Get Stronger Using Hills

WE ARE GETTING shockingly close to escaping the depths of basements, garages and training caves. I am always excited about the arrival of spring as it ushers in the outdoor riding season. For many, the first weeks of spring training offer the first indicators of how the early part of the season might shape up. I often find myself wondering if I did enough quality work indoors to make those small progressions I had set as goals during the winter months. Since hard work indoors does not always directly translate to outdoor riding fitness, here are a few workouts that can help boost power numbers before the race season begins.

One of the best things about cycling training for triathlon is that it is heavily geared towards constant, steady and long sustained efforts. In no way does this mean that short intervals should be forgotten – it just means athletes who spend some time working on sustained efforts ranging from two minutes to two hours will often see improvements in sustained power output.

I am sure you are all too familiar with the concept of training with power. The power output you see on your cycling computer is essentially the amount of energy you are exerting into the bike. The more power you push, the faster you will go. It does not matter if you are going uphill, downhill or riding on a speedway. If you can increase your average power on the bike, you should go faster.

Obviously, course profiles can affect one’s ability to push on the pedals. Courses with rolling terrain, or mountain passes, might entice you to coast or soft pedal on the descents. For this reason, metrics like “normalized” and “weighted average” power were created. What these numbers show is the average power for the time pedalling. Think of average power as a good metric to go by if you spend little time coasting. However, on undulating terrain, normalized, or weighted average power, might be more beneficial benchmarks.

With that out of the way here are a few of my favourite “kick your butt into shape workouts” to get you back on the road and working toward hitting some PB’s in 2020.

Hill Workouts

For all of those out there living near the mountains, I must admit I am extremely envious of you. This was my favourite part of my experience while racing in Europe. I was often surrounded by spectacular 10-km-plus climbs where I do a number of sustained climbing reps, holding a number of different power zones. From max 20-minute efforts, to 30-minute FTP work, I always found climbing intervals to be a very easy benchmark to judge my fitness.

Say I had 3 x 20 minutes at 390–400 watts one day for a workout. Knowing my best

20-minute power on a climb was north of 430 watts, if I could complete the reps at, or above,

400 watts I knew I was on track for potentially improving my maximal 20-minute effort.

We don’t always have the luxury of long, sustained climbs, so I would often modify these workouts to suit my home training roads in Hamilton. With the escarpment climbs we have here in Ontario, I would try to hit four to five-minute climbing efforts.

A set of 10 x 4 minutes on a local climb is a great way to assess fitness. Head out and see where things are at, lap each interval, and determine an overall average power for all the intervals. Then you can see how that stacks up against your best sustained power effort for the length of the intervals you did.

You should also incorporate both seated and standing climbing work – if you get bored, try one effort seated then the following standing.

Rest, Repeat

For those without power don’t fret, you can still incorporate these workouts into your training regime simply by timing yourself up the hill. After your first interval, see if you can maintain that time for the workout or go even faster.

The best way to assess improvements is to return back to a workout once you have finished a training block and recovered, then hit the road again to see if you have had any improvements.

Remember that power on the bike does not come overnight. Pros can spend years trying to improve a power number by just a few per cent. With a good block of spring training, though, you might see improvements over a number of weeks.

Hamilton’s Sean Mackinnon raced on the National Cycling Team for over five years and also raced for Irish cycling team An Post-Chain Reaction.