If it wasn’t hard, it would be easy

...And we are looking for hard, aren’t we?!

On this blog I guess many of the posts are about finding and attacking weaknesses. Lots of people avoid them without realising it and hence the need to keep reiterating both the general point and the detail. But what of milking your strengths. Some strengths, like being a little stronger of finger than the next guy or being able to reach a bit further or being dynamic and confident enough to jump can only be milked so much. Not all strengths, or weaknesses are equal.

Someone recently asked me what my ‘secret’ was for climbing hard. I’m wary of oversimplifying or seeing a complex picture as black and white, but I’d say I have one strength that I’ve milked a hell of a lot, and fortunately it’s a gift that keeps on giving. I’m not good at climbing hard, but I like having a hard time. Simple as that really.

So why is that a strength? Well just think about some of the things that are ‘hard’ about climbing: Failing repeatedly and not having an immediate solution or avenue to pursue next. Nerves of anticipation. Fear. Even occasionally a little pain or self-discipline (these things are all relative). These are normally the things that make climbers outright give up an attempt or decide not to keep having attempts. Or it could be more of a subtle effect. Thee things might not make you give up, but just cause you to lift off the gas pedal slightly.

Revelling in the ‘hardness’ of hard climbing isn’t an easy mindset to adopt. What worked for me was simply to remind myself, sometimes subconsciously, sometimes directly, that if whatever I’m trying wasn’t hard, it would be easy. I’m not looking to do easy climbs easily. I want to do hard climbs easily. Every hard climb I’ve ever done has felt easy in the moment of success, but hard right up to that point. Therefore since 99% of climbing time is going to feel hard in all the forms that ‘hard’ takes, if you enjoy those things then you get on with the journey to that special moment of easiness quicker.

Some examples:

Bouldering - When holding a swing at the limit of your strength, you feel like you don’t have enough strength to absorb it and are going to come off. A lot of hard bouldering experience teaches you to ignore that feeling and keep pulling. A proportion of the time, despite your expectations, your feet will swing back and you’ll get to the top. All of this process of doubt and reaffirmation of belief happens inside a split second at the apex of the swing.

Sport climbing - Just because you tried the move for 300 times doesn’t mean you cant do it with your present level of strength. You might not have found the best way yet. Just don’t keep trying it the same way. Change something, however small, each time. Experiment systematically. You’ll learn that the available holds and ways to move through them have a lot more to offer than you could have imagined. If you do want to try it 300 times though, do your belayer a favour and learn to top rope self belay!

Trad - When you are dealing with something that is all in the mind, like confidence, recognise that you are dealing with the most complicated object in the universe. You might try to understand good and bad mental performances, but you will never be able to attribute them completely and correctly to the factors that resulted in the performance. Take what messages you can, use them and shrug off the negative or retrograde feelings with vigour. We feel amazing after a steady lead of a bold route because it is a feat that is extremely difficult to achieve. Don't be scared of mental blocks. Although they seem utterly impenetrable when you are up against one, they are ultimately just thoughts. 

Treat each climb as a worthy enemy. Expect it to lie down and it might be impossible, Expect to be tested and you’ll be ready for the test.

9 de cada 10 escaladores cometen los mismos errores

We arrived home from Switzerland to find our stock of our latest publication; the Spanish edition of 9 out of 10 climbers make the same mistakes! 9 de cada 10 escaladores cometen los mismos errores is now available in the shop right here. It’s €18 and worldwide shipping is €3.

We are massively grateful to Alicia Hudelson and Elena Suarez for a huge amount of hard work to make the translation of the book. 9 out of 10 has been out for 2 years now and read by many thousands of climbers all over the English speaking parts of the planet. We are continually amazed not only by it’s popularity but the nice messages from so many of you letting us know that it helped you break real barriers in your climbing. It’s a pleasure to open it up to a Spanish speaking audience.

Stay tuned for news of some other translations of the book...

Good technique, bad technique and not enough techniques

Over the winter I got more involved in bouldering again and thought a lot about what’s changing among boulderers. There are a lot of great new indoor bouldering facilities all over the place and the identity of bouldering as a sport gets stronger all the time. It really struck me climbing at TCA how the way climbers move on these walls has changed fast. I guess it’s because in this type of centre there is a lot of opportunity to watch and be influenced by others climbing on the same problems.

Naturally enough, the changes I’m thinking of are generally positive on the whole. But there are some negatives to watch out for depending on your training goals. It’s hard to describe these subtle changes properly without demonstrating it as I would when coaching, but generally there are a lot of ‘front on’ moves, a lot of cutting loose, many moves with the foot on one foothold for part or all of the move and probably a lower ratio of foot:hand movements than outdoors.

It’s very hard to consistently set indoor boulder problems that have footwork that is outdoor like. The blobbyness of bolt on holds and limitations of panels is one thing. The bigger problem is of course that it’s just hard to match the creativity of real rock!

So folk training ultimately for outdoor rock but relying heavily on indoor centres (especially when it’s one centre in particular) end up getting really good at the techniques for indoor bouldering, but still fail to get their outdoor grade to match or exceed their indoor grade.

It’s important to understand what is going on clearly. The climber can move really well. In other words you could say they have excellent technique. They read the moves well and execute them with precision and few errors. And yet technique is the reason for failure to reach their outdoor potential.

It’s not that there is bad technique, just not enough techniques being learned through the training diet. A simple point when you say it out loud, but often missed.

What to do about it depends on your resources. If you can climb more outdoors, do it. If you really can’t (are you sure it can’t and not just less convenient?) then at least an awareness of the problem will help you stay focused on finding a better sequence rather than just blaming weakness all the time. You are training yourself to spot better sequences, by trying to do just that, all the time. A good mindset is that you are never just trying to do the move, but always trying to find the easiest possible way to do it.

There are social influences too. If your ‘beast’ training partner does the move one way, and you just can’t, don’t be put off straight away. Keep experimenting to see if there is a tweak in the foot sequence, or a way to take the holds that removes the need for power usage. 

Injuries: The problem with Lay-off

A traditional approach to a tendon injury such as commonly experienced by climbers is to include an extended lay-off of several weeks or even several months. There are several good reasons to consider a lay-off, and several not to lay-off at all, depending on the circumstances.

The basic rationale for lay-off is to allow the tissue some rest and a chance to recover from it’s severely compromised state. There are quite a few assumptions built into the decision to completely rest the tissue. First, that the tissue will really benefit from complete withdrawal from the sport. Unfortunately, this isn’t strictly true. 

In the earliest stages of injury rehab, where the tissue is extremely weak, inflamed and possibly swollen, even the lightest use risks further damage. However, this stage is extremely short - a few days or weeks at most. After this, lay-off is actually contributing to loss of tissue health. Even moderate activity tends to be enough to maintain strength in muscle or tendon. But inactivity causes it to lose strength rapidly. When the tissue is immobilised, the rate of atrophy is positively frightening.

A related assumption is that immature tissue that forms in those initial days and weeks after an acute injury will mature into tough tendon that will handle the forces you were asking of it when you were healthy. This isn’t true either. It was the training you were doing that made you strong. Only progressive training of the injured tissue will bring it up to the exceptional level of strength and toughness that you need for sport. If the lay-off is long enough for the tissue to mature without a good progressive rehab program, it will likely end up weak, the wrong length and vulnerable to re-injuring just as you start to get your momentum back.

Another dangerous assumption inbuilt into a lay-off program is that the painful tissue is the problem and that allowing this to recover will solve the problem. In a few cases this could be true, but in the majority, an underlying susceptibility forms a large part of the cause and lay-off will do nothing to remove it. For certain less severe injuries, simply addressing the underlying causes without any intervention to treat pain symptoms will be enough to put things right.

Who can help you identify those causes? Climbing, being such a technical sport needs an excellent coach with a thorough understanding of physiology, and the biomechanics of climbing movement to identify why your climbing movements are injuring you. Since your posture is probably contributing too, you need an excellent sports medic/physiotherapist who can thoroughly asses the mess of your wonky back and shoulders. If they are not too shocked by the horror of your shoulder movement, they will help you unload the stressed out muscles and tendons with proper alignment. Sounds like a lot of effort? Well, I guess you could always just hope the pain goes away by itself instead.

Now, what a heartening blog post I hear you think; forget lay-off, keep climbing and my injury will still recover? Be clear that despite it’s psychological challenge for keen sports people, lay-off is in fact the easy option compared to the work and discipline of recovering from an injury without lay-off. This is because changing habits is really hard and requires iron resolve that most people cannot sustain as long as they need to. Hence the high recurrence rate of injuries. People just try to do things as they always did (including the things that caused the injury). If you are ready to climb differently - at the level the injured part demands, working daily to correct your bad technique habits, tactics, postural faults and specific muscle weaknesses, then recovery without lay-off is the short cut to successful recovery. Most folk don’t have the discipline either to source the information on what they ought to change, or to put the work in and actually change it.

The detail of what things climbers should change has been my constant work over the last month as I continue to write my climbing injuries book Rock ‘til you drop. It’s been fascinating study so far.

Distracted from the task at hand

After my last post, Toby commented:

“I'm 25, been climbing for about two years, and am about to embark on a long road trip. I've quit my job and... ...I've had a whole spate of minor injuries crop up in the last eight weeks...It definitely helps to see you acknowledge the realities of being injured and managing those injuries. I look at some of my friends who train six days a week for months on end with no ill effects, and I curse my body for not being able to stand up to that sort of load... but the reality is we have to work with what we're given. Much as I would like to keep pushing it, I guess I have to view all these little injuries as signs from my body to take some time off, and be thankful they're not more serious.”

I wouldn’t take the message that this is a necessarily a sign that you cannot train as hard as others you observe, just that you cannot do it yet. Big difference. Injuries are much less often caused by a high training load per say, rather it’s sudden increases in the training load or where it is distributed across the body that is more important. 

It’s true that some respond differently than others to training stress, but I’d say this is a distraction from the real problem that people run into, which is failure to adjust training load carefully enough and failure to adjust the quality of the recovery to match the change in training load.

If you are used to sitting at a desk all day and training a handful of hours a week, getting stressed, not sleeping enough and drinking a couple of beers every night to forget about it, and then switch to full on climbing many more days on with intense work for elbows and fingers, no wonder the body gets a fright and isn’t able to catch up.

2 years of climbing is nothing. The body takes many years, like ten, for some just to get used to hard training. That is, just to get into full gear and then really start. There are no shortcuts. My advice to anyone in this situation is to use extra time they have to get out and climb in as many different laces as they can. The adjustment needed in the elbows and fingers to train harder will happen along the way, and meanwhile you will actually learn to be a good climber, a process that takes tens of thousands of routes under your belt. 

I’m sure Toby will have a good trip and come back a better climber.

Injuries in young climbers - learn the hard way?

When it comes to injuries, the vast majority of sportspeople learn the hard way. They learn how to take care of their bodies by getting injured repeatedly and cursing their misfortune until sheer frustration prompts them to look more closely at what’s going on and realise there is something they can do about it.

For youngsters, it’s even harder. They aren’t so used to thinking strategically and anticipating problems as real athletes do. They just go at it with training as keenly as they like until something starts to hurt.

Complicating things further is that kids often do more than one sport. Multiple training programs, multiple coaches all working independently, not always with an eye on the total training load and hows it’s changing over time,or possible sites of stress on a joint or tendon becoming excessive. I was lucky in a way to have no coach rather than partial coaching. With my first finger and elbow injuries at age 16 I realised that noone but me was going to get me back to climbing quicker. So I found that university book stores were good places to find sports medicine books and huddled in their corners reading everything I could to while away the many hours and days of my lay-off. It was a good thing too. I suffered plenty of injuries, as you do if you push yourself hard in multiple disciplines. But learned incrementally to anticipate them and respond quickly to manage them.

Being coached a little is sometimes worse than not being coached at all. The youngster relies on the coach to keep them on track and progressing sometimes at the expense of thinking critically and strategically for themselves. That’s fine if the coach is taking care of everything, but often the coaching only tackles one small aspect of the sport skills such as the technique or training exercises (possibly at the expense of the recovery, nutrition and injury avoidance/management).

The answer? Well, someone has to take charge of looking after the young athletes body! It’s best if the youngsters themselves take this seriously. It’s ironic that they rarely do since they show the fieriest passion to work hard at sport, yet it’s injury avoidance that is very likely to determine their ultimate long term success in sport! And after all, they are the ones who are going to grow up and manage themselves in adulthood. The sooner an awareness of injury and it’s prevention awakens, the better. If a climbing coach only sees them occasionally, that coach should probably encourage the parents to start thinking and acting like coaches, and realise that training for sport is a 24/7 activity that comprises training and recovery and that both are just as important.

Coaches or parents say “But all they want to do is climb, climb climb!” They don’t want to hear about planning the training carefully, increasing load slowly, stretching, warming up, eating well or exercising antagonists. That’s boring.

It’s boring until it becomes clear that this stuff is what separates forgotten athletes who were promising but burned out at 17 from those with long successful careers and still enjoying healthy climbing. So the advice from people who know better, whether that’s coaches or parent has to be framed in a way that makes it clear that this stuff is where the advantage over peers and competitors will ultimately come from. Anyone can get fit and strong just by climbing a lot and pulling on small holds. The goal is to climb for long enough without interruption from injury to actually get really good at it.

Learning errors? come back fresh

The story behind this new problem from yesterday is on my main blog here. But I wanted to share a couple of lessons I learned from a few sessions trying this rather technical eliminate:

First, while trying it after a summer of trad when I was weak I went backwards on it. I couldn’t understand why at first. I had an awful session when I couldn’t even do the swing move at all. My raw finger strength was still there - I could feel it in how hard I could pull on the holds. But the move wasn’t working. I later learned that lack of recent bouldering mean’t I’d forgotten (relatively speaking of course) how to maintain maximal body tension through a sequence of very sustained moves. In the process of trying it over and over out of frustration, I accidentally learned many errors in the moves. I started taking the holds in a less efficient way, timing the movement wrongly and getting less weight through my feet.

It happened because I was ‘over thinking’ the movement rather than letting my subconscious mind do at least some of the work. Because I was previously able to do the moves easily, I concluded there must be a movement error I was making, and If I just experimentally tried subtle tweaks in the move I’d figure out the mistake. But there was no mistake, I just wasn’t quite strong enough and in the process of looking so hard at one move I learned some new errors and lost confidence.

How to avoid this problem if you are in the habit of redpointing? On the whole I’d still say it’s fine to try one move that you can’t yet do over and over for tens or even hundreds of times. But recognise that within the session you sometimes lose confidence, strength, positivity and make more errors, even if this effect remains largely subconscious. You’ll sometimes find that you come back next session with a fresh body and mind and do it straight off. The correct way to do the move will just happen spontaneously.

Take a break, try something else for a session and come back to it.

One other thing: The first move of the problem required pulling in super hard on a small heelhook on a spike. Wearing slippers (I took my tightest pair that I can’t even get on my feet unless it’s cold!) or even lace-ups if you pull really hard your boot might start to slide off and you’ll lose tension. A good solution in the pic below is to wear a sock for extra boot tightness and run finger tape through the pull-loops around your ankle. Point your toes downwards while you stick the tape down. It works a treat.

Confidence de-training

I went bouldering outdoors for the first time in two months yesterday. Lochaber deluge enforced indoor training regime. I was shocked at how tentative I was and worried about bad landings after so long falling onto big friendly climbing wall mats. Note to self, and anyone else in the same situation:

Too much time above big mats destroys your boldness and ability to fall properly outdoors on poor landings. Not much you can do about this other than be aware of it and take care to give some time to retraining when the rain stops.

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!

Training the ability to try

If you see people in action during training (it’s easiest to observe in a traditional weights/cardio gym), it’s not hard to notice that theres a massive difference between the majority who are having a ‘light’ session to say the least, and the much smaller proportion who are really working their bodies hard.

As an aside, If you do see those people in the gym who look like they aren’t trying - don’t scoff inwardly (or outwardly!) at them - not everyone goes to the gym to work hard. Some people exercise to relax and wind down. And remember you don’t see what other workouts they get up to. You might be surprised!

Sometimes folk don’t have the right peer group to influence them to learn to try really hard, sometimes, they just haven’t found the right motivation, or more likely they just don’t realise how hard they could be trying. This is not something that applies to some and not others. Everyone has room to really grit their teeth and work themselves harder.

It’s true in many cases that the best athletes are the ones who are trying hardest. It’s not always the case for various reasons and it’s too simplistic and misleading to view athletic success purely as a product of effort. However, that doesn’t change the point that if you can find ways to try harder, you’ll go further.

I talked a lot about how to do that in my book, but one thought for your training sessions over the Christmas period; Before you go for your session, or have your next attempt on the problem, or circuit, or route, imagine what it would feel like if you were to try harder than you’ve ever tried before. Think about how your fingers would feel crushing down on that little hold. Think about how you’d grab the next hold and start pulling lightning fast and concentrate on keeping pulling with maximum force right through the move until your feet swing back in. Think about how sore your skin and arms will feel on that last circuit and how you’ll detach yourself from it and keep right on slapping. Think about the mindset of those climbers who inspire you by their amazing feats of climbing. What do you think goes through their mind when they train? They are people on a mission! They have learned to love their training and they feel satisfaction that every last grain of hard effort takes them closer to the routes they are on the mission to climb. So what's your mission?

Now repeat through the whole of next year!