Hill Repeats - workout suggestion

Here's one:

Ride hard up the hills.  Recover on the descents.  Repeat over and over.

You don't need any special 'workout'.  Just go do some work. 

One my coach gives me...

Run 2 miles warm up.

Find a 1 minute hill. Do 3 X 5 hill repeats, descending 1-5. Try to hold your fastest time on your 5th repeat over all 3 sets.

2 mile cool down.

Edited to add. Sorry, I just saw that this was for the bike. I guess it could work on the bike too. 10 mile warm up. Find a 3 minute hill. 3 X 5 hill repeats, descending 1-5.

10 mile cool down.

Tipically in my running preparation yearly cycle I have 2 periods of hills intervals and they last for 3-5 weeks. I throw in 1 or 2 session per week but 1 is ok.

3 different types of hills repeats:

1) short hill: it should be around 15% slope and no more than 18% otherwise you start loosing coordination and you are going to burn very fast all the energy in an efficient way. Try to measure it with Polar (very accurate) or with your car (you measure the start and the end and the altitudes). The short hills repeats should be around 100 meters and you start with 10 and max 15-20 when you are fit. In between, you first walk 15 secs and then you jog down to the start (total around 60-75 secs) and then you start again.

The benefit here is mainly to help understanding a perfect coordination, movements, etc. together with good muscle adaptation. You have to be careful to NOT feel too much the stress on the upper front leg muscles (sorry I do not know the english word for that)

2) Medium hills: here I do 5 times x 1km @6-8% of slope. Recovery should be jogging downto the start. If you are fit you can extend this to 6 to 8 times.

Heart rate shold be around the same as when you do 1km IT in the track and field. Be aware that if you start too fast, you will end at the third repeat! On the first 2 you should calibrate the effort.

3) Long hills: this one is a sub LT training where you run a long hill between 4 and 8 km (depending on your fit level) of 5-6% slope and I keep 160-165bpm over my 169 LT. 

In general, number 1 are extremely important and I do it 1x or 2x per week during that period.

Number 2 are very important and I do a couple of sessions in the whole period. You will see the benefits of this training in a short period: you can not believe how fast you will get in the races!

I do number 3 rarely, maybe once only in the whole period, mainly because it is not easy to find a long hill like I described. 

I have seen it too late!