Climbing masterclass dates at my wall

I don’t get much time to run climbing coaching sessions these days but I have just put up details of sessions I am running at my own wall in early December and over the Fort William Mountain Festival in February. These always sell out so if you are keen, do ring and book your place.

In the past I’ve tended to run either full day coaching sessions for one individual or shorter group sessions. This time I’ve decided to try out a new format of full day group sessions/seminars. This way, there will be time for two climbing sessions in the day focused on particular elements of technique, training practice and additional exercises, as well as informal lecture/discussions over lunch and after the second climbing session to cover principles and practicalities of planning and customising your training as well as preventing and managing injuries.

I’ll be running two separate one-day sessions on the weekend of December 3rd and 4th. 10am-5pm at my wall in Roy Bridge. Spaces will be limited to 6 climbers per day, £120 per person and climbers of all abilities are welcome. My wall is well suited to running sessions of this type folk operating at recreational grades right through to as strong as you like beasts!

I’ll also be running another one day seminar on Feb 19th 2017, over the Fort William Mountain Festival, as well as more traditional three-hour technique masterclasses on Feb 18th (£60 per person for these).

Full details and contacts to book a place are up on my events page here. See you there!

Reflections on beginning climbing coaching again

A few shots of my own training over the past few days

I built a large climbing wall at my house a year and a half ago, not just for myself, but with the intention of running climbing coaching sessions there. I knew it would be great to have a dedicated climbing facility that I’d set up myself, without some of the limitations of big climbing centres. Last week, as part of the Fort William Mountain Festival, I ran my first few classes - three hour masterclass sessions with groups of climbers travelling from as far as Belgium to join us.

I hadn't run clinics earlier as I spent some of last year recovering from surgery and then just wanted to go climbing! So it was really interesting to be assessing and observing climbers again after a break for a while and gave me a chance to reflect on what patterns these sessions reveal about climbers and what holds them back or propels them into improvement. Here are three themes that filled my mind after the sessions.

1. The ability to try hard still trumps everything

As usual I met some climbers with good technique, some with strong fingers and some with good tactical awareness. But out of all the climbers on my sessions, I met very few who had trained themselves in how to try hard. And so they were not improving nearly as fast as they could be, even when they had already made other good training decisions. You can design a great training programme, show up and complete every session and immerse yourself in climbing tactics, but if you don’t know how to really try, where is the stimulus to yield improvements from that training?

I think I was especially aware of this because we were in my own wall, where I normally train, uninhibited by anything. Some of the climbers I coached clearly had significantly stronger fingers than me, but I sensed that they did not habitually fight to the death on a routine basis.

To gain strength, the body really needs to be pushed into it, especially if you are not that young any more. In my mind, a big overarching weakness of many, if not most climbers is simply the ability to get really determined to get to that next hold and hold onto it. Often when you put this point to climbers, they are confused, even a little unhappy about the suggestion they could be trying harder. But think of this applied to other core skills of climbing - Of course it ‘feels’ like you are trying as hard as you can, just as easy routes feel at your limit when you are unfit or sequences are at the technical limit of climbers who are not immersed in climbing day in day out. This does not mean this limit is fixed. The ability to focus physical and mental energy is trainable just as other skills are. The limit is not fixed.

It is not just about delivering physical effort either. It is also the ability to make every single climbing session an immersion in deep concentration anticipating and then analysing each effort on each route, and comparing technical strategies for the moves with that of your climbing partners. Way too many climbers are resting their minds as well as their muscles in between efforts. 

If you start off by training your ability to focus and deliver a huge mental and physical effort during your climbing/training time, the rate of improvement rises. This helps to explain why two climbers who both climb the same number of routes per week at the same climbing wall improve at very different rates.

A final point on this - often I find that it doesn’t always work for me to make this point about trying harder. Climbers sometimes consider me, as a professional climber and coach, to be somehow ‘a different animal’ and not subject to quite the same constraints. However, the great thing about group coaching sessions on a bouldering wall is that over the course of the session, as we work on problems, me offering technical pointers of the fine details of the movement that get you closer to succeeding on each move, climbers in the group start to rub off on each other and lose their inhibitions to try harder than they otherwise would. They see the others doing so as desire to solve the boulder problem overtakes physical and mental inhibitions. They concentrate deeper and pull harder and often pull off some moves that seemed far off, an hour previously. Even if they don’t, I always hope that climbers can see this happening among the group and understand that real concentration and real grit is the basis for training that works.

Lesson? Boulder more, do it in groups of the keenest people you can find, and get into the habit of systematically offering each other feedback on moves and encouragement at every turn. Training is only training if you are really trying both physically and mentally.

2. Time remains a key currency of improvement

A big proportion of climbers are still seriously constrained by time to climb and train, and just as important, constrained time to rest and recover properly from the training they do get. Some only have time for one or two sessions per week. Others have time for four or five, but only get the results of two sessions, simply because they don’t have time to sleep, eat and rest well enough to get good results from their training.

I hope that running coaching sessions at my own wall would spark people’s imaginations about what fantastic training facilities you can make in a small space. My wall is about as badass as they come for home walls and it took a fair few years of prudent financial decisions to get there. But I remind folk that my last wall was in a small room and was still amazing, and the one before that was a single campus rung. The single campus rung got me up the world’s first E11 and from 8b to 9a in 18 months. 

When time is constrained, convenience is the king of training variables. Many of the climbers told me familiar stories of living just minutes from a big climbing centre, but how it was difficult to get themselves to it in the 90 minutes or so they had to spare after a tiring days work that hits you after you put the kids to bed. I have two responses to this problem. First, a home facility, no matter how small, removes the ‘getting myself out of the door’ barrier to completing the training. Second, remember that when you feel tired later in the evening, it’s because your body’s metabolism is slowing down. You can usually reverse this feeling after a ten minute warm-up and feel just fine again. Moreover, creating a late evening ‘second wind’ like this doesn’t necessarily interfere with your sleep. In fact, the physical activity and mental wellbeing that goes along with it can often improve it.

I noticed that the proportion of fingerboard-owing climbers seems to have risen since I started coaching ten years ago. However, the proportion of those actually using them has not risen nearly as much. This is a rather basic problem for which I offer some solutions in my book 9 out of 10 climbers. Underlying these is a principle that relying on using willpower to make yourself train if you don’t enjoy it tends to be unsuccessful for most. Instead, you change the environment or routine, to make it take willpower NOT to train instead. 

Putting your fingerboard in the highest use area of your house, so it’s where you always are, and highly visible is one way. Another is to use social pressure to your advantage. Ever noticed that your house is at it’s cleanest and tidiest when you have friends, or the landlord coming round to visit? You can capitalise on this social pressure in your training too. Invite your training partner round to share a fingerboard session two or three nights every week. You are less likely to skip it when you know they are coming. Got a TV programme or radio programme you never miss? Combine them with the fingerboard routine. It removes the boredom and makes it part of your week’s enjoyment. Digital tech these days makes this easier than ever.

There are countless other ways to tilt the behavioural environment to make it easier to complete your training, and harder to miss it. Use your imagination for your own routine, or get a coach to tell you straight.

3. Protect your hard earned gains better

It seems to me that the improvements in climbing walls could be widening the gap between the extremes of the bell curve of ability across climbers. Some of the climbers on my classes were in pretty poor physical shape, despite having a lot going for them in other aspects of the whole performance picture. Again, busy schedules are often the underlying theme responsible for this. But simply being aware of it can help you to mitigate it. A basic principle of training is reversibility. I discuss its implications in 9 out of 10 but I think it bears reinforcing as I still think climbers undervalue its effects.

Many climbers have lost periods of weeks or months of little or no training for a few common reasons - work/accommodation/family transitions, injury or simply focusing on something that makes you weak such as trad or alpine climbing. Now, some loss of base level strength and fitness may be unavoidable due to these things. But that doesn’t mean you should completely abandon any attempt to mitigate them. Yet that is exactly what many, if not most climbers do.

The result is that so much form is lost and it takes months to return to where you left off, if indeed you ever can. I have made this mistake myself several times. With hindsight I can see that 1 year without a board while I moved house and saved to construct my new board caused my level to drop to 8c. I was still out climbing just as much, but I just didn’t train. And so I lost strength, capacity to handle training and agility. Only now do I feel like I’m getting it back, 18 months later. Similarly, while recovering from surgery last year, although I trained harder than ever and emerged with stronger fingers after three months off my feet, I still lost some agility and base level of fitness. I could have mitigated much of this by incorporating more basic body strength and fitness exercises into my routine. You don’t need to make the same mistakes as me.

Of course, this problem doesn’t always apply - keep in mind your individual weaknesses. Wall rats who can be found in the climbing wall training hard 5 nights a week are often pretty strong and fit, but their climbing ability on rock will never match this because they lack the hard-to-measure tactical skills of being a rock climber. So far weaker souls who get to the crag more often will still out climb them.

Lesson? Life throws up things that interrupt your training. If you don’t plan for this, you’ll lose out. The time to really organise your training is not so much when you have lots of time, but when you have less. Don’t make the mistake of doing nothing, when you can only do a little. If you do, you’ll spend all the ‘good times’ just catching up to where you were, rather than breaking new ground.

So there are some highlights of themes I noticed that applied to a good swathe of the climbers who visited my wall for coaching. Of course there were many more - frighteningly common footwork errors, training errors, poor diet choices, psychological approaches and many more. If you are reading this thinking you’d like to get some coaching yourself, stay tuned to this blog as I’ll post up some dates I’ll be running more classes during the year shortly.

For climbing coaches : “In a Hurricaine…

...even Turkeys can fly”

I go on in my book and this blog a lot about influences and their importance on how well we climb. The above quote, reminded to me by a CEO talking about economics, made me nod and agree.

In a social group of climbers, like a group of friends, a climbing wall scene, a club etc there are some who are the beacons - they have so much energy and drive that it radiates onto everyone else nearby and helps them learn more, have that extra attempt, try that different foot sequence or bear down and hold that swing. If you are that person - great! All you need to do is learn to focus your energy and unleash it without inhibition at the right moments.

For everyone else, it’s a problem because without the warmth of external energy, you might not keep progressing, or may even go backwards in your climbing. The paradox is the that your challenge is to take what you can from the beacons, but also learn to be able to go under your own steam. This means understanding well what particular parts of the climbing game motivate you to do the mundane stuff, like try that problem all those different ways or complete those physio exercises, or do that training session on your own.

For coaches looking after a cohort of climbers - your task is tricky. You have to identify the beacons, channel their energy, not let them settle for just being the best in their little group.   Show them the next level of challenges before they lie back and forget how to be hungry for improvement. You also have to look for the turkeys (I’m only calling them that in ref to the above quote!) - the ones who will not keep showing up and giving it some if the beacon wasn’t there with them. Showing them how to stay patient, focused and enjoying the routine of climbing from within themselves rather than the social framework where it normally occurs is easier said than done. It’s best taken in small steps, with gentle  encouragement. 

Thoughts from technique classes

Some themes that commonly emerge when coaching movement technique with climbers. Thanks to Rick Marland for the pics from Big Rock at the weekend.

The nature of climbing walls - look at the layout of the holds on modern climbing walls. In the main, setters tend to space the holds fairly evenly leading to the sort of position I’m in here, with limbs all at different levels. This makes quite pleasant continuous movement. But keep in mind that a lot of rock types have more patterned arrangements of holds; holds together in breaks with long reaches between and sometimes on good handholds but miniscule dinks for feet or vice versa. If you are training for this, watch out that your regular diet of climbing contains at least some movement like this.

Note also the three finger ‘pocket’ grip on the left hand. Climbers in their early twenties or younger don’t use it much, relying on the crimp much more. They haven’t had the pulley injuries yet - but they will! When we go to the campus board they can’t even hang on it openhanded. Older climbers use openhanded much more through necessity - too many pulley injuries. The serendipitous discovery is that once you get over the initial weakness, openhanded is a much stronger and less tiring grip on more than 50% of holds.

I’m pointing at the left foot in this picture. It needs to be pressed hard against the wall to complete the preparation to move the right hand. Although it doesn’t have a foothold to go to, it’s doing one of the most important jobs of all the limbs here. By pressing directly into (not downwards) the wall, it holds the upper body upright, preventing it falling outwards as the right hand reaches. 

Beginners miss this, experienced climbers do it intuitively but rarely with enough force or often enough and often the foot is systematically placed in the wrong spot. In my classes I show how the flagging foot should be placed various different types of move.

About to pull in hard with the left foot to get in position for the hand move. Climbers are generally too passive with the lower body. It’s natural to focus your aggression on the tiny handholds, because pulling really hard with our fingers is not a natural activity. It grabs our attention. Pulling hard with the feet in rock climbing is a learned skill. You have to force yourself to do at first.

Comparing rockshoes. The move in the second picture was impossible for some because they couldn’t get any weight on the foot on a small foothold. The reason was purely that the shoes were poorly fitting or worn out so the sole had no stiffness left. It’s easy in your normal climbing to convince yourself that this isn’t happening or it’s importance is small. But when we all try the same move and all the chaps who are not as strong can to the move easily it is an illuminating experience and climbers start talking about choosing a good pair of new shoes.

Don’t do what they do

Remember that being a successful athlete, not matter which arena you compare yourself in (peers, amateur, professional) by definition means doing what other people wouldn’t.

Lots of people model their technique, training and tactics on what their peers are doing. But if you want to get better than them, they are exactly the wrong people to look at. 

The modelling can be conscious and deliberate, but most of the time you actually do it subconsciously. So wake up! The greatest success you can hope for by doing what everyone else (in YOUR world of peers) does is to assimilate the same level of mediocrity they have. More about all this in my book.

While we’re on the subject of role models, an important point about them. Yes they are useful, even essential to help you get more out of yourself, so long as you chose the right role models. But keep in mind it’s the approach they have that you’re copying, not the exact actions. Their life, physiology, schedule, resources etc can never fit with yours. So don’t try. So the question is “What would they do if they had this (my) circumstance right now?”.

And one other thing… Good role models in sport are ones you can actually find some details about - someone you can feel you know through seeing them, reading about them or even better, being coached by them! If it’s someone who never speaks, blogs, writes coaches, it’s pretty hard to ask the question above and get near a useful answer.

You have two choices, pick a better role model, or ask them to keep in touch more. Interview them for your blog or your favourite website and ask them all the questions you want in one go. Just an idea.

One dimensional coaching, or self-coaching

More climbers these days are starting to take advice from coaches, or from mentors among their peers, either directly or in written form. Great! But while the organisation of climbing coaching is still somewhere between primitive and non-existent (depending where you are in the climbing or geographical world), there are some big problems.

You’ll have heard of the expression; “For the man holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. Be aware that the advice you receive from climbing coaches is much more related to the background of the coach than your needs!

It’s also of true of other fields such as law, medicine etc. See a physiotherapist and they’ll provide a therapeutic answer to your problem. See a pharmacist, they’ll prescribe some pills etc..

Climbing coaches based and schooled indoors are likely to offer you solutions involving things you can do in the climbing wall. Thats fine, but it might not be all you can do, by a long way.

Fear of falling dictates your technique - yes you too!!!

Recent coaching demonstrated to me once again the inescapable effects of fear of falling on your movement technique on rock, even where you might not expect it.

Climbers that find falling unpleasant (simply because they haven’t practiced it and reinforced the avoiding habit) invariably climb too statically and waste huge amounts of strength. They often also stay very front on to the rock and so miss out on the opportunity to twist their trunk on reaches, bringing the reaching arm closer to the rock and extending the reaching shoulder to reach the hold earlier.

The waste of strength is massive and often even very strong climbers are operating way below their immediate potential.

It’s not just reserved to those who have a recognisable falling fear they are self-aware of. It can also happen subconsciously. One case recently that got me thinking was where a very strong climber with a home board had a slightly less than ideal falling zone below the board. It wasn’t too bad, but just enough to enter the mind when slapping at your limit for the last hold of a problem. There wasn’t quite enough mattage and some protruding wood structure to potentially bang into with a backward fall.

The result - subconscious setting of problems that avoid big moves, twisting and anything other that basic front-on laddery problems. This had engrained a static style and seriously compromised footwork and move repertoire. 

I noticed it myself working between my own board (which is fine to fall off, but still less than ideal for a wild backward swinging fall) and my nearest climbing centre board (The Ice Factor) which has a big amazing board with superb mats that take the wildest fall without any significant worry of nasty consequences. In the ice factor I subconsciouly set big powerful wild moves and my board has slightly more contained, more fingery moves.

The effect is subtle, but significant. The obvious thing to do - practice the falling or fix the landing to prevent or reverse the pervasive effect on your technique. If you can’t fix the landing 100%, at least be aware of it and plan accordingly. The lesson for me is to make sure and have one Ice Factor session per 5 home board sessions, so I don’t start sailing up the cul-de-sac of ‘board head’ climbing style.

How do I get better?! (in one email)

Averaging out at once every day, I get a very similar email, which goes roughly like this (with minor variations):

“Hi Dave, I’m a really keen climber. I’ve been climbing for (x) years and can do (x) on sport/ trad and I’m bouldering about (x). I go to the wall/crag (x) times a week and out climbing at weekends. I really want to keep improving but I seem to have hit a bit of a plateau and don’t feel I’m getting better as fast as I could. Is there anything I should be thinking about doing now to break into the next level? Thanks in advance.”

Sometimes it adds a couple of lines about what the climber habitually does to train and asks “where am I going wrong?”

It’s great to get these emails and know there are so many keen climbers out there feeling the same way as I do. I know that for every person who sends this type of email to someone they feel might have an answer for them, there are many times more people who feel like sending it but don’t for one reason or another. So I thought I should really share publicly the answer I write back, which is broadly the same each time as you’ll see why:

“Hi, Thanks for the email and good to hear you are psyched to get better at climbing. It’s not really possible for me to identify the areas you should focus on with your training without having much more information about your climbing and training habits. And even then the answers would be a lot more than I could fit into one email.

Basically you have two choices to break out of your plateau, Right now you don’t have the information to analyse your own climbing and identify the areas to work on or change. You could either shortcut the process of learning this information by hiring a coach to make a thorough assessment of your climbing and make the decisions for you, or you could learn to do it yourself. 

Learning this information is really the hard part of getting to be a better climber, doing the training is the easy part! It takes many years to learn everything you need to know to design your own program very well. It took me 6 years of full time study and many more years of soaking up every piece of information I could. I’d totally recommend doing this because you can adapt your training practice as you progress or your goals change. 

The worst situation for your improvement is to fall between two stools and take neither path. You’ll inevitably make lots of mistakes, focus on the wrong things and end up losing a lot of time not improving nearly as fast as you could given your available resources. Choose which path you want to take and go for it! Good luck.”

The first message in this is really worth re-iterating - For one climber, a mix of poor footwork, over-reliance on strength training bringing down technique, lack of variety in angle or hold type, or missed opportunity to supplement climbing training at home could be among a longer list of things needing changing. For the next climber, it might be a totally different set of problems. 

Most climbers carry around an incomplete picture of what to value and work on to get better at climbing. So they only follow the things in their picture. A good coach might fill in the rest for you very quickly. This is the shortcut. If it suits your circumstances and goals, take the shortcut! If you want to be a lifelong follower of climbing, take the hard road and learn the rest of the picture yourself, in the long run this will be a shortcut for you.

For those who take the self-coaching path, you are already ‘on it’ by reading this blog. Good one! Keep in mind that actually doing the training is the easy part. Your constant challenge is to be doing the right training at any given moment. So for every hour of training, it would really get you further if you did at least the same in learning about training (reading, watching, thinking, analysing). 

Make sure you are getting information from every channel available - things like: this blog, many other writers on this subject online, reading books on training and not just ones specific to climbing, motivation, watching good climbers, asking good climbers what they do. (Hint: Lots of very specific questions in a row will get much more than one general question like ‘How do I get better?’).

Which path are you on? Don’t fall between two stools.

PS: I am not sure if that final figure of speech is a British thing or not, but for anyone who hasn’t heard it before, please note it refers to stool as in the chair.

Start reading the rock (and never stop)

Coaching is really great fun. I don’t have experience coaching other sports but I’m guessing climbing must be pretty interesting as sports go. In climbing there are so many skills and abilities that create the performance. Meeting climbers who are at a high level you see that many of these skills are a prerequisite and don’t even need mentioning. With these climbers the challenge is to get them to stand back, and see the bad habits they have developed and to make a convincing enough case for them to see clearly the benefits on offer if they change those habits.

Coaching climbers at a less advanced level is very different. It’s strange sometimes to see different climbers all trying to climb the same problems but using totally different styles and approaches. When in groups it makes it easier to talk folks through the benefits of each approach and the effects of neglecting other parts of the chain. Always the most dramatic image for students is when someone who is obviously very much weaker than the rest (often a female climber in a group of strong young guys) makes climbing steep ground look effortless through applying momentum and lower body muscle groups. I love it when this happens because it’s something I cannot (easily) convincingly demonstrate myself. People assume that if I make a move look easy it’s because I applied more force through the handholds. So I spend a lot of time pointing out my tensed calf muscles as I move on a steep board and generate the force for the movement from my toes and my movement of my hips.

Getting down to the nitty gritty of movement is really great fun. And making breakthroughs in it is even more fun. One big thing that the climbers I coach say to me is that they worry that they will forget my explanations for how they managed a move easily that was previously impossible, so the improvement will be transient.

And that brings me to my most repeated piece of advice in coaching – look at the rock and the holds, and listen to your body as you make the moves on them. Soak up the information it gives you, even though it feels like a brain crash to start with.

At first you will have to process the bits of information consciously, chunk by chunk. Like learning a foreign language, at first you have to piece sentences together by individually recalling words and their basic meaning. Everything is clunky and takes a great deal of conscious effort. There is no sidestepping this stage – you have to go through it.

But gradually, more and more aspects of what the hold layout means in terms of movement decisions will come automatically, and you can deal more and more with understanding it at a higher level and refining the timing and execution of each part.

But the minute you get lazy and stop looking at the holds before, during and between attempts on a climb, your technique learning will slow down or even reverse. It is the conscious (at first) efforts to understand what the holds are asking you to do that makes the connections in the brain you are after.

Look > try to understand > try to climb > try to understand > look some more > and so on

This is the way for steady technique gains.

If you go for:

Try to climb > try to climb > try to climb > brain asleep > try to climb > try to climb

Not much improvement is on the horizon.

The seemingly hard way of trying to understand climbing movement from the word go, rather than hoping you might understand it someday is actually the short cut.

Davemacleod.com new stuff

Some of you will know that I recently wrote an e-book called ‘How to Climb Hard Trad’. I spent a long time on it trying to explain clearly the mental, physical and practical tactics you can employ to climb harder trad routes, whatever your level. Its got detailed sections on how to be bold, how to climb safely, even when really close to your limit on trad climbs and how to tip the scales much further in your favour than most climbers know they can.

Initially I was giving copies away with the Committed DVD. But I’ve just extended the offer to include the e-book free with any DVD or book purchases from my webshop. I’ve just added King Lines and Psyche DVDs and the new Stone Play book to the shop so there are more titles to choose from. Enjoy.

Deciding about specificity

Alex just sent me an email:

“Obviously you'll get loads of questions so probably can't reply to most but both a question and article suggestion.. Specifity is often mentioned in talk about training, but so is working weaknesses. Obviously weaknesses are often the aspects we use least in our outdoor climbing, so how would you advise splitting time between each of these? Eg. I mainly climb onsight on long-ish single pitch trad (30-50m), and most of my goals are of this style. On bolts again I tend to prefer stamina-based routes rather than powerful bouldery ones or those focusing intensely on power endurance. My weaknesses, unsurprisingly, are doing hard moves and -to a lesser extent - power endurance, whilst I do well at hanging around on vert and slightly overhanging terain for a long time. During the summer I spent any training time focusing on bouldering, fingerboard sessions and power endurance to work these weaknesses safe in the knowledge that my aerobic stamina and capiliarisation were getting worked on my 3/4 days a week out climbing trad and sport. Having recently moved to Sheffield I've started bouldering a lot more, and have noticed getting stronger but losing stamina. Thinking about goals for next summer, they're still of the same style as before but I don't know how to divide my training up during the rainy winter: how much to keep focused on bouldering and power to put me in a position to do harder moves on routes, and how much to focus on the stamina I'll want for these pitches but which I know I'm naturally more adapted to. Any advice/info on how much training time should be focused on each? Clearly the answer will depend to how weak the weaknesses are, etc. but I find it confusing when some articles stress working weaknesses whilst others stress working specifically for the type of routes I'm aiming for (which play more to my strengths).. Alex”

My response:

If you look closer at the task of onsighting a long route you’ll see that it often is strength or anaerobic endurance that lets you down. Where do you fail on long routes? It’s either on the crux, or at the end of a long strength sapping pitch. No matter how long the route is, if you aren’t strong enough to get through the crux, you’ll not be getting to the top. Also, anaerobic endurance is what gets us through the hardest sections of routes or keeps us on when we misread the crux and end up hanging longer than planned on the smallest holds of the route.

The specificity rule is “what you do, you become”. If you never practice for cruxes and only practice for the long ploddy bits, the crux is going to be where you always fall off. The specificity rule and your weaknesses are not at odds. Long routes have cruxes, and ploddy bits unfortunately. You need to be moderately good at both. Separate them, and train them until you get to the stage where you fall off at the crux 50% of the time and the end of the long draining pitch 50% - then you have got the balance right.

For your periodisation – train the strength aspects year round because they take longest to gain and can’t be shortcut without injury. Endurance responds quickly so you can shirt focus more onto this closer to when you’ll need it for the big routes. If you want the detail exactly optimised for you without having to do the research yourself, you should get a training program!

coachability

I was reading an interesting blog post by Seth about ‘coachability’. Now, most of you out there will never take that step and take formal advice from a climbing coach (bummer eh!) so you may think that this might not apply to you. But almost all of you are self –coaches of varying degrees of commitment (and hey you are reading this blog so you are coaching yourself right now). So it’s good to be aware of how coachable you are.

Seth: “A friend is wrestling with his ability to be coached. For the coachable, "Turn right at the light" is seen as a helpful suggestion for someone lost in a strange town... the advice goes in, is considered and then acted upon. For someone wrestling with coaching, though, it's like surgery. It's painful, it has side effects and it might lead to a bad reaction…”

I’ve met a lot of climbers who are very resistant to their own coaching. As Seth points out, the symptoms of un-coachability include challenging the credentials of the coach, reminding yourself of previous errors or flaws in the coach (substitute “coaching information” if you like), inventing reasons why the coaching does not apply to you or that you are being hard done by and even resisting the information just because of the source it came from.

It’s really hard to steer a course through the sea of crap advice out there by yourself. But the answer is not to put up walls to shut out questionable or unusual information. Unfortunately if you choose to be a self coach, you have to swallow whatever coaching comes your way and try your best to digest and analyse wherever possible. It’s a rocky road of constantly changing realities, practices and perspectives.

Such is life.

davemacleod.com updates - coaching services

I've updated the coaching section of my main site to give you more details about whats included in my climbing coaching services and the different levels on offer. Please let me know if there are any questions left unanswered when you look through these! You can find all the details here.

I've also added a shop page where you can find lists of books on training for climbing by Amazon and buy climbing DVD's, including pre-orders for the E11 film (coming out late October).