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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.

These days, a simple Google search will bring up every climbing skill drill imaginable, but there lacks a framework for progressing those skills over time. In this article, we’ll discuss three major overarching climbing skills that will build on each other. These are balance, precision, and execution. Some famous examples of these skills used in action: Tommy Caldwell using balance to carry him through the dime sized edges on the crux traverse of the Dawn Wall. Adam Ondra using precision when linking the crux boulder problems for efficiency on Silence. Alex Megos using execution when running out the last 30 feet of 8a + climbing after the crux on Bibliography.Within each skill discussion, I’ve listed drills that will progress from beginner to advanced. Climbing is a skill sport, and practice should be an essential part of your routine.

Statistically, climbers don’t do all that well as they age. If you hear of a 27-year-old climbing 14a, you’re not surprised except maybe by the fact that somebody felt it was worth talking about at all. A sixty-year-old climbing at that level is news, because it’s so rare. In fact, it’s so terribly unlikely that the very few people who do pull it off still become household names in the climbing community. Why? Because to climb (or do any sport) at a high level through middle age is supremely challenging. We have to walk a thin line between avoiding easy-to-get injuries and pushing our less-willing bodies to once more gain fitness. We have to climb enough to get better, but not so much that we can’t recover. And we still have to manage all the lists that come with the age.

Strength is fundamental to athletic performance. Many climbers get it, and they hit the weight room regularly. The problem with most weight training is that it only addresses one speed of movement, and most of us select bilateral exercises for most movements. By training in such a narrow path, we miss out on a lot of movements and speeds of contraction that can be really useful to climbers. In the standard Full Combination workout, we train five different facets of strength in five different movement patterns. The idea here is to break the habit of doing a single tempo in resistance training - which most of us adopt unconsciously. We train the same pace in squats and lunges and presses and pull-ups...and our muscles learn to work according to those rules. When we hit the rock, though, things change.

A few years back, I was asked during an interview how important running is to climbing performance. Somewhat reactively, I said, “Running is as important for climbing as climbing is for running.” Over the years, I’ve received more than a fair number of messages and emails about this statement. Although there are some exceptions, I stand firmly behind this sentiment.

Feel the burn. If you’ve ever worked to a pump that made you feel nauseous, sprinted so hard you had to lie down, or could taste the acid on your breath in a session, you know what maxing out the anaerobic lactic system feels like. In hard climbing, this is the system where we always end up right before we fail... and we make the mistake of trying to spend too much training time here because of it.

Movement is the basis of climbing up rocks, and in order to move, we need to supply our body with energy. Since any and all movement can occur at multiple speeds, in different directions, and over different durations, our bodies have evolved to handle supplying the energy for moving in several ways. In short, the body seeks to deliver Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP) - the body’s energy currency - to the muscles in order to keep them going, no matter what energy source is available at the time. Some ATP is created as needed, some is stored in areas outside the muscles, and some is stored in the muscle cells. The Anaerobic Alactic System (AA), also called the creatine phosphate system, or the ATP-CP system, deals primarily with the quick supply of ATP for fast and powerful movements. Because it relies primarily on the little ATP that is already present in the muscles, supplies run out fairly quickly, and fast and powerful movement drops off after just a few seconds. You can test this with a simple all-out sprint test; go outside, sprint down the street at full speed, and note how your movement slows after 5-8 seconds. Even the fastest in the world will slow in the final meters of the 100M sprint.

Too frequently, we try to over-categorize our training. Long-time athletes and coaches learned about training for climbing by reading about and practicing training that came from other sports. We all understood that strength and power and endurance were different entities, some of us going so far as to train all of these different qualities at different times of the year or in discrete sessions. Although most of our training is focused on the need for high levels of strength and stability in climbing, we understand that strength must be paired with skill, with capacity, and with power. Power is the primary physiological need of performance rock climbing. In sports-science terms, power is simply strength displayed with a speed component, or popularly viewed as strength x speed. Power is important in sports from heavy weightlifting to baseball, with all power movements falling somewhere along the force-velocity curve.