to share the workload with the quads. 

Method 2: Upright, with Fast Feet

Another technique that works well involves standing quite upright, with your hands either on your hips or behind your back to open up your chest, and allow you to breathe deeply and effectively. 

In this posture, you can take much shorter steps, but at a high cadence - essentially breaking the climb into lots of smaller chunks (i.e. steps) compared with the hands-on-thighs method. 

With this technique, each step requires much less force from the leg muscles, and the higher stride rate means that the demands are placed more on the cardiovascular system, and less on muscle strength, though you’ll still find you work the calf muscles quite heavily. 

When using this method, I personally like to drive my foot vertically down, with my foot landing almost right below me (rather than far in front), which helps utilise the glute muscles too.

Which is best?

Both of these approaches can be really effective climbing techniques. Which approach works best for you will depend to some extent on your inherent strengths and limiters.

For example, runners with good muscle strength but less well-trained aerobic fitness will tend to do better with the hands-on-thighs approach, whereas runners who have a strong aerobic system, and comparatively lower muscle strength will do better with the upright-fast-feet technique. 

One thing I’ve noticed from personal experience is that the gradient also makes a big difference too.

I tend to favour hands-on-thighs on slightly shallower gradients, because the muscular demand from each stride is not too high, and I can sustain the effort.

However, as the gradient gets really steep, the muscular demand becomes too high to be sustainable (because you are having to lift the body through a greater vertical distance with each step). In this case, I prefer the upright-fast-feet method, where I can chip away at the hill little-by-little. If I keep my cadence high with this upright-fast-feet approach, I’ve found I can climb notably faster on very steep gradients compared with using the hands-on-thighs method, even though my steps are much shorter. 

The best way to know which approach to use is to test them while climbing and see which feels best, and which allows you to move more rapidly with less effort. Sometimes switching between the two methods can be helpful too, because it will give your different systems (e.g. muscle and cardiovascular system) a bit of a rest. 

Of course there are also other adjustments or iterations to these approaches that you can try. For example you might favour an upright posture (to aid breathing), but with bigger strides. Poles are also an option, but we won’t delve into that topic here, since there is lots to say around pole technique. 

Ultimately, my advice is to play around with different body positions and techniques to see what feels good, but bear in mind that what works on one gradient might not be optimal for another. 

News

If you like to plan your own training, or are looking for some inspiration for different types of training sessions, I’m very pleased to announce we’ve just launched our new Complete Workout Library for Off-Road Runners!

This is a selection of over 80 workouts, specifically designed to hone the fitness, strength and skills necessary for trail, fell, mountain and ultra-distance running. 

The library is for use with TrainingPeaks, and allows you to drag and drop sessions into your TrainingPeaks calendar, and export the sessions to your running watch, or apps like Zwift. 

The sessions are graded by level, so that you can see how to progress as your abilities improve. 

The library also comes with a PDF user guide to help get the most from the library, including advice on choosing sessions and structuring these within your week. 

You can read more about the library here! 

That’s it for this month! If you’re relatively new to the mailing list and want to see previous instalments, then you can do so here.

Thanks and happy running! 🏃‍♀️🏃

Emma