CLIMB LIKE A SCHMO

To ‘climb like a pro’ you need to strip your body fat to single digits and eschew the finer things in life. Far better to…

To ‘climb like a pro’ you need to strip your body fat down to single digits. Far better to follow our hill-climbing hacks for the everyman and woman.

Climbing boils down to a simple ratio of power to weight – producing as much power (watts) as possible with the lowest body weight (kg). The higher your watts/kg, the faster you’ll rise up a mountain; clearly, the best things you can do to achieve this are train hard and, specifically, keep your body fat percentage as low as possible. We talk about how to ‘climb like a pro’ a lot at Cycling Plus, yet in reality few of us are ready to eschew the finer things in life, or are capable of absorbing the volume of training like the Chris Froomes of this world. And nor should you! Luckily, there are plenty of tricks to have up your sleeve to get you climbing faster than ever at your target event this summer.

Friends with benefits

In professional cycling, the grupetto – the often-substantial group of shelled riders at the back of the race – is a tight-knit bunch. Working together to make time cuts, they’re able to climb faster by virtue of being in a group. We all know about the drafting benefits on the flat, but it works on climbs too, to a lesser degree, on gradients under six per cent, and is more effective the faster you go. For a fourth category amateur racer, the drafting benefit falls away sharply above four per cent.

However, the performance gains of being in a group on climbs of all gradients are as much psychological, with your perceived exertion dropping when following wheels, says Liam Holohan, a former pro cyclist-turned-coach who came eighth in last year’s Etape du Tour sportive.

In terms of where you are in a group when a climb kicks off, there are clear benefits to starting at the front. In a road race, “it gives you sliding room,” he says. “Begin at third wheel and end as 50th, you’ve ridden that climb slower than anyone and saved energy, but you’re still in the bunch.”

In a sportive, darting off the front in anticipation of a climb is a decent tactic, because there’s little worse than seeing your mates disappear into the sunset. Getting up the road will give you a fillip that might just keep you in contact with your pals once they’ve made the catch. Climbing is as much in the head as it is in the legs.

The same applies to the start of a sportive: if there’s an hour window in which to start, as there is at many sportives, get going closer to 7am than 8am. Playing catch-up is less fun – and it reduces your chances of being insidiously stalked by the broom wagon.

Proper pacing is the most important aspect to climbing an Alpine col, says Holohan. “I see it way too often, people going off too fast. Their perceived exertion to begin with is low, but the effort catches up with them. The power graph needs to rise gradually, starting 20-30 watts below threshold and finishing just above.”

Plotting your perfect sportive is as much about shrewd planning as it is about heavy training. Spending some time researching the ride, and in particular the climbs, will take you far. Riding a climb for the first time? Then Veloviewer is a tremendous resource, adding an absurd level of detail – the showpiece being a heatmap gradient graph – for any Strava segment in the world and allowing you to plot a strategy for each. I’ve seen many a rider crack at either not knowing, or being given duff info, as to the length of a climb as they’re unable to measure their effort correctly.

“I was meticulous in preparing for the Etape,” says Holohan. “What I’m typically looking for is the draft benefit of the climb – when it’s beneficial to use a slipstream and when it’s beneficial to push on.”

Knowing your sportive course is handy for deciding what you should carry. Say you’re riding the Etape and there’s a feed station at the summit of the first climb, and that climb comes straight away, you’d be mad to fill a couple of water bottles when a well-hydrated person starting an event might get by on half of one – a full 750ml bottle, with cage, for example, weighs more than the whole frameset of, say, the Cannondale SuperSix Evo. The same applies if a long climb finishes a ride – do you really need to lug a full bottle up it? If not, squirt what you don’t need onto the road or, better still on a hot day, over your head, and chuck any food you don’t need away (into the designated disposal area, obviously).

Food is another area we can really focus on to fuel our needs and ensure we aren’t glorified shopping trolleys, unnecessarily ferrying uneaten food through a mountain tour.

“I often see people stuffing their jerseys full of food, taking more than they need to,” says Holohan. “I need 60g of carbohydrate an hour, so in the three pockets of my jersey I put 60g and make sure I empty one an hour.”

Massappeal

Reducing bike weight is an easy win, and aside from bottles and food, is

best achieved through a lighter wheelset, not just in heaving its mass skywards, but in its rotational weight – getting the things to turn. To move a kilogram of wheel takes more effort than a kilogram of anything else on your bike – including you.

One novel way of using weight to your advantage is to do your hill training on your super-heavy steed, thus making training harder, and only bring out your carbon featherweight for big occasions. It’s like putting on a suit if you spend your days, like me, working in shorts and t-shirt – in your best attire, you feel a million dollars.

Of course, as bike manufacturers find, there are limits to saving bike weight, short of the old-school method of drilling holes in things (not advised). So, while ceramic bearings are nifty, they pale into insignificance compared to cutting out cheeseburgers, which means its better – for both your pocket and long-term health – to lose weight from your body rather than your bike. “Every kilogram costs 45 seconds on Alpe d’Huez,” reckons Holohan. “You can spend a fortune losing a kilogram off your bike, so it’s far easier to lose 10 from your body.”

Losing weight off body and bike often steals the headlines over aerodynamics, he says, but by focusing on reducing drag you’d save far more time over the full course of an Etape than saving a kilogram of weight (he rode last summer’s event with aero wheels and a skin suit).

If losing weight is your aim, there are more instant, on-the-day ways of doing it. Contemplating the weight of a full bladder might well be putting the ‘wee’ into weight weenie, but it seems at least as significant as carrying a full water bottle. And while we’re on lavatorial matters, I do know a man, who I shan’t shame here, who, in a bid to improve his power-to-weight ratio, took to weighing his number twos, revealing the other benefit, after caffeine, of the pre-ride coffee.

These latter interventions fall squarely in trick – or ‘hack’, as the kids call it – territory, crude instruments at your disposal to increase your climbing speeds.

To this add the sticky brake. This is something Alberto Contador was known to do, where he’d pull the quick release of his brake caliper when he got onto a climb, to stop any prospect of it rubbing on the rim and stalling his progress. Which is great, as long you remember, in your exhaustion at the summit, to pop it back down. For disc brake haters, it’s another reason to kick them, as on-the-fly adjustment is impossible. If you’re competing in the British hill-climbing season, Holohan’s top hack is to load up on bicarbonate of soda, which helps to neutralise acidosis in the legs during short efforts and keeps you going for longer. Sports supplement firms sell it in tablet form – easier to stomach than the frankly disgusting powder.

Heavy Rotation

Unless you’ve come straight out of the ’90s pro peloton or you’re one of the Yates twins, it’s likely that, rather than pushing huge gears, you’d benefit from a high revolution, low gear cadence on longer climbs, aiming between 85-90 revs per minute. This will activate more slow-twitch ‘endurance’ muscle fibres, which are more sustainable

than fast-twitch fibres over longer periods and help prevent fatigue. Such cadences “are typically more economical,” says Holohan, but he’d examine his client’s power files to see what cadences their best efforts occurred at, and fine-tweak their training accordingly.

You need to be well-trained to spin at such speeds, but it’s certainly helped by fitting the sort of ‘dinner plate’ cassette that has even become trendy among pros. You don’t have to go back far to a time when a big sprocket in the 30s would have seen you viewed with deep suspicion. Five years ago, during a sportive in the Pyrenees, I was heckled by an irate Australian for having the temerity to spin past him with a 32t sprocket. For him this was nothing short of cheating, yet my crime was simply choosing the best tools at my disposal to cycle up a hill in a more efficient manner than he was.

Having a good pedalling technique is as much about having a strong core as strong legs. A good core helps to prevent back pain, and helps you drive through the pedal stroke smoothly without undue rocking and rolling.

“The analogy I use with my clients is that it’s like doing a leg press on a resistance machine without the back on it – if you have a weak core, it’s not going to work,” says Holohan. “People tend to think it’s just about the abdominals but it’s about the whole band around the mid-section.”

And when it comes to seated or standing climbing, if you’re a heavier rider, unless it’s a short effort or to rest working muscles and engage others, seated climbing is the way to go. “Not only are you much less aero out of the saddle, but you increase rolling resistance by defamation of the tyre,” he says.

When it comes to training for events in the mountains, of course it will help to head out there and get used to riding them. We’re not all afforded that luxury, however, but there’s much work we can do in the UK to get us ready. Holohan recommends simulating longer climbs by starting your effort on the flat, in a big gear, preferably into the wind, then finishing the effort on an actual climb. This could be a progressive exercise, starting at 20 minutes and building up over the months to an hour.

“Not only would I train for climbs themselves, but where the climbs come in the event,” says Holohan. So if efforts like the above tacked onto the end of rides feel like hell at the time, you’ll feel the benefit later on.

Going downhill fast

Improving overall sportive times year-on-year is about working on your weaknesses, so if you’re already a good climber, another season of solid hill work might see you squeeze out further small gains, but it’ll have nothing on boosting the areas you need to polish. For many, that means descending.

Over six consecutive summers of competing in the seven-day Haute Route events in Europe since 2011, I’d eke out small watts/kg improvements on the climbs, but consistently splurge it all, and more, on the way back down. To everyone else, I was ‘The Yo-yo’, so frequent the times I’d drop riders on a long Alpine climb only for them to do likewise on the descent.

Practice descending on the flat with drills, ideally in an empty car park, where you get to understand the limits of your bike and how much you can lean into corners. Like any skill, descending is something that needs to be nurtured. Don’t just blast your way uphill and coast down – commit the same focus, in the moment, to the descent. Try following the lines and speeds of competent descenders you trust, and try to anticipate the corner and look through it, rather than at what’s directly in front of you. As you lean into a corner, put weight through your outside leg to improve balance.

Holohan reckons descending is a much-overlooked aspect to event preparation. “What goes up, must come down,” says a man who, as well as his Etape endeavours last summer, also ended up on the podium at the Haute Route Alps.

“There’s a lot of new blood in cycling, if I can get away with using that phrase. A lot of riders I grew up with were brought up in clubs, where they learned the essential skills of it.” Those who came into the sport on the back of the boom in 2012 haven’t had that same schooling, he believes.

Nervous descenders, he says, have a short field of vision and instead need to look further ahead and spot hazards, to give them time to correct their line. “I also think you need to get as low as possible, in the drops, to lower your centre of gravity,” to become, in his words, more Lotus, less double-decker bus.