[Nick M]

Hi Everyone,

I’ve got a question about the tradeoffs on doing very short, steep hill sprints vs. longer hill sprints on shallower grades.

Basically my situation here in vertically-challenged Philly is that I have two options for easily accessible hills for my sprints. One is the long walkway over the Ben Franklin Bridge, which offers a 4%-ish grade for almost half a mile, plenty of distance to do 15 sec hill sprints with a 2 min rest. I am early in my base period and can do about 10 of these before I start falling short of my mark.

My other option is a nearby highway embankment that is tall enough for a 5 second sprint but not much more than that. This particular embankment is probably between a 1:2 and a 1:3 slope, so between 40 and 50 percent. I take 40 secs rest between each sprint to keep the work / rest ratio the same. I just did this workout and got to 27 before I tailed off. So the total amount of work between the two workouts was very similar.

I’m curious what the tradeoffs and differences in training effect are between these two types of sprints. I can tell you that they felt very different. In the longer, shallower sprints I felt like I reached my max speed at some point around halfway, and the back half of each rep was about carrying that speed through the final few seconds. On the short, steep sprints I felt like I had to generate maximum power with each stride, never really hitting my top speed.

Another observation was that 40 sec after a 5 sec sprint felt very short. Its basically enough time to walk back down and get about 15-20 sec of standing still before the next one starts. So I may experiment with increasing the rest a bit, maybe to a minute.

So, to summarize:

Option 1:  15 sec sprints @4% grade, 2 min walking / standing rest, repeat ~10x or until I start coming up short

Option 2: 5 sec sprints @45% grade, 40 sec walking / standing rest, repeat ~30x

Curious what people think. Thanks!

Nick

[Scott Johnston]

Nick;

Great questions. The longer shallow sprints are good for building actual leg turnover speed that a sprinter might want to develop.  They do entail much more injury risk, especially hamstring.  Which is why we don’t advocate them for mountain athletes, almost all of whom will not have a sprinting background.  We recommend minimum of 20% grade in the books. The mountain athlete is looking for leg power. The steep sprints give you that without nearly as much injury risk.

The 5 second sprints are going to pay off better for steep uphill mountain running or mountaineering.  Don’t worry about the work rest ratio. That kind of advice is only applicable to an endurance training session. That ratio is not important here because we are not training endurance but power. All that matters in max efforts like either one of these is that you are fully recovered between reps.  Notice that I specific at least a 3 minute rest between sprints in the books.  As soon as you feel the power drop of from one rep to the next, try lengthing the recovery. If that does not allow you to reach the same high point on the next rep, the workout is over.

See if you can find some steep stairs, like the fire stairs in a bulding that you can sprint up for 10 seconds or so.  I think those will be more effective than the 5 second version you’re using.

I hope this helps,

Scott

 

 

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