When you start running 70-100m hills on saturdays. What is the intensity supposed to be? Full exertion?
It depends - how many are you doing (i.e. total volume) and how much rest will you be taking between repetitions?
It also depends on what you are trying to get out of the hill workout (general conditioning, special endurance, etc.) and where this particular workout falls in terms of other training during the week.
I think people run hills because they feel difficult. That is not a good reason to integrate them into a program. Have a plan.
I am rookie bobbsledder so most of my work is in acceleration. But lately I wanted to use some long hills for speed endurance. Earlier in the year I did some 300s and did 150s, 120s, 100s, once a week and I believed they helped my top speed and work capacity but they had a negative effect on my strength work in the weight room and I even had some trouble keeping my bodyweight up where it needs to be. I just finished the gpp essentials 3 weeks ago and since then I had been doing 70-80m hills at around 15-20 degrees. 2 sets of 3 reps with 8 minutes rest between reps and 15 minutes between sets. And I have just been running them close to full exertion on saturdays after all my acceleration and lifting is done for the week. So far they don’t feel as punishing on my system as the other typical SE training but I want to save my cns for short sprints, lifting, and pushing the sled. Any advice would be appreciated.
For bobsleigh, I would be more apt to have you work on 30m sprints on an incline to develop general strength and acceleration power. Beyond 30m, you will only develop special endurance qualities and strength endurance qualities. You will not be improving maximal velocity work.
If you want to run the longer hills (60+ meters), you may want to use them for general strength endurance qualities and find a pace that gives you a good workout, without excess fatigue spilling over into other critical elements. This may mean putting a cap on intensity and shortening recoveries.
I’m not a big fan of having athletes run hills for Special Endurance as it will kick your ass and may not provide the payoff (adaptation-wise) that you are looking for. It’s a tough workout, but not a smart one for what you are training towards.
In the ten day taper dvd you had a short period of long hills, speaking with CF he said I could sub long sled pulls if I didn’t have access to long hills. What was your purpose of the long hills?
General strength endurance coupled with a break from acceleration work. Because of our climate situation and lack of a full indoor track, most of our speed work was limited to indoor accelerations to 35 meters. It became apparent to me that only doing work to 35 meters can burn an athlete out if the volumes get too high. I substituted in a longer hill workout to give us a break from the pure acceleration work (one workout per week) and work on general strength endurance.
Because of our cold, wet climate, I chose the hills because the velocity would be lower and we wouldn’t be at risk for muscle strain. But the hills would give us some strength endurance work that would serve us later in the year. I believe we did a 5 to 6 week block of training with the hills (250-300 meters in distance).
Good points N2. I’m in my GPP CF style, and also short hills (40 m) are taxing, particularly if you are not used to them. I experimented with long hills and I had big problems with my calves. That could be transient or not, but taking to my heart the precautionary principle, I decided to put them aside for the moment.
Thanks for the advice. I did 3 weeks of long hills which is probably enough. I still do short 30m hills and I will replace the long hills on saturdays with tempo.
what was the approx incline of the hlls you used?