Interval Training - on the flat or up hill?
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kylie posted 20 weeks ago.
I find that both have their place... your legs need to know that high turnover that comes with flatter intervals. But hill work is also important.
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wirebook posted 20 weeks ago.
Like Kylie noted, they have different purposes, so you need to keep that in mind. Typically, hill training teaches you both how to run up (and depending on how you do it, down) hills, but also builds muscular endurance as well as aerobic capacity.
Whereas intervals on a flat surface (such a track ideally) are more focused on aerobic capacity and potentially higher turnover.
Personally, I don't mix the two - I focus the track on steady & measured (and measurable) speed, and use hills (via incline on a treadmill, again, for more measurable and trackable performance) for muscalar and aerobic building.
-Ray
Tri Blog: Http://dcrainmaker.blogspot.com
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WillRace4Food posted 20 weeks ago.
1+ to wirebook. Hill work builds strength. Track work builds speed. I'm more of a trail runner who dables in tri so I do a lot of hill work. I typically build it into my long trail run session: at about 2/3 of the way though my duration I'll incorporate 30 minutes of hill repeats on a long 15% grade. I do very little track work and instead do threashold work on a 1.5 mi flat-ish grass loop.
Hi All
I´m starting to incorporate some intervals into my training and I just wondering whether it made a difference doing the "sprints" , whether I´m on the bike or running, on the flats or uphill. Obviously when I "sprint" uphill its much easier to get my heart rate/work rate close to the maximum, but is it better to sprint on a flat so that I get used to the speed? Not so bad running, but definitely on the bike my heart rate stays higher climbing hard for 3 minutes or whatever than going as fast as I can on a flat.
I have some fairly big climbs here so it would be easy for me to sprint solely uphill for a few minutes at a time.
As always all advice appreciated.
Best wishes
Simon