As Brad Hudson (Olympic distance and marathon coach) says of 'Short Ballistic Hills':
“They strengthen all of the running muscles, making you much less injury-prone."
He continues, "they, also, increase the power and efficiency of your stride, enabling you to cover more ground with each stride with less energy in races. These are significant benefits from a training method, that, takes little time and is fun to do.”
He argues, in a very Vorsprung manner, that: “Hill sprints’ primary purpose are to stimulate neuro-muscular adaptations, that, enhance running performance.
"They call for the nervous system to activate very large numbers of motor units, to fire these motor units quickly, to contract the muscles with great force, and to resist fatigue at maximal and near-maximal levels. They test the limits of the neuro-muscular system's capacity to generate and sustain running-specific speed and power, and thereby push back these limits.
By engaging in regular, progressive muscle training, you will improve your brain-muscle communications in ways that increase your power efficiency, running economy and fatigue resistance.
Your first session will stimulate physiological adaptations that serve to better protect your muscles and connective tissues from damage in your next session. If you do your first steep hill sprint workout on a Monday, you will be ready to do another session by Thursday.”
Pointers:
* Once your legs have adapted to the stress, that, steep hill sprints impose, this workout actually protects against injury.
* Hill sprints can similarly "jump-start" your neuro-muscular system so that it's ready to perform at a higher level during your toughest workouts.
* If you're doing hill sprints properly, you should feel more energetic, not less.
* The reason, that, hill sprints are an especially good indicator of readiness for hard training is, that, they place a high demand on the neuro-muscular system and thereby reveal underlying nervous system fatigue that you might not notice otherwise.
* Resist the temptation to jog down the hill. Cutting the recovery times defeats the purpose of hill sprints, because doing so will reduce the intensity of your sprints.
“When I first started coaching Olympian Dathan Ritzenhein in 2004, he was fairly susceptible to injury. He had already suffered two stress fractures and a few other breakdowns in his short running career. Most injury-prone runners have poor muscle strength in one or more important areas, and I found this to be the case with Dathan. He had trained hard in his youth, but the biggest thing he had neglected in his training was strength. To address the problem, I had him do a lot of short, steep hill sprints. His strength improved quickly, and he's been free of major injuries for a long time now.”
References:
Runner's World interview (February 2009)
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