My History With Hill Sprints… And Their Four Benefits
I’ve always found long-distance cardio boring. I guess one reason was due to how much time it took up. If I’m gonna be spending a boatload of my time in pain and my muscles filling up with lactic acid, there needs to be some immense benefit. And there are, as I have explained in previous posts but it comes at a cost.
7th Communications Battalion
This cost I believe is not only in time but energy as well. Every time we went on a battalion run in Okinawa which would be upwards of 5 miles most times, my morning after this was always rough. This was in addition to our company runs which would be around the same distance. The high mileage was due to our battalion commander. He wasn’t really a marathoner per se but he valued high mileage runs. When he eventually left and in order to break up the monotony of all this running, I would take my Marines and do some hill sprint variations from time to time.
Because he was avid about long runs, we had a very special introduction with the battalion commander. Most battalions, when you show up you arrive in your service dress alphas to his/her office and have a sit down with the battalion commander lasting a few minutes.
His option was to take you out for a run during lunch underneath the hot sun and in the humid Okinawa weather. Once you started, he would then pick up speed, and at the point it was getting hard for you to breathe he’d ask,
“So, tell me about your life”
One of the other positive aspects of these long-distance runs is mental toughness for you are forced to keep going and not give up. But there are still ways to program this without much time spent.
NAPS (Naval Academy Preparatory School)
My grades and SATs in high school were great but not stellar. Therefore, I and a few hundred others were offered the opportunity to go to a prep school before going to the boat school. This prep school was a year long and took place on a naval base in Rhode Island. There, we had a mixture of academic classes, some military training as well as sports.
Having done some martial arts and grappling in high school I became a walk-on for the wrestling team. The tryouts were brutal. The coach wanted to weed out as many people as he could so on a rainy day he took us out to a field and had us doing sprints, crab walks, bear crawls back and forth for an hour with little rest in between. This was the toughest sprint workout I ever did even to this day.
I made it on the team but later we were all kicked off because they were afraid of some of the walk-ons getting hurt and their parents suing the school. But one of the workouts we did would forever plant in my mind the value of a hill sprint workout.
The team ran over to a hill on the base and from there it was nonstop hill sprints, both forward and backward for about thirty minutes. The backward hill sprints are what really got me. By the time I got to the top of the hill, my quads(the front of my thighs) were on fire. Backward anything, sprints, hill sprints, or sled drags are a quad-dominant exercises but can also strengthen your knees as well.
That’s right, not only can our muscles perform better over time, but our connective tissues can become stronger as well as long as you do it right. This is one of the reasons I value progressive calisthenics so highly is that it strengthens this balance over time better than most methods.
29 Palms
Maryland, where the boat school was, didn't have a large selection of hills so I wasn’t able to go deep into hill sprints there but I was able to when I eventually came to 29 Palms, California. I was here for communications school. Here, I learned the wavetops of all the communications equipment we used in the Marine Corps.
This was one of the many hills near the training area where we would do our exercise. I would lace up my boots, find a sandy hill and proceed to do a few sprints up that hill. The nasty thing about sprinting on sand is that the force you generate into the ground quickly dissipates. This makes it much harder than sprinting on solid concrete or grass.
If you get good at sprinting on the sand you will be prepared for almost anything. If you’re going to do it barefoot just watch out for any objects that might do damage.
Okinawa
My leg conditioning here was pretty simple. If I wasn’t performing overcoming isometrics or pistol squats, I was incorporating hill sprints in my boots near the training area. There was a nice beautiful hill just before the gates of the main training area that was steep and long. I would do a workout every Saturday morning where I would
run up the 150 meters three to four times moving forward.
then come down halfway(75 M) and do up to three backwards
If I felt like it, I would throw in one or two 75 Meter sprints where I would start from a prone/laying position then pop up and go as fast as I could finishing the workout.
This would take about 30 minutes but I had plenty of rest in between in order to maximize the explosiveness of each sprint.
Texas
North Texas is flat, very flat. But there are still options if you look hard enough. There are a few hills nearby that either, have length but are not steep, or they’re steep but have little length. You have to work with what you got. Luckily, I still have my 20Ib weight vest from Highschool so I throw that on to make things a bit harder.
I’ve been pretty lazy the past few months on incorporating hill sprints into my regime but I’m growing back in consistency. Before this most recent period, I would do a similar workout to what I did in Okinawa which has the majority of my sprints moving forward, then cut it in half and do the rest backward. Again I would do this once a week. I wouldn’t really time myself but would go off how fast I felt I was going. Maybe I should have, I DUNNO, I’m not really trying to break any records. But, I do believe in being in tune with your body and having a general awareness of whether you feel stronger or not. If I don’t feel this I add a few rest days or lessen the number of sprints on the next workout till I do. It’s not how much you train but how much you improve.
Sometimes your body might not recover as well as it did from the last workout due to a number of issues like stress & sleep. Go with the flow.
Benefits Of Hill Sprints
Its Harder
What was that JFK said,
“We don’t do things not because they are easy but because they are hard.”
Hill sprints are a tough exercise but because it's tough you will reap many benefits. Among them is the burning of more calories as well as improving your top speed on a flat surface. The arm pumping and the raising of the leg which incorporates the hip flexors to a greater degree, will become more pronounced. If you perform a few hill sprints with a high enough intensity you should feel your shoulders and hips. In fact, they might be sore the next day or two…or three.
Think of hill sprints as regular sprints but with added gravity.
Quick Workouts
Given that it's harder, you will not need a long time or many repetitions to activate the stimulus for growth. Whatever length of sprints I’m doing I’ve always kept it below 10. Any more than that you affect your ability to generate force and tension limiting the physical benefits but simultaneously you will be improving the mental benefits at this point. Meaning, that if you decide to do an hour of hill sprints you could be improving your mental toughness. If I had to choose between an hour run and an hour of hill sprints I’m the type of guy to choose hill sprints.
Energy
I mentioned at the beginning of this post about the battalion runs sucking the energy out of me on that morning in which we did them. Long runs always tire me out. In fact, if timed correctly they could benefit the quality of your sleep. I wish to get strong and faster but not at the expense of the focus I have on my work for the rest of the day. The best workouts are those that leave you feeling energized afterward.
“If after you exercise, your bath and your rub-down, you feel fit to battle for a kingdom, then your schedule is right. ” (p 150 Liedeman Secrets of Strength)
A handful of hill sprints will do this.
Protective For The Hamstring
Due to the running mechanic of some, a sprint or run where the heel strikes the ground too far forward from the person's center of gravity could cause a hamstring tear. But running on the balls of your feet will decrease the likely hood of this. Hill sprints force you to run on the balls of your feet.
There are however other things that force you to run on the balls of your foot like minimalist footwear or no footwear at all.
The How
Start small…always. After you’ve located a nice hill warm up by taking a slow jog or brisk walk for a few minutes. Without getting into too much math, a decent hill is one where if you’re standing at the starting point, you should not see over the top of the endpoint. If you can see the end point and what lies beyond then it's basically a normal sprint.
On your first workout and after your warm-up, engage in only three to five “Moderate-intensity” runs. Keep in mind these are not all out sprints, that will come a few weeks down the road. At the end of it, you should feel like you can do more. Save a rep in the tank. Over the next month, you can add a rep here and there.
Once this month is up, then turn up the intensity but keep the rep counts low( three to five).
Then on the third month and if you feel spry, go all out with a few forward sprints. Over time either add in backward sprints or try to increase your speed.
Sprinting is simple and very effective.
Wrap Up
Dang that was a long post but thank you for making it to the end and the comments are below.
Until next time…
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