hill running

How Hill Running Can Be Good For You

Does running up the hill to stay fit sound a bit far fetched for an idea? The fact is that it can prove extremely beneficial for your body. It can help you lose weight, get rid of fat, improve metabolism, improve your body’s endurance capabilities, add to your body’s immunity, and do much more!

A Comparison

When you compare it with the other forms of cardio exercises, hill running displays various advantages. Not only does hill running employ the most stress to numerous muscles in our body, it imposes more stretching on these muscles as well due to different body posture during the hill climb. This makes it one of the most effective exercises to build the stamina and strength to a maximum number of muscles.

The best part of hill running is that it makes use of some of the muscles that seldom get used in our day to day affairs. Since hill running provides a more vigorous workout than most other exercises, it burns calories more efficiently.

How Does It Affect Your Body

There are various results that can be obtained from hill running. It makes your muscles more reactive, helping it to develop greater power and stability. It promotes strength and endurance to the muscles, and even improves blood circulation. With better blood circulation, the muscle cells remain better nourished, giving them more growth and immunity.

Better blood circulation affects most of the vital systems of your body. Digestion, metabolism and the endocrine system are all seen to perform optimally. Hence, we can see hill running imparts the benefits of both the aerobic and anaerobic exercises.

running-up-hill

How to Go For It

This exercise is very simple. An initial warm up session of around ten minutes is necessary to free the muscles, warming them up and enhancing blood flow through it. Simple jogging can be most effective. Once you are over with the warm up, start with running up the hill gradually and then on each trip or rep, increase your tempo or intensity. Choose a specific spot to reach at the crest of the hill as a goal.

Pump your hands and legs by running with a higher knee lift. Try to reduce the time to run up to the mark with each set. Run slowly down the hill each time. Try to keep a watch on your breathing rate. If you are breathing too hard, bring down your speed.

Depending on the incline of the hill, the need to climb on all fours or hands and feet may change the stress to the body and effectiveness of fat loss. The steeper inclines will require you to be on all fours and will burn significantly a higher number of calories than the lower incline hills which will have a more upright posture on hill runs using legs only.

Repeat this for required reps or time allotted for program goal each session. Keep in mind that you should never overstrain yourself. Once you decide you should end the session, cool down and stretch for another ten minutes to gradually allow your muscles to return to normal function. Hill running is very simple and yet has unique demands from you that cannot be duplicated in a gym or with a machine based cardio program. It is a great way to stay fit and healthy if performed properly and regularly.

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