Anatomy Of
Hill Climbing
We’re going to look at Brittish national hill climb champion Andrew Feather. He’s got a VO₂ max of 81 while Chris Froome has 84. With a higher VO₂ max your body is able to consume more oxygen and will be more effective on using that oxygen to generate the most amount of energy possible. Those two things are vitaly important for climbing up those hills.
Hill climb test
Feather has tested his VO₂ max two times. But when climbing up a hill he tries to seperate his energy and especially at the second half he tries to hold himself back a little bit. While being interviewd by Global Cycling Network he planned a 30 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes and 20 minutes test. While the 30 seconds test his power-to-weight ratio is 11,7 w/kg. With 1 minute effort that’s 8,6 w/kg, 5 minutes goes down to 6,9 w/kg. With the 20 minute effort his PWR is 6,12 w/kg. That’s pretty high compared to the 30 seconds effort. Overall he’s mostly focusing on the 2-8minutes climb.
Healthy lifestyle or not?
He rides around 2 hours a day and during that ride he’ll train a couple of efforts of like 3, 4, 5 minutes. He doesn’t follow a specific plan, but is rather enjoying what your doing, like for Andrew Feather that’s climbing. He’s not specifically a scientific, but he does use Strava to compare his numbers to previous years. Besides that at the end of a ride he looks back at his statistics, but not more than that. Andrew is also able to fluctuate a bit with his weight, but most of it comes down to nutrition like being careful what you eat (he particularly does that during hill climbing season). So during hill climb season he’s much more busy with living a healthy lifestyle whereas outside that season he enjoys things like eating cake or a pizza slice. He also thinks that when the temperatures go up you’ll also start to lose weight.
Bike
Now, let’s look at Andrews bike. One of the most important things is the handle position. He likes having it in an uprow position. So when climbing a hill he’s got something to put his weight against. It differs between every person, but for him it’s more comfortable. Besides a good bike he does a couple of presses each day to keep his upper body in shape. That would be around 20 push ups a day. The professional prefers to ride out of the sadle, but in particular situations like when it’s shallow it would be better to ride in the shallow. And so putting most weight over the cranks produces more power.
‘It’s weird to call it enjoying, but I enjoy pushing myself along the climbs.’
Go-getter
And what about getting the effort to get on the bike everyday? Moving through true the spring he probably does more climbing efforts. When doing that you want to begin with riding into the hill at your own tempo and then finish it of with a more stonger effort. But Feather himself hardly notices the pain, because ‘it’s weird to call it enjoying, but I enjoy pushing myself along the climbs’. A lot about climbing is more mental, so it could be a disadvantage when constantly focusing on your power meter instead of enjoying a good ride.
