By Steve Bechtel
Most of us either over-think our preparation for the sport or we don’t think about it enough. Far too often, we end up in the mindset of accepting limits, and decide that this must be our level. Why? Because we have plucked what seems like all the lowest-hanging fruit.
Let me run you through your climbing experience:
First, someone took you climbing. You went to the cliff or to the gym, and you loved the movement or the environment. You did a bit of climbing and had fun.
Next, you went back, remembered some of the tricks from last time and maybe mastered a slightly harder climb.
You kept this up. Had fun with friends. Got better. Felt good.
After a while, you had to start concentrating on some part of conditioning, like strength or endurance, or on tactics and strategies for success. Whatever the difficulty, you fought for it, got better, and started to enjoy the process.
And you might have done this time and again, leveling up a bit each time… but it got harder. Eventually, you leveled out and just resigned yourself to getting in and out of shape for the same level of climbs, over and over.
Diminishing Returns
When we continually apply an overload to a system, that system is encouraged to adapt. With enough overload, though, the adaptation process starts to stress more parts of our body’s systems. For example, if we cut back on calories a bit and exercise a little more, most of us lose some fat. In order to keep losing fat, however, we eventually need to increase the exercise or reduce the calories even further—the initial adaptation of losing the “easy to get at” fat is over. We’re running out of the stuff, so we have to dig deeper. Fewer calories still, and more exercise. Over time, this becomes too much: the recovery required by more exercise asks for calories we just don’t have, and so the system downregulates our ability to train (and burn calories), and eventually things grind to a halt.
Many of us foolishly do this same kind of thing in several facets of training. In a typical climber’s training, we might see the same process happening on many levels, from strength, to recovery, to nutrition, to mental facets of the sport.
The important lesson is to understand that we can work on improving the parts of climbing in 3 main ways. We’ve all inherently known this for years, but it wasn’t until I heard Steve Magness talk about programming in these super simple terms that it became this easy to pinpoint. We can either be building fitness through targeted developmental sessions, reinforcing fitness and skill in maintenance-focused sessions, or we can work on integrating parts of our preparation into more sport-like sessions or cycles. Let’s look at this in detail.
Building
When we have moved past the part of our progression where simply going climbing gets us better at all things climbing, we need to address our development in parts. Once we have a basic level of ability, we improve more slowly, with each step of improvement requiring a more and more focused effort and attention. If we are trying to build fitness or a specific skill, the general rule is to address this in one or two focused sessions each week, and plan on at least 15 sessions in sequence (depending on the thing we are trying to improve) to see marked improvements. In building, we look at our overall strength, our flexibility, or even training on specific hold types individually, and address them with tremendous focus.
This goal of improvement must be monitored and prioritized. Once you’ve improved the skill or weakness, the best next step is not to forget it and move on to something else, but rather to move it into a maintenance mode where you reinforce the work you did in the build cycle.
For example, instead of “Moonboarding” twice weekly and bouldering outside on the weekend—which worked great last year—we try to build some specific strength. We spend the “entree” part of each session working on slow / static climbing skills, and on the 3-finger drag position, for example. We quantify each part of the sessions, and we doggedly pursue gains here.
We might be able to add a second focus if it complements the first, such as hip flexibility or shoulder strength. After some eight weeks (15-16 sessions), we reassess and move onto the next focus.
Maintaining
On to the next focus…but don’t forget maintenance. If I invest weeks and weeks into my ability to hold tension in bouldering and my hip flexibility, I’d be making a big mistake if I simply ceased doing those things. Instead, we move important new skills and strengths into maintenance or “reinforcement” mode.
Depending on what I am trying to maintain, the frequency of loading can vary…but not so much that you need to get crazy about it. I have a simple rubric we follow: Cut duration down to about 20% of what you’ve been doing.
If I spent 90 minutes each week in a building phase with a given focus, I would then continue to train it through the next few phases (this could be a year or more!) at around 20% of the original volume. Thus, my slow/static practice in the example would drop to less than 15 minutes per session in a maintenance phase.
A climbing strength session might then look like this:
- Warm-Up and Movement Preparation: 15 minutes
- Primary Training Focus (Foci): 45 minutes
- Maintenance Sets: 10 minutes
- Other Exercises / Bouldering: 20-40 minutes
(This is all subject to the capacity you have for training, and these numbers will vary. Adjust the times, but respect the ratios)
Remember that your training should include a large amount of skilled climbing work each week. I am not a fan of putting your Solutions away for a month while you try to get stronger fingers.
Integrating
In the third phase of our “improvement” goal, we start to integrate the parts of training together. Strong fingers help. Better footwork helps. Better momentum skills help. If we don’t integrate these pieces, though, we still probably won’t get better. If my season so far consisted of slow/static skill and some learning how to use bad feet and some upper body strength, this phase should feature combination drills that start to stress all three. You might be thinking, “Why not just build some boulders with bad feet on a steep wall with holds that don’t let me move as quickly?”
Bingo.
Go back into performance climbing mode, but do so in a way that addresses your weaknesses.
I’ve found the key to integrating the pieces of the Building phase of training is logging. In a performance period where you’re trying to send and maybe do a little bit of training alongside, writing out the integration goal at the top of a training day is really helpful. Thus, the first line of the log will read:
“Bad Feet, Slow Strength, Pull Hard.”
Then, at the end of the day, I can assess whether I paid attention to these things in my training sessions, or if I just defaulted to climbing by habit. Save the habit (and hopeful new and good habits) for performance.
The obvious goal here is to integrate the pieces of your training into high levels of performance. If we do training right, it manifests in our climbing. Pay attention to improved ability out there, and not just whether you hit a new grade or not.
Improved ability shows up a few ways:
- A harder max grade. Yes, sending harder may be an indication of improved climbing, but it’s not always so. Worth noting and celebrating, but pay attention to the other factors, too.
- Faster sends in the second tier. Can you send climbs in the few grades below your hardest redpoints more quickly? You should note your best efforts on RP-1, RP-2, RP-3, and hardest onsight. Many climbers who spend time in bothe the redpoint world and the onsight world will be able to onsight at RP-4. If you’re way off this point, note it.
- More proud efforts. I continually come back to noting times you tried hard. Times you went for it despite the doubt, times you tried one more time even though you were not psyched, times you decided to lead even though you wished for a toprope.
- More total climbing. Not everyone pursues more volume, but volume tends to be a deciding factor in performance, and it’s pretty easy to chase.
It’s not your finger strength. It’s not your new gear. It’s not that you sent a personal best on the Moon Board. Improvement is about sending harder or more or better. You, of course, don’t have to pursue getting better, but if you decide that’s your path, make sure you’re on the right path. The only way to get better once you’ve got the basics down is to identify weak points in your performance and to eliminate them. Pick a thing or two, pursue them aggressively, then move them into maintenance mode. When you hit the rock, make sure that these things are truly improving. If you are paying attention, you’re going to see it happen. And if you get good at the framework, you can come back and address new things each and every season.
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 the globe bouldering, sport climbing, and doing first ascents of some of the world's biggest walls.
He is co-owner of Elemental Performance + Fitness, 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. He includes low-intensity training in almost everything he does these days...since it feels pretty tough.