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!

Boulderer's transition to route climbing

Ross asked me recently about making the transition to routes from an apprenticeship in bouldering. With ‘bouldering only’ climbing walls becoming ever more popular, there is an increasing body of young climbers who have an entire apprenticeship on them and make a difficult transition to route climbing after a year or two.

These climbers get pumped really easily on F6s even though they can boulder Font 7s. Their initial feeling is to blame lack of endurance fitness, which is of course a part of the problem. But a few weeks of racking up the route laps will see a lot of progress in fitness.

The bigger, but less understood problem is hidden in their technique. These guys have spend 100% of their climbing time trying to learn to pull as hard as possible, on 3-10 move boulder problems. The technique of route climbing - to pull as gently as possible - is a totally different technique. You can’t learn it overnight. 

Often, they want to find a training solution to climbing routes that still involves using the local bouldering wall - i.e. Circuits. That’s fine in theory, but it’s definitely the hard way. The reason is that to learn to climb efficiently for routes, saving energy as opposed to climbing explosively, is best done on long pitches that take 2 minutes to several hours (as in winter climbing). So the best thing to do is get out and climb some big routes, tons of them.

Fiddling with a wire placement for five minutes will always teach you how to relax and find the most efficient position much more effectively than doing circuits or lots of easy problems. Even a week of sport climbing will get you further than months of trying to learn route climbing technique on a boulder wall. Get out and climb at a standard that allows you to do 12 x 30m routes a day or more. That’s 2500 metres climbed in a week minimum - hard to achieve in the boulder wall. By the end of a week your movement and style will be so different.

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.

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.