Intervals on hills

Harrybelafonte

If I wanted to improve my climbing abilities by doing circuits of a smaller climb, would Drumcondra to Whitehall or Kyber Road be better?

Billy Whizz

That won't improve your climbing ability.

Climbing ability is determined by sustainable power to weight. Long 20, 30, 45 and 90 minute efforts at threshold will raise sustainable power. If you don't have a powermeter or HR monitor just go out and ride as hard as you can for the given duration. These efforts don't have to be done on hills to become better at climbing, in fact I'd suggest they are done on a flat to rolling course.

Ryaner

Intervals on hills DOES help your overall climbing ability. I'm living proof of it. However it is very painful at times. One of the drills I did was on 3Rock and consisted of 1 minute sprint / 1minute seated / 2 min sprint / 2 min seater / 3 min sprint / 3 min seated - repeat to the top.

Lumen

Kyber Road is a bump in the road compared to 3 Rock.

You want 20 minutes or so of continuous hard effort at lowish cadence. That can be on a hill, but it needs to be a long enough one.

Hence why flat threshold work is just as good or better. The only problem I've found is that once you get used to seated low-cadence efforts it starts to feel unnatural to climb out of the saddle, but that's arguably a good thing anyway.

thebouldwhacker

I lived in west cork until recently, I moved there from the midlands. When I started cycling the wests hills it was an epic fail however within 2 months I had cycled the Priests Leap.
My well hidden point is that I reckon my cycling ability was developed in the flat, rolling midlands but as soon as I got used to going up it was not a problem for me. I found the hardest part of a climb isn't so much the gradient but your mental attitude to it. Cycle flat or climbs (whichever theory you subscribe to) to get your body used to the pressure of climbing but you have to do climbs to get the confidence to keep going to the top (and to cycle well out of the saddle).

Harrybelafonte

Thanks for the input. So basically i should just get out there and just cycle at a decent pace for as long as I have time for?