Welcome to the quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up.

My name is Brock Armstrong and I'm the Get Fit Guy, and today we're going to talk about why I think

you should run up and down a hill over and over again. Picture this. It's a dark winter night.

It's negative 20 degrees Celsius outside or negative 4 Fahrenheit, and a group of

runners are diligently following their coach, that's me, up and down a rather steep and snow-covered

hill. There's some laughter, some shouting, and of course some cursing, but mostly there is the

steady deep breathing sound of hard charging athletes who are working

to improve their spring marathon finishing times.

How will they do this?

Why would they do this?

Well, let's start with some research.

In 2012, a group of Australian researchers used the latest technology to investigate the

question of what is the best way to run on hills?

They coerced a bunch of runners to go out and run on a hilly 10-kilometer course while

wearing a portable gas analyzer to measure oxygen consumption, a GPS to measure their speed

and acceleration, a heart rate monitor, and an activity tracker to measure

their stride rate and stride length.

The results were published in the medicine and science in sport and exercise, and it suggested

that most runners make two mistakes on hills.

They run too fast, uphill, and not fast enough, downhill. Wait, what? I know,

that seems odd, but stick with me. Now think about the last long run that you went on. When you were

running on the flat terrain, the speed that you ran at was limited by your heart and lungs, which were doing their best to

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