Why You Should Be Running Hill Repeats (and How to Get Started)
Hill repeats are a great training tool if you’re a runner, or if you’re any kind of athlete looking to improve your cardiovascular system. But you can’t do hill workouts without a good hill, so your first question is likely to be okay, where?
I’ll briefly answer your next few questions, too: why? How many? And how far? Let’s tackle those first, and then find your perfect hill.
What are hill repeats and why should I do them?
A hill repeat means running uphill. They’re called “repeats” because you won’t do just one. You’ll head right back downhill, and repeat the process—maybe doing 10 reps of a short hill, or 2-3 reps of a longer hill. The shorter, faster ones are sometimes called “hill sprints.”
Hill repeats are a type of interval training, so in theory their benefits are the same as for any similar interval training. You can improve your VO2max, your insulin sensitivity, your overall fitness, and so on. But there are lots of ways to do intervals. Why take to the hills?
The textbook benefits of hill repeats are:
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They’re lower impact than sprints or speedwork on flat ground, since the ground effectively rises to meet your feet.
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They provide strength benefits for runners, making your glutes and hamstrings work a little harder. (Hill repeats still don’t replace a proper strength workout with weights, though.)
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They make you practice good running form, driving your knees up and landing softly on your midfoot.
But there’s more. I think these benefits are under-appreciated:
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They give you confidence to attack hills on your training runs or in a race. There’s nothing like chugging up a hill in the middle of a marathon when the people around you are stopping to walk.
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They give non-runners an easy way to measure effort in a workout. You don’t need a regulation track or a stopwatch to do hill repeats, nor do you need to plan a route or know your paces. You just run up until it’s time to walk down, then repeat. One hill, one workout.
How many hill repeats should I do, and how long?
Hills are a tool, not a workout. So it depends on what you’re trying to get out of your hill repeat workout. If you’re following a training plan, the plan should give you a distance or time for both the hill and the recovery. That said, here are a few common types of hill workouts:
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Hill sprints (like, real sprints): 6-8 seconds absolutely all-out. Rest about 3 minutes before going again. (This includes your walk down the hill.) Maybe 4-8 reps.
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Hill strides: These are the hill version of strides, 15 to 30 seconds of a peppy little run with at least a minute or two of recovery. They shouldn’t feel hard on your lungs, they’re just a drill for your legs. Do these at the end of a workout, or at the end of your warmup as you’re getting ready for a race or a hard run. Two to six reps would be typical.
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Short hill repeats: These are maybe a minute or two long, with recovery equal to however long it takes to walk back downhill. Some runners will add an extra minute of recovery at the bottom before going again. You might do 4-12 of these.
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Longer hill repeats: These span several minutes or to a specific distance. I’ve done 400-meter (quarter-mile) hill repeats, and I even have a favorite half-mile hill for very long ones. You might do only 2-4 of these, since they’re so long.
Where I give a range of reps, usually you’ll do the lower number the first time you try them, and add a repeat or two next time. Nothing is set in stone about these descriptions; view them as typical workouts you might see, not the only types out there or the only way to do them. If you’re doing a running program and it calls for hill repeats, it should give you all the specifics.
Make sure you’re warmed up for hill repeats (as you would for any hard workout). If hill repeats are the main part of your workout for the day, jog an easy mile before you start doing them, or warm up in the way of your choosing for 10 minutes or so. You may want to do another easy mile at the end as a cooldown.
What is a good incline for hill repeats?
The steepness of a hill is usually measured in percentage: 0% is flat ground, 2% is a little bit of a slope, and 10% is going to look like a mountain if you have to walk (or drive!) up it. A handful of the steepest streets in the world are 30% or more.
Since you’re not likely to run up a hill that’s more than about 10% grade, I’d recommend thinking of grade as a scale of 1 to 10. Want just a little bit of a hill? 2%. Need something real challenging? See if you can find 8%. The longer the repeat, the lower you probably want the incline to be.
Here’s a guideline for how steep a hill you want:
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2-4% if you normally run on the flat, and you want a nice gradual slope for longer repeats.
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4-6% if you’re used to hills and want a long repeat, or for short or medium repeats for most normal people.
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6-8% if you’re used to hills, running short repeats, or just feel like you’re up for a challenge.
How do I find out how steep a hill is?
To calculate the percentage grade of a hill, remember the phrase “rise over run.” That means the elevation gain (“rise”) gets divided (“over,” like in a fraction) by the horizontal distance (“run”). Here’s the USGS describing how it’s defined, and here’s a handy calculator so you don’t have to read all that. If you ever forget how to do this, just Google “rise over run calculator” and look for one that lets you input any units you want. If you’re in the United States, rise is usually easiest to measure in feet and run will be in miles.
So how do we find the rise and the run? Run is easy—you’re probably already tracking distance with your running watch or with route planning tools like Strava or MapMyRun. Or you can go to Google Maps and right-click on a point to measure distance.
For rise, I like the elevation finder tool here. Click the top of the hill, wait a few seconds for the website to calculate, and then jot down the elevation in feet (or meters). Then click the bottom of the hill, and do the same. Subtract the lower elevation from the higher, and the difference is your rise, your elevation change in feet.
I’ll do the above when I’m picking out a hill, checking different start and end points to figure out exactly where the steepest hill in my neighborhood is, for example. But if you already have a hill in mind and just want to know how steep it is, you can use a route planning app.
How to find the elevation of a hill in MapMyRun or Strava
MapMyRun requires a free account to use the route builder tool. Click your starting point and your ending point, and make sure the “show elevation” toggle is on. The elevation gain, in feet, will show at the bottom of the screen.
Normally, if you’re doing a hilly run, you would need to worry about the total elevation gain as you run up and down and up and down. But for a single hill, there’s only up. So take that elevation gain, and the length of the run in miles, and plug that into the rise over run calculator. The hill in my example is 0.39 miles with 175 feet of rise. That’s an 8.5% grade, yikes.
Strava also has a route builder tool, but it requires a premium subscription. It works the same way: draw a line from the bottom to top of your hill, and take a look at the total distance and elevation gain.
How to do hill repeats when you live in a flat place
Finally, I know some of you have one final question: how do you find a hill when your area doesn’t have any hills? If you live in a relatively flat place, open up Google Maps and turn on the “terrain” layer, which will add shading to the hills so they’re easy to spot. (Any topographic map tool can do the same.)
Look in particular at parks within driving distance; sometimes there might be a public trail that you could run on if you’re willing to make the drive.
Otherwise, people in prairie states and other flat areas have been known to run hill repeats on overpasses and parking garage ramps (please be safe about traffic if you go this route). Stairs are also an option: they’re not the same thing as hills, and you may have to go slower, but you can still get some of the benefits of hill repeats by climbing stadium stairs at a school track. And finally, if nothing else, there’s always the incline button on the treadmill.
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