8 Hill Running sessions

It may be obvious to include hills in your training if your race is hilly, but there are many other ways that hills can help you run better; they can improve run technique, leg strength, speed, power and endurance.  Along with adding interest to your training.

Top hill running sessions

1. Long run with plenty of hills: this will build up leg strength and endurance.  You can run this in 2 ways.  The first way is to just focus on running any ups hard and take the rest of the run easy.  Run up all the hills if you can, however slow you are going as this will build your confidence in what you can get up.  The second way is to focus on the downhills.  Just take it steady on the ups, but go hard and think about technique on the way down (relax, don’t lean back, pick up your feet quickly).  Down hill running builds leg strength and can also gain you time in races if you learn to maximise your use of gravity.
2. Hill sprints: these should be included in everyone’s run training!  They consist of sprinting as fast as you can, up a moderately steep hill for 8-10s.  Followed by a very slow walk back.  A thorough warm up is required first and you may want to build up speed over 2-3 sprints before hitting top speed.  Start with 3-4 reps and build up to 8-10.  The mistake most distance addicted runners make is not to allow enough recovery time to really sprint each one, or not to treat it as a proper session because it is so short.  If you run fast enough it will be hard.  How hill sprints will help; they will encourage a short, quick stride with good knee lift, arm drive and a toe push off, they improve leg power and allow you to work on your maximum speed with lower injury risk than sprinting on the flat
3. Kenyan Hills: this is a continuous hill sessions either going up and down the same hill, or around a hilly loop.  You have a set time to keep running up and down, keeping the tempo up throughout, teaching you to run over the top of hills and building endurance and strength.  An example session would be 3x 8min continuous with 3min recovery between.
4. Hill pyramids: these can be done in a couple of ways, either using markers such as lamp posts or cones to divide the hill up, or using time.  Example sessions are short, medium, long, medium, short hills using markers with the number of sets depending on your hill length.  For time you can do 30s, 1min, 2min, 3min, 2min, 1min, 30s.  Jog back down after each hill then go again.
5. Start each hill higher reps: These are useful if your hill isn’t that long, as starting higher each time reduces the recovery.  So you would start at the base of the hill and run to the top, then just come down 2/3 of the way and back to the top, come down 1/3 and sprint to the top, then jog back down to the bottom and you have completed one set.
6. Downhill repeats: Find a nice grass down hill that you can comfortably run fast down and work on the often missed downhill technique. You want to be picking your feet up quickly, leaning forward if possible and using your arms for balance.
7. Devil take the hindmost game: a fun group game to play where whoever is last to the top of a hill has to drop out until there is a winner.  Do a hill training session first, or the first to drop out doesn’t get much of a session!
8. Combinations: Most of these can be mixed together to give you even more variety in hill training sessions.  Good combination sessions are: 3 hill sprints, 10min Kenyan hills, 3 hill sprints or add a Devil take the hindmost game onto any hill sessions as a surprise extra to get everyone working just a bit harder.

What if you don’t have any hills?  There is probably some sort of incline somewhere near you, even if it is a road bridge.  You need to make the most of this.  Of course treadmills can also provide a hill of any length, but most can’t offer a downhill.

Hopefully all these different options will offer you plenty of hill running challenges and fun!