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So after a fair bit of bike pushing over the weekend I am keen to improve my tackling of hills.
Living in the salt flats of Suffolk we don't really have hills to practice on!
I quite enjoy climbing on the bike but my stamina for prolonged/repeated climbing is poor.
Without moving back to the Southwest or heading North what can I do?
get a road bike and pedal
keep pedalling - go fast and go long get used to pedalling hard for a long time
oh and pedal and pedal and pedal
join a road club that goes out on hard fast rides (eg a chain gang that do a 50 to 60 miler on a saturday morning - these hurt alot to start with but as you get fitter they still hurt alot)
keep pedalling alot
due to work I had to move to lincolnshire - I did the above and can more often than not beat my mates up long climbs in Scotland these days (they all ride hills)
I am still struggling on short fast steep stuff - but am working on it.
1. Loose weight
2. Get fitter, more long rides
3. Interval sessions
4.Increase leg strength at gym using weights
5. Turbo interval sessions in very high gear, not spin
6. Do not stand and climb as you lose rear wheel traction on MTB so practice climbing sat on the seat
There’s nothing special about hills its a combination of power to weight ratio. Less weight more power is what you want.
Technique can help, the lowest gear isnt always the best for climbing. Spinning like a nutter just increases hear rate. Try slightly higher gear keeps hear rate lower. On techy climbs you need to blast up or get over obstacle a higher gear can help to.
Points one and two are key 😉
Best bit of cycling advice I got told was from one of my club TT riders. He said, "always pedal and never freewheel"
Obviously, this is only good on a road bike but was his way of getting the point across that you should always be working.
"always pedal and never freewheel"
Fine for the road but bobbins advice for offroad where freewheeling and pumping the ground can generate more speed for less effort and be smoother.
My experience of being injured and only able to ride a turbo in my living room was that it actually improved my climbing.
As suggested above, I was doing hard spells with high resistance though.
"always pedal and never freewheel"
Fine for the road but bobbins advice for offroad where freewheeling and pumping the ground can generate more speed for less effort and be smoother.
If you can pump your way up every climb (the subject of the OP's question) great, but fundamentally the best practise for pedalling... is pedalling.
Having said that OP, have you considered other (non-cycling) forms of exercise? Swimming might help build stamina and leg muscles perhaps? Running although using your muscles in a different way could also help...
You're after some sort of steady resistance exercise I guess where you can stress yourself a bit above normal for sustained periods... Right?
Swimming might help build stamina and leg muscles perhaps?
If you're doing it right swimming won't build leg muscle! It may burn fat though.
Interval sessions
This +1
If you want to get better at climbing 5 minute hills, go out and 'climb' for 5 minutes, repeat 4 times. 'Climb' in Suffolk is just finding a nice long continuous road, preferably into a headwind and ride as fast as you can sustain for 5 minutes (i.e. at the end of the first 5 minutes you should feel exercised, but not worn out, at the end of the 4th interval you should throw up, but you should still be doing the same speed as interval 1). Then repeat a few days later but 2x20min at a slightly slower pace.
That assumes pace/speed is a good proxy for power. You could also use heart rate, but I find this is too slow to react, it takes mine 10 minutes to reach it's threshold at my 20min power.
29 er wheel on the front, 26 on the rear - that way you'll be riding uphill all the time!
If you can pump your way up every climb (the subject of the OP's question) great, but fundamentally the best practise for pedalling... is pedalling.
You're right. I was just questioning it as
Best bit of cycling advice I got
What TINAS said - hurt yourself on intervals!
Mix up the durations to make it lightly less suicide inducing.
As a native of Devon, sometimes I dream of flats longer than 200m.
TINAS's advice sounds best to me- I used to live in Fife and even there I found something that was moderately uphill for 2-3 minutes that I could batter up and down a few times and this made a real difference.
Head to the roads in the South of the county. The section from Freston through to Hadleigh and Bildeston via Stoke by Nayland has few continuous flat sections. It will make the Northern contingent laugh but I have a route through this area that manages to get 750m of ascent in 80km. There's some off-road in the Woodbridge area that I managed to squeeze 50m of ascent out of a similar distance (nettles and cheeky were involved).
I'm no expert but surely the most effective way to train for hills if there aren't any available is to buy a turbo trainer and keep doing sessions with a very high resistance on..there must surely be a specific hill training set of intervals that can be downloaded from somewhere