The Secret Cyclist Strategy to Build Unshakeable Leg Endurance
Build strength and stamina with these hill-repeat workouts.
Ever noticed a cyclist's legs? They may not have the sheer mass and strength of a powerlifter squatting 400 pounds, but they’re typically lean, defined, and built for endurance. But those sculpted legs didn’t happen overnight—or by biking the same route every day. To build muscle, you need to expose your body to new and challenging stimuli. If you want to challenge the different kinds of muscle fibers in your legs, swap your weekly flat surface route for something like high-resistance hill repeats.
Similar to how a dumbbell adds resistance in a biceps curl or gravity challenges you in a pushup, hill sprints use the incline of the hill as a form of resistance—forcing your muscles to work harder than they would on a flat surface.
"Hill sprints challenge you to fight against both gravity and the steep incline, making them an incredibly efficient workout," says Katie Leonard, a personal trainer and group instructor at Life Time Lakeshore-Irvine, CA. "They combine all three key training modalities—strength, power, and endurance—into one brutal *yet effective* workout."
How to Perform High-Resistance Hill Repeats
According to Leonard, you can structure your hill repeats in short, medium, or long intervals. Put together, these intervals may look very similar to a strength training workout, as they include a given number of seconds of working sets and a given number of seconds of recovery, repeated for a given number of rounds. Below, Leonard breaks down three different ways to perform hill repeats:
- Short Sprints (8-12 rounds of 10-15 Seconds): Best performed on minimal-incline hills, these mimic the effect of sled pulls or resistance sprints on flat terrain. Perform 8-12 total.
- Moderate Hill Repeats (8 rounds of 1-Minute Intervals): Start at a moderately hard pace up a steeper hill for one minute, followed by two minutes of easy or moderate recovery. Repeat eight times for a full session.
- Ladder: In a ladder-style workout, your intervals get longer after each bout of recovery, until you reach a relatively long interval—then you descend the ladder. For example, you could sprint for 15 seconds, recover, sprint for 30 seconds, recover, push for 45 seconds, recover, push for 1 minute, recover, and then work your way back down with 45-second, 30-second, and 15-second intervals.
Related: This Unexpected Sandbag Trick Can Build Total-Body Strength Better Than Traditional Weights
How Hill Repeats Improve Strength and Endurance
Much like lifting weights, hill repeats build strength and endurance by forcing your muscles to work against resistance.
"Uphill cardiovascular exercise engages more muscle groups than the same movement on flat ground," Leonard says. "The added resistance of the incline and gravity causes faster muscle fatigue, which is actually a good thing. Fatigue stimulates muscular endurance adaptations, strengthening the quads, hamstrings, glutes, and calves while improving overall [cycling] efficiency."
Hill repeats don't just build muscle endurance either. They also improve cardiovascular health by pushing your heart and lungs to work harder to supply oxygen to your muscles. This does wonders for boosting stamina over time. Plus, the repeated effort trains mental toughness (trust us on this one), which helps you sustain intensity for longer durations.
