Have you ever altered your running route just to avoid a hill? These running hills tips will help change your mindset, so that even if you don’t love them…you might just start to seek them out.
Ok maybe that’s taking it a bit too far, but at least we’re going to help you learn to embrace them. The benefits to running hills are huge, which is why we’ve dedicated a whole article to that and why every single runner we have starts a new training cycle with hill repeats.
Once you’ve mentally decided you’re onboard for all the benefits, building leg strength and power, then our next step is making sure that you get the most out of these runs. That means helping you become more efficient and smarter with running hills.
7 Tips for How to Run Hills
What if a few changes could making running hills feel easier and make your time spent there more useful? They can! So let’s work on them.
One of the most common mistakes runners make is incorrect form when tackling a behemoth of a hill. Your gait is in fact going to change and will change more with the steepness of the hill.
- Shorter stride
- Less intensity
- Change your arm swing
- Stay tall
- Fuel up
Hill training is actually one of the best ways to improve your overall running form. Use these hill running techniques to get up and over feeling better.
Optimize Your Stride
Rather than extending your stride as if trying to power up the hill, shorten it. It might feel awkwardly short at first, but this will increase foot turn over and requires a great deal less effort.
Think about picking your knee up, which you’ll see in the example of Kilian below. You’re going for that optimal stride you often see with sprinters on the track.
A shorter stride will increase your cadence, it will help drive the knee forward and keep you in a bit of a forward lean.
Conserve Energy
Stop attacking hills, unless you’re doing a hill interval workout. Charging up hill is just wasting energy that you could be using to gain speed on the downhill or maintain your pace later.
Instead, focus on maintaining the effort of your run prior to the hill. In fact, one of the keys to good downhill speed is not being exhausted from the uphill.
Upper Cut Arm Swing
ChiRunning says to imagine that you’re punching someone in front of you with an upper cut. This is to say your arms stay at your sides, but punch up instead of just forward to help propel you.
Once again, you want to ensure your arms are being used to propel you, not just hanging by your sides and not crossing in front of your body.
In fact, many trail runners like to utilize trekking poles which help you to stabilize yourself on the steep inclines, declines and technical parts. HUGE bonus because you’re now getting a full body workout!
Pictured here Killian Jornet doing the upper cut, lifting his knees and landing on forefoot…yeah he’s kinda of an amazing runner.
Practice Perfect Posture
When we get tired, we look down and our shoulders start to slump…this is not going to make getting up the hill easier. In fact it’s going to make breathing harder and slow you down, so pretend someone is at the top and a rope is attached to your hips and pulling.
Imagery is a great tool used by a lot of elite runners, why wouldn’t you attempt it as well?
Visualize a rope around your waist pulling you to the top. This can mentally conserve energy or help to keep your chest up and pulling forward.
Don’t Bend
Adding to the above tip about keeping your head up and chest forward, is don’t bend at the waist. Again this tends to be something we do as we fatigue, but it’s cutting off your air supply and messing up your gait.
Remember you want to stay tall and if it’s getting this hard, then see the tip below about walking!
Fuel for the Effort
Hills increase your heart rate, at which point your body switches from fat to carbs for fuel. Ingesting some carbs prior to hitting steep or hilly portions of a longer training run can be beneficial.
This could mean taking a shot blok 5 minutes before you start hitting hills or after you’ve warmed up and are ready to take on a hill workout.
Downhill runs are a whole different beast, which is why I’ve written a separate post about it! You need to change your form to save your knees and learn how to take advantage of the flow for race day PR’s.
Walk if Needed
Trail runners call this power hiking and it’s a secret weapon to running ultramarathons.
It’s not failing. It’s looking at how your energy is being spent and if running is worth the effort. Hills are going to increase heart rate for everyone, across the board. However, the more adapted to hills that you become you’ll notice you can run farther and farther before your HR is jumping out of Zone 2.
If you’re supposed to be on an easy run and your HR keeps going to Zone 4 every time you hit a hill, then power walk. Keep your easy run, east.
How Often Should You Be Running Hills?
As with all things running remember our rules about not adding too much too soon. If you’ve been generally sticking to the flat areas, then we don’t want you to suddenly only do hilly routes.
Because you’re going to work your quads, calves and ankles differently running both up and down that’s a recipe for disaster.
Instead, I encourage you to look at the vertical gain from your recent runs and then see if you can slowly increase that amount on a few runs per week. It’s ok to still have days that are flatter, but try to overtime work to stop avoiding your hilly route options.
One of the most exciting things while training is to find a long hill and watch as each week you’re able to run more and more of it. Or maybe that’s exciting to me because it’s how I started! But I still use that as my gauge when looking at HR and where my fitness is at.
All right, no more running excuses! Now you know the benefits of hill running, I’m absolutely positive there will be fights over space on every nearby hill.
Looking for more great training tips? Start here!
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