Every Timed Climb in Zwift

Three numbers describe a climb, and they answer different questions. Length tells you how long you will be riding. Elevation gain tells you how much work you have to do against gravity. Average gradient tells you how hard that work will feel at any moment.

Elevation is the one that actually sets the effort. Lifting 80 kg of rider and bike through 1481 m takes a fixed amount of energy no matter how you spread it out, and on any climb steeper than about 6% that lifting is where more than 90% of your power goes. That is the entire reason power-to-weight ratio, rather than raw watts, decides climbing performance - there is more on the mechanism in the power-to-weight article.

Gradient decides what kind of effort it is. Anything above roughly 8% is a pure grind where drag barely exists and there is nowhere to hide. Between 3% and 6% you are fast enough for the draft to matter and for a group to pull you along. Below 3% a "climb" is really a hard flat effort with a tilt, and races on those segments are won by whoever can produce the biggest one-minute number.

You will find maximum-gradient figures for Zwift climbs quoted all over the internet. Almost none of them trace back to a source. Neither Zwift nor the community reference sites publish a maximum gradient for any timed segment, and the numbers that circulate are usually the average of a particular steep section, which by definition cannot be the maximum of the segment containing it.

Rather than fill the column with plausible-looking numbers, it is left out. Where a climb has a genuinely notable steep section, that belongs in prose with the section described honestly, not in a table cell pretending to be data. The same principle applies everywhere on this site and is set out in the editorial policy.

The elevation and length figures here are cross-checked against the community reference list of timed segments. If you spot one that has drifted after a Zwift update, let us know and it gets fixed.

A climb is a training tool, and the right one depends on what you are trying to build. Matching the duration of the climb to the duration of the effort you want to train is more useful than picking whichever one is famous.