Perhaps last year did not go as planned. Maybe you didn’t have the endurance you needed to reach the anchors. Maybe those crux holds still felt too small and far apart. You built a program based on the disappointments of last year. Based on the hopes you have for this year. You hit the gym all winter long and it’s coming time to start hitting the crag regularly.
But did it work? Did you hit those numbers you dreamed about months ago while laying out your training in your program? Far too often, we end up doing an entire season worth of training, and not knowing whether or not it was effective. Worse, still, we will assume it just worked and will continually repeat the same bad habits that led us to mediocre results.
This is why I am careful about underscoring the importance of reflection at the end of each training phase. By doing a focused assessment of your previous training phase, you can improve your outcomes for the coming year. What's more, by doing a quick 3 to 5 minute assessment at the end of each week, you can keep yourself in line with the stated goals of the plan. Let's dive into the first couple of questions. I like every athlete to ask.
Is It Working? Do You Like It?
Wondering if you’re on track? Every week you should circle back to two fundamental questions:
Do you like it?
Is it working?
If you can answer one as a “yes,” you're doing well. If you get both, congratulations.
The toughest part of moving forward in training is figuring out training that is both effective and enjoyable. Look, nothing against Zumba, but if that was best training for hard bouldering, I’d still take my chances with hangboarding.
Each week, we should look at our training and try to figure out if the things we are putting time into are worth that time. Do I need to do 4 sets each of these exercises? What is the value of 90 minutes of bouldering over 60 minutes? If it’s because I love it, great. But if the sessions are starting to leave me beat down for days after, I might consider adjusting the time.
Small adjustments to schedule, load, and duration are easy to implement on a weekly basis, and easy to backtrack on if you made an error in the adjustment. Just don’t fall into “following the plan” if it is leaving you on the edge of injury, messing up your marriage, or simply not producing numbers.
Execute and Adjust
We need to do the training, make an objective assessment of how the training is going and then to make adjustments to the plan. When we are doing a training program of any kind, the first marker of success is avoiding injury in the training. If you are 4 weeks into a program and your shoulder is getting achy, adjustments are needed.
Four weeks into training, or approximately the end of your first series of sessions, you might not be performing profoundly better on boulders. In fact, if you’re getting way better, it’s probably the fact that you are just “getting it” and climbing better…good job. However, you should feel a bit stronger on your strength exercises, notice that you can do more total work per session, and probably have a bit more energy.
Even if things are going great in the training, sometimes we still make adjustments. One of the traps of training is falling into a routine of “same session every day.” Let’s say you’re super successful with bouldering for an hour followed by a short weight session. We might, for sake of keeping things fresh, simply flip-flop the two sections of the session for the next month.
Once we’ve assessed and adjusted a couple of times, we get pretty good at it. This will happen every month of your training, and after a few seasons, you’ll probably get to where you do some quick adjustments monthly and then a big quarterly review of the trajectory. Oh, and don’t forget to actually get out there and go hard when the time comes!
Review, 2 hours, Once Per Quarter
Every 3 months, I get the training log and a spreadsheet out, and put down some numbers. This should include:
- Total exercise duration per week
- Total number of sessions
- Type of sessions
- Climbing performance during the phase (# of boulders/routes, and grades)
- Testing data (i.e. did you get a new in-a-day level?)
We also want to look at whether we made improvements in the facets of training we were trying to improve.
And in the bouldering gym, did my climbing improve in the way that I had aimed my training? We very likely won’t see our max grade go up in any 4 week period, but are the building blocks coming together?
The final part of the review is your impression of how the training went.
Did it feel like the volume was correct?
Did you start to feel any overuse?
Did you like it?
What would you do if you could re-do this last quarter?
What do you want to make happen in the next quarter?
Always, the last part of the quarterly review is to kick the 1-year plan out another three months. You always want to have this future plan building out ahead, even if it is just some notes on upcoming trips, big changes you want to make after this season, or warnings to self about what you messed up on this year. Since most of us operate on a roughly yearly cycle, now is the time to make the best-informed decisions about this time next year.
If It Ain’t Broke
You know the saying…
It is important to assess whether your training is really working. If you keep getting better and sending harder, make any changes to your training very slight. If, however, you’re hung up at the same grade you were last year, start digging deeper.
Remember, training happens over long cycles and results in performance improvements. You can go to the gym and get throttled and be sore for months on end, and not get better in the performance environment. This is called exercise. You are an athlete. You need to do more than exercise. You need to train, and training is more than sweat and failure.