Periodisation in 4 sentences

‘Periodisation’, or the rather fancy term for planning your training over days, weeks or even years is something lots of folk ask me about. Either you have a trip in 6 weeks, 6 months or you just want to mix up your training so you don’t plateau and stop improving. Most people with an interest in training know that it’s important to make temporal changes in the training activity you do to avoid injury, plateaus and to get the biggest effect out of your training.

It’s true that the details of how to make decisions about allocating training time to things like strength, endurance work and different types of climbing are complicated. The right decision also depends on knowing what your weaknesses are. More and more climbers realise this and get a coach to assess them and make the decisions using their experience. But it’s possible to get on broadly the right track just by sticking to some basic principles. Here they are below squeezed into a neat summary so you can plan your training for 2008 without a headache:

Strength gains take ages to get and trying to shortcut them gives you injuries; train finger strength year round so you steadily climb the ladder of finger strength gain and don’t slip back to where you started each autumn.

Endurance responds quickly – in weeks – get on the laps in the weeks before you will need the endurance and work yourself hard, several times a week.

As a general rule of thumb you can maintain the same level at an aspect of performance with one session per week and make steady gains with three or more sessions.

Don’t worry about doing strength and endurance work in the same day, just to the strength work first.

24 pull ups

Last time I checked, I could do 24 pull-ups on a bar. A tiny amount for a climber at my grade. Fortunately, being super strong at one strength measure is not so important as being equally strong at holding onto any type of hold. Last time I checked, I could do 24 pull-ups on a bar, on crimps, on slopers and on openhanded pockets. Those who are super strong in one area but weak on another might not be as good at climbing as they could/should. Those who aren’t so strong at any type of hold or exercise, but not weak on any either are much more likely to climb at a surprisingly high level given they are not exceptionally strong at anything.

If there is a type of move/hold/angle you hate, attack it until you love it.

Notes from my Training Diary

Feeling light on A Muerte 9a, Siurana

I don’t often talk much about my own training on this blog, but in my ongoing long term experiments on myself I’ve seen a really interesting trend this year.

I’ve always held the view that having a low body weight was really important for hard climbing, especially sport climbing. It used to be in fashion but then seemed to go out of fashion for a long while, perhaps because people were going about dieting the wrong way and ending up weak and unhappy! But I reckon being light should come more back into fashion again among anyone who wants to link more than a few moves on steep ground close to their limit.

My evidence? In the past 10 months I’ve been able to increase my grade from 8c to 9a. That’s a very quick progression at this end of the grading scale, especially for someone not so young these days. How did I do it? I lost 4.5 kgs.

Yes, it really was that simple.

Now, I should qualify that by saying the effect would not have happened had it not been for all other aspects of my training, tactics and approach being relatively close to optimal and my strategy for managing the weight loss very well thought through and researched. The dynamics of who would benefit from this type of adaptation, why and how and when to go about it is something I’ll be writing at length about (probably in a book quite soon).

But the basic message is clear – being light is pretty damn important for hard climbing.

If you feel otherwise, please comment below and I will argue you round!

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!

Cold Treatment revisited

A great many of you have commented, emailed etc to say that my videocast and articles on finger pulley injuries were helpful – thanks to all of you. It’s been really interesting that so many of you have tried the cold treatment I suggested with such positive effects.

I thought I’d let you know that I’ve heard feedback from someone who has used the cold treatment (same protocol – 30 mins immersed in the bucket, twice per day for several months) for an elbow injury and reported excellent results with much speeded rate of progress of healing and it allowed continued climbing during the rehab process. Good news.

Such anecdotal reports are all we have to go on at present until someone does a decent longitudinal study. All you sports science/medicine students who email me to ask for research project ideas – now there’s an excellent one worthy of a paper in BJSM if you have the guts to put in the work!

Any of you out there tried it on a shoulder injury?

Fear of Falling

One of the main things I hear again and again from climbers I coach or climb with is that they are limited by fear of falling. In fact I’d say that maybe 2 out 3 of these climbers could walk out and climb their short-medium term goal routes tomorrow if they could eliminate this excessive fear in their heads. What a waste of ability.

Let’s take a look at the issue.

When we talk about fear of falling we often deal with the concept of our ‘comfort zone’. Climbers with a performance crippling fear of falling often believe that confident climbers are happy to be outside their comfort zone all the time.

This is incorrect.

The reality is that their comfort zone is just bigger. They ‘suffer’ being outside their comfort zone every so often, in order to enjoy being inside it most of the time (because it’s getting bigger all the time).

Each time you opt to stay inside your comfort zone and avoid the unpleasant feeling of fear of falling, your comfort zone gets smaller. Falling off becomes less and less familiar, and backing off becomes more familiar. The most basic training principle is “What you do, you become” So you are practicing reverse training.

Down the line, the end result is that there is almost no comfort zone left to crumble, and just being on a cliff feels too close to the edge of your comfort zone. Climbing often feels unpleasantly scary, and unrewarding. These climbers often give up eventually, or keep going with a perpetual undercurrent of frustration about their climbing.

The flip side is to step briefly outside of that comfort zone every so often, say maybe every 5th route, or maybe once in the climbing day or week. You feel the pain of fear of falling and suffer it briefly. And you realise it’s not so bad. Your comfort zone grows a little. The rest of the time, routes that were once barely comfortable are now totally comfortable – happy days!

It carries on and you suffer a little fear again, comfort zone grows a bit more… and… you get the picture…

So, trying to stay comfortable 100% of the time results in that comfort being harder and harder to find. Accepting the pain of facing fear 10% of the time means total comfort on 100% + of what used to feel unpleasant.

Scare yourself a little, in order to be comfortable and free from fear more than before.

Unfortunately there is no other way.

Ken asked about translating strength training

Ken asked:

“I'd like to know your comments on adjusting to the improvements and effects of training. I've been following a training program for about 4 years now, and I've noticed a repeating pattern: When I find that I've gotten myself into a new power zone following a training cycle, it seems like I have to relearn my body. Even though I'm foremost a technical climber, the added sense of power seems to take over and I often will actually climb poorer for a while, abandoning my technique and trying to brute force things. I won't even realize it at first until I've had a couple of bad sessions climbing and go about trying to figure out what's wrong. It's like having the engine tuned in your car and gunning it all the time until you remember you've still got to drive with finesse…

…I wonder if, through your career, you've encountered a similar experience as your training has made you stronger, and if there's any specific approach you've applied to adapt?”

That is a good question and something I have spent a fair time thinking about and experimenting with. It comes down to the most basic training principle of ‘specificity’ – what you do you become. If the training is significantly different from the activity being trained for, there will be a problem in translating those gains. Here are some solutions to the problem, which are not rocket science but the only options available:

· The problem most often arises when you train indoors a lot but ultimately want the fitness for outdoor climbs.
· Ideally you would dump the indoor climbing and just train outdoors! But often its not possible due to weather or work schedules. If so you can either plan to make sure you give yourself a period of integration where you do lots of volume of routes outdoors to get used to your new strength and offset the loss of ‘outdoor specific’ technical ability from the indoor work.
· Or, you can limit the strength work to basic strength exercises such as fingerboard/campus board, while still doing all your actual climbing on real rock (or whatever you are training for). This option only works if your schedule allows you not to drop the volume of moves climbed in a given time period.
· Try to maintain regular sessions on your goal rock surface even while you are doing hard training, so your body does not forget how to climb so much!

My solution to this has been to do all my climbing outdoors and never go to a climbing wall (all my climbing goals are on real rock). But I am lucky that my work schedule is often flexible enough to climb when its dry and work when it rains. I supplement my climbing with basic strength work on the fingerboard which does not have a negative impact on my technique.

The negative effect of too much strength work on overall climbing ability is not to be underestimated! You don’t have to look very far to see climbers with fingers strong enough to climb several grades harder if they decided to pay attention to their technique an tactics training.

Potential vs Track Record

What happens if you focus all your energy on getting strong and putting hours in at the climbing wall?

People say “Wow, that guy/girl has so much potential. They are so strong, they could do something really hard”

What happens if you balance your energy between training and fine tuning your performance tactics and risk losing training time by staying out there and finishing projects or trying new things?

People say “Wow that guy/girl has done so many hard routes, but they aren’t as strong as I expected them to be.”

If you are the guy with the awesome track record, it’s a psychologically difficult place to be. Everyone is constantly surprised by how much you’ve achieved on the strength you have. Why? Because the climbing world is full of wall rats who are super strong but too scared to put their neck on the line and risk failure by getting out there and actually trying a hard route. They will compare you to this norm and will never understand how you did it. So many strong climbers have achieved so little, because they are too scared, and like the easy position of being the guy with the potential.

Who do you want to be? The guy with potential, or the guy who does a lot of hard routes?

Energy - cycles

You may have noticed that the posting frequency on this blog has gone down recently. Sure, it's partly because I had some other work that needed to get done (I've had some major changes in my life to adjust to recently). But partly because I needed the time to think, and not write about my ideas for a wee while. I've made a bit of progress in this area, and you'll here more on this blog when I'm finished the procress.

This idea of cycles is pretty important in many areas of life - work, relationhips, art and, yes, training for sport. One of the main ways it shows it's face in climbing is that we are trying to perfrom at our best all the time - year round. Of course it doesn't work, but when it doesn't we get mad and try to pull harder and get even more riled. The reult is generally apathy, overtraining related injury, or both.

The filp side is that if we have a brief respite following one of these periods of reduced performance and frustration induced hard effort/training, there is often a major jump in performance. In sports sicence this process is called tapering.

Tapering is part of a theory of sport science called periodisation. The idea is that we focus on different training tasks is sequence to prevent fatique accumulating to injury and plateau inducing levels. Once have worked ourselves hard in each area, we reduce the training volume in all areas to give the body a chance to refresh itself completely. The result - a performance leap. Most people who apply the concept (and that includes most books on training for climbing) limit its use to the first part (varying the work during training) and ignore the second (using tapering to switch between training and performance modes, or even recognising the distinction at all!).

In summary

• Trying to perform all the time, and neglecting to give yourself time to prepare for the performance is a route to failure.
• Allow for the fact your body and mind work in cycles - don't worry when you feel stuck in a rut of training or atempting to understand a concept. Performance is inevitably depressed during training. Keep grappling with it to stimulate the body/mind to adapt. When the signs of overtraining appear, taper and reap the rewards of your efforts.

'OK Dave, I get that... next question: how do I distinguish between the healthy fatique and frustration of a good training period, and the downward spiral of overtraining and apathy, and hence decide the right moment to stop training and start performing, or switch training focus?'

Answer - It's not easy! years of experience or a coach can help. Sometimes, even asking a friend can help -anything to get a more objective reflection. There are many clues you can use yourself though - I'll be writing more about these soon.

New research review - Audry Morrison interview

Audry Morrison and Volker Shoffl have just published a review of the available research relevant to young climbers in the British Journal of Sport Medicine As well as collating some interesting data on studies carried out within climbing, it also draws on other useful sources of information to give us a better picture of the effect of climbing and training on the young body. Not everyone has access to the scientific research press or can digest the information it offers; so I asked Audry if she would answer a couple of questions for this blog.

Young climbers are always asking (and if they don’t they should be!) “how much should I train at my age?” and “what harm can training at a young age do?” The review underlines the need for young climbers and their parents to educate themselves as to what activities and intensities are safe at given ages, and what can be done to minimise risks of permanent alteration or injury to the developing tissue.

Audry Morrison

Non-climbers are always noticing my hands and commenting that they look very different to 'normal' hands. What changes should climbers who train regularly expect in their hands and are there any negative consequences to consider?

Audry: Climbing is certainly a ‘load-bearing’ sport, with the fingers supporting a lot of this ‘load’. Those bones that are most involved with this ‘load-bearing’ or ‘resistance’ exercise are constantly remodelling themselves in response to this type of exercise. Bones are not static. So in a veteran adult climber’s fingers there is up to a 50% increase in the tendon width size (a few years to achieve), a thickening of the collateral ligaments here too, the bones in the fingers physically remodel themselves to become wider/thicker to better accommodate this loading (especially at joints, notably the middle joints), and the fingers just tend to be thicker. How much the finger bones thicken is in direct relationship to the number of years climbing, hours spent training, and climbing ability level. Repeated over training can create micro traumas that collectively can result in stress fractures, ganglions, pulley strains/rupture, tendon nodules, finger nerve irritation, arthritis, etc.


Negative consequences to consider
Good bone remodelling to create strong bones also relies on the assumption that good nutrition is also in place…. like not drinking a lot of soft drinks. An American study found females around age 20 had osteoporosis (brittle bone) similar to that of a 70-year-old because of the volume of soft drinks they drink. These drinks act to limit the amount of calcium your bones can absorb when they remodel themselves. Also, if calcium intake poor, the body will ‘steal’ calcium from other bones to use when remodelling the bones that are getting most of the resistance workout.

A lot of climbers quite rightly have concerns about their fingers and hands. We ask a lot of fingers when climbing, especially at a high ability level.

This is probably obvious, but high ability climbers generally experience more injuries, especially to the fingers, because of the greater mechanical stresses and weight-bearing loads to the fingers. ‘Crimp’ position exerts the greatest compressive force to a finger joint cartilage, compared to the ‘open hand’ position that is more protective and also allows you to climb for longer. Over gripping holds will limit climbing performance because of the direct knock on effect of increasing blood pressure and heart rate, increasing stress hormone levels etc that in turn influence and change metabolites in the forearm so you get pumped quicker.

Climbers should continually assess the full range of motion in all 3 joints of each finger. Can you place your hand palm down so that it is flat on a table surface? If any of the fingers can’t go flat, it may suggest Dupuytren’s disease. This used to be confined to those aged 40-60 who worked manually that created micro traumas to the fingers, though there is also a North European genetic predisposition to it. Unfortunately even young climbers have various stages of Dupuytren’s, that if severe, requires an operation to straighten the finger. But some NHS hospitals a while back refused to perform this surgery any more along with some others as a cost cutting exercise.

In one good study examining osteoarthritis in 65 veteran adult climbers (average age=37.5, climb experience=19.8 years, grade=5.12c) compared to non-climbing age-matched controls, there were five specific joint areas in the climber’s fingers that scored significantly higher than the controls. But having said this, the overall osteoarthritis scores between both groups were similar.

What do you think are the main things young climbers should keep in mind to progress quickly and safely to the upper levels in climbing?

Audry: Below the age of around 12 (pre-pubertal), no youngster has the ability to adapt to either aerobic or anaerobic exercise as would happen in an adult. There are many adaptations in their body that prevent this from happening. But they can learn movement well, and they most definitely should be participating in sport (all sorts). It’s not known when specialisation in climbing should take place. They must be encouraged to learn very good technique because they don’t have the strength, have immature pain barriers, etc. In younger children, actually demonstrate what they are doing wrong.

Elite young climbers will also have thickened finger bones. What’s critical for young climbers is that their finger bones grow to their full length around age 16.5, and that this is not interrupted by finger training too intensively. Damage (temporary or permanent damage) can occur when young climbers undertake extensive finger strengthening exercises. This is especially so when they try to compensate for their increased weight when they have their final growth spurt around age 14-15. Some 20% of adult height is achieved in this final growth spurt where skeletal mass increases twofold and a lot of muscle can be packed on. Ligaments and tendons have not yet adapted to these increases in bone length and load, and increasing levels of certain hormones can also weaken the joints. The training focus must be on ensuring good technique/efficiency (always!) and on volume & diversity of route, rather than doing any finger strength training those elite adults do.

Also check for any curvature of spine, tight shoulders that have a rolled hunched look. If so, much more stretching needs to be carried out, possibly physiotherapy or medical intervention if severe.

Check feet too. See if there is any pain or deformities, or loss of nerve sensation. If any of these is the case, the shoes are too restrictive. Feet grow in a linear manner length and width from ages 3-12 (in females) and to age 15 in males. Height is highly correlated to foot growth to the age of 18.

Thanks for answering those questions Audry and well done on the research. Its quite a striking figure that tendon width increases so much – when you consider the effects on the cross sectional area of a doubling of tendon width it seems even more impressive. But we ask so much of our fingers in climbing and muscles work at such a mechanical disadvantage that I suppose it’s not so much of a surprise that the adaptations are so striking. I’ve certainly noticed a marked thickening of my PIP joints over the past two years and more aches and pains in them than before.

I think the key takeaway from all this is to read and educate yourself before you launch into the training, rather than once you start having problems. At the same time, all these consequences to getting training wrong as a youngster doesn’t mean you cant push yourself until you are adult. It just means that there are trade-offs between going hard when you are still growing and accepting and managing some consequences from it. But most of the negative consequences should be avoidable with healthy respect for the body. Just look at climbers like Fred Nicole who was climbing F8b+ at 16 and has been bouldering at the cutting edge right through to his late thirties with seemingly no breaks – inspiring.

You can see the abstract for Audry’s paper here. You can view the full text if you have an ATHENS password.