Transcription
It's time for her repeat. Let's go! [Music] Karate. My name's Bennett Parks, 225 marathoner and Ultron, and today I want to talk about something that's going to make you faster, stronger, and improve your form: Hill repeats! [Music]
So let's start out with the basics. What are hill repeats? We're essentially running up and down a hill a multiple number of times. Well, you either do that based on the amount of time we run up that hill, so it might be 60 seconds, or we could do that on the distance we run up the hill, so it might be a hundred, 150 meters. And we do that, as I say, a multiple number of times or an arbitrary number of repetitions.
Moving on to why are we going to be doing hill repeats? What makes them so good? Well, the first thing is it really helps build leg strength, and that's obviously really crucial when we're trying to run an endurance race. In long distance, we need some strong foundation legs there to go the distance. It helps improve our running form, in the way we're sort of striding out there; it gets that good leg turnover. And also, it is a lot of that speed work in disguise. It's disguised with the way our heart—which is a muscle—it's sort of growing and contracting, growing, contracting; it's really having to work that, working on the cardiovascular system as well as building our leg strength as well. And also, if you're out and you've got some trail races and things, it gives us really good confidence when it comes to those hilly races that we can get up that hill really well.
So where are we going to be doing our hill repeats? Well, on a hill, obviously. Now, people get really obsessed about finding that perfect hill to do their hill repeats on, and that really doesn't exist. I suppose if you had to look for something, you'd be looking for something about a four percent incline, which is very similar to where I am here in Mays Hill, just at the side of Greenwich Park in London. But don't stress about it too much. You can do these on treadmills. I'll put some treadmill workouts link down below and some examples over here. And yeah, so just any hill that's around about your house where you feel you can run up for a roundabout 60 to 90 seconds. Of course, if it's too steep, you're going to burn out, and if it's not steep enough, you'll feel it's quite easy. So you're just looking for somewhere, 60 to 90 seconds, that you can run up at a nice sort of comfortable but energetic pace.
So how are we going to go about doing these hill repeats? For me, I like to work on distance. So I picked two different landmarks, one at the bottom of the hill and one at the top of the hill, or two things to get to towards the top of the hill, and I like to run between those two points and then sort of time how long it takes me to get between them. Now, I lap my watch when I'm at the bottom of the hill and lap it again at the top of the hill. And then for that lap, I get a specific sort of set time, and I just try and replicate that every time going up the hill. I don't sort of get too obsessed about it during the session, but I try and keep all of my reps to be around the same sort of time, and I can have a look at it when I get back home on Stryver later on. Alternatively, of course, you can run up for a certain amount of time, and again, that works in a similar way. You can lap your watch at the bottom, run up the hill for that anywhere between 60 to 90 seconds—is what we recommend—and then after that time, two laps, lap it again at the top, and then you get a certain amount of distance that you've covered in that time, and you're always trying to cover the same amount of distance. It's quite good with this one because you can try and sort of work a little bit harder as the session goes on and try and get further and further up the hill as it goes.
So how hard do we want to be working? We want to be talking around about that sort of 85, 90 percent effort going up the hill and keeping that nice intensity all the way up. Now, I always say the most important thing for me is the recovery when we're coming back down. You want to bring your heart rate right back down, so you may even want to just walk down, relax. You can never go too slowly when you're recovering from hill repeats. When I do my hill repeats, I wear my heart rate monitor, and on the way down, I put that my heart rate screen onto my watch, and I don't start the next hill repeat till I'm back in zone two—back it sort of roughly into the 140 beats a minute for me. So for me, recovery is key, and then you turn around and give it, well, give it a really big effort going back up, up to about that sort of a 90 percent effort.
So how many of these do we want to be doing? I would recommend if you're a beginner, you haven't kind of done this sort of thing before, you want to be talking about sort of four or five repetitions. So yeah, after that, you're going to feel it nice and tired. If you're more of an intermediate, you're probably talking about six, seven, maybe up to about eight repetitions. More advanced runners, yeah, sort of like myself, I'm going to be doing sort of nine, ten; if I'm feeling particularly good, maybe even about eleven repeats before I get really nice and tired at the end.
A few of the little things to consider is make sure you get a really decent warm-up done. So for me, I might be doing sort of 1 or 2K nice easy running and also then some dynamic stretching, really sort of open up both legs and get all the muscles activated. You don't want to be doing this from cold; you're really going to open yourself up to potentially getting injured. And something I always quite like to do is to do sort of that sort of medium run beforehand; that might be sort of five or six K building a little hill session—probably a little bit less, more about five or six hill repeats—and then carry on with my run afterwards. It's really good to get to yourself running on slightly tired legs in that second half of the run and really helps with marathon endurance training. And also, if you're, if you're just doing that hill session alone, and of course while we're doing a warm-up beforehand, make sure we're doing a cool-down, a little bit of static stretching, and a nice sort of easy 1 or 2K jog.
Our guys, that's my little quick guide to hill repeats. Let me know down in the comments: Are you someone that really liked being out on the hills? Are you one of those rare breeds that loves that charging up and down the hills, or do you just hate this but you have to feel like you're out there getting it done? Let me know what your thoughts are. If you've got any other questions and things and videos you'd like to see coming up, then let me know down there as well. As always, I couldn't do these videos without your kind support, so a like and a thumbs up would really help, maternal. And of course, subscribe; we've got loads of new content coming up with training for ultras and also a 10 @k tips at video in the pipeline. So these, you guys, thanks so much, and I'll see you [Music].