Five ways to help improve your climbing

Everyone has a sweet spot, a training intensity at the perfect point between hard and too hard. Your sweet spot should feel just a notch down from the kind of effort you could hold for 20 minutes. It should feel hard, but not out of control.

If you’re training with power, you’re aiming for 84-97% of your functional threshold power (FTP), which is the amount of power you can hold for an hour-long maximal effort.

Try to incorporate two 20-minute sweet spot efforts into your ride with plenty of time in between. And remember, you should finish each effort with a little left in the tank. The efforts will raise your heart rate, but not so much that you feel high levels of lactate, which is when you get that burning muscle ache from lactic acid in your legs.

As your fitness improves, you can build up the amount of efforts you have in your ride. A goal would be to work up to having 60-90 minutes of sweet spot riding within a ride. Those long, controlled efforts replicate the conditions of a long climb, and next time you’re taking on an epic climb, your legs are going to thank you.

Mountain roads are very rarely a steady gradient. To prepare for the constantly changing inclines that can be thrown at you, cadence work is super helpful. By conditioning your legs to pedal at odd speeds, you’ll be far more comfortable when out in the hills.

Try adding 10-minute interval blocks into your rides, during which you alternate between 50 rpm and 120 rpm every two minutes. The goal here isn’t to go super hard. It’s to get used to pedalling in a rhythm you’re not used to – to take you out of your comfort zone.

Start with just one block of 10 minutes, and, over a period of a few rides, slowly build up to 3 blocks per ride. And listen to your body on this. Pedalling in high and low cadences can put more stress on your joints. If you get any knee pain, knock the session on the head and try again another day.

Riding out of the saddle is a super important skill when climbing. It can give you a quick burst of power, it can help you grind up super steep sections, and it can shake off any stiffness that develops from riding in the same position.

Try to ride out of the saddle for five minutes without a break. If you’re more comfortable sitting down, this is going to feel like a really long time. But by pushing yourself, you’ll be developing muscles that simply don’t get used when seated. Once you’ve managed five minutes, try building up to 10 minutes.

This drill is all about being able to recover while riding hard, which is crucial on long climbs. It also replicates the conditions of races or sportives, in which most climbs are preceded by a tussle for a good position

Go flat out for 30 seconds, then immediately settle into a six minute aerobic effort at the kind of pace you can hold for 30 minutes.

The challenge is to bring your heart rate down after the sprint, and to manage your effort without a complete rest period beforehand. Keep the intensity of the effort steady, and let your heart rate gradually decrease throughout the six minutes. Try incorporating two or three of these efforts into a short ride.

Measuring your performance is really important to your training, and setting yourself a bit of a competition or a goal to tick off can be a brilliant motivator.

Pick a local climb to make your testing ground. It doesn’t matter how long it is, or how steep it is. It’s just about choosing one climb that you’ll benchmark your performance on. Add this climb into your rides, and really push yourself. Keep pushing for new PBs, and you’ll start to see the benefit.