Immediate Hill Climb
 

First off, I'm 67, and just bought a Canyon Grizl On-Fly to help me get back into fitness.

I live at the bottom of a steep hill, something like 10% gradient. If I stick the Grizl in granny gear and Turbo mode, and can make it up the hill easily. But I'm wondering if its the right thing for me to do.

I get on the bike cold, and the first thing I do is this almighty hill. Even in Turbo mode on the Grizl, my heart rate shoots up from around 80 to over 140 in under 30 seconds. I'm wondering if this is good for me.



https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...d344e05c30.png
(I'm just buggering about for the first 6 minutes, that's why heartrate is so flat initially). I'm woindering what the best strategy for me to warm up properly is. My strategy so far is just to hit it and go, and get up the hill quickly. But I wonder if I should hold back more, and maybe take twice or three times as long for the climb, to let me warm up more? Other options include walking the bike up the hill and then cycling from there, which would be more gentle on me, or doing some warm-up exercises first to get the heart rate elevated before riding off.

On the other hand, what doesn't kill you you makes you stronger, so maybe I just stay as I am?

I am right back at the beginning stage of my fitness journey -again- so I'd appreciate advice on how I should manage the immediate load the hill represents when I start.

Thanks for any/all help,

- Pasta

You are right to complain. For a while my group ride had a leader who took us up a long 10% grade after maybe 200 yards of almost flat. I hated that! Kinda ruined my whole ride to have to ride like hell with legs which weren't warmed up. After a few months of that, he saw the light and quit starting the ride that way. We rode for a couple miles and took a less demanding hill to the top of that ridge. Still hard, but better.

How about driving to the top with your bike, doing your ride, descending that hill and then climbing back to your car? Final hills are a good barometer of how well you paced your ride. Yeah, there's probably no convenient place to leave your car just there, but maybe further along.

Yeah, whatever doesn't kill you . . . but no reason hurt yourself unnecessarily.
Other possiblilities - don't walk, that's not cycling, different muscle groups. Super low gear and less effort - also a good plan. Take it down to 4 mph, but you'd have to have a low enough gear that you were turning more than 50 rpm. But then you'd miss the training input of riding the climb hard.

When I was young and stu, er, inexperienced, I wondered why racers used up so much of their energy before their events riding around. And then I noticed how the first 10 minutes of every ride felt more difficult, and the little dim light went on in the back of my head that it wasn't just low tires / headwind / lack of sleep / insert excuse. These days, I have a brief 17% grade I have to climb before exiting the neighborhood, so I just stomp it out and get it over with even though I'm not quite ready for the effort.

As for what you're doing, it might be good to see what level of effort you can balance between the motor and yourself to get up the hill for those first 6 to 10 minutes before your body comes to full normal power. Relying on the motor might be seen as slacking, but I think if it allows you to get over the hill without overexerting too soon it's a net positive, as long as your post-warmup effort is reasonable.

Lucky me. The very steep (10-12% for one short block) hill in my neighborhood comes at the end of my rides, never at the beginning. But I can skip it and go up a less-steep hill if I'm already gassed.

Also, we don't know how to gauge what 140 bpm means for you. For me (and I'm 64), that's no big deal - my max HR goes up to about 180. What's the highest HR you've seen to date?

No real strategy, you live where you live. If you can’t go the other way (dead end street ?), then it’s a no choice, no problem situation. Or get in the car and drive to an alternative start location. I wouldn’t worry about the HR, it is what it is.

Putting aside the actual HR number,
1. how do you feel when you get to the top of the hill? And,
2. how quickly after you reach the top of the hill does your HR recover to your "cruising" HR?

If you're not gasping and feel like you have to stop when you get to the top but can continue, albeit more slowly, you're probably okay. If you have to stop and you feel like you're going to throw up or your head is going to explode? That's probably too hard.

And, if you can recover relatively quickly back to "normal," you're probably okay. If your HR is elevated and takes a long time, you're probably going too hard.

Some of us have a different problem: it takes a while for our hearts to respond. That's not so good, and you don't appear to have that problem: your HR appears to go up when it should. See if you HR goes down when it should.

It's not completely wrong IMO.

I can't get on and ride without my HR going up into z3 HR and beyond. In addition I have a hill that I attack trying for a Personal Best just 4 minutes into most of my rides.

I'm 67 yo. And I've been doing that particular route for 17 years. My cardiologist does not have a problem with me doing that.

Cycling is supposed to get your HR up. I'd be more worried if my HR stayed below 135 bpm while I was riding.


Perhaps from a training standpoint, there might be a better strategy. But from a heart health stand point, I don't think it's a concern or big deal. Unless 140 BPM is your max HR. Mine is about 175 BPM. But I really haven't gone all out lately to check.

However, I will say that if your HR is going from 80 to 140 within 30-seconds that means you are definitely going into the Red, i.e. you're going anaerobic, regardless of what your max HR may be, because with the lag time of HR. I wouldn't do that in the beginning of a ride before a warm-up.

As for managing the hill, I'd just back off and go slower, if you haven't warmed-up. You want to be very deliberate in when to go deep into the Red. Even on a traditional bike without a motor, you should be able to climb it cold without pegging out your HR.

EDIT: I deleted the first 4 sentences, because I misread the OP's initial post. However, the rest of the post still applies.


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Why is going from 80 to 140 BPM in 30 seconds a issue? The heart doesn't need a warm up. It's been loose and limbered up ever since it started beating.

I sometimes start off a bike ride in a mad rush to get no where fast. And of course I hit near my max HR. I don't particularly see the issue.

As for it being a e-bike, if the person is not in cycling fitness yet. Then I'd expect a high HR just from moving the legs at a fast cadence whether or not there is power assist.

I agree, I also sometimes start out in a little sprint. However, I was taking into account that the OP is 67(***not that 67 is too old for that), but his age in conjunction with that he stated he's just getting back into fitness.

I also didn't focus on the fact that he said he gets over 140, rather that he gets to over 140 in 30-seconds. That indicates that his HR is headed much higher, since HR is a lagging indicator and doesn't immediately reflect effort. That seems to me that he's doing a really hard pull, which is fine, but not something he wants to do every day in the beginning of getting back into fitness.



***P.S. I'm 61

I just deleted the first four sentences of my initial post because I misread the OP's initial post.


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It would help to know what the OP actual max HR is or the fastest that's been obtained so far. Although I don't have any reason for this, I suspect those that have led a otherwise active life probably will have a higher max HR than what the calculation comes to. Or maybe it's just that more than a few have way higher max HR than what the calculation comes to for some other reason.


Warming up might do one good to get the maximum performance they want for a attempt at a PR or for a race. But it's not necessary at all for heart health if the heart is otherwise healthy. A noob to cycling might feel a little fuzzy after the first few max efforts on a bicycle. But this should go away after less than handful of attempts.

There might be some concern for always exercising in the upper zones. But that is long term stuff you get from almost a lifetime of rides. And not from just a few minutes out of a hour of riding.

As always... consult a doctor or other medical professional before beginning new exercise.

However don't expect a GP to know or want to tell you about matters of the heart..... of either kind <grin>. My GP thinks I'm nuts for wanting to ride a bike. And he thought that even when I was fifty yo. 17 years ago. But all the cardiologists and other heart doctors I've dealt with have told me it's okay for me to work out as hard as I like and let my heart run as fast as it wants to during those times.

Hey everyone, thanks for the replies.

The issue isn't the HR per se, I'm just concerned about this hill being the very first thing I do when I start pedaling. However, I did some scouting around at the bottom of the hill, which is a cul-de-sac and there is a small unmade path that leads to a bigger unmade path that actually skirts around the hill so I don't need to go up and over it after all. I have a sneaky solution!

PS thanks for the Paul Dirac quote, I had not heard that one.

- Pasta

There's a reason that racing cyclists warm up at a moderate pace on their trainers before the start. Just sayin'. It used to be possible to hold a TT on a public road near me It. It started at the base of a short, steep hill. Before the start, I'd do a few loops up that hill and down a slightly circuitous route just before my number came up. That really helped. It's not a matter of HR. It's a matter of arteries and muscles. They take a little while to come up to "operating temperature." Starting up a hill cold will affect your whole ride. Not a lot, but it's noticeable to me, just like it is to those pros.

I agree it's good to warm up if one needs peak performance for a event that comes early in a ride. Or for the entire event if it's a race where you must start out as the best you can possibly be.

I don't think there is anything unhealthy about just getting on the bike and almost immediately going up a hill that gets ones HR up. I took the OP's question to be more about whether it was detrimental for health than a timed performance issue .

My advice? Take that hill slowly enough that your HR and breathing stay down. Forget about RPM. Feel free to stand, holding the bars firmly and do a somewhat circular push-pull on the pedals. It won't take long before you develop the muscles to do this and it will become fun.

I know this sounds pretty far out but consider - before gears, this was just a fact of life on bicycles. Doing the full body dance/lug up that obstacle in front of you. (You do have good foot retention, don't you? If not, seriously consider going that route. The full body dance/lug is based on the pull up of your foots nearly as much as the push down.) This will develop muscles in you that regular. "properly geared" climbing will never touch. And you will find that feels good and is fun. (One of the joys I reap of the climbing of hills on fix gears the past nearly 50 years.)

Now, be patient. It will take a while to develop the strength and until then, your HR and breathing will be high. But this is just a different way of doing the work of RPM times force. That high force isn't much work at a slow enough RPM. (It doesn't take hard breathing to just hold that heavy (edit: weight lifting) weight.) I've "loafed" up Germantown Road in Portland from the river side on my heavy commuter fix gear on a 44-17. I was very aware that while I was loafing, on the 15+% hairpins I was loafing with every muscle fiber in my body! (Yes, 20 years ago when I was a lot stronger. I'm 72 now.)

Why do you think that the HR needs to be kept down? We don't even know if 140bpm is high or near his HRmax. 120 - 140 bpm is a good range for aerobic exercise. So if he keeps his HR low, then there is no aerobic benefit.

And aerobic benefit is one of the things cycling does well. But only if you get your HR up.

Thanks again peeps. Just to be clear, the issue was never about the HR being 'bad' or even something to be avoided. It was always about doing max load without warming up first. Now I have scouted out an option that lets me warm up before taking on heart-attack-hill, I'm really happy to tackle big hills: I just want to be warmed up first
:deadhorse:

I'm suggesting a way to start the ride going up a hill that cannot be avoided and do it in a way that allows an easy warmup; simply advice that has been given forever. I find if I go that hard right at the outset it negatively affects the rest of the ride. I have a 3 block hill; well over 10% average and much steeper at the steepest 5 blocks from my home. I never start my rides going up it. I do walk it hard carrying up to 25 pounds. Great HR workout but the rest of the walk isn't very fast.

And that is reasonable. IMO, it's not quite what the OP is asking about. Though for a experienced cyclist that is fit and can pace themselves at a recovery pace during some of the other parts of the ride, I'd say that a immediate hill climb has little negative affect on the rest of the ride.

IMO, the OP is only asking if this immediate hill climb is detrimental for his/her health. And likely for the heart health in particular. My biggest dispute with many of the other answers here seems to be that many are talking about warming up for best performance as if this hill climb is a timed event.

The heart doesn't need a warmup period. The OP probably was moving around and already has gotten his HR up a few times briefly in preparation for the ride. So it's not like the OP is getting out of bed and immediately tackling the hill.

The heart is designed to go from resting HR to HRmax as fast as is needed for the bodies blood supply and oxygen requirements when ever the demands require it. Only if the heart is unhealthy might there be a issue with going from 80 bpm to a mere 140 bpm in 30 seconds. IMO, even if the OP's HRmax is 140 bpm. Which I don't think it is.

Some responses seem concerned that the OP is on a e-bike and getting this high HR. But the OP stated they are using a fast cadence. And just moving ones legs to pedal fast will produce a high HR whether on a regular bicycle or a e-bike with assist.