By Steve Bechtel
Ahh, the holidays. Snacks in the break room, cookies on the table, and a little bit of extra cheer at the end of the day. Work schedules are off, kids are home from school, and there are all kinds of other special things going on this month. No wonder we don’t make it to the gym. Statistically, December is the time that people are the least active (in the Northern Hemisphere), and tend to see the biggest drops in fitness metrics. It makes sense—January is coming and that’s when we tend to think of “starting again.”
For climbers wanting to do well next year, this is no time for resting. December is when you’ve got to lay down the foundation for next year. Certainly, most of us won’t send at our best level this month, and the short days and cold tend to restrict our time outside. I suggest instead, that we pursue a strength goal that is specific, limited to the next 4-8 weeks, and will pay dividends throughout the coming year.
In December, it’s a good time to look for an honest reflection of how last season went. Did you send? Were you injured? Did you get burned out? What felt like a limiter?
I don’t want to fall into the common “podcast host trap” of talking about my own climbing here, but for me, last year was defined by a loss in lock off strength and in overall capacity. I just didn’t have the energy to do as much climbing at the end of the day in the past. On routes I do frequently at our local crags, I found moves that used to be reasonable to be much harder. It was clear there was something off in my strength. These are both tangible training goals, can be addressed in the gym, and can be measured. Big win for December Strength Season.
I caution against going for even more ability in your strongest facets. If your fingers are pretty strong and you hangboard regularly, I’ll bet this isn’t what’s holding you back. What we need to look at are general adaptations that will support specific training later in the season.
What we want to do is focus on one or two exercises, and really make some progress. The problem with most training plans that we start is that way too many things are trying to happen. If I am trying to build crimp strength AND endurance AND get more flexible AND drop 3 pounds…well probably none of those things has a chance of happening. After all, I probably was trying pretty hard to be an athlete leading up to this.
So, pick.
And keep everything else chugging along.
A climber looking to gain in end-range finger strength (locking off on crimps or pulling sidepulls in close) would need to address that strength specifically for maybe 15-20 minutes 3 days each week. If this were an athlete I was coaching, I’d still have them bouldering regularly, working on some mobility, hitting a few sets on the campus board, and getting out for some walks. The thing we would chase would be this specific aspect of their strength.
The testing is simple: In this specific move, what is my current ability?
Set up a strain gauge, get into the difficult position, and get some numbers.
Then we train. We want to train general and peripheral abilities. In this case, we’d lock off on a pull-up bar. Do some single arm cable pulls, hang from edges with arms straight, do some dumbbell rows and more. In order to build lasting specific strength, we need to start with a foundation of general strength.
For the first 3 weeks, training would be quite general, as noted above. Then we would slowly transition to more climbing movements that address the limiter, and start to integrate the hard grip positions with the big muscle pulls. This helps us avoid one of the great blunders in training: too specific, too soon. If we just started with specific movements or even with a route simulation, we would top out our adaptations too soon and our capacity for these movements would be limited.
For the following 3 or more weeks, then, we’d do specific movements that address our limiter, and maybe once every 5 sessions test our progress.
Getting better at the exercise is our goal, but it’s not the end goal of performance. That’s the biggest issue with physical testing batteries in our sport at this point—we fall into the trap of Goodhart’s Law. “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” When our end-goal is to beat the test, we erroneously think that it will automatically improve our sport performance.
Thus, the crucial final step of the training is this: address the trained ability in practice throughout the following season. Which is harder than you’d think.
After the 6-8 weeks of focus on that limiter (or two), we have to keep coming back to it in the gym. We have to adapt our climbing style to bring it into play. We need to continue to pay attention to it, even though most of the movement we do on rock is subconscious. How do we do it? We practice when we are fresh and not training near our limit.
Once we have moved the dial in the correct direction on that limiter, we can check that box for the focused training phase and move it back into maintenance mode.
A specific example:
From December 4 to 24 I am going to work on general strength that assists with my ability to hold a lock-off. This will be 3 days per week of training that includes strength-based exercises for pulling, holding isometric positions, and for holding edges at arm angles that are challenging. It is unlikely that straight-arm hangboarding will be useful, nor will bodyweight pull-ups, or campusing, so these will not be part of the program.
From December 26 (note I let you rest on the 25th!) until maybe the 20th of January, I’ll keep up the strength work, but at a reduced volume. I’ll add in specific integrated moves such as lock-offs on a board, foot-on campus movements, and system-type lock-offs / slow climbing on a board.
All the while, I am still climbing! One thing I can’t afford is to stop movement and skill maintenance just to gain some strength. In fact, all the training I am doing for this lock-off ability should be seen as supplemental to my climbing.
That’s the thing with most of our training most of the time—it should be done with maintenance in mind. I want you to go to your limit on the rock, but maybe not so much on practicing the splits. Coax gains, chase performance.
A well planned year, then, would see you climbing a lot and training maintenance from maybe February through June, taking a month away and working on some specific facet of your game that is limiting you, then performing again from August through November. Then it’s time for focusing in the gym again for 6-8 weeks.
Look, I get it: There are always more gains to be had if you spend even more time training. But what so many of us lose when we get in the training game is why we started in the first place. Training is not just moving your performance game indoors for the winter. Training, in an ideal program, addresses the issues that are holding us back.
If you’re not addressing limiters, if you’re not stepping up the demand, you’re not training.
Hold Fast,
Steve
ABOUT STEVE BECHTEL
Steve is the founder of Climb Strong, and is proud to be the worst coach on the Climb Strong team. A climber for nearly 40 years, he has traveled to globe bouldering, sport climbing, and doing first ascents of some of the world's biggest walls.
Steve's main training goal is just to stay strong enough to do more pull-ups than his kids, since they've each been promised $100 if they can do more than he can.
He is education director of the Performance Climbing Coach organization, and is the author of several books on training for climbing. He lives in Lander, Wyoming, with his wife Ellen, and children Sam and Anabel, who can each do around eight pull-ups as of this writing.