Here are five fixable reasons your climbing is slow. You know the moment when the road tilts up, you look down at your head unit and it starts to show those little red gradients ahead and suddenly it feels like someone's after coming up behind you and they're dragging off the back of your saddle. That moment's absolutely no fun.
You're not new to the bike. You train. You've done the hard work.
And yet on the climb, you're watching wheels just drift away and thinking, "What am I missing?" Here's the good news. For most riders, it's not talent.
It's not genetics. It's a handful of fixable mistakes. Small little leaks that add up to minutes on every meaningful ascent.
In the next few minutes, we're going to walk you through five of the biggest culprits and give you strategies to fix them in a way you can actually apply this week. And stick around to the end because the fifth one is the one most misunderstood. And fixing it is often the fastest way to stop getting dropped on a climb without actually having to train more.
Sarah, the authority on getting dropped on clims has joined me. >> I feel seen. [gasps] >> I'm not the only one who struggles with this.
I mean, climbing is it's that moment. You kind of described it in the intro there. The moment when you see the that gap between the wheel in front of you just drifting further and further away, that elastic band.
>> There's not a climb in Ireland you haven't been dropped on. >> So true. I'll put my hands up.
But you're going to help me with all that today, aren't you? >> Uh yeah, we'll see. We'll see.
There's I think climbing is misunderstood and this is going to help people a lot because there's two parts to climbing. There's the the physics and there's the physiology side of climbing. So like on meaningful grades, yeah, you're fighting gravity and that's how many watts you can sustain.
Like everyone wants to break climbing down to, well, there's only two variables, you know, weight and power. And that is true, but it's also like how effectively you spend those watts. That's like your budget for the week.
Like there's many ways you can spend your budget for the week. You can go out and blow it in the bookies after 10 minutes of getting your wages or you can distribute it evenly across the week and pay your bills. So it kind of breaks down into two parts.
It's that sustainable power that we talked about what you can hold on the on the climb and that's your power to wait that everyone rattles on about. But there's also the climb execution. And that's where I think the fixable mistakes can come in.
How we approach the climb. And you know, I don't want to give away everything here, but there's things like pace and cadence, fuel, and cooling. Like there's loads of stuff we can get into on this.
>> Yeah. Because you are where you are with your weight at this very moment. So, why not use these tricks or hacks for one of a better word to, you know, help you get up those climbs a little bit quicker and maybe not get dropped or not get dropped as fast.
So, okay, let's jump into the very first reason. >> The first one is there's a technical term for this and it's called WBAL, but there's a that's kind of a confusing term and I'm going to start shallow and then I'll go deep with this. I remember one of the first times we went cycling.
We were down in Cork. You might remember coming from my uncle's house heading back into Conale and there's a big steep hill on the way and you approached this like you didn't know what power meters were but this was maybe I don't know a 2 minute climb. You approached I'd say at 800 watts for the first 6 seconds and then 40 watts thereafter.
So >> like we were just started dating so I was probably trying to show off a little bit. And can I also say I was really hung over that day. So >> you tried to go up like but it's the it's the distribution of your available resources over the duration of the climb and that's what WBA if any wants to really dig into this I had a very technical podcast with the catalon as you do development coach Alex Wellelburn we talked about what WBAL is WBAL is effectively your battery for effort so if you think about that client we talked about that's a twominut effort you have a twominut battery as well so it's the distribution ution of your resources over that 2 minute.
So most people that I see that struggle on clims, yeah, maybe they can improve the power to weight, but we're going to take that as like like parking it for this conversation. They're going to go a lot faster by just distributing that effort better over the climb. And this is often worse with people who pace off heart rate as well because heart rate lags behind effort.
So you go, "Oh, I can sustain this heart rate for 20 minutes." But you're actually way above your sustainable W ball power like your critical power and you're dipping into reserves and eventually you know the mathematical equation I'll show you exactly where you're going to fall off the line but this is isn't this something that we see as well you might be touching on it um but you kind of get pulled into going at somebody else's pace. We've seen like I think Indio Sky changed that, didn't they?
Where they pace they work their own numbers going up a climb rather than climbing to feel. And I think when you're really struggling with climbs and you're not very good at pacing, that's a good thing to do, right? Do your own pacing.
Like there's no point in me following you up, you know, if you're racing up a climb. >> I had to concentrate on my own effort. And in some cases, if there's not that much of a gap between the amount of power that two people can put out, but you shoot out of the traps really fast, but I pace it better, I could potentially beat you because you might fade halfway up or 3/4 the way up the climb.
>> Yeah. Wiggins is a classic example of that. He used to ride the climb rather than ride against his rivals.
And it's not very romantic for him used to do as well. It's not very romantic. It's like, how can I get from A being the bottom of the climb to B being the top of the climb in the fastest way possible?
Well, I'm just going to distribute my effort almost linear over the top of it. Now, it doesn't always have to be a linear distribution. A negative split sometimes works for people where you try and ride the second half of the climb faster than the first half of the climb.
But I think that really works well because it focuses the mind to not riding the first half of the climb too hard. >> Yeah. >> Which maybe gets you closer to a linear distribution.
But some riders were actually calling for parameters to be banned for this reason back years ago. Like Vinceno Nebley said it was taking the romance out of climbing that Wiggins had to just ride this steady state all the way up. So I would work on that and I think you can work on that by just going out and practicing this.
Like go out and do the same climb. Do it, you know, we'll call it instinctively ride it the first time just the pacing that you would normally do it at and then go out the next day and ride the same climb with this negative split strategy. And I guarantee you go faster on the negative split day.
>> Oh, that's really interesting. So, kind of do a little test, a little selfience. Trust me, bro.
Trust me, bro. [gasps] >> Okay. I absolutely love that.
I think that's really, really good advice. Okay. >> Excuse the brief interruption, folks.
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Check the terms in your policy docks. The next one's around kind of uh your engine which I want to talk about because you can sometimes it's >> it's about the type of efforts that you have practiced in the run into this and your engine just can't sit at the right intensity long enough. And by that I mean like you could be sure you could be good on these short little rollers and punchers.
Like you can do a two-minute climb, you can do a fiveminute climb, you can do a seven-minute climb, but then there's a limit. When you start going over 15 minutes or you know that 15 to 45 minute where we'll call them proper climbs, you the wheels start coming off. So if we look at your power distribution curve, you will probably have good power and shorter durations.
And I really see this as being a typical when I'm I'm looking at athletes files. If an athletes coming in, they've spent a lot of time on these indoor plans like using a trainer road or a Zift for example, which has this almost Netflixification of training where they feel like they need a lot of intensity thrown in to retain customers. People end up having very good peruration course for lower durations, but it's not that glamorous to go and do 45 50 minute intervals on an indoor trainer.
So most people neglect this. So long climbs, they really reward something called high fractional utilization. And that's holding a high percentage of your aerobic capacity for a long time.
And that's mostly driven by like mitochondrial density and function, capillarization, lactate production versus clearance, and this new term we've kind of heard of durability. >> Talking about durability, that this term has always been there. Just to go back to the lactate production versus clearance, we have a a really uh I hate seeing it on my uh my training plan every week over unders.
And that's essentially what we're trying to train the body to do there, isn't it? Just be become a little bit more efficient at clearing lactate and then going again. >> Exactly.
Yeah. >> Yeah. Hate that session.
But you can build your I think the fix for this, it's not quite as fast as the fix for pacing, but it's just to start thinking about your weekly training to match the demands of your weekly training to what you want to get good at. Like if you're going away to ride in New York at 312 or an attack the tour that you know has long climbs. Don't build your week around all these short efforts all the time.
Make sure you're anchoring around stuff like sweet spot efforts which is like 88 to 91% the threshold. some maybe threshold efforts like the old school two by 20 type threshold efforts. So like a week you you could progress that as well where you're diving in instead of jumping in by two by 20 threshold which is quite hard.
You might start it with like two or three 12minut threshold efforts and then a week later it's 2x 20 threshold efforts. A week later it's 3x 15 minute threshold efforts and then week four you come into a d lo. >> Just going back to that durability piece I know it's kind of a new buzzword.
It's the the the function has been there forever, but this word durability seems to be popping up everywhere. Can you just talk a little bit around what it means? >> It's simplified >> like it's not a new idea >> concept.
Yeah. It's when I had Vasilus Santoopoulos on the podcast from Estana, he talked about this and he's just like it's just a word for what we've always known that you need to be good later in rights. So durability is almost like if you see an athlete who can climb well because the climb's 10 minutes into the ride and then they fall apart four hours into the ride on the same climb.
This would have happened and been vividly uh shown to me when I used to go and spend some of the summers in late doal but we'd stay at the top of the doal because it was super cheap accommodation and we figured oh be amazing we can ride it in the morning first thing like we can roll down and ride back up and we'll get a bit of a warm up and then we can ride it last thing in the evening. So sometimes we do that. We just stay at the top, roll down.
You'd be freezing after rolling down. So instead of going into the valley cold, you'd ride a bit of climb again to warm up or maybe the whole climb again to warm up and you ride again at the end of the day, four or five hours later. And the power drop off and the time extra it took to climb at the end of the day was shocking because I had really bad durability.
So that durability is that ability to produce the same effort after a certain amount of kilogjles. Yeah, I can't imagine riding Altos three times in a day. >> It it shouldn't have a massive drop off if you have some decent durability, but it's just a new word for something that we've always known, like you're meant to be good at the end of a >> an event, at the end of a race, cuz that's mainly what matters.
>> Okay, the next thing that I can work on to improve my climbing speed. >> Actually, just before we jump into and continue with these, I just want to give a heads up about something really cool that we are building in the community. It's a free resource for the cycling community.
And the reason is I've been increasingly frustrated with Twitter as a place where I used to love to go to talk about cycle on Twitter, but I'm just getting increasingly frustrated with how much noise there is there, the politics that's there all the time. So, we wanted to build something like an alternative to this, a place where you can go and talk about all aspects of cycling regardless of your level. And I'm also going to stack in a bunch of free resources in there, stuff that the community has asked for, and I'll continue to add that stuff in there.
So, to kick this off, I've actually added in already like a 14-day kickstart meal plan, a tire pressure calculator, and a nutrition course that I recorded with Dr. David Dunn and Dr. Sam Impy, who are two of the leading nutritionists in the world tour.
So, if anyone wants to join this new community, it's totally free and all the resources in there are totally free. All I ask you to do is to be a good community member, to uplift others, and to give more than you take inside the community. So, if you want to check that out, you can go to www.
school. That's school spelled sk. >> That's how the cool kids spell it.
School.com/roadman. >> Oh, I think the the the thing that sets, you know, the whole thing apart in there is the community.
It's on it's on fire. Everybody just putting their questions in. We've got coaches in there answering them from technical kind of aspect and then we have people within the community who've also had similar issues come in and chime in with their you know with their problem solving.
Okay. So, number three to help me increase my climbing speed, >> it's you misunderstand the demands of the climb. And by that I mean you haven't understood that torque is different uh on steeper climbs.
And this is you see this happening quite a lot on gravel climbs because gravel climbs are so steep and they have this weird interaction of the surface is rough. So it forces you into this awkward torque demand. And you'll feel this manifesting itself as cardiovascularly you feel fine.
Your heart rate might even be that bad, but your like your exoskeleton is almost starting to give up. Your quads and your glutes are starting to fail first. And what's happening here is we're all familiar with the term power, but power is comprised of torque multiplied by cadence.
So on steeper gradients, you'll often push towards higher torque demands at lower cadence. And that's unless you absolutely nail your gearing, which it just sometimes isn't possible to nail your gearing. >> And higher torque recruits more muscle fibers that we're not used to.
So it increases local muscular fatigue and it absolutely rips through glycogen as well. So, if you only ever train steady state, regardless of the zone at your favorite cadence, you're going to lack that cadence range for when the gradients do really like the amount of time I spent in Badlands below like I would say 40 cadence was insane. >> I was just going to say I'd hate to see I should really check out my average cadence for on my Badlands ride because I'd say it was super super low.
But we do know that when people even get fatigued, their cadence generally does drop, doesn't it? Well, for me, and I I know that this that's something that we worked on in my training for Badlands, you know, I did a lot of low cadence drills to kind of make sure that I had that leg strength because we knew it was going to happen. >> I think the problem with Badlands is you do things.
I I you were really undergeeared. I was under gear for sure. I don't think we quite understood how steep the climbs are going to be.
So that creates a low cadence demand, but also the load. You know, first time doing an event like that, I didn't fully anticipate how heavy the bike was going to be fully loaded with all the fuel. So when you the miss steep gradients, heavy bike, it's just >> heavy rider, >> bad gearing.
Yeah, >> I think as well the way I usually describe for new people coming into the sport and you can see that they have a low cadence. Now, cadence is something that I've worked on, not just on hills, but in my, you know, cycling over the last couple years, and I'm slowly eating those numbers up from like an average of 70 72 when I first began to I think I'm up in the mid 80s now. That's been a really slow process.
But the way I always look about look at it is if you have a high cadence, you're kind of using your lungs and your respiratory system to fuel your movement. >> Yeah, we're talking about almost the inverse of your problem. >> That's what I'm saying.
If you're using your legs, if you're using low cadence, >> you're using your muscular system and your heart and your lungs can go forever and ever and ever. >> So, you were doing like years of unknowing strength training for bad. >> Exactly.
Yeah. But your heart and lungs can go forever. I mean, they're constantly working around in the background.
Yes. You get fatigued, but your leg strength and your muscles will burn out a lot easier. So, for me, that's just kind of like a way that I think about always trying to be in that nice higher cadence.
>> Yeah. I think that kind of what you're talking about there feeds nicely into the fourth point which is around under fueling, under hydration because there's when you do find yourself in those lower cadences. Now there's a glycemic demand at riding high intensities always but it seems like it's higher.
I must confirm this with like Sam Imp next time I have him on the podcast. It feels like it's higher at lower cadences. And on longer climbs, this is a problem because when people are under pressure, when they're riding at zone 4, they end up suboptimally fueling on the climb as well.
And if you're doing like there's long climbs like we rode Alto Letas, which is like a 6-hour climb or something or longer. It's like 80 kilometers bottom to top. And even some of the climbs in Morca are long climbs as well.
You could be climbing an hour on some of them. Uh what's the pig mayor is like a long long climb. So you'll see the pattern for a lot of people when they fuel poorly on the climb is you start okay on the climb, but the climb starts to feel disproportionately harder regardless of the grade the further up the climb you go and power dropping off.
Like if you look at the power file afterwards, power is dropping off as rate of perceived exertion is absolutely skyrocketing. Heart rate's going up. And why that's happening is because at those sort of intensities, we rely heavily on carbohydrates and low glycogen.
It's obviously going to reduce your sustainable power. It's going to reduce and it's going to increase your rate of perceived exertion on the climb. And then if you couple that with dehydration, it's just like it's a recipe for disaster because dehydration is reducing the plasma volume.
And that's higher heart rate for the same work is going to be the consequence of that. So, it it's just none of it's good. But the good news is the fix is easy.
Like even if you're not using anything like uh you know carb calculators and you just want to keep it basic, most riders will perform better on a 60 to 90 g of carbohydrates per hour, especially if there's intensity sprinkled into that ride. But fueling like before the climb is what's going to matter for you. and aiming to hydrate well before the climb as well, like in that kind of 400 to 800 mil range in the time leading up to the climb.
And cooling also helps like pouring bottles over your head, keeping your jersey unzipped, >> an absolute game changer, the cooling kind of aspect. Just to go back to the fueling. I think if it's a a ride [clears throat] that you're doing every week, you know, in your club spin, I know exactly where to have a gel or um a couple of like a couple handfuls of Haribo on our Saturday spin.
Like I always even if it's not in my I have an alarm on my hammerhead that you know tells me to eat every half an hour and I usually stick to that rigidly but I this one spot even if I've already eaten 5 minutes before 10 minutes before I will still eat at this moment because I'm not going to really get an opportunity while I'm trying to stay on the wheels or like push an effort to drink out of my bottle or have eat because that's going to put up you know my heart rate up as well when I'm eating. So at the Hammerhead again, even when we were doing Badlands, it tells you how far away the next climb is, which is an amazing feature. >> So you can kind of say, okay, my next climb is a kilometer away.
So get the grub in now, and that's going to sustain me for for the climb. >> And um yeah, I just find that really good. Just like absolutely load yourself up with carbs before that really hard climb.
That would be my advice. >> Caffeine. >> Caffeine.
Yeah, >> caffeine's always your friend. >> Yeah, caffeine. I'm actually going to put a really cool post uh into the school uh community today about caffeine and why why it's so popular, how it works, and like the best times.
>> Caffeine used to be banned. >> I know. Yeah.
Yeah. >> People are using caffeine suppositories. >> There's amazing.
>> Would you ever do that to not get dropped on the group ride? >> I would do anything to get not dropped on the group ride. But there's these receptors in your brain that make you feel fatigued and make you feel tired.
And caffeine basically dulls down those receptors and that's why you feel like you've got this super high energy. So have a little look in school later and you'll see that that post about when, how, and uh why you would take caffeine. >> Since getting back into training, the biggest thing that's hit me isn't fitness, it's fueling.
I used to finish rides totally wrecked. I'd come through the door, collapse on the couch, scroll through Instagram, and call it recovery. But now that I'm actually fueling properly, and that's anywhere from 80 to 120 grams of carbs an hour, depending on the session, it's a completely different story.
I'm coming home from training feeling fresh, and my power data throughout the ride supports this. I can actually function when I get off the bike. It's honestly blown me away how big a difference that proper fueling makes.
When I started fueling right, I realized just how good I could actually feel on the bike. a daily staple in my training now. It's for endurance because I know exactly what I'm putting into my body.
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com and start fueling smarter. I'm going to put the link in the description down below that we're finish up the fifth point of the fixable reasons with the one we almost can't avoid and it's what's per kilogram but with a slight twist on it because it's it's not the part you think like there is riders out there who are strong on the flat, you're strong on the on the group ride, but you're constantly just getting hammered on climbs and you're looking for that like like what's the lowest hanging fruit weight to go a little bit faster on the climb? It's obviously those four things we've talked about, but on those steady climbs, like performance is there's no way of getting around.
It's strongly tied to what's per weight. And that's like when I say weight, it's like rider plus kit plus bike, everything, total system weight. >> But a small reduction in mass, like 1 kilogram, it definitely helps for sure.
You're going to go uphill faster. But I think a better way to approach this is think the 1 kilogram lighter is not going to massively help you on the flat. Putting on a little bit of extra power, like a modest increase in your sustainable power is just going to help you all around.
Like it's going to help you disproportionately as a bike rider. And it's actually not that hard to do if you're at like a train at an unstructured level or your basic level. So raising your sustainable power isn't that hard to do, especially if you reverse engineer the demands of the type of climbs you're going to do.
If you're going away to a Morca, if you're going away to a top tutorial, you kind of know what the climbs are. And then it's starting to I put out a good blog post yesterday on Facebook about how Mate Mor likes to deconstruct this training. And that's effectively it's breaking it down into its constituent parts so you can start to reverse engineer and put a few of them into your training because sticking on or taking off like 3 4 kg is amazing.
But the crash diet often leaves you in that negative energy availability. And when you're in a negative energy availability, you can't fuel adaptations to train. And so a much easier way to get faster.
It's actually just to create a quite a modest deficit with your diet. So you're not crash dieting and to focus on doubling down on trying to do some of those sessions that we talked about like sweet spot sessions, threshold sessions, stuff like that. Yeah, I think we do just become obsessed as cyclists with the whole weight thing.
You know, even if I can't if I'm struggling to to lose weight, what if I spend 600 bucks on that carbon printed saddle that weighs like 40 g? >> Oh, do that for sure. >> Or, you know, you know, all the kind of >> I've got titanium bottle cage bolts.
>> Yes, >> I love them. >> That's deep. That's deep.
But yeah, no, it's good to hear that you can kind of work on something else as as you said, like your power rather than just trying to lose a lot of weight. >> Yeah. The goal isn't to be just as light as you possibly can.
The goal is to be powerful for your weight and that needs training along with a slight weight loss. So, just to kind of wrap it up and wrap it all in the bow before we finish off, like we talked about, I wanted to give you those five fixable reasons. So, there it's pacing is the first one, not going into it and whacking the base of the climb.
sessions that match the demands of your climb. It's torque cadence range so you don't get trapped just grinding up it. It's fueling, hydration, cooling strategies for the climbs.
And it's power to weight does matter, but focusing on the higher leveraged, you know, uh gains you can get there rather than just chasing weight for weight's sake. And my challenge to listeners will kind of be to just pick one of these in the next 14 days. Maybe it's just pacing discipline or maybe it's adding the two interval sessions in a week or having the fueling targets on your rides.
Try and take one of those and run with it for the next 14 days and just track that as your own little challenge. >> Yeah. Yeah.
I'm definitely going to try and get a little bit better at pacing and not getting pulled into what everybody else is doing on the group spin and kind of ride my own ride up the climb. >> Okay, folks. Let me know in the comments what you did choose for that little challenge for the next two weeks.
Uh thanks for watching. If you have a friend who can't climb for donuts, please share this with them.