Every month or so, I sit down with a climber who has traveled to our gym Lander to climb and to sit down for a training talk. Obviously, I sit down with more than one athlete a month, but this athlete is special. This athlete is not one of my regulars, but rather someone who has put a lot of expectation into this one meeting, and who has a hope to be "changed" thereafter.
I'm not saying that I am somehow special—coaches across the world get this kind of thing all the time, and much like meeting with a financial advisor, marriage counselor, or chiropractor, talking with a coach one time will probably not result in any meaningful change.
Add that to the fact that unless if I give them some kind of interesting and exciting new workout to do, the overall advice will be pretty boring.
People want the training to be exciting. They want there to be secrets. They want there to be some hack "that doctors don't want you to know about."
Sadly, there are none.
There is no supplement, nor training tool, nor app, that will take us from bad to great. The things that are going to make up 90% of our gains are free, totally up to us, and simple. Although buying a new training device might or might not help (I see a lot of Moon Boards in garages that have more dust than chalk on them), building better training habits definitely will.
Below, I have outlined four pieces of advice that will have many people rolling their eyes, and yet are essential to great training. It hurts to know that your detailed hangboard session is probably not going to move the needle in any significant way, while getting enough sleep will...but that is the reality of sport performance.
Start Where You Are
Building out a new training plan is exciting. I can't even count the number of times that I read a book or heard an interview and got inspired to rework my training. The problem here is that the way humans adapt is not by leaps and bounds and crazy overload. Instead, it is by slowly asking the organism to make changes. I explain this to athletes in terms of getting a suntan. If we go out and progressively expose our skin to slightly more sun each day over the course of several weeks, our skin turns brown, and gets more adapted to being in the sun. Conversely, if we decide to just go for it and strip down and get out in the sun for six hours the first day, we do not tan but rather damage the skin to the point of burning. This is really similar to what happens if we go from no training to hard training.
With this in mind, I ask people to review their training log before starting to plan a new program. I know that most people don't actually keep this training log so the next best advice is to think back as far as you can and write down what you have done in the past several days or couple of weeks. What we are looking for is the total duration of activity, the specificity of that activity, and the general intensity of that activity. These three items are going to be vital in planning effective training.
You can write out a simple chart that has four columns. The first one will be the date, the second one is the type of activity, the third column is duration in minutes, and the last column is intensity. Once you write out all of the details for the previous couple of weeks, you can then start to crunch the data a bit. How much total time did you exercise or climb? This should include all walking, cycling, weight training, anything else you did that seemed like activity. If you have a super physical job, I would include that. Anything that is low intensity, like walking is for most of us, shouldn't really figure into this unless you did it for more than 20 minutes in one session.
The type of exercise is key, since climbing is a skill sport. If you did a whole bunch of running and mountain biking, that is awesome and you should be proud of the activity you are doing. Also, it does almost nothing for your climbing so we need to note that. This goes back to the basic goals of training… If your primary goal is to get some activity, you are succeeding, simply by doing anything. If your goal is to get better at rock climbing, you need to minimize other activities if they limit your ability to get sufficient time on the rock. For most climbers, I feel they should spend 70 or more percent of their time in climbing activity in order to develop. Of course you can still go run or mountain bike, but don't get fooled into thinking those activities will somehow translate to better climbing.
Noting the intensity is important. I generally just am looking for some macro qualifiers here, easy, medium, and hard. Most hiking or cycling or alpine climb climbing will be in the easy category. It's not that these activities aren't challenging, but things that we can do repeatedly for 30 or more minutes generally are lower intensity. The medium intensity category will be most peoples climbing days, weight, training, and bouldering with friends. If you had to stop this activity because you couldn't sustain the difficulty, it would then be in the hard category. This would be limit bouldering, maximum strength training, or sprint training.
Your assessment of your activity will then give you six useful numbers:
Easy Training, Non-Specific
Easy Training, Specific
Medium Training, Non-Specific
Medium Training, Specific
Hard Training, Non-Specific
Hard Training, Specific
From here, you have a good look at what kind of holes are in your sessions, and maybe what "type" of climber you are. If your goals involve hard efforts, how much hard movement are you doing? If your goals are long pumpers, are you doing anything that prepares you for this? Your first step in planning is to address holes in the essential parts of training.
Add Capacity First
A thing that often comes up is a lack of climbing time in an athlete's week. Here is an actual week's structure from a climber I met with recently:
Monday: Rest / Stretch
Tuesday: Climbing Strength [weighted pull-ups, block pulls, levers, hangboard] 120 minutes
Wednesday: Hill Hike [with weighted vest] or run 60-90 minutes
Thursday: Campus Session / Limit Boulder 90 minutes
Friday: Rest
Saturday: Boulder Outside or Strength Session
Sunday: Short Run
This looks like a week that will produce a lot of tiredness, and has plenty of intense training involved. The issue is that the climber in question is a professed boulderer, and yet most of his training is oriented at training the "parts" of strength, or at developing aerobic endurance. The running is about trying to "stay light," and all the supplemental stuff is because the climber feels weak when he boulders on the weekend.
Clearly this person is not lacking for total work capacity, but might be lacking the ability to do much more climbing (probably as a result of fatigue from sessions that are supposed to support climbing).
When we look at a climber's climbing, we need to break it down into total volume of moves, much like a runner or cyclist might look at hours or miles per week. Just because I go climbing three days per week, it doesn't mean I actually do a lot of climbing! The most useful measures are probably feet/meters of climbing, or maybe more precisely, moves. In order to build capacity, we then follow a very simple process:
First build total exercise time (can be walking, weight training, swimming, etc.)
Second, build more specific exercise time, adding more climbing (or maybe specific strength) to the week, even if by small amounts.
Third, intensify the specific exercise—do harder moves.
In our example above, we don't really need to add more total time, we simply need to convert existing time on the schedule to climbing. I do understand the challenges people have with scheduling, and I do understand that values and habits play into decision-making. When it comes to making the tough choices, then, we need to decide where to put our minutes. Are we boulderers or hill hikers who boulder occasionally?
Chase Something In Training (One Thing)
Once you have capacity and are hitting all of your workouts, it's easy to fall into intensification of everything. For a couple of workouts, this works OK, but over time, the body can't keep up. Especially as one reaches closer to "limit" work, the training needs to become more focused.
Instead of moving from doing twenty problems at V3 to trying twenty of V4, consider only intensifying every fourth problem in a session. In the weight room, consider holding all of your exercises but one at "hard, but do-able," or around 80% of max, and then put all of your effort into pushing load on one movement for that training cycle.
If it is a new skill or movement you're addressing, make sure it show up often in the week, and at the beginning of the session. My own nemesis, still, is holding small crimps, so I address this early in a few sessions each week, and then spend the majority of the session doing other, less intense, training.
Assure Your Behaviors Match Your Goals
Looking back at your assessment of the volumes and intensities of your exercise, you should be able to see one thing clearly: are the things you're doing in training addressing the things you'd like from performance? A person training for the Nose-In-A-Day should probably not be spending a ton of time each week on the hangboard, and had better be working on some very long climbing sessions occasionally. A comp boulderer should be climbing hard, but should also be addressing the specific fatigue of long comp days.
I have told the story before of how my friend Bobby Model and I tried to prepare for our trip to attempt a free ascent of Trango Tower. Much of what we did involved running stairs at the University of Wyoming stadium and hucking laps on 5.11 cracks at Vedauwoo. When I told our friend Todd Skinner, who had been living at Hueco Tanks that winter, about our preparation, he asked simply, "What if the climbing on Trango is harder than 5.11?"
The training we were doing was hard. It was developing our bodies. It was wrong.
One of the hardest lessons I have learned over the years is that the most physically difficult training does not always produce the best results. I wrote an entire book about build hard power endurance workouts, only to learn in the following years that short bursts of anaerobic endurance are not what most of us need when it comes to climbing harder.
As I moved into adding more easy volume into my training, it was a huge challenge. If I was not pumped out of my mind, how could I be training "endurance?" And yet as I did more and more workouts that felt too easy, (as well as a ton of hard bouldering) the climbing at the crag also became easier. I wasn't having to die on the circuit to avoid pumping out.
The same lesson can be found in training at submaximal levels on the hangboard or in the weight room. Anyone who has worked through the 40 day strength plan or has done six weeks of ladders will attest that training at 95% is just one way to get strong.
The gym is the forge. We go there to build ourselves into athletes who can perform at the highest levels. We don't have to go to the death or follow secret formulas to do that. Most of the time, it ends up being about showing up and doing what we know we need to do. No expensive tool, no supplement, and no secret workout will get you anywhere near where you want to go if you miss out on that.