How to Train for Vertical Gain

Ask a trail runner their weekly volume and they will tell you a number. Ask their weekly vertical gain and about half will have to go and look.

That is a problem, because in mountain running the second number often determines the session more than the first. A 15 km run with 1,200 m of gain and a 15 km run on a flat towpath share a distance and nothing else - not duration, not muscular demand, not recovery cost, not the adaptations they produce.

Vertical is a load, so give it a budget

Start logging weekly gain alongside weekly hours. Then treat it the way you treat volume: progress it deliberately, cap the rate of increase, and unload it in recovery weeks.

The progression rule I use: no more than 10-15% more vertical per week, and do not increase vertical and volume in the same week. Pick one. Runners who raise both simultaneously are compounding two loads and usually find out about it through their Achilles.

The peak target: about 1.5 times the race's total gain in your biggest week. Some worked examples:

At the longer end, the multiplier drops - nobody is doing 15,000 m weeks casually, and at that level the constraint becomes total recovery rather than climbing capacity. But the principle holds: your biggest week should exceed the race, so race day is not the largest climbing demand your body has ever handled.

The three climbing sessions

Different gradients and durations train genuinely different systems. A complete build uses at least two of these three.

1. Uphill intervals (2-5 minutes)

What it trains: VO2max, uphill running economy, and the ability to push over a short steep section without blowing up.

How it looks: 6-10 x 2 minutes hard uphill, jogging or walking down to recover. Or 5 x 4 minutes on a moderate gradient. Effort should be hard-but-repeatable - the last rep should look like the first.

Gradient: 6-12%. Steep enough to load the climb, shallow enough that you are genuinely running.

Frequency: Once a week in the middle of a build.

2. Sustained climbing at threshold (10-25 minutes)

What it trains: The effort you will actually hold on a long race climb. Lactate clearance, and the mental habit of sitting at a hard-but-controlled effort for a long time.

How it looks: 2-4 x 10-15 minutes at threshold effort - comfortably hard, breathing rhythmic, able to say a short sentence but not want to. Long recoveries down.

Gradient: 8-15%, or whatever your longest continuous climb offers.

Frequency: Once a week in the specific phase, weeks 9-13 of a typical build.

3. Vertical volume at easy effort

What it trains: The muscular and structural tolerance for climbing for hours. This is the biggest single contributor to mountain-race performance and the least glamorous.

How it looks: Long runs and midweek runs that simply include a lot of ascent at a conversational effort. Hike the steep parts. There is no interval structure - the session is the terrain.

Frequency: Every week, all year. This is where most of your gain total should come from.

If you only have room for two, take sustained threshold climbs and vertical volume. Short intervals are the most replaceable of the three.

Power hiking: the session nobody programmes

Somewhere between 15% and 20% gradient, hiking becomes more economical than running at the same speed. Above 25%, running is a waste of energy for almost everyone including the professionals.

Which means that in a steep mountain race, a large fraction of your climbing time will be spent hiking - and if you have never trained it, you will be doing your race's most-used technique for the first time on race day.

Train it directly. One session every week or two:

• 4-6 x 5 minutes of steep uphill hiking at a hard effort, walking down to recover.
• Or 20-30 minutes of continuous steep hiking within a longer run.

Technique that matters:

• Hands pressing down on the thighs just above the knee, one push per step. This recruits your upper body into the climb and takes real load off the legs.
• Lean from the ankles, not the waist. Bending at the hips collapses your breathing.
• Short, quick steps rather than big reaching ones. A high step is a single-leg squat under load, repeated a thousand times.
• Find a rhythm you could hold for half an hour, then hold it.

If you race with poles, hike with poles in training. They change the movement pattern substantially and the pole technique guide covers how.

Strength work is climbing work

Uphill running is, mechanically, a series of single-leg loaded extensions. Heavy strength training improves it in a way that more running does not, and the evidence on resistance training improving running economy in trained runners is about as consistent as sports science gets.

Two sessions a week, 30 minutes each:

• Rear-foot-elevated split squats - 3-4 x 5-8 per leg, heavy enough that the last rep is genuinely hard.
• Step-ups onto a box at mid-thigh height - 3 x 6-8 per leg, driving through the top leg without pushing off the bottom foot.
• Hip hinge - Romanian deadlifts or trap bar deadlifts, 3 x 5-6.
• Calf raises, straight and bent knee, 3 x 10-12 each, through full range and slowly.
• Plyometrics, once you have a strength base - pogo hops, split jumps, box jumps, 3 x 6-10, quality over quantity.

Heavy and low-rep, with full recovery between sets. Circuit-style burnouts build a different quality and are not what you are after.

If you live somewhere flat

You can build most of the climbing engine without a mountain. What you cannot easily build is the descending tolerance, and you should plan around that honestly.

What works:

• Treadmill incline. Set 8-12% and run; set 15-20% and hike. A 45-minute session at 12% at 6 km/h accumulates roughly 540 m. It is monotonous and it is effective.
• Hill repeats on whatever you have. A 40 m rise repeated 25 times is 1,000 m of gain. Not identical to a continuous climb, but the muscular and cardiovascular adaptations are largely the same.
• Stairs, car park ramps, bridges, levees. Unglamorous, entirely functional.
• Stair machine or stepmill at the gym for pure vertical volume with low impact.
• Heavy strength and plyometric work, which matters proportionally more when your terrain does less of the job.

What does not substitute: eccentric downhill loading. Treadmills that decline exist but are rare. If you can, plan two or three travel weekends during a build to run real descents - even a handful of exposures triggers the repeated-bout protection that stops your quads from failing at hour five. Where that is impossible, slow-tempo eccentric strength work - four-second lowering on split squats and step-downs - is the best available proxy.

A vertical progression across a 16-week build

For a runner targeting a 50K with 2,000 m of gain:

Every fourth week drops to roughly 60% of the preceding week. That is not lost training - it is when the adaptation from the preceding three weeks actually consolidates.

The mistakes

Chasing a vert number instead of a training effect. A 3,000 m week accumulated by hiking slowly for eleven hours is a different stimulus from 3,000 m across two structured climbing sessions and a long run. Both have a place; only one of them is what you meant.

Increasing vertical and volume together. The most reliable way to develop Achilles tendinopathy in a trail build.

Only ever climbing at one effort. Runners who exclusively grind long easy climbs get very good at grinding long easy climbs and have no gear when the race demands one.

Ignoring the descent. Every metre you climb, you descend. The downhill guide exists because that half of the equation causes more DNFs than the climbing does.

Never training steep. If your race has 30% pitches and your local hill is 8%, you are training a different sport. Find something steep, even if it is short and stupid, and use it.

If you want to know whether your current block has actually prepared you for a specific course, the race readiness score grades your last twelve weeks across endurance, vertical, speed, and taper, and names the weakest link.