Do Less

by Steve Bechtel

It’s a great honor for me to be asked training advice, but it’s also a circle of frustration. The only thing that keeps me from strangling the climbers that contact me, receive advice, and ignore the advice is the fact that I do the same thing myself. Most of us inherently understand the value of, say, eating well and being flexible, but most of us have a hard time doing the “needed” stuff.

Over the years, I’ve found two things to be true:

1. Most people are stuck.
2. The way out is obvious, but they won’t do what it takes.

Oh, and there is a third thing:

3. We think that the solution is to do more “stuff” when in fact, doing less is the answer.

The athletes that contact me are driven. They typically have trained for years and have had great success in the sport. They have access to all the tools, travel hours each week to climb, and make many of their daily decisions by how those decisions will affect their climbing. Most of them even have clear goals and a plan on how to get there.

But the answer to the question, “What does a typical training/climbing week look like?” shows the flaws of almost every plan.

“I boulder twice a week for about an hour, do a hangboard program 3 times per week, do a full-body weight workout Tuesdays and Fridays, and I go for a short run on my rest day. Also, I do some forearm endurance work 2-3 days a week after climbing. I need to be doing more Yoga, but only get there a couple times a month right now.”

A good coach looks at an email like this and sees not activites, but intensities. He doesn’t see workouts, but required rest numbers. In short, he sees that no matter what is going on, everything comes down to adaptation potential and recovery ability.

Adaptation potential is your ability to improve the facets of your fitness. When you are young, you have this in spades, yet as you age this ability decreases. You also adapt relatively quickly to new activities, moving from awful to OK just by doing the activity for a month or two. Think back to when you moved from 5.6 to 5.8 then to 5.10…many climbers will do this in a few weekend trips, followed by slower and slower progress.

Adaptation potential is very limited, and can be all but stopped if you are trying to master too many exercises or movements at once. This is not to say that trying to master multiple disciplines is not entertaining: we all know people who perform at a high level in several sports, and clearly enjoy their lives. For many athletes, though, performing at their very best it their major motivator. In order to fully master any facet of the sport, that facet needs a lot of your attention for a very long time.

The longer you’ve been climbing and the older you are, the more you need to focus your efforts. The positive thing here is that even taking a couple of months away from your normal training to work on a specific skill will see your other skills decline very little. What you give up in potential you make up for in experience and “muscle memory.”

Let’s take a look at the week described above:

Boulder 2x

Hangboard 3x

Resistance Training 2x

Run 1x

Forearm Endurance 3x

Yoga 1x

We are looking at 13 sessions that are aimed at developing six different fitness qualities. Although several of these qualities can be developed at once in most athletes, I’ll reiterate that the first solution to stalled progress should be to simplify the demand for adaptation on the system. Total training volume aside, you could ease the burden on the athlete (and advance progress!) by simply reducing the number of qualities you are trying to develop. This is just as simple as you’d imagine:

Boulder 2x

Hangboard 3x

Resistance Training 2x

Run 1x

Forearm Endurance 3x

Yoga 1x

With the newly altered program, we allocate more of our energy to getting strong and powerful. We reduce the number of adaptations the body, and particularly the forearm muscles, are trying to make. Most important of all, we start getting better again. You can even go one better. Do you really think a month of the following would be the end of the world?

Boulder 2x

Hangboard 3x

Resistance Training 2x

Run 1x

Forearm Endurance 3x

Yoga 4x

Or this?

Boulder 2x

Hangboard 3x

Resistance Training 2x

Run 1x

Forearm Endurance 3x

Yoga 1x

The other factor to consider beyond your adaptation potential is your recovery ability. Even if you were consistently able to move all of the different training factors forward, the total training volume might be too much for you to endure. Sure, the first couple of weeks are OK, but as each session intensifies through the cycle, many athletes find that their performance starts to level off or decline. In such a case, we ask the question, “How much training is necessary for progress?”

Those of us that are fans of “Rocky” always seem to think that more is the answer. And this being an Olympic year, who can’t get a little fired up about flipping a tire down the street a few times in the hopes of breaking a plateau? For most climbers, excessively high volumes of training rarely result in a better level of performance.

If you’re thinking recovery is your issue, you have two options: recover better or train less. The easy answer is to simply reduce the training load by 5-10% and see what happens in a couple of weeks. Most of us don’t like to do this so we’ll just stay on the gas until we start seeing signs of overtraining or we go ahead and get injured. Trust me, backing off is not that bad.

Short of a load reduction, you can always take an honest look at how well you recover. Al Vermeil’s advice of “train hard, recover harder” shouldn’t be overlooked. How much effort do you put into recovering? Some factors to consider when trying to improve recovery:

• Post-session meals. I’m not too concerned about the 4:1 ratio, but you should eat right after training, every single time.
• Sleep. Is TV really more important to you than climbing well? Figuring out how to sleep even 15 minutes more per day can make the difference between a season of injury and your best season ever.
• Eating enough good stuff and eliminating meaningless calories. You know what’s good for you and what might not be helping. I am becoming increasingly convinced that it doesn’t matter if you’re keto or paleo or vegan so much as whether you’re paying attention to what goes in your mouth at all.
• Eating enough at all. If you’re trying to lose weight, you cut calories. Cutting calories also means reducing your strength gains, hindering your endurance, and extending your recovery times between workouts. If you’re training hard, don’t diet. If you’re dieting, don’t train hard.
• Massage, stretching, heat and cold, and the like. The more attention you give to recovery, the more you’ll recognize that actively not training is really the big key. Simply going home after a hard day and grabbing pizza and a beer just won’t cut it after a while…

If you’ve been training a while, you have a pretty good picture of what your current program is providing. Sticking with the same plan and just trying to force yourself to go harder occasionally will only get you so far. If you really want to get better, pick one or two facets of the sport, and dedicate yourself wholly to them for a month or two, letting everything else go. I promise – nothing bad will happen.