Motivation and Tactics
Training Age
Tags: Assessment, Change, Expertise, Feedback, Practice, Progress, Training
by Steve Bechtel Want to get good at climbing? Be patient. Every month at our gym, we have a training meeting with the entire coaching staff. These meetings range from exercise technique to invoicing to habit change – basically everything you can imagine when it comes to training athletes. A few years ago, I talked…
How Hard Do You Try?
Tags: Habits, Intensity, Motivation, Pain, Planning, Quality Training, Training
By Steve Bechtel Why is it that some people just keep getting better while the rest of us are stuck? Further, why can I follow the same program as another climber and watch him rack up the grades while I still fail at the same level year after year? As hard as it is to…
Three Mistakes You Might Be Making in the Gym
Tags: Assessment, Intensity, Progress, Quality Training, Specificity, Training, Weight Management
By Steve Bechtel Training is all about progress. Unless you just love to train (I’d rather watch Deadwood), you’d better be seeing some results for the hours you spend flogging yourself. What we see in most climbers, though, is really just slight decreases in fitness throughout the year, and then an occasional return to a…
Get Out of Your Rut
Tags: Change, Habits, Quality Training, Supercompensation
By Steve Bechtel Do you remember back when you used to get better at climbing? Month after month you could climb harder routes, you could feel yourself get better at jamming, at lock-offs, at edging, and it felt like the sky was the limit. Now you know that the limit is right about 12a, and…
The 1-6-3 Rule
Tags: Habits, Intensity, Motivation, Pain, Planning, Quality Training, Training
By Steve Bechtel Training can be fun. It can also be a huge effort. Usually, it’s somewhere in between. One big mistake first-time trainees make is thinking that it’s going to be fun the whole time. Think about it…remember how exciting the first day of school was? That first kiss? The day you bought a…
Change
Tags: Change, Habits, Planning, Quality Training
by Steve Bechtel This site is filled with our best training ideas and advice. There are dozens of books on systems for improving your climbing. You could watch quality training videos online for a whole day and get ten lifetimes worth of good advice. So why do so few climbers reach their goals each year?…
E-Stim Might Make You Weaker
Tags: E-Stim, Endurance, Recovery, Training
By Steve Bechtel I am as excited about the next big thing in training as the next guy. When Electronic Muscle Stimulation (E-Stim) came on the scene, I could almost feel my forearms getting stronger just thinking about it. It was a great idea for climbers; a way to train the forearm muscles when you…
Pre-Climb Rituals
Tags: Planning, Rituals, Stretching, Training, Warm-Ups
By Steve Bechtel I like to go to competitions. I like them for many different reasons, but mostly it is to watch people as they prepare to compete. See, the vast majority of pre-event activity is nothing like the way we prepare for training. At bouldering competitions, we see all kinds of craziness, and pre-climb…
Less is More – One Reason Your Training Plan is Failing
Tags: Focus, Programming, Simplifying Training, Tactics
By Steve Bechtel Some people train so that they can climb better. I am convinced, though, that some people train so that they can make up cool spreadsheets and obsess over numbers. They start to lose touch with the basic rules of training, and add, add, add more stuff until they don’t have any room…
Minimalist Training
Tags: Indoor Climbing, Minimal Training, Planning, Program Design, short workouts
By Steve Bechtel Minimalist training has been around in some form or other for years. And when I talk about minimalist training, I’m not just talking about doing jack shit and calling it good enough. I’m talking about doing the minimum necessary training to see continued progress. Undoubtedly, doing more of a particular thing works…