Consider this age-old dilemma: you’re at the bottom of a hill, and you want to get to the top. Should you head straight up the steepest slope or switchback back and forth at a gentler incline? The answer depends on the context. If you’re on a marked trail, for example, you should definitely stick to the prescribed switchbacks. But a more general answer involves digging into the physics.
That’s the goal of a new study in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, from a research team led by David Looney and Adam Potter of the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine. Previous researchers have found that “steeper is cheaper” for runners, meaning that it takes less energy to ascend directly up steeper slopes. But it wasn’t clear whether the same is true for walkers and backpackers, or whether the answers change depending on how hot or cold it is.
The Best Slope for Trail Runners
For starters, it’s worth looking back at the trail-running data. In 2016, researchers at the University of Colorado decided to study the increasingly popular world of vertical kilometer races….
