Why our tendencies limit us when it comes to going the distance.
We’ve been talking a lot lately about optimizing endurance training, and even if we can’t get there, we can surely improve it. Our sport is young and we’ve done a poor job of understanding the energy system needs thus far. No one’s to blame—there’s nothing really like climbing to compare, so we’ve been left to guess for a long time.
We knew that climbers who went climbing a lot got good at climbing a lot, but not all of us can do that. So we tried to simulate tiring climbing in the gym.
In an effort to get better at avoiding the dreaded pump, we figured out ways to get pumped really quickly in the gym (4x4s, anyone?), and sussed out fatiguing circuits on spray walls to bring us to that terrible state quickly. It seems like no one stopped and thought, “Hey, maybe we should try and figure out how not to get pumped so those routes aren’t so awful.” It’s like we didn’t notice that at the crag we tried to avoid fatigue as best we could, but in the gym we tried to get there as quickly as possible.
Which is exactly where the high/low or alactic/aerobic training models came in.
Instead of aiming to get wrecked, we took a longer approach and we slowly built fatigue resistance. We looked at the total volume of activity, the difficulty of the climbing, and we pushed gently toward more of each.
And yet the siren song of super-fatiguing training is hard to ignore. Today, I want to frame this a little differently. It’s not that power-endurance training is “bad”—it’s that we need to time it right in order to get a lot out of it. We need to get the dose right. And we need to understand that it’s the last step in the endurance sequence, not the only one.
Going back to Joel Unema’s “Two Buildings” model, we need to envision that there is a strength and power building, and a capacity and endurance building, and they are connected by a slack cable that represents “power endurance.” The way to truly improve your power endurance is to increase your power and your endurance…effectively making both buildings taller, which pulls the cable higher. Working aggressively on power endurance, exclusively, really just “tightens the cable,” which can never go higher than the tops of the buildings it connects.
We need to remember that our goal is not to “feel tired.” Our goal is to be able to do hard climbing moves without having to also deal with fatigue. We do this, simply, by getting to where we can do a lot of work. It’s so simple, in fact, that most of us can’t imagine it working. The enemies of developing capacity? Your schedule and your need to go hard.
The winning method is to focus 2-3 days per week on developing high force capabilities. Address limit strength and boulder hard and campus and stuff. What you do, exactly, doesn’t truly matter as long as you’re addressing high forces. You’ll need to recover for these sessions, and the cool part about recovering from strength is that you can do capacity training while you do it.
What does capacity training look like? It looks sustainable. It looks (sometimes) boring. It looks like hiking, and easy weight circuits, and routes that don’t tire us out, and doing all the V0s, then all the V1s, and so on. The important difference is that with strength, we’re measuring power/force output—how hard we go—and with capacity, we measure duration.
And then there is the whole intensity of the climbing thing. How do we know what’s right? How can we measure it? Measuring output in many sports is pretty straightforward. What’s our heart rate? What does the power meter tell us? How fast are we going? But in climbing, we can go up a 50 meter vertical wall and it could be 5.6 or 5.15. It could take 40 seconds or it could take an hour.
Finding the Right Intensity
Although someday there may be a way to effectively measure several zones of intensity while climbing, I am not really waiting for that day with great anticipation. What we need, in addition to the physical adaptations of endurance training, is the ability to receive feedback from our internal system and understand what it means and how to manage it. I want my athletes to be able to regulate in the real world and not be dependent on tools to do so.
In practice, I try to keep it pretty simple.
- If we want to get stronger, we want to overload the body’s ability to produce high force, and we want to make that happen in under about 15 seconds of effort.
- If we want to sustain a powerful effort for a little longer, we push into fatigue only until the quality of movement declines, then rest a lot before repeating that effort.
- If we want long endurance or greater all-day capacity, we work very hard to avoid fatigue in activity, and focus instead on duration.
For almost all endurance training, I ask my athletes to stay at an intensity where they could do 25% more effort than the set requires. This means if you did an eight-minute traverse, you’re not raging to finish. You stop with a couple minutes left in the tank. We also remind them they should be able to breathe through their nose, hold a conversation, and be at a level of fatigue where hard moves would be possible.
Finally, we want them to stop the session with something left in the tank, too. If we do 15 laps on gym routes, I want the athlete to have been confident they could have done 17 or 18.
If we are getting too close to that wiped-out feeling, we’re not “raising the building,” as Joel advises, but “tightening the wire.”
“How Long Is This Going To Take?”
This is where I might bullshit you if I’m trying to sell you on my exclusive and revolutionary new program. I will not do that. It’s going to take way longer than you want. It’s also not going to generate amazing results…for a long time. The easiest way to explain how this arc of improvement works is to compare it to investing.
Adding dollar after dollar to your retirement account when you are in your 20s and 30s takes a large amount of faith since it is not generating a lot of return. But in your 40s and 50s and 60s things start to take off. If we can look at our endurance training in this way and understand that it might be not just months but years before we see it as something we are adept at, we are probably on the right path.
Yet we want it now. An essential aspect of getting better endurance might be to do your best to get better at climbing at the same time…to make yourself a climber that doesn’t need so much output from your body because you’ve become more skilled and smart. As I’ve noted elsewhere, fear is an endurance killer. Simply put, it’s not worth building stamina, at all, if you are gripped by fear when climbing. No amount of fitness can overcome the negative impact of your fear.
If we can embrace adding more total volume to our training and plan to work on skills, tactics, and fortitude at the same time, I can say that in 2-3 months, or 12-16 sessions, you’ll see a measurable change in performance.
What Does Improved Feel Like
It feels light. It feels fast. It feels precise.
It feels like you’ve put in the work.
Less desperate.
When you are really pushing more oxygen into your system and climbing relaxed, the only issue is figuring the moves and holding the holds.
It’s a sliding scale. Better won’t be perfect, but for any given route, you’ll feel it’s just a little easier, and each route will take just a little less out of you.
Every Effort Is Finite
An essential reminder when we train for stamina of any kind is that every effort is finite. Your rope is only so long. We need the ability to output energy for a fixed amount of time, and beyond that, we are simply trying to be able to do harder moves. The eternal quest will be to coax strength along and not get greedy. To continue to address fitness as the ability to avoid fatigue instead of getting tough enough to endure the pain of anaerobic effort. In the future, climbers will do routes we now consider impossible. It won’t be gear or evolved genetics that get us there. It will be maximizing the athlete’s economy and having a world class level of strength married to optimum aerobic endurance.