Paul;

These are very good questions. Here is the back story as to why you don’t see much about it here.

When writing the book Training for the Uphill Athlete Kilian and I discussed including VK specific training. His feeling was that not enough people specialized in VKs for us to go into detail about training for that event.

Hiking on very steep terrain is certainly more specific that running on flatter trails. However, doing every workout on steep hills, where there is a big muscular loading in the legs is very likely, even if you keep the HR low, to lead to overtraining. I would limit steep hills to 1-2 days/week and do much of your other training in Z1 on less hilly trails. In the early season those 2 days will be done in Z1-2 and later they will progress to Z3-4.

As for strength training: As Scott Semple said, these strength training protocols in both books are not the only way to train for strength for these events. We wanted to present a simple approach that almost anyone could use. You’re right that VKs look more like mountaineering when it comes to the strength portion of the training. So a solid Max strength period will set yo up well for moving to a ME phase. That ME can be done on hills like Kilian does or in a gym stepping up high many times.

I hope this helps
Scott