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Don't expect to climb for 8 hours if you can't do 8 hours of chores. If maintaining threshold level aerobic activity (i.e. a jog) for more than 10 minutes makes you want to puke, that 40 meter project is probably not in the cards. If simply lifting a few heavy objects off the ground leaves you crippled in bed the following day, you'll likely never get anywhere near your real limit on a boulder problem.

Even though tendon strength is crucial to athletes and rock climbers in particular, there is rarely any discussion about it. Today, the little information we find about training our tendons is truly disproportionate to the abundance of information we find about muscle training. Tendons, like muscles, are crucial components in our movement system. Time is wasted on training strong muscles if the force cannot properly be translated to our skeleton because we have neglected our tendons.

Did I get your attention? Are you searching for the magic bullet that will instantly transform you into a stone crushing Crankenstein that eats hard rock climbs for breakfast? I sure hope not. The truth is, there is no magic bullet. My sincere hope is that if you're reading this piece, you already know that, and you're still here because you can't turn away. There's an accident on the side of the road, and you're slowing down to see what happened.

Remember the last time you felt almost unstoppable at the crag? You had loads of energy, latched holds with authority, and savored the fight on every attempt. It was almost as if there was actually less gravity every time you pulled onto the wall. Goals felt attainable and you saw tangible progress on a regular basis. That is the feeling of positive momentum.

Five years ago, fed up with what felt like a lack of inspiring options, I set a goal to redpoint Better Than Life, an infamous 5.13c at Owl Tor in Santa Maria, California. Owl Tor was my local area back when I lived in Santa Barbara and my friends still climbed there regularly. Yet, even with belays at the ready, this was logistically challenging. For those without a map handy, Santa Maria is about 1000 miles south of Eugene. The route was also well beyond my current abilities. I had only redpointed two other 5.13's at that point in my career. So yeah, it was going to take some time, effort, and more than one trip down south.

I pretty regularly see and hear the same story. You did everything right, maybe? You hired a coach, or at least read every book and post Steve has written on the CS website. You've taken all the supplements, done all the stretches, and even took a whole week off after a climbing trip. But all of sudden you've got this nagging complaint, this whisper of an issue. You keep telling yourself it's just a little soreness, or that you need to shift into a lot of "easy" volume for a while to reduce the stress. You may even convince yourself you need to double down on all the sexy looking antagonist exercises you saw in the most recent instagram influencer post as the key to preventing injuries. The answer is unlikely none of the previous mentioned. As you press on and try a new self directed treatment strategy each subsequent gym visit you've now pretty clearly taken yourself down the injury path.

I couldn’t even close my hands. I clawed at the huge holds, hoping the skin on my palms would tear a bit and give me a few seconds of purchase before I flew off into the sky below. My hips were slack. My footwork sloppy. Once again I flailed at the moves that were so, so easy when I was fresh. I was 13 bolts up and five feet from the chains. Airborne again.

This is Steve's breakdown of a question that was asked of him, along with his answer. He dissects each in an attempt to understand what is really at play, beyond the question that was asked and answer that was delivered.

Walk into any gym in the world and you’ll see someone doing isolation exercises to focus on building strength or size in one muscle group. Isolation is a good way to build strength in one muscle or small group of them, and it is a preferred method for building mass. It is limited, however, in its transfer to sport performance. Good coaches look to more complex movements that utilize several muscle groups at once to prepare for most sports. By using our bodies in movement patterns rather than aiming for targeting one muscle at a time, the strength and power gained in the gym is more applicable to real-world environments.

This past August we were winding down the Climb Strong training camp in Lander, WY and Steve Bechtel said something that really stuck with me. A participant asked about assessments and Steve replied that if we piled all of our physical assessment numbers together we probably wouldn’t be able to pick out Jonathan Siegrist’s from the pack. However, if we all wrote down our climbing history and created a second pile, it wouldn’t even be a question and Jonathan’s would stick out like a sore thumb.

Typically, we’ve had the most success with doing intervals that are 5-10 seconds of effort, with longer rests of up to 4 minutes. This makes for a long session and it doesn’t feel like hard work. To address this, we started pushing different exercises into the sequence and then trying to overload the system by changing the work the body was doing during a shorter cycle.