In this cycling tip I talk about how to get better at attacking on hills – The Secret to Dropping Riders.

Video Transcript

The next question is by Donna, and she’s asked, “How do you get better at attacking on hills?”
Now, attacking on hills requires you to develop quite a huge amount of power over a short period of time. There’s two ways that I address this issue. The first thing is that we work on developing strength within the athlete off the bike, and this is really important. If you’re able to develop that strength off the bike, then you’ll be able to transmit that onto the bike and develop more of the power that you require to be able to do big, huge attacks on the hills. So that’s the first, key thing is to develop that power off the bike.

Now, the second most important thing is to start working on training yourself to develop that power on the bike. So what I do is I get my athletes to work on developing this power on the bike by doing hill sprints or doing big accelerations on hills. Now, you can also do this on a flat, but it’s best to do it on a hill. How we do this is through hill repeats. Now, what we do is we find a hill in the local area that the athlete lives. It doesn’t have to be a very long hill. It can just be a hill around about 250 to 750 meters. Now, these attacks are done at maximum intensity, and you also want to give yourself plenty of time in between the efforts to recover.

We generally work on somewhere between five and 10 efforts during a session, but the important, key thing to remember is that as soon as your speed or your power drops off by around about 20%, then you really have to call it quits and come back and do those efforts another day. Now, the idea is that you build up these efforts over time to around about five or 10, and you want to vary the gradient of these efforts, as well. So you may want to look at a 3% gradient and perhaps a 7% gradient and then throw in a few 12%’s if you’ve got that in your local area, as well.