Every runner I know has a love hate relationship with hills. On one hand, we know they can make us fitter and feel amazing to conquer, but on the other hand… they’re freakin’ brutal. We’ve all felt the ways an inclined surface affects our bodies – the strain of pulling yourself up and the pounding on your joints while coming down. But what specifically happens to our body when we go up or down hills? Does running hills increase injury risk?
Today we’ll explain what changes when you’re running uphill or downhill and help you understand how that affects injury risk. The more you know about how hill running affects different muscles and bones, the better you’ll be able to incorporate hills into your training while staying healthy.
HOW RUNNING UPHILL CHANGES YOUR STRIDE
Running uphill is hard. To power the mass of your body up a slope, the muscles of the legs have to work harder and put out more force. That part is obvious. What’s interesting are the other changes that go on as we begin to jog up a positive slope.
When we run uphill, it costs more energy; our calves and quads work harder and our hips work way harder; we tend to shift towards our forefoot; our cadence tends to go up; and impact force goes down.
HOW RUNNING DOWNHILL CHANGES YOUR STRIDE
When we run downhill, it costs less energy to a point; our hips and knees absorb a lot of impact; we tend to shift footstrike towards our heel; our shinbone manages a lot of force; and our cadence tends to go down.
All phenomena in these diagrams compiled from this (review) of uphill and downhill running research.
DOES HILL RUNNING INCREASE INJURY RISK?
Both uphill and downhill running increases load in certain muscles, bones, and other body structures, but that does not necessarily mean injury risk directly increases. For example, if you have particularly strong hip flexors that rarely bother you, lots of uphill running is probably not going to aggravate or injure them!
It’s important to consider hills and the increased load they put on the body in the total context of your training. If you’re having pain in your calves, a big uphill day might be a little extra risky. Similarly, if you’re dealing with some soreness in your hips and knees, then a hard run with lots of downhill miles may aggravate your existing issues more than a normal run. Generally speaking, if your life strain (stress, lack of sleep, or nutrition issues) is high then it may not be a great time for a hill workout because they do put more stress on our systems. For all of us, if you’ve just done a lot of hills make sure to take it extra easy the next day!
HILL RUNNING INJURY RISK SUMMARY
With a living thing as complicated as the human body, it’s rarely as simple as “more hills = more injuries.” The more we know about how these kinds of things, the better decisions we can make about when we push it in the hills and when we stick to slow jogs on level ground!
Proactive resistance training (we call it prehab) has been shown to increase every aspect of running performance and one study even found it reduces injury risk by over 57%. If that sounds like something you’d benefit from, we’d love it if you gave the Recover Athletics App a try. There is an unlimited free trial and a year’s subscription costs less than one trip to a PT if you get injured!
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