2 Indoor Cycling Workouts to Improve Your Climbing
By Gale Bernhardt • For Active.com

It doesn't matter whether it's winter or just bad weather that puts you on an indoor trainer, at one time or another most cyclists will find themselves riding to nowhere.

If your training plan called for a hill workout and you want some solid suggestions for indoor workouts specifically designed to work on improving your ability to climb hills, I've got two workouts for you. The first one only takes 45 minutes. It's tough.

Before heading into workout specifics, we'll use the intensity descriptions found here in the free download Training Intensity document.

When you are setting the tension on your bike, be wary of excess load on your knees. The work should stress your muscles, not your knee joint. If you are using a bike at a gym, try to have the seat height set as close as possible to your personal bike.

Rest of article: http://tinyurl.com/7wuzhjj

What is a hill....... it is a segment of terrain that causes you to increase effort. For longer distance races, you want the bike to not effect your run, but you still want to bike fast, right? So you need to make the bike course as flat as possible. You make a bike course flat, by keep an even effort (or wattage if you have a power meter) throughout the segment. A hill only effects you, if you work too hard going up it.

To decrease the effect of the hill, bike more, like ALOT more, and yes do intervals. Hills represent, intervals. It is an increase in effort, so your body should get use to changing gears. The ability to recover from those efforts are based on your endurance, so ride more, and more, and more, and if you think you've ridden a lot, ride some more.

Use your gears!!! If you keep the effort and cadence the same up a hill, as when on flats, or down hill, it makes the course "flat". I've done IMLP (hilly) and IMFL (flat). My approached didn't change. I had a wattage goal, and stuck to it for both. It doesn't matter the terrain, I stick to what I'm capable of.

I do change out my rear sprocket for IMLP, so I can keep cadence up on some of the uphills. Just something to mess around with. The hills aren't bad, no big steeps. Just long grinds.

[quote=vjohnson]What is a hill....... it is a segment of terrain that causes you to increase effort. For longer distance races, you want the bike to not effect your run, but you still want to bike fast, right? So you need to make the bike course as flat as possible. You make a bike course flat, by keep an even effort (or wattage if you have a power meter) throughout the segment. A hill only effects you, if you work too hard going up it.

To decrease the effect of the hill, bike more, like ALOT more, and yes do intervals. Hills represent, intervals. It is an increase in effort, so your body should get use to changing gears. The ability to recover from those efforts are based on your endurance, so ride more, and more, and more, and if you think you've ridden a lot, ride some more.

Use your gears!!! If you keep the effort and cadence the same up a hill, as when on flats, or down hill, it makes the course "flat". I've done IMLP (hilly) and IMFL (flat). My approached didn't change. I had a wattage goal, and stuck to it for both. It doesn't matter the terrain, I stick to what I'm capable of.

I do change out my rear sprocket for IMLP, so I can keep cadence up on some of the uphills. Just something to mess around with. The hills aren't bad, no big steeps. Just long grinds.[/quote]

Well said VJ.... Hills are more a mental struggle than a physical struggle. Mentally you see yourself working hard because you are putting in the same effort as you would on a flat, but you are going nowhere. Best thing you can do mentally is head down, gear down and keep the cadence the same. On a hill a slower cadence means you are working way tooo hard!