Syntaxsid

What are the muscle groups and techniques needed for a Stiff but short climbs and 3-5% gradient long climbs?

Daniel4

Quads, glutes, hamstrings and calves. Do squats and deadlifts.

gregf83 

The ones that are sore after a hard ride. For me I know it's been a good workout when my quads are sore going down stairs. Hamstrings & calves rarely, if ever, get sore from cycling although my hamstrings are susceptible to cramping after (but not during) a ride.

Carbonfiberboy 

That's right. If you're not hurting, you're not training hard enough! My quads, glutes, hams, and hip flexors are sore after a hard ride. You have to get your head around the concept that pain is a good thing and is sought after. I do one-legged calf raises on a stair, full range of motion, to exhaustion at least once a week. That hurts good and is a big help. I also do full body workouts in the gym in the fall and early winter, focusing a good bit on back work, about 2 hours/week total.

Stiff, short climbs are usually best taken standing unless you're riding long distance (well over 100 miles) in which case you spin up. Best training for standing is to stand on long climbs of moderate grade or even on the flat for a mile or so. Try slightly different cadences and techniques and see what works for you, i.e. reduces HR at X speed. It's good training to sprint up short climbs as hard as you can, pulling up in the back like crazy.

I find it best to spin up long climbs seated, using as many leg muscles as possible, i.e. spinning circles. Your hams should get just as tired as your quads. Relax your calves. - they're too small to do much work except during short accelerations - they'll get tired enough anyway.. I change up the muscles by standing for as long as is comfortable about every 10 minutes.

Basically, train what hurts after a ride in the gym.

McBTC

just suggesting having lowest gear possible and spin as much as possible while breathing through your nose as a gauge (I call it the jack rabbit)... i.e., if you get the point where you need to gasp you can stop temporarily... this may take less than a minute before normal breathing can be resumed. Then, you continue on. If you're in a situation like this -- long steep hill, big load -- several such stops may be required. In my experience from years ago this technique is a lot quicker than grinding away and then collapsing at the top for half an hour. It's also a signal that a lower gear are needed for this kind of riding. Additionally, if you're young enough your body will respond pretty quickly because, it's a lot like doing wind sprints, unintentional as it may be since you probably didn't intend to than gears that were not low enough for work load. Having the right gears is like having the right size shovel-- e.g., a big shovel will move more coal but you get tired moving such a heavy load peter out whereas, you could go longer with a smaller shovel and ultimately move a lot more coal.

tobey

Besides the good suggestions from others I've found the seated leg press works best for improving hill climbing. At least for me. Since I seriously started this exercise early this year at the gym I now no longer use my front small ring except for long hills over 12%.
Just crank away and force yourself to work hard. You won't go faster initially but will find your less tired so when you need to use the small ring it will seem fairly easy. At my age (67) I was surprised at the results of this exercise since I didn't change the rest of my fitness routine.
Use Lifespan machine and do 3 sets of 230 lbs. 40 reps, then 60 and finally 80-90 reps depending how I feel. For every 10 miles I ride my elevation increase averages about 1,000ft so getting better at hills was pretty important.

Carbonfiberboy 

That's about how I started out in the gym, just a few years younger. I did that for ~3 years and then I switched to heavy squats to work my back and stress the little muscles more. Worked great.

KraneXL

When I'm climbing I run out of air before I run out of quads. I end up panting like a race horse. What do?

wolfchild

Do you stop and take a short break or do you push through the discomfort ??.

KraneXL

Always push through. Although in retrospect I sometimes think the rapid heartbeat could be the big one Elizabeth.

Carbonfiberboy 

The rule is: if legs hurt worse than lungs, use a smaller gear and vice versa. So use a bigger gear. Also, force yourself to breathe deeply, inhaling first into the belly and then into the chest. A photo at the right moment would make you look pregnant. Push your chin forward and straighten your neck. Open your mouth wide and drop your tongue to the bottom of your mouth - open your airway. Move as much air as possible in cu.ft./minute. Of course the other thing you could do is lose weight. Your legs could be lots, lots smaller. You want to tune your weight so that, spinning a nice 80 on a climb, you run out of legs and lungs at the same time. Another thing is do more intervals. Do a total of at least 45' of steady Z4 and 20' of Z5 per week. Or more, as much as your ability to recover can handle. More RBCs, more plasma, larger ejection fraction - move that oxygen. Beet juice and B12 are good. More endurance at high efforts, at least a 60 mile 3000' ride per week, weather permitting. Weather not permitting, it's interval time on the trainer or resistance rollers. Like I tell my wife and stoker, if it didn't hurt, we wouldn't be doing it.

KraneXL

Sounds painful, but I'll see what I can do.I'm tall but lightweight. My genetic gave me great muscle density for my size, but unfortunately also gave me a very small torso and therefore, meager lungs. Aerobics capacity has always been my Achilles heel.

Carbonfiberboy 

So ignore the weight stuff, but the rest is still valid. My wife and stoker has about half my lung volume. Our tandem is fastest if I set the cadence to take advantage of her abilities, so our cadence is lower than mine on my single. It'd be even lower except that I have to keep it a little above her optimal range so I can produce more power. Another example: really good climbers, Cat 1 types, climb well at 95 cadence. I climb best at ~80. Big difference, and it's just aerobic ability.

Yeah, it's painful. That's how you know it's worth doing. I look at it this way: I bank the pain against future withdrawals. Pain now means less pain on some future difficult ride. There's no way around pain other than to ride slowly, which of course is a valid option, just not mine. 2 X 20' Z4 intervals are great as are 3-4 X 8'-10' Z5 hill repeats. Those last really work, but be careful not to get overcooked by doing too much, easy to do.

Those minutes I mentioned are weekly totals, not what one would do at one go!

Carbonfiberboy 

Here's another thing to try: On a longish steady climb, stand and mess around finding what feels like your strongest standing cadence. Say it's 65. Then sit and pedal 70 in what feels like a big gear. As you tire, stand and kick it back up to 70, then sit again. Go back and forth, experimenting with sitting and standing at cadences which are fairly close together. There are some folks who prefer to climb like this.

79pmooney

Two pieces from my experience (of loving to climb forever)

1) breathing (from the guy with the smallest lung capacity in my PE class) - exhale! AS hard and long as you can. Don't sweat the inhale. (This from a phys ed. grad student who taught beginning swimming. She stressed that we needed to clear the old air from the bottom of our lungs; that was where the best oxygen receptors are. Co2 air sitting there shields those receptors and they do nothing. If we exhaled through virtually all of out free-style stroke, we inhaled into empty lungs and even if we only got a 1/4 breath (say a wave hit us in the face), those great receptors would be seeing fresh air and we would be getting far more oxygen than with the worlds biggest inhale and only a partial exhale the breath before.

2) A really good way to see what muscles do what when you are standing (and how well you turn complete circles) - go up steep hills in big gears and "loaf". Go so slow you cdon't get your wind up. Doing this, you aren't allowed to "coast" on any part of the pedal stroke since you have no momentum to carry to carry you through the dead spot. (For those of you who are familiar with the Portland. OR westside hills, I have loafed up Germantown from the river on a 44-17 (70") and Blooming-Fernhill Road from Fernhill Road) in the gear of 44-18 (66").. This will tell you what muscles are not up to the job of climbing hard, standing.

I guess you could do 2) sitting, but that sounds like exactly the move my knees would never forgive me for. I'll let someone report back.

I rode close to 70 miles on the fix gear yesterday. I am not in great shape. This was just prep for my annual Black Friday ride; same route on my gravel bike plus as much gravel into the coast range as I am up to. I didn't ride hard; just doing it was going to be . To save time I went over that second hill both ways. Going west isn't all that hard and I figured I'd do the flat two more miles coming home. But I was running a little late and feeling OK so I took on the hill. (250', 15% maybe? Its starts out so steep there is no run-in at all.) The climb took a long time. But it was actually fun ... because I passed the test of having good standing fitness; being able to muscle the pedals smoothly through the circle.

Ben

Seattle Forrest

Do your climbing at high tide so you get a gravitational assist from the moon.

Duh.

KraneXL

Hmm, interesting info. But not a lot of hills in my neck of the woods (which is why I'm not good a it). Maybe I'll should just set a climbing program on the cycles at the gym? I'll bookmark this page.

Carbonfiberboy 

Ben has excellent points IME in post 15.

It's hard to get good at climbing without big hills. Advice is usually to ride the flats and easy hills in a big gear. Though that helps, it's not the same due to crank inertial load: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11784546

rubiksoval

You not being good at it isn't because you don't do them, it's because you can't produce the power necessary to do them well. You can work on that power anywhere.

Seated accelerations spinning up to max power (not max cadence; it's not cadence work) can help a ton. Sprints can help. Longer aerobic intervals can help. Lots of things can help. You have to actually work on producing that higher power to be good at producing higher power.

tobey

Take some spin classes that emphasize standing up which most classes to. They will kill you in the beginning but after awhile you will be able to stand much longer even when using a high gear. You'll be surprised how much they help when you ride outdoors. Spin classes are are just a variation on the peloton craze that is going on now and works really well too

BengalCat

For reference, during the past four years, I've developed worsening polyneuropathy of both lower legs. The left more than the right and you can see atrophy compared to years ago. No other muscles have been affected by the ailment. On a 5 mile cat 3 plus a half-mile approach I have lost 60-65 watts of power. The little over five-mile climb now takes me on average seven minutes longer. For seated maximum efforts of 45 seconds, I've lost about 100 watts.

colombo357

Strength training helps with your durability and is absolutely recommended.

However, by itself, it won't do anything for your speed in any sort of sustained effort.

colombo357

For climbing, you're primarily looking at the leg group.

As for technique, the key is to pin it.

berner

This sounds right to me. In my overly ambitious days reading up and preparing for light mountaineering, mountain guides, many of whom had experience on the big mountains of Nepal, were instruction students on this very same technique. Concentrate on the exhale by forcefully pushing air out and the inhale takes care of itself. As an asthmatic I need to pay close attention to breathing.

canklecat

Ditto the breathing exercises. I still use the incentive spirometer I got at the hospital last year after surgery. Helps remind me to correct my poor breathing habits, reminds me to exhale fully and use the diaphragm. After an injury last year (hit by a car) my entire torso was tense. I'm still needing to work on loosening the intercostal muscles to breathe deeply without pain. Massage, foam roller and percussion massager help loosen up those tight torso muscles so I can breathe more freely.