How I Got 14% Better At Climbing

Want to get better at long climbs? Ollie takes you through his journey of training for the legendary Alpe d’Huez, from the latest science and technology to nutrition and gear. He’s an amateur rider in his 40s with a full-time job, proving that with hard work, significant improvements are possible for anyone. While the big day didn’t go exactly as planned, a later attempt on a different climb proved his methods work.

Chapters:
00:00 – Intro: The Goal to Climb Alpe d’Huez
01:19 – Heat & Altitude Training
04:59 – Specificity in Training
06:05 – Improving Lactate Processing
06:37 – Progressive Overload
07:26 – Nutrition for Cycling
13:30 – The Importance of Equipment
15:08 – The Alpe d’Huez Attempt
18:04 – The Second Attempt
19:41 – Final Thoughts and Takeaways

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You want to be able to go up long climbs faster? Well, I’m going to go into detail and explain to you how I’ve done it. For context, I’m an amateur rider. I’m not particularly talented. I’ve got other commitments on a full-time job, and I’m in my 40s now. But through working really hard and employing the latest science and technology, I’ve seen significant improvements. And these are all things that you can do, too. So, I’m going to break them down and explain them in this video. So, let’s start at the end. Now, first you need to set yourself a goal. And in my case, that was to perform better at longer climbs in general, but more specifically, Alzd to France climb. It’s something that excites me and it gives you a great appreciation of how good the world’s best climbers are by posting your time on there and being able to compare. Plus, we were due to go out there with Andrew Feather and the super light bike, and so I could piggy back off the back of that and have a go myself. Now, for those of you who are unfamiliar, Aldoz is a 14 km climb with 21 hairpins and a max elevation of 1,850 m, which means that for my effort, I’d be looking at roughly a 45 to 50 minute max effort sustained with also altitude to contend with and heat because in summer it gets pretty hot there. So, my training needed to reflect that. [Music] Now, where I live in Bath, I don’t have access to altitude or long climbs over about 10 minutes. But I do have access to local time trials around here, which is great for long sustained efforts. I have a Wahoo kicker. I can do sustained efforts on that. I can do heat training, which helps with altitude. And I also have a coach who’s helped me train. His name is Jody. Hi. Altitude is an important factor because over 1,500 m, most people will see a drop of 10% in their V2 max. Essentially, if your FTP is 300 W, you could be looking at 270. Pros combat this by doing altitude camps, staying for weeks at a time in mountainous locations like teen. For most of us though, myself included, this isn’t feasible. But as mentioned, I do also have access to heat training. And this is something that does help you perform better with the heat and deal with that better. But a common misconception is that that’s kind of all it’s good for. No, this is wrong. It also helps you perform better in other conditions as well. It just helps make you stronger. And for me, this has been an absolute gamecher. This is mainly because heat training increases your blood plasma volume by as much as 5 to 15% after just 5 to 10 days of heat training exposure. And this has a knock-on effect. It reduces the cardiovascular strain on your heart and increases the stroke volume of your heart every time it pumps. It also allows you to more effectively cool yourself through sweating. Broadly speaking, more blood plasma volume means there is more blood volume available for oxygen carrying capacity around your body. And there are other benefits too. I’m now no longer like Prince Andrew because now I sweat a lot more and the onset of my sweating is a lot more sudden than it used to be. And that’s a sign that my body is more efficient at cooling itself and it starts cooling itself sooner. To perform this kind of training, I did a mixture of active and passive training sessions. Now, passive sessions are my favorite. You just go sit in a sauna, and then you can record the amount of time and the temperature uh that you spent in there on the core app and log it as a passive session. Many gyms and uh leisure centers have sauners, so you can find one that’s local to you. For the active heat sessions, we developed a really good strategy with Jod whereby I’d do a normal interval session on the kicker uh with the fans on with cooling and then once the hard intervals are done and my body had really got hot and warmed up, I’d jump off the kicker, turn off the fans, turn the headwind off, bang on the heat, and jump back on. uh and then just continue to ride at zone one, zone two. And in doing that, you’ve got really hot and then that traps the heat in and your body just continues to get warmer and warmer. I found this sort of approach works really well because it means that you don’t compromise the quality of the really hard intervals that you want to do, but you still get the key adaptations where you want them. But if you want a video on more detail about about heat training, then well, we’ve got them on the channel. So, uh well, like and subscribe. Another big aspect is specificity. I’ve mentioned this before, but I naturally prefer to climb out of the saddle just like Andrew Feather and Alberto Conidor, only considerably slower. Although even at my target pace of around 16 to 18 km an hour on a climb like Al Dair, riding out the saddle still has an aerodynamic penalty, typically around a minute. Arrow still matters even at lower speeds. So my training reflected that. I did lots of sustained long efforts on the kicker in a seated position so that I can get better at doing that. I still have to get out the saddle sometimes, but I can stay seated for much longer now. And another little hack I’ve done is to elevate the front wheel. Now, you can do this with a kicker climb, but a cheaper solution is just to use some books. And what this does is it orientates the body and the muscles and the way that they’re firing into a position that’s akin to riding on a climb and gets your body adapted and used to that. In terms of the efforts themselves, a key focus was improving the body’s ability to process lactate. This typically involves doing an effort that’s above your threshold that is high intensity and accumulates a load of lactate typically for a minute or two and then immediately settling down into an effort that’s longer at below just below your threshold for around 8 to 10 minutes. And what that does is it teaches your body to process and deal with that lactate. And this is really really important. And the other important aspect of this training and and also any training really is to make it progressively harder. And Jod is great at doing this. So one of the things you do is you work to a 4-week block of training. And the intervals in the first week of that block would look something like this. And then the next week they would get slightly longer or slightly harder. And then you’d get to the fourth week where it’s gone progressively harder and the intervals at the end of that fourth week are significantly harder. So much so that if you tried to do that session right at the start of the block, you probably would have just mentally capitulated and thought, I can’t do that. But by just doing that progressive overload, you get there and you think, yeah, I can do this. And then you’ve actually just got a lot stronger. Next is nutrition. And this is absolutely massive for a number of reasons. And every time I talk about this, I have to resist the urge to do a Brian Butterfield impression. I will try my best. But cycling and riding uphill is a power toweight sport. Body composition is key. But you’re not a bodybuilder. And you’re also not some aesthetic fitness influencer Instagram person. So you need to fuel for the effort. And that means eating carbs and not hoisted crispy owls or just trying to avoid ultrarocessed foods in general like bon bon bon bon bonss. Anyway, sorry about that. But I’m going to break this down into some easy bullet points which hopefully make it really simple to understand. Fortunately, there’s lots of published science on this. Here it is. [Music] That is a lot of bedtime reading, but fear not, I will summarize it for you. Now, the key thing is that fueling begins the day before, and the amount you consume varies depending on what you’re going to be doing. So, if your next day is a rest day or a lighter training day, then the advice is for 3 to 5 g per kilogram of body weight of carbohydrate, which is enough for recovery and not an excess. If you got a day that’s going to be a key session or a race, then look at 5 to 7 g per kilogram of body weight. And this will maintain your glycogen stores. However, if it’s the day before a big ride or a big race, then 7 to 10 g per kilogram of body weight is what’s advised. And this is probably more than you think. So for a 70 kg rider, 10 gram of carbs equates to 700 gram. In terms of on the day of your target event or ride, then you should be looking at 2 to 3 g of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight around 2 and 1/2 to 3 and 1/2 hours before. And this allows your body to process that, get it in, and it means that you shouldn’t have too many gastrointestinal issues when you actually start doing a hard effort and start tasting your breakfast. Again, in terms of the best foods to eat, well, basically just carbohydrate in whatever form you you kind of enjoy. Rice is very popular at the moment in the Propelaton, especially when it’s sweetened with something, but good old oats, potatoes, pasta, whatever you fancy. [Music] Note, there are other things that you can consume too, such as well various lactate buffers. There are a few funky things that are sort of emerging on the market, but the most notable of which, which has been around a while and is very cheap, is by carb, although it does cause some gastrointestinal distress to quite a lot of people. The other issue with it is that it generally doesn’t help much beyond 12minute efforts. So, for longer efforts, is it really needed? It also causes a huge amount of water retention the next day. Caffeine is a fantastic erogenic aid and the world’s most popular psychoactive drug. However, for short sort of TT efforts, I find it doesn’t really give me much benefit. So, I just avoid taking it. Uh, but one thing that I did take and I found has made a big improvement to me is taking creatine this year off the back of Connor’s fantastic video. So, I take a small amount of creatine daily. However, one side effect of creatine is it does create added water retention. Now, for a large ultra endurance event or just a long endurance ride, starting out with that added water retention can be seen as a bonus. But for a short time trial lasting less than an hour, I’m not going to need all of that water and it’s actually becomes a bit of a hindrance. So top tip, I found that you can lose that water retention simply by stopping taking creatine a week before your your target event and it comes out. And I found that for me that was around 1 1/2 kilos. So pretty significant. So other things I’ve done, I minimized my alcohol intake. I still have the odd beer here and there socially, uh, but it’s something that I find that I can cut out. But as I’ve got older, I’ve just found trying to be lean harder and harder. It’s really really hard. And so other things that I’ve done in a bid to just keep my my sort of body fat lower is just minimize treats. I stopped eating my favorite thing, almond quissassons, which was a bit rubbish, but uh I was so determined to do this that was something that I was willing to forego for a couple of months in in order to try and be the best that I can be. And I managed to get my weight down to 68 kg, which for my height, which is 185 cm, is is pretty light. But that is a good weight for me. I’m not losing power at that. And that’s something I’ve just found through trial and error. At that weight, my body fat was very low. But I should stress that that is the weight I’m saying there is when I’m fully fueled with full glycogen stores and hydrated. Um I wasn’t trying to sort of dehydrate myself. You can dehydrate yourself and instantly lose a couple of kilos if you really want to. Um but that’s not going to serve you well. In general though, the rules that I was following was I was trying to prioritize carbohydrate intake for when I needed it, so I could make sure that I was fueled when I needed to be fueled and really slamming in the carbs. Also focusing on protein, something I found that’s probably even more important as I’ve got older, but not just any old protein, focusing on the quality of that, too, and making sure that I’m getting sources that have a complete amino acid profile. And then just trying to sort of minimize saturated fat in my diet. Still eating fat obviously as part of a balanced diet, but just not almond quissants. Although I should point out this technically for the eagle-eyed viewers is not an almond quassant. It’s a pano shakala uh with hazelnut. Um which is still an elite choice. However, they’d ran out of almond quissants when I came to purchase the prop for this part of the video. And the next big thing is equipment. But I see this as the cherry on top of the cake, which is appropriate with this sort of cherry red on on my bike. So, I tricked out my Orbeea Orca to make it as light as possible, which was was good fun. Um, and it’s 6.2 kilos roughly with the the Wahoo on there using the bolt cuz it’s the lightest one. I’ve made videos about this before and all the mods on it, so you can check that out if you want. There’s a couple of mods that you might not have seen uh on there which I think are pretty cool. So, I swapped out the bar tape and put on this like really minimalist lightweight stuff. It is literally just sort of a textured back tape that goes on. The guys at Fairwheel sent me that and it’s the same stuff that we had on the crazy super lightweight bike. Another really cool mod I’m going to show you here is I managed to swap the through axles out for some uh titanium ones. Uh, so this is just a really nerdy detail. It saves about 50 grams in total, the front and the back one. Um, but every little helps, why not? And of course, waxed chain and optimum tire pressure set from the silk calculator naturally. But the overall message that I want to get across here is regardless of the level of equipment that you have at your disposal, I think it’s really good to just make the most of it and just try and optimize the things that you have because it puts your brain in a really positive mindset about the hard effort that you’re going to do. And well, that effort is going to be hard enough. It’s going to hurt. So why make it any harder? And so with all that prep, we headed to France. And I had the opportunity to ride up Al DuZ. And so I gave it a crack. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] I’ve been lucky to ride the Alp a few times and with all the history, you can’t not be inspired. I even had Andrew Feather for company on my effort and although I was struggling, he really pushed me on which was absolutely amazing. And we even got some great supporters near the top, which was unexpected but really nice. [Music] You know, you’ve done a good effort when you’re covered in snot. But it didn’t go to plan. And so now it’s time to consult my favorite book, The Big Book of Cycling Excuses. Now, many of you will be aware that we were out there to film the Alp DZ video with Andrew Feather uh on the super light bike, and that didn’t exactly go to plan. What’s more, our flights were delayed the day before and we also had issues with our higher car. And all of that meant that I ended up doing my attempt uh ride on the Alp at a suboptimal time. And I was so confident in my prep and my fitness that I ended up breaking quite a few of my own rules. The timing of my nutrition was way off and my nutrition the day before was suboptimal. On top of that, we’d flown the uh in the day before and my legs just felt a bit crap and it was incredibly hot when I attempted my ride around 36° which even with my heat training I think was a bit ambitious to do a max effort. I still managed a a PB on Straa, which was pretty decent, I I suppose, but in truth, I was pretty disappointed with my effort because I was kind of inside my head aiming for under 50 minutes and I did it in 5410. My power was okay, but I’d done a lot more in training and I knew that I just hadn’t done a really good performance. Now, unfortunately, owing to our filming schedule, I didn’t have time for another crack up the Alp. But a few days later, I was in another place with a really cool climb and decided to have a go at that. I was determined to put my fitness and my legs to good use and prove to myself that I could do it. Things don’t always go to plan, but you just have to have another go, don’t you? My target in Nice. a climb that’s been in the tour to France a few times and also a regular feature of Paris Nice. Actually, the fastest times on it was set in the 2020 tour to France on stage two. Now, I was in Nice and so this was something that was available to me a few days after attempting Al Duez. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the GCN film crew with me, but undeterred, I decided I wanted to put everything into practice that I had trained for and prepared for and give it my best shot. The result, I went 3 minutes quicker than my previous best time and managed to do just over 5 watts per kilo for 26 minutes and 10 seconds. And it was blooming hot, too. It was 28° when I did my efforts. Uh, but I still managed to perform even in the heat. Now, this this is a a modest time compared to the world’s best. And to put it into context, they’d be 6 minutes quicker than me. But I’m really proud of my effort because I put a lot of effort into it. And it’s a performance that I’m proud of because I feel it represents my potential of of what I can achieve if I really try to to climb and ride uphill. And it validates all of the things that I’ve discussed in this video in order to try and make myself as good as I can be. Overall, if you want to get better at climbing, you don’t have to do all the things that I’ve discussed in this video, but these are all things that you can do. And if stuff doesn’t go to plan, don’t stress. There are times when I’ve missed training sessions or I’ve failed at training sessions because, well, life gets in the way. Sometimes you have other commitments or you’re just too tired. But that’s okay. No one’s perfect. It happens to everyone. And as long as you’re consistent enough, then you’ll be actually be able to make some progress and achieve something that you’re proud of. Right. I hope you’ve enjoyed this video and found it useful. And if you have, well, support our channel by subscribing. It’d be much appreciated. And uh I’m going to go now. Love you. Bye. Going to have a quasonant. An almond quassant. My favorite food in the whole world.