Originally posted by kmurnane
A couple of general tips that may be too elementary for you but here goes anyway.
1. With due respect to what another poster mentioned, spinning is usually better than mashing on hills. Riding in a big gear, especially if you're a big guy, increases the chance of muscle and knee injury and leds to faster lactic acid buildup which makes climbing even harder. Keeping a high cadence, especially on hills, takes a lot of practice. Don't worry about speed getting up the hill when you're first learning to spin, worry about form. The speed will come.
2. Stay seated as much as possible. Standing gives you more power in the short run but it is less efficient and you will wish you had the energy later in the ride. The pros make it look easy but good good form when standing is difficult. Poor form leads to a lot of thrashing back and forth and twisting at the hips which wastes a lot of energy and can lead to back soreness and tightening on longer rides. Standing occasionally and briefly on long climbs to bring different muscles groups into play is a good idea.
3. Pedal in a circle. You’ve got a whole leg and 360 degrees of arc to move it through. Use the whole thing. Climbing is tuf enuf without trying to do it with only part of the available muscle power you have. Clipless pedals make this a lot easier.
4. Drop your heels. Keeping the heels low brings more of the hamstrings and glutes into play. These are very powerful muscle groups – use them to get you over the hill. Many riders tend to point the toes downward which puts less stress on hams and glutes and more on calves (frequent calf cramping is a good indicator you’re pointing your toes down).
5. Change working muscle groups. There are several ways to do this. If you typically ride with toes pointed down or feet flat, drop your heels for a bit to bring your hamstrings and glutes more into play and give your quadriceps (the muscles on the front of the thigh) time to recover. Likewise, if you usually ride with your heels dropped, raise them so your feet are flat or point your toes down. Shift forward and back on the seat. Sitting on the front of the seat accentuates the quads, sitting on the back accentuates the glutes. Stand up for a brief interval and then sit back down. Just before you stand, shift into a bigger gear and then shift back to the smaller gear when you sit down. You will have more power when you stand and if you stay in the smaller gear you will lose momentum. Use these techniques for 10 to 30 pedal strokes periodically throughout the climb to buy recovery time.
6. Keep a loose, relaxed grip on the handlebars. As you strain up the hill it’s easy to grip harder and harder. This can lead to numbness in the hands. More importantly, the tension in the hands will spread up the arms to the neck, shoulders and chest. Tightness in the chest will restrict breathing which will reduce oxygen consumption. Oxygen is necessary to remove lactic acid from working muscles. Your legs will tire more quickly and you’ll have a harder time finishing the climb if you are not breathing freely.
7. Gear shifting. This is perhaps the most difficult hill-climbing skill to develop. Because of the way the gears work, when there is load on the chain, such as when you’re climbing a hill, downshifting to an easier gear puts more strain on the chain and the shifting mechanism than shifting up to a higher gear. You’ll often need to downshift to an easier gear during a climb but if you don’t do it soon enough, there may be so much stress on the chain that you can’t make the shift and then you’re stopped dead in a gear that’s too big to get up the hill. On the other hand, if you downshift too soon, you lose your momentum which can turn an easy climb into a hard one in the blink of an eye. It’s all about timing. The trick is to relax your pedal stroke for a brief instant and shift a split second before you have to so that you can put forth the same effort throughout the climb. The only way to get good at this is to practice. There’s nothing like a perfect climb where each shift comes smoothly at precisely the right moment and you feel like you’ve just flown over the hill as if it wasn’t there.
8. And as has been mentioned repeatedly - practice, practice, practice. There is a lot here to try and put together and it’s easier to be successful on the small hills than the big ones. Also, success on the small hills today will lead to success on the big ones tomorrow.
Hope this helps.
--Kevin