Hill workout for beginners

No matter how experienced you are or where you’re at in your training cycle, hills are an excellent training tool for every runner. For beginners, however, they can be somewhat intimidating. After all, running up and down a long, steep hill over and over again is not exactly easy. If you’re new to running and considering adding hills to your routine, give this “intro to hills” workout a try to ease your way into them.

Managing effort: learning the art of running uphill

The workout

All you need to do this workout is a gentle incline that takes you at least 30 seconds of running to reach the top. Since you’re relatively new to hill workouts, we don’t recommend choosing the steepest hill in the neighbourhood just yet. You can easily make this workout harder as you get more confident on the hills, simply by adding more repetitions or repeating the sequence as many times as you like.

Warmup: 10 minutes of easy jogging, followed by five minutes of light, active stretching.

Workout: starting at the bottom of the hill, run up for 10 seconds, then walk or slowly jog back down to the bottom. Run up again for 15 seconds, then return to the bottom. Run up again for 20 seconds and walk or jog back to the bottom. Repeat this sequence as many times as you like, or lengthen the workout by adding more rounds, increasing the length by five seconds each time.

Cooldown: 10 minutes of easy jogging, followed by light stretching.

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