By Steve Bechtel
One of the hardest parts about sorting out training for climbing is getting out of the rut of your own thinking. All too often, we think that what we learned from our mentor or youth coach or high school climbing buddy was the be all, end all of training advice. I spend way more time than I probably should trying to learn how to do this stuff a little better, and often fall into the trap of simply looking for advice I agree with. If I don’t really like training and would prefer to be outside, I’ll gravitate toward the advice of those who say that just going climbing is the best way to go. If I love barbell lifting, I’ll seek out experts that tell me that presses and squats are essential to hard bouldering.
What I truly love these days is when I find someone who understands the principles of training, and shows me creative and thoughtful ways of looking at the same stuff we’ve always pondered. Sergio Consuegra is just such a person. An accomplished climber, Sergio is also a coach and a keen reader of research. His 2020 book The Science of Climbing Training, is revelatory in ways that no climbing training book has been for me, and his constant quest for application of training to the performance environment is heartening—I don’t need to get good at putting numbers up on a strain gauge.
Short of telling you you need to read the book, then read it again immediately after (which you should), I’m going to share five big takeaways I had that have helped me reshape the way I look at training.
Remember the Arndt-Schultz Law: Stimuli that fall short of the threshold have no training effect.
Some of us like to take some time to ramp up into harder climbing, to build some mileage, to “listen to our bodies,” or whatever. Our bodies are masters of homeostasis, and without enough overload, they will do their best to maintain the status quo. It is metabolically expensive to hold onto the adaptations of fitness, so when we stop overloading the system it falls backward. Climbers who take extended breaks tend to have to rebuild frequently, and we often see these rebuilds being protracted periods of submaximal work.
Too many easy pitches, light sets, and volume days can potentially result in no progress, which can be really hard on the motivation, especially when we think we’re “rebuilding.” This is doubly confusing when we hear about No Hang training, bodyweight-only strength routines, and great climbers who seem to just go do tons of pitches.
The key here is to push your system to the edge of what it can handle. A 5.12 climber doing volume on 5.9 will have to do a lot of volume to get a stimulus. When loading up exercises, we need to find a place where each one takes us close to, but not over the limit.
Strength training is the best preventer of injury
In preventing injury, an appropriate strength program is the most effective mode, leading to a 30% reduction in overall injury rates and a 50% reduction in injury due to overloading. Many climbers feel that they don’t have time for weights, and would better use those precious minutes doing a few more boulder problems. Staying strong and focusing on general strength exercises rather than simply more climbing-specific drills will actually enhance our ability to do more problems, simply because injury risk drops.
In strength, we really need to look at long timelines. A month of training in the gym will show little result, where twenty years will be profound. We need to look at it as an investment of time rather than an expense.
Anaerobic lactic metabolism is far from the predominant energy system in climbing.
In the future, I believe our obsession with getting pumped, fatigued, sweaty, and nauseous in order to build endurance will fade. It doesn’t take too educated an observer to see that elite-level climbers aren’t fighting the same pump battle that novices and intermediates are fighting. The short version: If you want to be elite, you need to focus all of your energy on building strength and on building aerobic capacity.
Consuegra makes a couple of great points here from the research. This first is that the oxidative capacity of the FDP muscle (one of the primary “grip” muscles in the forearm) is directly proportional to the climber’s redpoint grade. So yes, you need to be strong, but if you want to climb hard routes, you clearly need greater oxidative capacity. Sometimes we look at an incomplete picture of an elite climber, and assume all that climber does is strength and explosive climbing. But in reality we have an athlete that puts in an inordinate number of easier movement, even if they “just boulder.” Thus, even a power-focused climber can build this capacity, but they must allow for a tremendous volume of activity at submaximal levels.
Another point. Acidosis causes fatigue. Elite climbers have lower concentrations of lactate than recreational climbers when tested post-climb. This suggests that elites can produce more energy from alactic and aerobic pathways, enough for the hardest sections of a climb, without having to switch to the lactic pathway, unlike recreational and intermediate climbers. If we look at energy production as a continuum with a threshold at the point where we switch from primarily aerobic to anaerobic pathways and another at the point where activity is primarily alactic, we can imagine the elites have closed the distance between these two levels. More aerobic, more alactic, very little time between.
Warm Up
Yeah, yeah, yeah, warming up. Some people don’t believe in it, and they’re going to lose many days of great performances because of it. Priming the body for activity not only increases power output, but also reduces chance of injury and increases work capacity. From the book: “A proper warm-up affects 79% of performance-related factors and can improve performance by up to 20%.”
A good warm-up will take a lot of your training session. You might be tempted to spend more time training and less time warming up. This would be wrong.
If you don’t have time for the warm-up, a serious look at your minute-by-minute schedule in a day is warranted.
Rate of Force Development is Key
Many of us take pride in how “deep” we can go in a session, how fatiguing it was. But our sport is rarely about enduring low-skill, low-force movement until the last possible moment. More often, it is because we can no longer produce efficient and high-force movement that we end up in that state anyway. If there were only one quality to chase in our strength training, it would probably be rate of force development…how much force we can generate as quickly as possible.
Consuegra suggests a practical recommendation for increasing power and RFD would be do to half the possible moves or reps you could do in a given set (5 of 10 for example) or to stop as soon as you are moving 15 to 20 % slower than the first rep. Rest, and then go again.
In the gym, a simple assessment of, “Am I at full power?” would be a good test between each set. Because of the multiple facets of what goes into a boulder—you can still pull off some pretty hard moves when power is declining—sometimes “enough rest” is hard to see. For this reason, I suggest getting a feel for this with a strength exercise such as pull-ups or a
bench press.
Figure out a weight where you can do about five reps. Do five, then rest 2-3 minutes. You should be able to do five more at the same load after this rest. After this seconds set, rest just 90 seconds. You might be able to pull off five more, but you may have dropped to 4. After this set, rest just 45 seconds. The reps will feel harder, and the movement will probably slow, especially on the latter reps. If, for some reason, you got five again, rest just 30 seconds and try again. You’ll see what I’m talking about.
You’ll have done something like 5-5-4-3-2 reps, and be pretty wiped. If you’d have held to 2 minutes between sets, you’ll likely have done 5 reps across all sets, and been powerful for each movement. This same performance
holds true in hangboarding, bouldering, and on the campus board.
Over the years, we’ve seen climbing training move from mimicry of other activities to a discipline of its own. In the future, we’ll be even better. If you’re a climber today, and want to make the most out of the brief time you have, you’re a fool to miss out on landmark books like this one. Give yourself twenty minutes each morning to learn about your craft, and your trajectory will be forever changed.
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.
This month, he worked closely with Zach to recategorize more than 400 articles and plans on the CS site...and was happy to read things he'd written and forgotten. It's been a good ride!
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, children Sam and Anabel, who are closing in on the $100 pull-up challenge.