Nicola Giovanelli is an Italian mountain runner, coach, and sports science professor at the University of Udine. He’s also the guy who, with his colleagues, jerry-rigged a treadmill to climb at angles of up to 45 degrees—that’s a 100 percent gradient, equalling the steepest treadmill in the world—with an extra-wide belt so that his subjects could use poles on it. The goal: to answer the endlessly debated question about whether poles actually help you climb mountains faster or more easily.
A few years ago, I tried to sort through the confusing and often conflicting literature on trekking poles. The main conclusions I came away with were that using poles makes you burn about 20 percent more energy, but in return they enable you to walk faster with a longer stride, and in some cases reduce your perception of effort. That’s primarily on level surfaces, though. In recent years, Giovanelli has deployed his custom treadmill to explore a series of questions about going uphill with poles, a topic of particular interest to mountain and trail runners.
His latest study, published in the European Journal of Applied…
