BoJaffa

I've been between 210 and 230 through out my cycling days.. Hill repeats will work wonders for your climbing ability.There is also a lot of strategy involved. I've always done well by staying in a good zone for the first 3/4's of a hill and the dropping down a gear or two and standing and really going for it near the top. You be surprised how many guys fade near the top. It''s a good feeling passing some of those little guys.

beatlebee 

yeah, no offense OP but you're about 1.5" taller than me but about 70 pounds heavier and I am not in climbing shape. No one would say I am rail thin.

SHIM_105

There's one that just opened about 45 mins away. I ride mainly for fitness and enjoyment. Always loved cycling. I'm non competitive. Just kills me that hills are such a b$tch. I know, HTFU. Which is what I'm doing. Just was curious as to what other heavier guys are experiencing.

bbattle

Chris Froome versus Taylor Phinney on climbing Mt. Ventoux.

Of course, they are professionals at the top of their game and we post nonsense on a forum.


Go ride your bike.

bigredkevbot

I will say OP, I'm 6' even and probably at 230 pounds on my bad days. I don't cycle competitively, but I do ride with a large group of mechanics and enthusiasts, including a few friends that have ridden coast-to-coast (in the US). I am always the first to the top of the hills. That being said, I reiterate: I do not cycle competitively, and do not, at this time, have any frame of reference for how fast I go up hills compared to competitive cyclists. So I don't know what my power is like uphill. My strategy has always been to stand for as long as possible, then slowly drop gears when you can't stand anymore. I climb a fair amount where I ride.

Best of luck, and keep giving the hills everything you've got!

CNC2204

Ive got 100 pounds on most men and a easy 150 pounds on most women.

Try wearing that on a 50 mile ride, it all goes right to ur butt.

loimpact

But to be sure.....if you're really 70.5 inches tall (and as I said before, lots of people are as much as a couple inches shorter than they say they are) and 160lbs, then I'd most definitely classify you as skinny. Maybe not Wiggins at 154 skinny, but definitely skinny.

And again, there's some folks that can climb freaky regardless of weight (relativity, again) as one guy in particular I think of is probably 5'10" and if I had to guess, about 210-220lbs and the guy can leave EVERYONE in our group (30+ riders) which includes a couple of cat 3 racers!

beatlebee 

whoops, 74 kg today

I think that our lens is distorted when it is more common to be overweight as an adult than average.

chasm54

Jan Ullrich could climb only becasue his EPO-boosted heamatocrit levels were hovering around 60%! And have you ever seen Robert Millar? When he was winning the KOM jersey, he was positively skeletal, I doubt he weighed 125lbs.

All the fat guys in this thread who think they climb well (I include myself in the former group, but not the latter) are deluding themselves. I suggest they enter a road race over moderately hilly terrain. Then they'll understand.

superslomo

I am now around 195-205 depending on the day, and am just under 6'3". I was at 245 earlier this year, and I can definitely say that climbing (both on hiking trails as well as on the bike) are easier, as far as I can tell. I was out of shape on the bike when I started, and we're in a hillier place than we were when I was last riding frequently, so it would be hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison, but when we were still in the city, I was at one point down around 165, and when I got up and over 200 the difference in my ability to go uphill was profound. At 165-175 I could just stand up on my old steel bike and felt like I was just tearing up hill on a standard double, compared to grinding up on a triple at a heavier weight.

superslomo

I am now around 195-205 depending on the day, and am just under 6'3". I was at 245 earlier this year, and I can definitely say that climbing (both on hiking trails as well as on the bike) are easier, as far as I can tell. I was out of shape on the bike when I started, and we're in a hillier place than we were when I was last riding frequently, so it would be hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison, but when we were still in the city, I was at one point down around 165, and when I got up and over 200 the difference in my ability to go uphill was profound. At 165-175 I could just stand up on my old steel bike and felt like I was just tearing up hill on a standard double, compared to grinding up on a triple at a heavier weight.

I get through it at the moment, but I'm miles away from being "fast" up hills. If you want some perspective, you don't have to go race people, just run strava going up any local climbs (or even on flat TTs or downhills) and you'll get a picture of exactly what "fast" looks like. I did, and I know that I'm super, super slow

loimpact

Naw.......that scale is just evil!! Pure & simply evil!

Reminds me I need to get on my horse & work the scale down a few pounds, though now's when it's gonna get hard. Birthdays & holidays from here on out til the end of the year. (Ugh)

And I still gotta try that Strava! Group rides are good to compare/contrast but I think that Strava is another great tool!

big john

I joined a road club 25 years ago and I was 220# then. I always set my bikes up with a low "bail out" type gear and still do.
Riding with the "A" group, I've always been the slowest climber of the regulars. I just ride my own speed on long climbs and they wait for me. Many of them ride a lot more than I do and when I can get more saddle time I feel better and they don't have to wait as long, but still I'm in the back.
I rode across the U.S. on a touring bike which was around 55-60 pounds, that's 270# to drag up every hill. Just have to settle into the right gear and grind away.

Johnny Rad

In a word, YES your climbing skills will improve if you keep riding them and lose some weight.

IME, I'm no longer hanging the equiv of 3 full milk jugs off the side of my bike ... and I'm riding considerably better up the mountains. You can, too.

Leinster

The 55 and 60kg midgets that Ullrich used to leave behind up those Alpine slopes were also charged up on EPO, so I don't see where that comes into it. Millar didn't always beat Sean Kelly to the top of the mountain, and Millar "isn't as big as one of Kelly's thighs," as one journo once wrote.

Of course climbing is easier at a lower weight, that's physics. But I was responding to a suggestion that it's the number one factor. Truth is, I could go on a lettuce and water diet today and get down to my Dallas Buyers Club weight in a couple of months, but I won't have the strength to get my bike over a speed bump let alone some of the 10-15% grades that I sometimes have to deal with around here. Weight is an important factor in climbing, only an idiot would say otherwise. But fitness is a far more important factor. I climb better now that I've lost 15lbs. But the biggest improvement in my climbing came in the 3 months when I went from cycling solo once a week maybe, to riding 2-4 times a week in groups and having to keep up with people faster than me. I didn't lose much weight in that time, but I got a lot faster.

wphamilton

At 150 pounds and 69.5 inches I'm right in the middle of the healthy weight range and object to the "skinny" appellation. In fact I could advantageously lose about 5 pounds, and losing 10 pounds wouldn't be "skinny" or "skeletal" either - it would be useful for climbing and probably wouldn't impact my raw power.

Body weight is half of the equation. Power is the other half. They have, literally, equal impact on how fast we can climb.

caloso

So true. Normal person skinny = bike racer fat.

chasm54

Obviously, if you're not cardovascularly fit you're going to be pretty useless. But the huge improvement you are making between being "unfit and fat" to "quite fit and fat" is the improvement from being completely hopeless to just being rather poor. Cycling fast uphill is all about watts per kilogram. Fat people can improve, but they can't get good.

CNC2204

I just enjoy riding, last time a checked that was okay ...

AbsurdChalk

I'm standing at 5' 8" with 120 pounds under my belt. Climbing is so nice because I pass everyone. Flats are okay, but downhill is difficult when it comes to keeping up. I'd rather be good at climbing than anything else though.

canam73

I think in discussions like this more mention needs to be made of the length of climb people are using in their reasoning. I am 5'-10 and 180#, not a prime climbers physique. But I do very well at hills that take no more than 5 minutes where I can stay anaerobic and "power" up them. Much longer than that and the guys with better w/kg at ftp will have a definite advantage.

To put it in pro terms, think about the way Cancellara and Sagan will uses the bergs of the Classics to launch attacks that distance true climbers. But when those guys get to an alpine climb they are quickly dropped to the autobus.

Leinster

Obviously losing body fat is never going to hurt anyone's climbing ability, because fat adds weight, but doesn't produce any watts. Losing muscle mass might, though. You still have to generate the watts from somewhere. Getting down to the jockey weights in the peloton isn't really practical for most of us average joes. Kelly had some of his worst days on the bike because De Gribaldy, in those days before modern sports science, was obsessed about his riders not eating too much.

carpediemracing 

Climbing is like running. It's mostly you (no drafting, no real tactics), there's a pretty solid way of predicting performance (power and weight), and you really can't change much about where your numbers put you.

You can work some numbers yourself. I'll use myself as an example. I weigh 175.x so I'll round up to 176 lbs or 80kg. My FTP is about 200w.

Right now I'm at about 2.5 w/kg (200w/80kg).

With the same power but at 155 lbs (70kg), I'd be more like 2.85 w/kg (200w/70kg).

What kind of power would I need to get to 2.85 w/kg while weighing 80kg? 228w. That's a 11% increase in current power. That's significant. 20% would be a realistic limit in improvement for me (240w), at least without losing the Missus etc. I'm not very fit so I know I have some room for improvement, but in 2010, when I was super fit (450 hours riding, upgraded to Cat 2) my FTP was something like 220w. Since I don't train very scientifically I'm going to say I could have been more like 240w.

Dieting is relatively free. It's possible to lose weight and keep it off.

If I trained a lot and I lost weight, I could be, say, at 228w @ 70kg. That would give me 3.25 w/kg. That's a huge, huge improvement from 2.5 w/kg.

My goal in the next few months is to get back to 70kg, like I was going into the 2010 season.

However I have to keep in mind that I still belong in a very low-level world in terms of climbing. 2.5-3.0 w/kg is pretty low. Even as a Cat 2 I couldn't stay with my Cat 3-4-5 teammates on hills. Heck I couldn't stay with non-racers. I understand that and accept it.

Seattle Forrest

Your weight is always a hindrance when you fight gravity, that's true no matter what you weigh. The important thing is how much power you can generate and the ratio between that and your weight. So, if you keep working on going up hill, you'll get stronger and it will become easier, even if you don't shrink your belly.

Lanterne Rogue

If all you care about for fitness is riding a bike, then lighter is definitely better on climbs. That said, there are clear disadvantages in life to having T-Rex / cyclist arms.

I've been on several cycling tours where grown men were too weak to hoist their own duffel bags of gear (maybe 50 pounds) into the back of a waiting semi-trailer. That would embarrass me. However, they smoked me on two-hour climbs up mountain passes.

As for the previous poster who said lighter hikers were better / faster in the mountains, I'd say, it depends. If you are day-hiking, you are right. However, if you need to carry a load for backpacking trips, or skis / crampons / gear for winter trips, then a 50- or 60-pound load can be crushing for thin guys.