The mic is hot and the game is on. You're listening to News for the Nation podcast by Aces Nation, where we talk about nutrition, sports performance, the journey of a student athlete, and more. I'm Claire. I'm Zach. Time to level up. Welcome back sports fans. Today we're talking about sprinting at inclines, whether that's on a treadmill or up a hill. There'll be some downhill included.
But yes, we are back from a long hiatus of, you know, honestly, just working with clients and trying to get things ready to make the best experience for our clients. And now I feel like we're ready to talk about a topic that we haven't covered yet. And we brought in the best to talk about sprinting training. We got Tiana Wood here today. So this is going to be great. So something that's come along Just recent topic is training up a hill and Tiana, I know that you've experienced
this as an athlete and probably as a coach. So I'm glad you're here today. Tell us about your feelings and experiences with uphill sprinting. Yeah, well, it's great to be back on the podcast. Thanks, Zach. As far as hill sprints go, I feel like if you've ever done them or given them out as a coach, it's a love hate relationship. because at times, they can be a tough workout, but there are a lot of benefits as we'll kind of cover
today if done properly. So yeah, there's, I would say as an athlete, I remember them most in terms of preparing for the heptathlon in the 800 meter. So and you know, in that particular case, we're using that anaerobic capacity. Um output for him for that type of hill training Yeah, it's it's uh an interesting thing I think whether you're the coach or not and I think it's even different uh, maybe viewed between sport coach and Strength conditioning or athletic performance
coach or something like that. Um But but i'm glad we can talk about this because i've had experience with sport coaches outside of track giving this to athletes in in a manner that maybe it was like just on a feel not necessarily with any research information behind it so I'm glad I want to bring this to light because we've had you know we're running the hill today and what does that mean some unknown distance from bottom to top for a certain period of time that may
or may not be advantageous to positive results in performance. So I mean, there's a hill right now at North Georgia, like on the backside of one of our recreational field fields, and it is, it's a long hill, I'm telling you, it's probably like, it's 100 yards plus, and it is pretty steep.
I mean, there's one like, yeah, and there's one further down that's not as steep and maybe just as long but It is a beast to go up and so you know that kind of got me thinking based on things I've heard before with like the the Yankees at their Tampa facility They built a hill specifically for sprint training and it's at a certain incline and there are certain grades of heel of hill that are built for Improving speed, you know not not just some random mountain that you're
running up, you know, that's, I don't know, just like the steepest gradient you could think of, or even one that's maybe not steep enough. You know, so I wanted to talk about this in general, to just give everyone insight. What do you think coaches are thinking the ones that are outside of kind of the track and field realm or the strength and conditioning realm? What do you think they're thinking when they're programming hills? Like what are they trying to accomplish? Do you think?
A lot of times I mean I'm just gonna be frank a lot of times I think people are just doing because it's like hey this is gonna be tough and I want this to be tough for our athletes nothing like nothing like anything we're about to get into right now and maybe there's a I want to give credit because maybe there's a little bit of intuition happening for them as far as like a Acceleration standpoint or what they would consider speed, you know I feel like a lot of
coaches outside of track who may not have that background probably just lump speed as into the entire time you run right from beginning of from stance to The time you have passed the end line, right? Like that's lumped in a speed and it's not broken down into different phases So I honestly I think it's just because it's like hey, this is tough and I want my kids to do something tough. That's what I think And I think there may be
some merit to that too. And you know at ACEs we're always talking about the mental aspect of things and you know, if you've competed if you've done hill workouts in terms of The ones that are longer in length and maybe less of an incline they are tough and they do kind of take a toll on you physically so it takes some mental
fortitude to get through those workouts. And so I do think in some respect, even if they may not have been getting the benefit of the scientific basis for the sprint training or anything, they may have been at least giving some mental toughness training to their teams in that respect. I'll give you that. I'll give you that. And I also think that there's There's a rest time emphasis that's probably not consistent not well thought out either Which is probably adding to the quote
-unquote toughness of it, right? I mean if you do 100 yard hill sprint and you got 30 seconds of recovery between each one or it's like a You know, hey jog back down so we can start again. Yeah, that's gonna be tough and there's probably a little bit of trauma bonding as they say happening between the athletes that may bring them a little bit closer together but hopefully we can shed some light into making it that toughness component add to as well as giving you that performance
benefit that you may be looking for. Right. So one of the things I talked about was the timing of it or like the distance that is like a lot. So there are Several articles that we're going to talk reference today and We will post these in the description of the of this podcast So if you want to go take a look at these for yourself, please feel free to do so One article first one.
I want to talk about it's just kind of talking about coordination patterns at different Inclinations of the sprint time here and one of the things that I definitely highlighted was the time that they sprinted they looked at only five seconds of sprinting in this and I believe they went from Zero incline to 16 percent incline, which is not not it wasn't a ton of incline to be honest based on some of the other ones that I have here, so But really what they were looking at in these
like I mentioned, was like what the mechanics kind of mimicked. And what they found was that the highest inclination was more like early acceleration, which would make sense, right? You're coming out of two, three point, four point stance. You're coming out of that initial phase and just running up the incline, the angles of hip flexion. the knee angle, ankles, all that stuff is really mostly linked to early acceleration. And then those lower inclines were more like the late
phases of acceleration. So again, you're not going to get into max velocity, those really high velocities, angles in this hill training, but you're going to get that Early acceleration and then like before you get to max velocity that type of acceleration with these knee angles So they were seeing that those types of benefits
were found. So the higher inclines were closer to when you first start your sprint and then the lower inclines were more like Later in that building up speed if you will type of phase I'm
sure you'll find that to be true. Yeah Yes, you're in line in line in line with that thinking Absolutely Yeah, and just for our listeners here flight time and step link decreased as you Increased the time there and your step frequency increased as you got higher in the incline so I think intuitively that makes sense to everybody that You're gonna have to take more steps as you get More inclined because you have to you know, try to get the next step in to move yourself up And so from
that it was like what do we want to how do we move forward from that? And I pulled a article about load and force velocity profiling So just to think about every degree that we incline and
slope you're gonna be slower moving, right? So you need to keep those things in mind but also um shown that people who have greater horizontal force on flat surfaces are going to be the most uh affected by this gradient of hill so um this one interestingly enough remember the last one i talked about 16 incline this one this article here said that gradients up to 17 .6 which is you know uh above that range or within that do not provide sufficient resistance to optimize
power development. So the last one was kind of just giving us a breakdown of like where these phases kind of fit in. No numbers of like development or results pre and post afterwards. So it was saying just kind of where your limbs and the coordination effect happen. This one's saying that you need to be pretty steep if you want to get power development results in there. I thought this one was good because it mentioned
division one athletes, multitude of sports. They only looked at three different areas, nine sprints in their whole test battery or training battery. They only sprinted 30 meters. So you think about 30 meter sprint. Remember the last one I mentioned five seconds. This is going to be less than five seconds. So we're still in that really short range. Yeah. And then like I said, their results showed just not really enough for power development
because it was on there. However, a couple of notes that I made a practical applications at the very end that they mentioned was from a mechanical power standpoint. Hill sprinting may not impose a great enough velocity loss and in turn overload to optimize power output development. So they're just saying that you don't have enough, if you don't have enough incline, you may not be losing enough velocity to get into power, right? And force velocity curve type of implications there.
And then it did say that due to longer time spent at lower velocities, hill sprints may reflect an ideal training stimulus for developing horizontal force output and ability to direct that force at an angle more inclined to the supporting surface. So again, power output at that early acceleration phase that we touched on in the first article. Now, Tiana, that's a lot of information for our
listeners there to start off with. Is there a point, did you come across mention of a point of kind of diminishing return where the incline
is too steep to actually gain benefit? Because I do know, I see, you know, especially outside of the sports that we've mentioned in terms of just overall conditioning and strength training and track and field where you'll see athletes running up extremely steep inclines and thinking that they're getting benefits like we're discussing in terms of acceleration or biomechanics, but there is a point at which those hills are too
steep to be able to do that. So did you get a number of any range or anything where that kind of no longer becomes beneficial? Not necessarily from any of these articles, but I know the NSCA
has. Information out there about optimal degree angles of hill to increase I think they said speed again, which could be a loose term, but This is I think the max of that was like 22 to 25 degrees on the incline of the hill So forgive me I'm not very good about degree and percent incline and how those things match up but I know there is a point of which it does that which is funny that you mentioned because the next article I'm going to talk about has a 30 degree
angle and it's mentioning no change in anything so maybe this is probably at the max of like anything higher you're just going to see I mean, like I just talked about, you're going to be training at lower velocities, right? And probably a little longer foot contact times, which may result to if you prolong the training at those exposures, it may result to slower max velocities or slower speeds. Yeah, I think we tended to
work in that 20 degree angle range. And then depending on the length of the sprint interval, that may change the degree a bit. So if they're a bit longer, if we're working on more, you know, sprint endurance capacity, they'd be a little lower. Whereas if we had a shorter 30 meter sprints, it'd be a bit of a higher angle. Yeah, and I think that makes sense. You know, as far as overall load and exposure, like intensity wise, I think that does make sense, you know, more. It's more
intense, you go lighter, right? And that even translates to resistance training, right? No one's doing 30 reps at 80%, you know, in one set right there, you know? Right. Yeah, that's great that you kind of segue right into this next one. Like I mentioned, they were looking at how 100 meter times were affected. by uphill and downhill exercises. So. The training program that they had their athletes go through. It will warm up, which was over 20 minutes long, between
20 to 30. And then they had different meetings, right? They met a total of 16 times. And like the first four were this were like uphill. Next four were downhill. next for uphill, last for downhill, that type of training. So they did a combination of the two. So the uphill training, first time, first four times, three to four reps, five sets, it was 20 second interval. They had five minutes of rest in between all of them.
but it was at 30 30 degree angle with the 30 meters right and then the same thing happened with downhill right so they're kind of like increasing the reps on the second time that they came through with the uphill or downhill and 20 second interval the whole time about five minutes of rest for every single one and then what they came to at the end was that there was no significant difference between the uphill downhill training when it came to 100 meter types, like they were statistically
the same. So they probably have reached that point, which may indicate or support a little bit more our theory of that number that's out there by NSCA, about 22 to 25. I think it's a number from them. So I mean, you take that for what you will if it's not increasing your 100 meter time at that point. In your estimation, How many meters of that 100 meters is acceleration and not top speed? Um, I think that varies depending on kind of the school of thought, but I want
to say it's in the 40 meter ish range. Yeah. Um, yeah, probably 30 to 40 meter. But if you're looking at world -class sprinters versus, you know, your, your beginner Athletes I that's gonna vary the you know the amount of power output that a world -class sprinter is gonna have And be able to maintain is obviously much different than a young athlete. So Yeah, I mean as an outsider as a casual fan here I know Usain Bolt had a
really bad early acceleration phase, right? He was really slow out of the blocks every time Well, I don't know I don't know in that case that it mattered but yeah there and that could be just block reaction time versus early acceleration so he may have just had a slow reaction out of the blocks versus other athletes but he definitely made up for it over the force of the hundred no doubt so no doubt no doubt he did you know aces nation is a team of former college athletes
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a demo. Let's go. I was curious if they mentioned any reasoning for not separating the uphill sprint Group versus the downhill sprint group in that particular study because you know, we're talking biomechanics of course Uphill is gonna be a lot different than your downhill So combining them together and then saying that they didn't have an effect on the hundred meter I find interesting versus kind of separating them out and seeing what they could find between the two yeah, one
thing they talked about was the reasoning behind that but they went off a trying to affect stride length and stride frequency. That's why they had both. So they had the resistance, quote unquote, training of it from the uphill and then the overspeed training of it from the downhill. So they wanted to affect both areas of the stride. And that's
why they did both combined. I think that was mentioned as a limitation in their study, is that they didn't separate and have like four different groups going uphill, downhill, uphill, downhill, and then the control. The next study that I was going to talk about does separate into all those different groups. But it's not about times. It's about aerobic and anaerobic power. That's the metrics they were looking at.
Yeah, I agree. It would be nice to have it separated out to see if does this uphill training for a
longer period of time. You know yield some results or or not and like have these different conditions with every single one And I will say practically speaking and as far as downhill training goes especially in team settings You know as a coach when I program it that degree of Decline was much different than an incline because if you're over speed training You're obviously opening athletes up to positions that they're not necessarily used to yet and making sure that you're not inviting
injury can be more difficult on the downhill training and that overspeed position where your center mass is forward and your chest is forward. And, you know, people are tumbling here and there sometimes. So I would say, you know, just a word
of caution. If you're using that decline training with athletes, you should really make sure that that is not a steep decline and that you're preparing athletes for kind of what they're going to feel and making sure that you're not opening them up to additional injuries that are unnecessary.
Yeah, I agree because that's a tough spot to be in with someone who's not really used to training overspeed at downhill because it can either turn into a bunch of tumbling and injury potential, like you said, or just a bunch of heel strike
breaking, right? For people who are like, oh I'm getting out of my comfort zone now I'm gonna start breaking and not really training those positions Yeah, yeah Surface kind of plays a role in that too That's a you know, whether you're on pavement Doing uphill and downhill training that's something to consider versus, you know, your grass grassy or dirt surface area I personally wouldn't program it on pavement Unless it was that longer kind of training group That was going
in your kind of mid -distance ranges and going on shorter inclines Whereas like any sprinter jumper or anybody in those type of groupings would always be on grass or dirt I've got a friend they do some hill training out in the hills of Los Angeles and that's always on dirt She was a she was a fun day for coaches Not for athletes. You personally, in terms of programming any of this, do you feel like they're with seasonality? Is there a perfect time to program uphill sprinting?
Because, you know, for us in the track world, it was generally in our off season training. That was, you know, a big portion of the very
beginning of the training cycle. um we'd start in you know the end of summer early fall and hills would be a big part of of that time period did do you notice something different for other sports uh i i would say the same for other sports i mean especially for flat ground reactive athletes who you know move laterally or just aren't really familiar with any downhill stuff at all especially like heavier athletes maybe that play contact sports. I think early off season or mid off season
would probably be where you would do it. I've used band assisted over speed training before. In my opinion, like it's great that you can get increased stride length, but sometimes bands aren't any safer than running downhill. Sometimes I've seen bands break on people. I've seen bands get really loose towards the end of that over speed rep and become like a hazard for the feet. And then I think it just kind of changes focus and intent. And now my intent is to not trip
or not fall here. I think it just depends, but I like it as well in that early to mid offseason area and then Any time away from like extra sports practice because you're gonna start getting into other stress I mean in track you guys are the the sports stress and and training all in one basically, but When you start adding the outside stuff that we aren't in control of Prescribing then You probably back away from that type of stuff and get back to those straight line things
as well. Or flat ground, excuse me. That makes sense. Yeah. So I'll move to the last one here
that I have to talk about. um which was the mix that we talked about it's uphill group downhill group uphill and downhill group and then the control group who i think just stayed on uh flat ground the entire time so what interesting about this one we talked about the other ones they were mostly treadmill based studies and this one actually they found some type of incline specifically graded hill um that they could run on this one was mainly looking at sprint interval
training for aerobic and anaerobic uh power okay so just to mention just kind of right off the top vo2 max increase for like all these groups and it wasn't like a continuous running up the hill for a really long time frame it was a lot of rest in between um So really high work -to -rest ratios for all the groups, and they all had benefits in VO2 max. To be right up front, the groups that showed the best results in this one were definitely the uphill and downhill training
groups, so the people who did both. The other ones, they did show benefits, but not as high as the other group. And the only ones that - This is the - This is the study that had the four only four degree angle, right? This is a four degree. So that's interesting too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So not, not, not big at all. Uh, the other, one of the other groups who talked about, they did 30 meters sprint, um, on an incline. I think that was the 16 % one and Actually, we
talked about so many right now. No, the 30 degree was the one that looked at 100 meter sprint times. That was 20 second interval. The other ones was five seconds at 16 percent incline. So we're looking at a lot of different variants that's happening here. This one in particular we talked about was the four four degree angle. So the difference just to describe a little bit of the
sets and reps that were happening here. The uphill training group they did four sets of four repeats So they would have their rep go back to beginning they do it so uphill group started with a 5 meter acceleration so 5 meter flat 20 meter uphill and then a 15 meter like slow down at the top. So they they only did the uphill the downhill would do kind of the reverse of that five meter build up and speed 20 meter downhill and a 15
minute or 15 meter slow down at that point. Up and downhill they had a five meter acceleration 20 meter incline 15 meter what how did they describe that plane running so you just were I guess maintaining at that point at the top of your plateau and then a 20 meter downhill sprint and then the 15 minute cool down plane running of trying to stay at the speed so they did a much longer one than everybody else so they ended up doing only two sets of four repeats uphill and downhill
did four sets of four repeats and then the horizontal group they did four sets of four repeats uh 25 meters i think they just went all out sprint training 25 meters and then had their rest time in between reps and in between sets so um obviously they had a little bit different stuff i will say that reps uh increased a little bit as they went through the weeks this was an eight week program so at one through four they had a certain amount of reps five through six they had a certain
amount of reps and then seven through eight they had a certain amount so they increased um reps a little bit here and there as They went throughout the program So that was one of the points of emphasis at the end was that the program was eight weeks long Which was enough to induce results out of everybody But they did say something about wanting to move into a further longer study Yeah, basically at the end interesting again that they did change uh the distance um in each one so
that's another thing that i you know studies there's always something kind of that you wish they would have controlled a little bit more um yeah uh but i actually think they kept it pretty similar i mean every time someone went up or downhill it was 20 meters whenever they finished their up or downhill they had 15 meters of plane running as they described it and even in the uphill group everyone started with five meters of acceleration or plane running you know
acceleration phase as they talked about everyone started with five meters once they finished an incline they had 15 meters and then obviously our up and downhill group got the additional 20 meters going down and then they finished with another 15 so i think they kept it pretty similar throughout the protocol Yeah, I was I was actually okay with the protocol that they created there because everyone was experiencing Inclines at the same distance and the same distance free
and post -inclined the other group just had to do an extra one I thought you said there was a 20 -second group that ran for 20 seconds. I don't know. Sorry. Sorry 20 meter I think I said minutes at one point where where I read meters with the him on there, but yeah, so everyone was meters measured out for everyone, uh, essentially the same. So really they, after this whole thing, this whole program, um, only two groups that had anaerobic power increases, the uphill and
the uphill plus downhill. So any group that included uphill increased and anaerobic power. And then obviously, like I said, everyone improved. Everyone improved in aerobic power via to Max. I just think that comes from training, you know, exposure to training. This group did say recreationally trained male subjects. So, you know, that would lead me to believe too, that they're not. optimally trained already. So I think you'd see an improvement
over eight weeks regardless. Yeah. Yeah. Another thing I thought was interesting with this study though, is that they brought, they took everyone through two weeks of general strength training and running technique workouts before they did this. So they kind of set them up for success. And like that was strength training was three sets. of eight to 10 reps at 75 to 80 % of their one RM, which don't get me started on some of the stuff is like how you have one RM for some
of these exercises. I'll list off the exercises for you, right? Squat. Okay. Makes sense. Yeah. Abdominal crunch. Don't know. Oh, okay. Leg extension.
Okay. I could see it. Core extension which I'm gonna assume that's like back extension or something like that And then a leg curl it says leg flexion exercises, I'm assuming it's like seated leg curl or something like that Yeah, they performed all the exercises to a metronome So I got the metronome they got the metronome going rest times on there uh, sets reps percent of this on there. What were those one RM sit ups? I don't know.
Like I have no idea of like whether or not that was, but it was only eight to 10 reps of that. So maybe they had, maybe they had a machine that had the pad on the chest and they were crunching that way and they had found their one RM through
that machine, you know? So Not my choice. Yes, I know I know but but very interesting to see that as well Yeah, so after all these I would say that there's definitely a benefit to it like like we've talked about and I think that in a lot of speed and acceleration I think strength coaches and coaches outside of track can learn from track coaches in maybe how some of these things are applied and then stay in touch with, you know, research that's been done in these
areas within the last 10 years or less, you know, and try to make use of, hey, I've got this information. This is how, you know, historically or best practice track coaches are using this information in order to create a plan For your athletes who are probably not track athletes, right? So I think there's definitely some benefit to it I see more benefit to it as far as like hey, we're gonna use this for acceleration What I would assume I mean look I think the furthest distance we talked about
was 30 meters, right? Because the other the last thing we talked about was only 20 meters So I think maybe the first study I mentioned with like five seconds being the interval that used, I think that's probably a good estimate of like, hey, I'm going to use five, five seconds as the time we're going to run. Right. And then you've got whatever work to rest ratio you want for your outcome after that, which a lot of these studies were getting three to five minutes of
recovery, you know, between reps. So I mean, you better ensure that everyone's going all out for given five minutes right right and i do think it is a good tool outside of track and field to work on sprint mechanics um for other sports because you know when you're working with those types of athletes on a flat surface and trying to train all of those different positions, it can get difficult. Whereas the hill is kind of a good tool to just kind of force them into some
of those. And then it's a little bit easier to cue some changes from there while they're sprinting up a hill. So I do think it's a good tool for that. I don't think kind of one of the aspects that we touched on, and we'll probably have to do some more digging in terms of some different studies, but is those kind of lower inclined
but longer distance? Sprints or kind of they're not your I would say you're falling in your 70 to 75 percent range in terms of effort Because that's something we use a lot as well in the offseason for any of our athletes that weren't just pure sprinter jumpers Any of your mid distance, you know longer distance athletes Or anyone that
has to do or like a multi -event athlete. There's a lot of benefit there that we would see in terms of kind of closer to what we were talking about, even up to in terms of 20 second range, so around 200 meters even. But those are much lower incline and they're usually on a soft surface and they're just kind of, you know, you're doing repeats longer rests in there and just overall more volume.
So I think there's multiple buckets that you could put these uphill sprint workouts in, you know, you've got that sprint and biomechanic group, you've got that anaerobic kind of capacity group, and then kind of your longer aerobic benefits
as well. So I agree. I think, personally, if you're a short burst type of sport, whether that be football, basketball even a lot of soccer positions and stuff you're probably better suited for inclined short distance short time intervals, but but yeah, I think if we're looking at early offseason Getting in training volume, you know at a stimulus or an incline that is gonna give
you Benefits beyond flat surface running. Yeah, I think that that would be great addition to your program is to have those really low inclines for those longer intervals. Yeah, I'm thinking especially in terms of like your, you know, soccer, maybe field hockey, some sports like that where you're moving constantly for the entire duration of the game. Agreed. Yeah, the cross in there to, you know, thinking about some of the runs
that I've seen people make. Yeah, I think that all that stuff could be perfectly fit into whatever your desired outcome or your sports requirements or demands are. You know, you can find a spot for some type of uphill, maybe even downhill training in your program somewhere in the off season. Absolutely. Thanks everybody for listening. If you have any questions that you want to ask us directly, please reach out to us through our ACES Nation website. find us on social media
as well. We'd love to answer any specific questions to kind of help you and maybe just start a conversation and dialogue about how we as professionals and coaches through our platform can help your team, you know, be better prepared for the season that comes, help you be more organized as a coach, as an organization. So please reach out to us with anything specific. We'd love to start a dialogue and help you guys out. But Tiana, thank you so much for being here with us on this one.
We really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me and let us know how you program Hills for your program Yeah, definitely. We will catch you on the next one