Vlog #10 Three strategies for a stronger new year

Here are three strategies I use in my own climbing to reflect on the previous year and plan for better results in the coming year, with some examples of how to implement them. Near the end of this video, I discuss some supplementation I do while recovering from tendon/ligament injuries. The paper I reference is this one by Keith Baar and colleagues.

Vlog #1 How to train early or when you only have 10 mins

For a long time I’ve considered making a vlog as an additional form of media to share ideas for improving at climbing. Now its happening and here is episode 1. I’ll post all of them up here on this blog of course, or you can subscribe to my youtube channel as well to make sure you catch the following episodes.

In this one, I dive into how to make sure you are awake, alert and ready to train early if that is your window. And how to squeeze high quality training into a schedule so busy you can only spare ten minutes. Ten minutes. No excuses.

Sean McColl's training video

Always interesting to see what other people are doing. Canadian climber Sean McColl sharing his regimen for endurance circuits and core. The core work is still fairly climbing specific on the whole which is good. Plus the press-ups seem to be good for preventing ‘Font elbow’.

Beastmakers in the shop

Since this site is one of the main places on the web to get information about training for climbing and our shop sells all the best books on the matter, it was about time we started selling some of the best training equipment too. So priority number one was to get hold of the best fingerboards on the market right now; the Beastmakers.

Designed by Font 8b+ boulderers and made out of rather lovely skin friendly wood, their design is clearly a labour of love and that is why they have become so popular in the UK. Oh, and they make your fingers strong. Well, owning one isn’t enough on it’s own. It’s the numbers of hangs clocked up that get makes the jumps in grades we all want. But having a well designed and skin friendly hangboard is a good first step.

I started fingerboarding in summer 2005 just after I first tried Rhapsody. At the time I was climbing F8b and the odd 8b+ and about 8A on boulders. After a solid summer doing my deadhangs most days I got back on the sport climbs in the autumn and was blown away to discover I could now climb 8c. The following year I did Rhapsody and the year after that my first 9a.

That raw finger strength was obviously the ingredient that propelled me forward to grades I never thought I’d get to. There are of course many young strong lads I’ve seen and coached in walls up and down the UK who would wipe the floor with me on a hangboard yet can’t climb nearly as hard outside, since power is nothing without technique. And technique is just as hard won as finger strength.

So every climber needs to have a balance between learning technique and learning to pull hard. However, every climber who spends any time training or aspiring to harder grades should have and use a fingerboard. And if they are going to own any one, a Beastmaker is a pretty good choice. 

We are stocking both the 1000 and 2000 models. The 1000 is designed with those new to training in mind (Font 5-7C) and the 2000 is a better choice for those already used to bouldering walls and basic strength equipment (7C-8C). They cost £75 with our normal £1.50 shipping. Shipping to Europe and the rest of the world are at normal Royal Mail rates.

Get hanging and get strong. The 1000 is here and the 2000 is here.

The Milo of Croton school of training with Freida MacLeod. I wonder how long I can still manage this?

Freida getting started with some assisted hangs

Through the whole move

I’ve just spent the week staying with family in Glasgow and visiting the fantastic new TCA bouldering centre as often as muscles allow. It’s obviously a bit different from most bouldering facilities, being the biggest in the UK, and this brings many new benefits for training, as well as some new ptifalls. Some observations on these:

The first observation I made which was very heartening, was the notable absence of people complaining about being too short, or the moves being too reachy. Obviously, part of this is down to an underlying assumption that by it’s very nature, the bouldering game involves more big dynamic moves that route climbing tends to. For those who find themselves often blaming failure to climb on height or reachy setting - have a few sessions in a bouldering centre like this. Take time to look around you at the short folks slapping and jumping for the holds. You can’t change your height, but you can learn to move your feet into the right position and then go for that hold!

Someone asked me about how training purely in a bouldering wall, even for route climbing stamina might affect their technique. It’s a worthy concern - constantly bouldering teaches you how to to deliver maximum force and tension from start to finish. It’s often very easy to tell that a climber mainly boulders, just by looking at them climb for a few moves. For someone very experienced who is still climbing a lot of routes for a large part of the year, it’s not such a problem. But if a large proportion of your yearly climbing is on a boulder wall and you are ultimately training for routes, it’s still worth putting a harness on and clipping a rope on a real route whenever you can so you don’t lose the ability to climb with minimal force on the steady parts of routes. In the boulder wall, circuits are still ‘the business’ but make sure and mix them up often and include some you don’t have dialled, so you remember how to use your brain while pumped and make it up as you go along if you mess your feet up or forget where the next hold is.

Someone else asked me about high steps. They are a real weakness for me, as they are for a lot of guys. I’ve improved mine a good bit with some work but I’ve got plenty more to do and I’m determined to sort it out this year. My passive hip flexibility is fairly poor but I get away with it to a certain extent by having very good active flexibility. A lot of folk don’t know about the difference. Passive flexibility is the range of motion (ROM) you have when you pull the limb as far as it will go with an external force (such as your hands pulling your leg into a high step position). Active flexibility is the ROM that the limb can achieve under it’s own steam (i.e. Your highest high step in a real climbing situation!). Obviously, if the antagonist muscle group is very short, passive flexibility will ultimately limit how far you can pull the limb. But in reality, active ROM is often limited by the agonist muscles ability to pull hard in the inner range of it’s ROM. I’ve seen lots and lots of climbers with pretty or even exceptional hip flexibility who still struggle with high steps because they are not strong enough at the extreme joint angles to pull the leg really high under it’s own steam. Why? Like everything, it comes down to the basic rule of training - what you do, you become. They spent lots of time sat on the ground stretching by pulling the leg with an external force, and not enough doing desperate tensiony high steps.

Properly inflexible guys like myself have to do a lot of both passive and active flexibility training - a LOT and for a long time - to see real improvements. So if you really want to high step, work on it every time you climb. If you have your own board, make sure you set problems with very few footholds available and in very unhelpful places. Try to set them so that moving the feet is the crux of the problem. Train yourself to stay tight and strong on the lower foothold and two handholds while you forcefully open your hips and pull the leg right up into a high step at the limit of your ROM. I find it helps to visualise my body as a rigid board stretched between my toes to my fingers while I move the other leg. You can also stretch by pulling the leg up with your arms to stretch your gluts and then let go and try to hold the position unassisted to train your inner range holding.

Training at big boulder walls with big dynamic moves requires a lot of body tension. I’ve often seen the term ‘body tension’ referred to in magazine articles as a strength aspect. It’s  not just that. Strength is needed to be able to apply body tension, but it’s your technique that actually does the applying! It’s perfectly possible to be a front lever monster with rubbish body tension on the rock because you fail to apply that strength. A big part of body tension technique is remembering to apply tension through one or both feet through the whole move as you dynamically lunge to the next handhold. I found myself recently completing a lot of problems during training by consciously thinking about this as I executed the move. Really claw down into the key foothold with the big toe until the last possible moment. This buys you the maximum amount of time to take the next hold a little slower and more accurately and generate enough grip to hold onto it. I often remind myself by saying ‘through the whole move’ inwardly as I set up for a big move, so I don’t lose tension too early and end up with an impossible swing to try and hold. It works!

The limiting factor - setting

The limiting factor in your rate of improvement can sometimes be something that never changes throughout your climbing career. That’s not to say they are inescapable, just that folk simply never take the bull by the horns and change them. ‘Permanent’ limiting factors are things like only climbing a couple of times a week, avoiding overhangs, never learning how to try hard or focus, or being scared of falling.

Other limiting factors are more often important for part of your career. Things such as having an old floppy pair of rockshoes you never bothered to replace, putting on a stone over christmas, getting a new job and not climbing much for 6 months. That kind of thing. 

While giving some coaching clinics recently I met quite a few good climbers who struck me as being limited by their ability to set their own problems. I’d hazard a guess and say that most climbers who regularly boulder to train and have climbed for more than 10 years know how to go a bouldering wall and set themselves problems to fill the training session. It often seems surprising to climbers that I think it’s a critical skill to have.

But think about it, if you can’t set your own problems, you are dependent on either a bouldering wall with a steady supply of well set, numerous and regularly changed problems, or climbing with a bunch of mates who can set good problems and are willing to show you theirs all the time. That’s fine if you have that, but move house, lose a regular climbing partner who moves away, or get a lazy route setter at your local wall and all of a sudden your training drops a couple of gears to say the least. You aren’t in control of your own improvement basically. 

Even if your local wall does have excellent problems, there are some pitfalls. The biggest of these is local hero syndrome. You have the problems wired, you do them a lot and feel strong. But even though there are quite a few of them and they are on different angles, they are not varied enough. Your technique suffers. Your standard outside of the wall is not nearly as high. If you have any sway with your climbing wall management, persuade them to invite a rotation of different setters as often as possible. Some modern dedicated bouldering walls are now showing the way in this respect. Hopefully the dinosaurs will catch up. But even in boulder walls which have a steady flow of good problems, it’s a good idea to set your own of make variations on the set ones rather than just lap them all the time. This is about setting a nice ratio of hours spent climbing on moves you know well vs moves that are new to you. Too much of either extreme has consequences for technique.

If you have a wall which doesn’t have set problems, or set ones which are never changed. Setting your own problems is essential. Get into a good routine of setting the problem at the right standard for this part of the session (warm up, in a few tries, or whole session to climb the problem). Tweak moves that don’t work well. When you have the hold choice right, stick with it and refine the movement until you do it. If you can do it with others helping to choose the holds, even better. It adds variety and saves you from playing to your body size advantages (tall or short!).

All this means that when you have the inevitable sessions when noone else is around and the set problems are crap, you still can do some meaningful training and not end up bored, demotivated or just not any stronger than before.

Serious resting

I have been reading many books recently in research for a book I am writing. Reading texts on different aspects of professional sport, and training science always makes me feel small. I understand a little more each time how amateur climbing training is compared to real athletes. One of the biggest areas climbers let themselves down is when it comes to resting.

The term ‘resting’, just like ‘training’ causes all sorts of problems in discussion about it’s optimisation, because it brings up a very limited idea of what it involves. So lets think about it by it’s proper and more descriptive term - restoration. When we think of resting between bouts of climbing/training, it conjures up ideas of forgetting about your sport for a bit and just doing something else. Often the something else contributes to rather than relieves the training stress. 

Restoration is a better word because it describes the true goal, which is restoration of the capacity to train. For most people, rest days involve going to work. Everyone has to. But for a lot of people, going to work involves psychological and/or physical stress of other types. Even though the stressors are of a completely different nature, they add to the total amount of stress the body must recover from. And the result is incomplete recovery from the training. Of course, you can’t always do that much about it. Fine - but most climbers don’t recognise that their ‘normal’ training becomes overtraining during times when life gets busy and stress gets overloaded.

And restoration is not just about rest. Training is by definition an exceptional use of the body. And in response the restoration must be of exceptional quality if you expect your body to put up with such abuse for years on end. The quality of the rest time can be increased in all sorts of ways. Good sleep and diet are just the basics. 

Light general exercise is a really useful way to accelerate the recovery from summative general stress. Massage, heat, stretching, are three of countless other therapies that add to the speed you can recover from overworking your body. 

Serious climbers with the time to do all this stuff don’t do it either out of laziness or just being constantly too focused on the training to concern themselves with the other half of the picture. Serious weekend warriors with busy lives don’t do it either, often because they think all that stuff is only for the elite who do enough hard training to warrant it. It’s a mistake though - busy recreational climbers at a low-medium level in climbing suffer from overuse injuries just as much as the elite. Why? Because the recovery state of these climbers is poor and there is not enough build up of training load over time.

Another problem is that young climbers have never felt the frustration of long term injuries, and there is no message from the body that the tissue damage has already started. Young climbers - I guarantee those of you still trying to climb hard in 10-15 years time will curse yourself for not thinking about this now.

Understanding how muscles adapt

Whenever I post on this blog about the nitty gritty of strength or endurance training regimens, many comments come back looking for a more detailed explanation. From my last post, in the comments we got into talking about training anaerobic endurance and effects of training generally on different muscle fibres.

This is where things get tricky because muscles and complex structures, and the adaptations they make to training are also fairly complex. Picking over the surface of some details and using this to make inferences about how to train is shaky ground. My general advice or those who want to understand training at a muscle physiology level rather than the simple prescriptive or principle based level that you’ll get from coaches and coaching books, is to read thoroughly through the anatomy and physiology of muscle. I’m not trying to be difficult here, but understanding training will always seem confusing with only partial knowledge of the physiological picture. Perhaps adding a good exercise physiology text to your pile of training books would be a good help and reference. Any of Ron Maughan’s books are excellent resources. His book Basic and applied sciences for sports medicine has a superbly clear chapter on muscle and it’s adaptations which by an old lecturer of mine Neil Spurway. Spurway’s writing on muscle, like his lectures, are a great pleasure to read!

But back to the nitty gritty. Reeve was commenting just then about anaerobic training, asking:

“What is the certain type of force which a muscle must be exposed to over months and years to develop (presumably) fast twitch fibres? And if I do anaerobic work, thus growing my intermediate fibres, what effect will I notice in my climbing? Will I feel stronger? Increase my muscle's capacity to handle lactic acid? Or just have bigger heavier guns?

Secondly, you state that recruitment will get poorer with endurance training. Is is possible to maintain it whilst endurance training (maybe by a few deadhangs at the start of each session, say)? I imagine (although this is purely specultation) that the body is capable of maintaining high levels of potential recruitment without having to use them all the time (I can deadhang then go to the fridge and hold an egg). Is there any truth to my speculation?”

High (near maximum) forces are needed to develop fast fibres. By high forces I mean hard boulder problems or hanging on a fingerboard with as much weight as you can hang on for less than 10 seconds or so. If you do anaerobic work, you’ll get better at that anaerobic work, and not much else. We come back to the specificity principle! Anaerobic work won’t make you stronger - the forces are too low. In fact recruitment is lowered to make the muscle more efficient at sustaining work over the length of sustained sport routes. Yes this work creates better tolerance of the chemical imbalances of hard anaerobic work in the muscle. Muscles won’t get dramatically larger.

As for maintenance of recruitment during anaerobic training - yes, some high force work mixed in is the thing to do to maintain it. One session a week bouldering while you are training a lot of endurance for a sport climbing trip would be a good example. A little fingerboard before your endurance sessions would have the same effect, but not as good.

Why not? Because ‘recruitment’ is not a simple attribute of a muscle that rises and falls. Lots of people think of it this way - simply the number of fibres the muscle can recruit for contraction. The reality is much more complicated. Recruitment composes of the number of fibres recruited, the frequency and firing pattern and timing of the firing, and the ability of the central nervous system to supply a strong enough stimulus. But we can understand it much more simply as the body ‘learning and remembering’ how to pull hard on holds. 

Endurance training in climbing is a constant reminder for the body teaching it to use the minimum of force. Hard bouldering is the exact opposite on the hardest moves. Using a fingerboard is great to stimulate the forearm muscles and remind the fast fibres to grow and be responsive. But it’s important to show the system some hard bouldering on a real climbing wall in order that the whole nervous system remembers how to pull hard.

Measuring gains

My last post and comments from them reminded me of a significant problem in training for climbing, or anything where you train component skills/strengths away from the competitive arena of the sport - measurement of gains. 

KT was just commenting noting good gains from training anaerobic endurance on a fingerboard - great! In my head my immediate question was - where was the gain measured? On the fingerboard? Or in the ‘real’ climbing? It made me realise that the significance of this question might not be immediately apparent.

If you train on a fingerboard for climbing, then gains measured on the fingerboard (personal bests on the exercises) give useful information that the training is working or not. However, if gains are happening on the fingerboard but not the ‘real’ climbing, then there is information about whether it’s been the right kind of training.

Naturally, It’s necessary to obsessively monitor both, and any other measure you can get your hands on. Measuring changes in performance variables in as many different situations as possible allows you to make many deductions and useful monitors about the effectiveness of the training choices and how well you are adapting to it.

Some important points linked to this:

The ultimate measure of training effectiveness is the final climbing performance, and this measures both the adaptation of the component skill being trained, and also how much it’s contributing overall. For example if you put a lot of time into improving raw finger strength on a fingerboard over a year or two, but climbing ability actually goes backwards (quite common) then maybe the time taken to achieve the strength gain has caused losses in far more influential areas. Maybe there is some information in there about your real weaknesses.

That said it’s easy to underestimate the value of basic strength or endurance gains from a basic strength exercise because it takes time to work it’s way into your climbing technique. In my book I discussed this effect - The body needs to ‘learn’ that it has the new strength and this only happens when you leave the hangboard and go back to performing for an extended period. An extended period means anything from a month to a year or more.

While you measure gains in one area, remember the ones you are neglecting are going backwards, not staying still. Take this into account when measuring effects in overall climbing performance. Similarly, if your training is improving several separate areas at once, as is normal, don’t be too quick to attribute gains to one possible cause, when it could be the other(s).

The common tendency is for sports people to only measure one or two components of their game - the ones they like training the most, and put all gains or losses in ability down to these.

- Climbers who use campus boards a lot tend to know their personal bests on a given board very well, even if they are climbing well but haven’t been campusing they go back on the board and when unable to touch a previous PB, feel they must have got weaker and their good climbing form must be down to other factors like technique etc. Not necessarily.  The specificity of basic strength exercises is not to be underestimated, and strength measured on one piece of apparatus is only truly a measure of strength on that apparatus, not strength generally.

Fingerboarding -timings

Several climbers have picked up on routines floating about the web advocating very short rest periods between sets on the fingerboard - like 6-10 seconds hanging with 3 seconds rest. They have compared it to notes in my book talking about 5-8 second hangs with more like a minute’s rest. Confused?

The regimens are very different because they are training completely different things. The former is an anaerobic endurance protocol. It replicates roughly what happens when climbing a route - hanging for some seconds on each move with only a few seconds rest as the hand reaches for the next hold. The rationale for using a fingerboard to do this type of endurance training is two-fold:

Because you can’t get to a real route or bouldering circuit to do this training more effectively. Or…

You already train a ton and need something that bit more intense to keep the body responsive.

Clearly both are a very specific and fairly rare set of circumstances. Most people can get to some real climbing, and they should do that instead because they need the technique element of the training every bit as much as the fitness. And very few are doing enough training to have squeezed everything out of the technique element and need a really intense stimulus to keep the body responding. If you do fit those above special cases, using the fingerboard in this way could be useful as a very intense way to build anaerobic endurance.

The majority of fingerboarders are doing it to gain strength. Gaining strength needs a high force stimulus - pulling at your maximum. If the rests are short, it’s not possible to sustain this - you get pumped and can’t pull your hardest. So that’s why you rest fully between sets and the sets are 90% plus of your maximum force.

What ‘body tension’ means

Since the explosion of bouldering, especially indoors, many climbers ask these days about how they should improve their body tension. However, the discussion is often limited because of a basic problem in actually defining what this performance quality is, and this leads climbers on the wrong path for training it.

Climbers frequently refer to body tension as a strength component. Most would agree on the objective - to be able to keep the feet on the holds more and to apply more force through the feet. The problem comes when you see this purely as down to body strength, which it’s not.

Body tension is the product largely of technique, but also of strength through the body. Some important (and trainable) parts of it are:

Climbing rhythm. That is not getting too extended with both arms high before moving the feet.

Aggression in the lower body. Many climbers are far too passive with the lower body, and aren’t using the strength they already have.

Placement of the foot - The big toe must be in a position to apply the strength, and it’s often not possible because the toes are not engaged and the heel is dropped low.

Turning of the trunk - Helps bring the tensioned hip close to the wall during a stretch and be more ‘over’ the foothold.

Momentum use. Momentum is essential to apply body tension from awkward positions where it’s hard to apply foot force. For example throwing the hips into a plane in which the foot can apply force during execution of a move.

You could go to a gym and train body strength for a decade and it would make little difference to your body tension in climbing if the above factors are not working for you already. The flip side is that many climbers have enough strength already to get a lot more body tension just by working on the technical elements.

How to go about this? Boulder voraciously on steep ground with limited footholds, in the presence of climbers who can show you the techniques involved in applying body tension. You’ll know you are making progress with the technique when you feel calves, hamstrings and core stabilisers in your trunk complaining from effort from single moves in steep bouldering. And if you’ve got this far, you’ll be training strength in these areas in a far more efficient way than you would achieve in a gym or elsewhere.

All that said, those who do some other whole body work such as Yoga or other activities that break up the imbalances that climbing demands on the body will be protective from injury by maintaining posture and strength across joints.

Potential problems with blobby climbing

Recent days coaching in big bouldering walls reminded me of a potential specificity problem of using these for training for outdoor hard problems and routes. I think a good proportion of those training indoors with a view to climbing harder outdoors get that grabbing big rounded sloper blobs the whole time creates a problem with missing out on gains on the fingery holds you find outdoors. But I’m finding that even the small holds that are about right now, tend to be quite big! I don’t mean big in the sense that they are easy to hold onto. I mean that even the really poor holds have quite a pronounced profile and are fairly pinchable. 

There are even more effects at play when it comes to the feet. Indoor holds are often very rounded and sloping on top. Using them develops a good skill for maintaining contact with the feet, using continuous and carefully directed force application to the foothold. But the technique required to use tiny but positive footholds (like you commonly find outdoors) is subtly different in the way strength is applied using the lower body, foot and toes. The pattern of foot movements outdoors is different too, and habitual indoor climbers often lack ability in foot swaps, matches etc..

All of this means that if you are using big modern climbing centres to train for outdoor climbing, make sure you get enough diet of positive but really quite small fingery holds by seeking them out diligently at the wall.

My own board- notes after 6 months

Many of you have emailed or commented asking me to talk a bit more about my board and  the structure of my sessions. The short version is that I have been using it most evenings after work and I’ve made really good strength gains in the past 5 months or so. I’ve also been almost constant on the edge of getting injured - climbing in there is pretty damn intense. I’m used to training for several hours at a climbing wall, so I’m conditioned to keep going. But 1 hour on my board equals about 2 in a climbing wall and 4 outdoors. I just completed a couple of projects on it I’d been trying for about 4 months which are in the wee youtube above.

It’s really kept me going since I’ve been writing the book. Btw progress with that is going great guns with 12 hours a day working on it. Right now it’s mid way through being edited. I’ll keep you posted how it goes...

I use the board as much as my body allows. At times I can get away with two 90-minute sessions on it a day for about a week. But the next week I might only manage day on, day off. I do bouldering, endurance circuits and dry tooling on it. The main difference I’ve found to past training is that it’s much more intense on my board and I can do less hours training before I feel exhausted or develop injury niggles. On a climbing wall 45 degree board I’d normally expect to boulder for 2.5-3 hours straight with rests only about a minute between trying moves or a couple of minutes if trying a longer link. But on my board I can only manage 1.5 hours before power fades. The main reason is training alone so rests are shorter; 30 secs for working moves or maybe 90 secs between link attempts. The 4-6 move problems seem to be excellent for building strength and I tend to make them totally sustained which really tests body tension to link between successive hard moves.

The main problem I’m having right now is that I’m developing a lot of injury niggles after nearly a month of using it most days. I can see it’s going to be essential to break it up regularly with other venues to avoid getting injured.

The best things I found that really helped the board be more effective were:

Painting the board and generally making the room a little less of a dingy, grim place to spend time - I look forward to the session much more! (NB: the flowery wallpaper was put up by the previous owner of the house!)

Very carefully choosing fingery but skin friendly holds. My favourite holds are Dream Holds Dumby edges and pinches (review on the way), Entreprises Big Bangs, Old school bendcrete selection, my own wood edges and pinches and Dream Holds Torridonian Sandstones.

Not putting too many footholds on the first metre of the board, just an adequate selection, and all tiny.

A fan for keeping the temperature right and cooling down soft fingertips.

Annual rest and recuperation time

Nicholas asks about incorporating annual rest periods into your climbing year to stay injury free and healthy. Is it a good thing to do?

The short answer is yes. Of course it’s not possible to handle uninterrupted hard work of the same type indefinitely, and if you don’t give that particular energy system/muscle group a rest every so often, it will force it on you through injury or stagnation sooner or later.

But the mistake is to feel you need to rest the entire body or do something completely different to achieve the rest and recuperative period needed. Normally, doing some sport climbing if you’ve bouldered for months, or so ice climbing if you’ve been clipping bolts all season is change enough for the body. There’s very very few people out there working themselves hard enough in every area to need to rest entirely, or to need something outside of climbing to keep them active during this recuperative period. For almost all of us, regular work and life ‘stuff’ gets in the way enough during the year to give us more than enough periodic rests. If you feel worn down at the end of a season, it’s more likely due to the monotony of your sporting regime than the sheer volume of it. So, instead of hitting the couch, or pounding the pavements for a few weeks, try just mixing up the climbing a bit first.

Some suggestions:

Go to a different climbing wall than normal for a few weeks. Or even just climb on a board/wall you normally avoid.

Climb some slabs

Climb some trad

Climb some psicobloc/DWS

Do some ice climbing

Go on a trip into the mountains

Leave the guidebook (or maybe even the equipment) at home and go climbing by instict for a while, without the need for hard routes, just discovery and enjoying the place you’re in.

Hook up with a new climbing partner with a very different style to you.

Completely re-shuffle the days in the week/session lengths/ venues and activities you do in the week. Do the opposite.

If you still don’t feel refreshed all of that I’ll eat my hat and then suggest doing something good that climbing is always getting in the way of - like lying on a beach for two weeks with your other half, or refurbishing your bathroom.

To crimp or not to crimp

Crimp to get strong on crimps, but crimp with care!

David points to a common discussion about the wisdom of crimping during training. Crimping is indeed the riskiest grip position for the fingers and the more systematic your training of it, the risk of picking up a pulley injury, or just inflamed and swollen PIP joints gets really high.

So it’s always a balance, but here are some thoughts on how to steer through the injury risks and get the best possible strength gains.

In my experience, crimping is needed to get strong at crimping. So the idea that some support that you can avoid it altogether and still get strong on crimps I feel is incorrect. 

Crimping on boulder problems can be much safer than crimping on a fingerboard or especially a campus board. I never crimp on the campus board - the forces peak so rapidly on the sudden dynamic movements that it gets really dangerous. Crimping on the fingerboard can be quite safe if your form is perfect. And crimping without the thumb helps to make the position more natural when using one hand or two hands quite close together.

I train crimps mostly on steep powerful boulder problems. It is safest, but only if your technique is good. Poor footwork, leading to sudden foot slips, or a violent climbing style will make it just as dangerous as campusing. It tends to be less hard on the body because the accelerations are slower than with campusing, the body is often turned underneath the hold to bring the wrist into a neutral position during the highest force part of the move and the hold is generally grabbed openhanded before closing into a crimp.

Having said all this, the vast majority of climbers crimp far too much and would seriously benefit (in both performance and injury risk) in developing their openhanded grip to a point where they use it more often than crimps and are at least as strong openhanded as crimped.

- Mini case study: I used to be one of those who crimped too much, and averaged about 3 serious pulley injuries per year for 5 years until I finally was forced to get strong openhanded, and to love this crimp position too. Since then I’ve had one very minor pulley tweak (needing only a slight drop in training intensity for a few weeks) in the past five years.

One peak or two?

Rested up and firing on all cylinders, again. But still no success on this project and fitness levels are wavering - what to do?! Photo: Cubby Images

For those who are climbing quite regularly and are at a level where they can feel their fitness slip if they do less days on in the week, here is a thought.

When your local outdoor climbing is not in condition and you are going through a spell of just climbing indoors primarily as training, you’ll tend to work yourself a bit harder right? You train hard, you get better. In the short term, you are often tired, skin and muscles are sore, and performance is a little depressed. This is exactly where you want to be to make physical gains. Many weeks of this, just stopping short of developing injury or wearing yourself out.

The opposite extreme is when your outdoor projects are in condition - you want to be out there, rested, sharp and strong and trying to get them nailed! So you take more days off, basically to peak for the project. In the short term (a week or even two) you feel bionic - the sudden abundance of rest gives the body a chance to fully catch up and you have that crucial last few % of strength to get a bit further and hopefully bag the project.

What if it doesn’t work out? You rested, got the extra few % and you still didn’t quite do it. What often happens is you extend the cycle of resting a lot more than usual to be fresh for the project. You still make progress on it and so often fel that fitness is still improving. It probably isn’t.

What usually happens is that the extended focus on one or two climbs makes you learn the movements ever more efficiently and sharpen up the tactics, but then attribute it to increased fitness. But fitness will be going down.

So it’s a trade off. You have to judge how close you really are. If you are super close to success, another week of rest an focus will see you at the top. If not, maybe it’s better to go back to the training, even for a week or two until you are a bit more ready. But perhaps the end of a trip or a season will influence the decision.

How important is the project overall? Is it worth losing some gains from your training to gamble on success in the next week or two? Sometimes you’ll be so glad you did. Other times you’ll just end up setting yourself back a few weeks. All this logistics is part of the fun though, don’t you think?

New series of climbing improvement articles

I have been working on a series of introductory articles for the Mountaineering Council of Scotland’s magazine and site. They deal with general concepts of improvement in climbing so hopefully they will be thought provoking for beginners and those who’ve been climbing for many years. I’ve just finished the second one, with more on the way soon. The articles are here.

Brendan raised an interesting point after reading the section ‘The truth about famous climbers’. In this I’m talking about the dynamics of the returns you get from effort put in. It turns out, it’s not as simple as you might think. This is his point:

Hi Dave,

cheers for writing those excellent MCoS training articles, I wish they'd be available a few years ago when I started climbing, would have saved me loads of wasted effort.

 

I have a query - you say in the last section about top climbers that they go the extra move/problem/route each time.

However, I've heard a lot of people at the wall recently say you should 'finish strong', I suppose so that you shouldn't keep going after you're too tired to give your all as it will take longer to recover for the next session.

How does this resolve with your advice in your article? I suppose it depends on how soon your next session is going to be?

It’s a good point! And it doesn’t have a totally simple answer.

What I’m trying to put across in my article is that a little extra effort can often yield a lot of extra return by taking you over the threshold between enough to maintain the same level and stimulating the body to improve. This is an issue of training volume. The objective is to achieve the highest possible training volume that is sustainable over time (i.e. You can recover mostly from, in time for the next session).

Most climbers shouldn’t concern themselves with ‘stopping strong’ because they weren’t trying hard enough in the first place, or they have days of rest in between sessions. 

Another smaller proportion of climbers might have problems with being fresh enough for the next session, but the problem is not with training too hard, it’s with not recovering hard enough! i.e. They are too stressed, don’t eat well, sleep enough or add more things to recover from like a night on the sauce.

An even smaller proportion of climbers will need to take care not to overdo it on each session because they are really going for it with both their effort level and volume and taking care over their recovery as well as training. What should they do?

It’s a fine balance to tread between injury and improvement. Stopping strong will mean different things to different climbers. In general you should train as hard as you can and feel worked after your sessions. There is a subtle but perfectly tangible line turning point in the session when quality attempts on climbs becomes a rapidly declining thrashing session. When the elbows come out on the first moves and your hands melt off jugs that were easy to hang an hour ago, time to go home, eat a nice meal and sleep well. Come back tomorrow with the pedal on the floor again.

side note: the physiology of this is about using up the 'fuel tank' of muscle glycogen. It happens that recovery of the glycogen store takes much longer if the store is completely exhausted. You know this has happened when you are slapping your way up F6a gasping, when you were fine on F7b an hour before. So overall training load is higher if you stop just before you drain the tank altogether.

How many days on?

I get many emails from climbers asking how many days on they can have and whether they can do some supplementary training on the ‘rest days’ like fingerboarding.

Of course, my reply is ‘it depends!’ Most people can see clearly that an elite level athlete can tolerate many more sessions per unit time than a beginner or someone carrying a complication such as an injury. So there is no standard unit of time to rest between training sessions except this one:

Rest as long as it takes your body to recover from the specific stress you have placed on it.

This rule has two messages; the first is that you can only use the messages coming from your body to decide how much training it can handle. If your performance is going down from session to session, while you are training more than usual and feeling tired and sore, then maybe it is too much. If nothing is happening (no improvement but no soreness or temporary fatigue, then maybe you could experiment with more.

The other part is to keep in mind that climbing training requires variety in the venues, modes, intensities etc. of the training stimulus. Exposing yourself to this variety is not just important for training all the elements, it also allows you to spread the stress on the body across different muscle groups and energy systems and hence maximise the overall training load.

So, what does that mean in practice? If you go to the same wall and do the same problems, week in, week out, You will only manage a small proportion of your potential maximum training load without getting plateau and then injury.

But if you mix up your training in any way you can, you will be able to handle much more days on and longer sessions. Even subtle variety will help here – a different board, problems set by a different person, different hold manufacturers etc. But don’t use this to neglect the big sources of variety – routes instead of always bouldering (or vice versa), different rock types, different training venues, different training partners and many more…

New research published on finger endurance

My undergraduate research project investigating determinants of finger endurance in trained climbers was recently published in the Journal of Sport Sciences. You can see the details here or access the full paper if you have access to the scientific journals through an academic or other institution. A huge thanks to Stan Grant for encouraging me to keep going with the log preparation of the manuscript for submission and to everyone that worked with me on the paper and volunteered for the research itself.

We observed that climbers were not dramatically better at tolerating occlusive isometric contractions of the finger flexors (as you get in difficult climbing), but were surprisingly good at sustaining long periods of intermittent high force isometric contractions compared to untrained people. This could be down to an ability to perfuse the muscles very rapidly and recover from the contractions while reaching for the next hold. Not surprisingly, we also observed yet another confirmation that pure finger strength, and especially finger strength to weight ratio was a strong predictor of climbing level.

The intermittent isometric muscle contractions of our fingers in climbing are not that common in strength and endurance dependent sports, and there is still much to be learned about the exact causes of failure to maintain force output and sequence of chemical events that happen deep in the exercising muscle during fatigue. 

Big up to anyone out there willing to take up this mantle and help us to learn more about the physiological limitations in climbing. The continued dramatic rises in the level of ability of the worlds top climbers really shows that we are nowhere yet, either with our understanding, or what could be done with it.

How much training can you handle?

Something that people ask constantly is how much training should I do? How often can I climb? Of course the main worry in the back of folk’s minds is injury. It’s a constant trade off between training hard enough to make an overload and giving your body too much to recover from between sessions and descending to the point of chronic tissue damage.

The answer is of course ‘it depends’. It depends on how much your body is ready for the training. The more years of training you have behind you, the more you can deal with. Ultimately, the only person who can decide whether you are training too much of little I you. Fortunately, your body is constantly giving you messages informing you of whether this is happening or not. Lets look at a few of them:

‘I am not getting stronger/fitter’ – This message means you are not training the attributes you wish to target hard enough.

‘I really have to force myself to do each session and I’m feeling tired, sore and unable to maintain a similar level of performance to previous sessions. – This message means you are doing more than your body can recover from. But before blaming too much training, first ask yourself if it’s the quality of your recovery that is actually to blame – too little sleep, too much additional life stress, poor diet, too much alcohol etc…

To start answering the question of ‘how much should I train?’, a good place to start is ‘try a bit more that you are used to’. Your body will tell you whether your choice is broadly correct or not. If its not enough training, you will stay at the same level. Too much and thing will hurt.

Another complicating factor that will confuse the messages coming your body (besides how well you take care of your body in recovery) is training choices you make. So if you train harder and harder than before and still nothing happens, you probably need to add some variety in the training.

Pulling on the same holds, on the same wall or crag week in, week out, for years is not training, it’s just going through the motions.

The bottom line is – listen to your body, if you really pay attention to it, it will give you almost all of the clues you need to choose the right workrate.