Hill Running Benefits: Why You Need Hills In Your Training Program

Updated: 1 day ago

Checking your schedule and seeing you have a hill session for the day is, for most runners, a horrible feeling. Knowing that your legs are going to be aching, breathing hard and having to really push is horrible enough, but for some reason a lot of runners do not find hill sessions very satisfactory. I have an interesting theory as to why this is- most runners use any faster sessions to test where they are with their fitness and hills don't give the best indication of how fast you can run a 5k really.

However, this is the biggest mistake runners make by far! Never use training to find out what shape your in, instead get in the shape you want to be in by training.

"Training to failure is failure of training" - Arthur Lydiard

Whether you are running an interval session, a tempo or a hill session, you should always have a fair bit left at the end of your session, you should always be able to do a couple extra reps at the end if you had to.

The benefits of running hills

Running hills has many different benefits to your performance:

Better form: Running hills encourages you to run with better running form, and one of the main focuses you should have when running hills is to have good form. Running hills forces you to drive your knees higher, meaning you are going to be learning to run with a longer stride and have more power. Hills also teach you to run with your hips in better position, meaning your glutes will activate better and help you to run more efficiently.

Increased strength: Due to the gradient of running up hills, you will improve the strength in your legs. This can help to prevent injuries from running and also help to develop your stride length to help you run faster.

Improve sprint speed: Due to the benefits of improving your form and the fact that you will be doing short reps, you will improve your sprint speed. Better sprint speed means that all your slower paces will feel much more comfortable.

Improve lactate threshold: You are going to be building lactate acid up in your legs when you run hills, so one of the main benefits of hill running which often goes overlooked is the fact that your body has to learn how to clear lactate acid. When you finish each rep and begin to jog down the hill, your body starts clearing the lactate acid whilst you are moving, this in turn will improve your bodies ability to get rid of lactate acid efficiently.

Improve aerobic capacity: Hills are not an all out session, but it is a continuous run because as soon as you finish a rep you start jogging down the hill for your recovery. These continuous hill sessions will benefit your aerobic capacity to help you to maintain harder sessions later on down the line.

Overall, the benefits of running hills go on and on, running hills are a vital part of everyone runners preparation and hopefully these benefits are going to make you more motivated to get out and do your hill sessions!

How to run a hill session

Hopefully this explanation will also make you hate hill sessions less!!!

People hate hills because they see it as this horribly hard session with the aching legs and all of that lactate acid. However, to get the true benefits of hill sessions you should not be running these too hard, instead you should run with good form and should only push this session to about 85/90% effort. You should be able to do at least an extra few reps by the end of the session and it should feel very controlled all the way through.

You may have heard that the best and most efficient way to run hills is by shortening your stride and increasing your cadence. And this is true!!! HOWEVER, for a hill session you can get more benefits by running with a good stride length to increase your strength and improving your form. You should feel like you have a nice long and strong stride, but make sure you are not over-striding.

Example hill sessions

There are many different ways to run hills, but these 3 are going to be the most beneficial to your performance.

The classic hill session

This is where you do reps of 30-60 seconds reps up the hill and have a slow jog down as your recovery. I find this to be the most beneficial hill session, I usually do 2x 10x 30 seconds reps. For added benefits do 2-4x 15 seconds hill sprints at the end with a very slow and long recovery between reps (this is a vital part of the session for me and I personally highly recommend doing this).

Kenyan hills

This type of hill session is very different to most. For these type of hill sessions you run fast around a hill loop or run uphill fast and down hill fast. Running this type of hill session has the benefits of teaching you how to run down hill efficiently and develops your speed very well as you can run even faster down hill. This type of session works very well to develop your aerobic capacity as it is ran at a continuously fast pace.

Arthur Lydiard hill session

This is a very unique hill session which was first introduced by the revolutionary coach Arthur Lydiard who coached some of the best to ever do it such as Peter Snell.

This session is a much longer session but it can be made shorter by doing less reps. What Lydiard's athletes used to do it run a 2 mile hill loop 4 times. The loop goes as follows:

800m up hill (200m hill bounding, 400m running normal up the hill and then 200m hill springing, which is similar to bounding but you focus more on pushing up than forward)
800m flat at the top, this is taken easy to recover
800m down hill fast, this used to be ran very fast by Lydiard's athletes (Snell ran 1:50 for this)
800m run a long the bottom of the circuit (this is broken up into 50m leg speed drills which focuses on turning the legs over as fast as possible)

This is an amazing hill session as it develops power, improves form and increases endurance better than any other hill session, but it is just harder to run a session this long or find the right spot to do it.

Lydiard coached a lot of athletes and never once had an athlete with achilles tendonitis or hamstring tendonitis, he puts that down to the fact his athletes used to run these hill sessions.