Training Tips and Inspiration: Explore Our Blog

Endurance is the ability to display power or strength over time. It can be of continuous, high intensity, or it can be intermittent in nature. There are many different ways that endurance shows up in our sport, and there are a few key lessons to take home before we start equating simply working up a sweat with being able to beat the pump.

The year I turned 40 I finally learned how to read. Actually that's a bit misleading, as I have been devouring all sorts of fiction ever since primary school: classics, crime novels, sci-fi, you name it. But non-fiction nearly always left me cold. Sure, I slogged through plenty of it out of necessity, but not with much enthusiasm. Then I discovered a radical new reading tactic, thanks economist and polymath Tyler Cowen. The trick is to stop being a slave to reading every page, front to back, of every book you start.

Strength training takes time and effort. And when training pure strength, it can be taxing on the nervous system. What if there was a way to decrease your feelings of fatigue and increase your training efficiency? New research has come out that describes a way to do just that. By paying attention to your speed for each rep, you can improve your results and they might just come more easily. Velocity loss training is a relatively new training protocol that prescribes rep and set amounts not based on specific repetitions, but when the athlete cannot keep the same velocity during the lift.

The cool thing about studying one field for a long time is that you start to identify the core principles of how that field works. You start to understand that it shares principles with other fields. And you start to see that everyone who advances in the sport must follow those principles.

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.

Simply put, mindset training for climbers enhances the ability to engage attention on climbing movement. Our mindset is a set of beliefs, which inform the perceptions of self and surroundings. How we view ourselves as climbers, how we show up to our sessions and how we perform are influenced by our mindset. Our mindset determines the direction of our attention: our thoughts, emotions and behaviors. What we direct our attention on (how we think, feel and act) determines the quality (our performance and our enjoyment) of climbing.

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.