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If you haven’t heard by now, the way you get better at doing harder things is to do harder things. If you are constantly playing it safe, building volume, and avoiding discomfort, well guess what - you’d better get used to doing the same routes over and over again. For those who want to advance, there are some obvious questions that come up and sometimes the answer isn’t so obvious. In training (and by training I mean working on the hangboard, weights, campus board, etc.) it is generally easier to quantify, and thus progress, training values.

Sports science defines endurance as the ability to sustain a given power output for a prescribed duration. This can take the form of high power outputs for relatively short periods - what we might call power endurance - or it can take the form of fairly low power output over greater durations, what climbers might call pure endurance or stamina. In Physiology of Exercise for Physical Education and Athletics, Herbert Devries laid out a encyclopedic framework for looking at the factors affecting endurance. I am going to list these below, and then we’ll look at how each can be manipulated, and by how much, for better climbing.

Foundation is the hard-earned strength you don’t want to pay for twice. Getting strong is a real chore and can take years and years. Staying strong, well, that’s the key to being able to do all the specific stuff. If you don’t have to worry about strength, conditioning is a snap. Foundation strength is what you do every week. It is not forced, it is coaxed. It is the kind of strength that you can’t fake, and it’s the kind you want to prioritize in every phase of your training.

In the old days, training “specifically” for climbing was almost unheard of. You either just climbed or you were one of the few climbers who trained in the weight room and did some door jamb pull-ups. Over the years, things changed. As climbs got hard and more physically challenging we sought out ways to beat the pump, many of which derived from the tricks of old time strongmen and gymnasts. Exercises such as dumbbell work, rope climbing, and even nail bending found their way into climbers’ routines. In the 1980s, climbing-specific training devices began to hit the market. The Metolius Simulator, various grip devices, and even rudimentary climbing walls appeared all over Europe and North America. By the end of the 1990s, we were all training on steep walls covered in plastic holds - converting our training into almost a perfect mimic of the sport.Knowing the value of specificity in training, defined as patterning training after the movement and metabolic demand, many of us plunged full-on into “climbing to climb” as our sole form of training. Although this is a general rule that represents a good step forward in the sport, I think we may have stepped too far.

As a young climber, I would frequently talk to my parents about climbing. They were genuinely interested, and my father even did a few climbs with me early on. They wanted to know enough to be sure I was safe and careful, but didn’t need to know more. As I improved, I started to talk route beta and movement with them and I usually missed the blank stares when it came to jargon they didn’t understand. They had no idea what a gaston was or a smear or a flash pump...and didn’t really care to know. It didn’t stop me from sharing, though.Years on, I started teaching training techniques to athletes and although many of them understood the language of fitness, many did not. It wasn’t until the blank stares I’d remembered from my youth registered that I realized that we weren’t speaking the same language. Over the past few years, a large portion of the questions I get about my books have to do with simple notation. The error is mine - assuming someone understands how to read a workout or a plan is the worst first mistake. If they can’t even read the thing, how can we expect them to do it?

Training is the thing that makes you stronger. Warming up right is the thing that makes training work. For most of us, warming up has an intuitive "feel" to it - we start easy, and after a few minutes of gentle activity we feel ready to go. Younger athletes do, and need, less warming up. Older athletes sometimes joke that warming up is all they do. The warm-up functions as a way to get the body working right for hard activity. It increases blood flow and respiration, runs the body temperature up a couple of notches, and gets the mind in the right place. In climbing we usually just climb to get going, but there is probably a better and more effective ways to prime yourself for a good session. The warm-up should be tailored to the requirements of the session.

You've tried ARC training and you've done your share of 4x4s, so why do you still come peeling off the wall just before you reach the anchors? What is it about your energy system development that isn't working? It might be that you aren't progressing your sessions, or it might be that you are increasing the difficulty in the wrong way.

Along the same lines, I think we too often imagine ourselves making big changes if we commit money to the cause. As a person who makes his living from building climbing training plans, this might seem like strange advice, but I've found that there are some huge basic issues that climbers can and should cover before they start paying...for anything.

The term "training" is over-used. People refer to any and everything they do in climbing as training, yet training is a very specific act. It is repeated efforts at improving specific parameters of your fitness. Imagine "training" a dog but just randomly giving it orders with no expectation of behaviors. Organized, progressive, repeated...these are how training must be defined.Yes, there is training for climbing. It is done in the weightroom, on the hangboard, against the clock. And although bouldering, climbing routes, and even System board work can be considered training, they are really practice. Training is how you get stronger. Practice is how you get better.The saying "practice makes perfect" is known to all of us, but the truth is that practice makes permanent. Simply doing something a lot doesn't make you good at that thing. What we really need to do is practice correctly, do it a lot, and then reap the rewards. This is where my 75/25 rule comes back into play: 75% of your "training" time should really be practice time. Don't go to the gym to get tired, go to get better.

Bouldering is exactly the same as rock climbing, except that it's way harder. In an attempt to do this way harder sport, we often employ rock climbing training programs, yet they don't quite work. This article is intended to highlight these differences, provide an introduction to bouldering training, and suggest an alternative way of thinking.