HIT THE SLOPES
Learning to run up (and down) hills in the right way can be hugely beneficial to your training, as Peta Bee reports
Using hills in your training is very much worth the effort
HILLS are hard and they are brutal. Yet, however unforgiving they are in the resistance they provide, the benefits that come from regularly running up them are immense.
Beyond the obvious gains to endurance and strength, there are more subtle, less obvious, performance enhancements.
Running up and down an incline develops strength in the trunk muscles that promote stabilisation, improves co-ordination and balance and heightens muscle elasticity — crucial in warding off injury.
There is little doubt, too, that they will also slice valuable seconds off your running times.
When exercise scientists at the esteemed Karolinska Institute in Stockholm studied a group of marathon runners who were asked to perform sessions on a 400m hill twice weekly for three months — running at a variety of intensities from relaxed, easy striding to very hard efforts — they found them to have improved their running economy (or energy demand for running) by three per cent at the end of the trial. That may sound small, but it’s enough to shave minutes off a marathon time.