Part 4 of a series by Craig Upton
This installment was written by fellow New Zealander, Jon Ackland from Performance Labs, NZ.

@##=#<1,L>@##=#The reason appears to be as follows. If you do lots of easy training, you end up doing more hills, and if you did hill work gently how many hills could you do? Lots and lots, right? All day if you wanted to.

If you do them at the moderate intensity you normally do them at, how many could you do? 5, 10, 15, 20?

Why is this significant?

If you do your hills gently, you do more hills and that makes you a lot stronger.

So one of the most interesting things about hill work is that you initially need to do hills gently to get the strength that you can use later on. The reason for this is that when you are going up a hill at moderate intensity you are using 2 systems, the muscular system and the cardiovascular system. The problem with this is that the cardiovascular system is the system that creates that primary and most significant stress on the body, which fatigues you quickly. If you have the cardiovascular system involved a lot in your hill work then it will be very very hard to do too many hills. And it takes a lot more time to recover.

But what if you could remove the amount of cardiovascular effort required? In other words, do the hills gently. What this does is remove the cardiovascular stress with most of the load going onto the muscular system. If you did that you could do many more hills and get much stronger.

As you got towards the end of the program you would then do moderate intensity and high intensity hills as you traditionally do. Imagine how this final training would go with all that initial extra strength already done. So the bizarre thing is that to go fast you need to do hills gently but you have to do 2, 3, or 4 times the number of hills you have ever done before. So you don’t cycle 10k to get to the base of the climbs, you drive to the hills and then go and ride in the hills. You become a mountain goat. Mistakes that can be made are doing too many hills too hard and getting shattered, or doing hills gently but not enough of them.

Part 1: Following the Program
Part 2: Recovery–The Forgotten Training Element
Part 3: Racing the Big Races Without Feeling Small