Motivation and Tactics
Three Things I Wish I Would Have Been Told During My First Few Years of Climbing
Tags: Carly Cain, comparison, effort, lessons
by Carly Cain, Performance Climbing Coach, NASM, AMGA RGA 1. Your Climbing Doesn’t Matter Well, it does matter, but not to anyone but you. All of you out there reading this while shaking your head saying, ‘But my partner cares,’ well, you’re wrong. They do not care like you care. No one…
Not Dark Yet
Tags: Aging, Bouldering Training, General Training, integrated strength, Mobility, Steve Bechtel
by Steve Bechtel There is a certain profundity to aging that gnaws at us, and the bites seem to get bigger at the decade marks. Twenty meant moving forward, freedom, and driving my own life. Thirty felt like I should have already sorted out most of the stuff I was working hard to sort out,…
Lessons: 2020
Tags: lessons, Steve Bechtel
by Steve Bechtel As the year wraps up and I have time to look back on all that happened in the previous 12 months, I find looking for lessons useful. None of us would say that 2020 was unmemorable, but I feel that despite the difficulty of the year, there were valuable experiences that can…
Developmental and Maintenance Loads
Tags: developemental loads, maintenance, Planning, Strength
by Steve Bechtel We can train to improve or train to hold our ground. This is an important distinction, and one worth keeping in mind when you are training. Most of us think only in terms of trying to get better – to push more weight, to hold smaller crimps, etc. Most of us think…
Accountability Partners
Tags: Charlie Manganiello, partners, Planning
by Charlie Manganiello You know that obnoxious poster you might see in a telemarketer call station. You know the one. The poster says “TEAMWORK” in blocky letters under a photo of someone being helped to the summit of a mountain by another climber. The sun is setting, their hands are reaching out to one another,…
Recovery Points – Challenging Youth Athletes to Recover Well
Tags: Recovery, Recovery Weeks, rest, youth
by Steve Bechtel A little while back, I wrote an article about Recovery Training, where I tried to underscore the idea that you should take your recovery as seriously as you do your climbing and training. We all love to add and add and add to our training in hopes that somehow the throttling will…
7 Habits of Highly Successful Climbers
Tags: Habits, Motivation, Planning
The last few years have seen a big focus on training for climbing and a great interest in the specific methods top athletes use to improve their strength and conditioning. Although this has been good overall, I still go back to the belief that strength and endurance should be the last thing you worry about…
The 90 Percent That Matters
By Steve Bechtel You wouldn’t read this if you didn’t want to get better at climbing. Many of us are on a constant search for a new training program, a new tool, a secret formula that somehow someone figured out that makes it all easy. Getting better isn’t complex, it’s simple. It’s simple, not easy….
Why Am I Stuck?
Tags: Planning, Plateaus, Progress
Oh, the glory days when we used to actually get better at climbing! I remember well doing a 5.6 one weekend, a 5.7 the next, a 5.8 and so on up. That whole first year, things just got easier and easier and the grades rolled by. The next year, progress slowed. The next, I had…
Recovery Training
Tags: Balance, Nutrition, Recovery, rest
We get good at pushing hard into training. We all have been in that super-pumped zone or so sore we can barely move the next day, or so exhausted from a week’s training that we stay on the couch the whole weekend. As good as learning to go hard is, there is a critical Yang…
Hacking the Zlagboard Contest
Tags: Hangboard, muscular endurance, Zlagboard
If you’ve never done a 20mm edge static hang to absolute failure, you’re missing out. This pleasure cruise of forearm endurance is not to be missed. I had the chance to try out the Zlagboard Contest a couple of years ago. The contest involves one simple test: grab the “medium” sized edges on the board…