Training
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…
Are We Assessing the Right Things?
Tags: Assessment, ken klein, testing
by Ken Klein, NASM, PCC This past August we were winding down the Climb Strong training camp in Lander, WY and Steve Bechtel said something that really stuck with me. A participant asked about assessments and Steve replied that if we piled all of our physical assessment numbers together we probably wouldn’t be able…
Full Combination Strength
Tags: Explosiveness, Isometric, Power, Specific Strength
by Steve Bechtel Strength is fundamental to athletic performance. Many climbers get it, and they hit the weight room regularly. The problem with most weight training is that it only addresses one speed of movement, and most of us select bilateral exercises for most movements. By training in such a narrow path, we miss out…
Third Gear: The Aerobic Energy System
Tags: 4x4s, aerobic endurance, ARC, Endurance, energy systems, Extensive Endurance, short workouts
by Steve Bechtel A few years back, I was asked during an interview how important running is to climbing performance. Somewhat reactively, I said, “Running is as important for climbing as climbing is for running.” Over the years, I’ve received more than a fair number of messages and emails about this statement. Although there…
Shifting Goals in Lockdown
Tags: at home, Goal Setting, Kathryn Perkinson, Strength
By Kathryn Perkinson We are not living in an alternate reality. This world– a global pandemic, quarantine, no access to climbing– is reality. If you stay stuck wishing for what was or hoping for what will be, you’ll certainly miss this opportunity and make yourself miserable. How will you fully accept our new normal and…
First Gear: The Anaerobic Alactic Energy System
Tags: alactic, Anaerobic Endurance, Endurance, energy systems, first gear, Power Endurance
by Steve Bechtel Movement is the basis of climbing up rocks, and in order to move, we need to supply our body with energy. Since any and all movement can occur at multiple speeds, in different directions, and over different durations, our bodies have evolved to handle supplying the energy for moving in several ways….
High Load and Low Load Density Training
Tags: Density Training, Endurance, Power Endurance
by Steve Bechtel In the old days, we trained “endurance” by climbing easy moves until we got pumped and fell off. For me, this usually involved doing routes on toprope at Fremont Canyon, or traversing a long flagstone wall near the interstate in my hometown of Casper, Wyoming. The problem was this: Eventually, you got…
The Speed Barrier
Tags: Power Training, speed
by Steve Bechtel “Here lies the contradiction of developing speed. On the one hand, to increase speed, the movement must be repeated many times, but on the other hand, the more repetitions, the stronger the speed barrier grows. Increasing the amount of work does not help; on the contrary, it consolidates the speed barrier.” –…
Melding Strength and Power
Tags: Finger Strength, Hangboard, Power, Steve Bechtel, Strength, Weight Training
by Steve Bechtel Too frequently, we try to over-categorize our training. Long-time athletes and coaches learned about training for climbing by reading about and practicing training that came from other sports. We all understood that strength and power and endurance were different entities, some of us going so far as to train all of these…
Weight Training: What it is and is not.
Tags: Strength Training, Weight Training
As humans, we all tend to use categories and observations about groups of things to understand the world.Puppies are cute. Fruits are sweet. Scarpa shoes are awesome. Categories. It gets dangerous. Women are crazy. People with dark skin are dangerous. Liberals are weak. We learn through our culture, our parents, our schools that individual observation…
High / Low Training… What To Do and When.
Tags: aerobic endurance, Anaerobic Endurance, Endurance, High Low
“In endurance, not only does the magnitude of fatigue matter, but also its nature.” – V. Zatsiorsky, 1966 Endurance – simply the ability to keep doing a task over and over – is something we all feel we need more of from time to time. The problem with gaining endurance is that there are…
Foundational Bouldering (or Why Being a Novice is a Good Thing)
Tags: Bouldering, Bouldering Training, Novice Training
One of the great blunders of training is over-complication. It goes like this: You get interested in getting better so you go to the gym a bit and you get a little stronger and you get psyched and so you read about training and you get inspired to try some more stuff and you keep…