6 Top Tips To Make Running Uphill Easier

Let's not skirt around this one. Hills are hard. Whether you're tackling an upcoming event with lots of ups and downs or simply just want to make hills more enjoyable in your everyday training, we are here to help with six quick tips to make running uphill a little bit easier. Now, the most common mistake we see people make is that when they hit hills, they go into attack mode. Hills are hard, so let's smash this thing. Hills become a race. I'm not really sure why this happens, but what I do know is that is a surefire way to blowing up before the top of the hill or just making the rest of the run significantly harder. Now, you want to basically maintain the same effort from the flat into and through the hill, not the same pace, the same effort. You should be able to gauge this by feel, but if you are using a heart rate monitor, then you should also see the same heart rate or very little difference as you hit the hill. You should feel strong over the top. Now, whether running on the flat or uphill, we should always be aiming to strike and land with our feet underneath us, not out in front of us and overstriding like this, because this is essentially acting like a braking force that's going to slow us down. This becomes even more important uphill. For some reason, as the ground kicks up, it's very easily done. We end up overstriding, essentially going to this lunge position, which is obviously quite demanding on our muscles, like doing these big lunges in the gym. Instead, we want to be striving for the slightly smaller and more frequent strides under our body, which actually ties nicely in with the previous point about pacing because hopefully that'll hold us back and feel strong at the top of the hill. Changes in body position can also make a huge difference when running uphill. We want to work with gravity. To do so, we want to make sure that we're holding our body nicely upright and then leaning into the hill slightly. We want to make sure we're not leaning from the waist. Instead, we want a little bit of a lean from the ankles and a touch from the hips. If you find yourself hunching over and leaning in from the waist, what this can do is end up constricting the airwaves and prevent you from breathing deeply. It's also really important, if you're dropping your head down, this can also restrict how much oxygen we can take in, but also further result and cause us to slouch and bend over. Now, I know it can be tempting, especially when you're running off-road on technical terrain, but instead, we need to keep our head relaxed and looking approximately 20 to 30 meters ahead of us, obviously depending on how steep the hill is. Also, don't forget to use your arms. By driving them forwards and backwards, we can almost use them like pistons to help drive us up the hill. Now, we want to hold the arms in around approximately a 90-degree bend at the elbow. As I say, driving them forwards and backwards. Try to avoid, though, crossing them over the body too much. Focus on driving your knee off the hill, not into the hill. Now, to work on this, you can think of yourself as landing on the ball of your foot and then we're springing off with our knee. Another way of maybe thinking about this is that you're exploding from your ankle and we're using that last bit of energy to drive ourselves off the hill. Finally, get out there and practice. Whilst hills may be your nemesis, the only way you can get better on hills is by working on hills and doing hills. Actually, there's some great benefits to running on the hills. It's going to help improve your leg strength. It will also help improve your running economy, your stride length, and also hopefully help reduce injury by making it a little bit more robust. Get out there, start running on the hills. Let us know how you get on in the comment section down below and whether you're starting to enjoy the hills a bit more after some of these tips. Well, hope you do. If you do, please do give this video a like and don't forget to subscribe.