Would you like to make your climbing easier? Dance up the incline?
Perfect, we have got just the tips for you.
Just last week CINCH athlete Lauren De Crescenzo set the QOM on Mount Lemmon during our Tucson Training Camp.
She used six powerful climbing strategies to ride the climb her best and the same ones will work for you!
Let’s look at each one from the video more closely.
1. Don’t surge at the base of the climb to try and keep up, or to try to fight your dropping speed. Instead, hold back and feel out the climb. Find a pace that you can increase your effort from later on in the climb.
2. Set your respiration rate to one that you are able to deeply exhale at the end of each breathe. This is key because your respiration rate and depth of each breathe act as your guide all the way up the climb on how hard you can go. Those short, shallow breathes mean your pace is NOT sustainable and the universe will intervene shortly by slowing your pace WAY down.
3. Don’t fight it, flow with it. This means pushing the pace on the transitions from steep to flatter gradient while holding back on the transitions from flat to steep gradients. Don’t fight it, flow with it.
4. Change your cadence constantly to manage the different gradients. Use a lower cadence most of the climb to prevent the steeper parts of the climb from taking you over your zones. Then use a higher cadence to build speed on the flatter sections.
5. Look ahead. Don’t be a victim of the climb! Instead, look in advance and take control by “driving” the climb as you would in a car by proactively planning your actions around what’s coming.
6. See your effort through until the end of the climb. Don’t change how hard you try, or how much of the climb you try based on what others do at the bottom.
Get out on those climbs, big and small, and give these tips a shot and take your climbing to new heights!