General training makes us better as human athletes, and it is unquestionably the fastest way to develop our overall energy systems and strength. As climbers, we have all seen the value of specific training, so convincing someone to step back and develop their back and arm (and leg!) strength in the gym instead of just bouldering is hard to do.
As we move from general training to specific training, we need to look at it not as a switch, but a transition. Some general exercises are somewhat specific to a sport (such as inverted rows in climbing), so they may be present in both general and specific training modes.
When it comes to specific training for a sport, we need to remember that it is not simply execution of the sport. Doing the sport is called performance. It is also not exact mimicking of a route or a comp set up. This is called simulation.
Specific training for a sport involves using the same movement patterns or muscle groups as we use in the sport as well as addressing the same loads and durations. We call these movement specificity and metabolic specificity, respectively.
For example, bouldering is movement specific to route climbing, but is not metabolically specific; the durations are too short. Similarly, climbing on a treadwall might be close to metabolically specific to route climbing, but probably falls short of being quite movement specific due to the easy footwork and fixed plane of movement.
When we go into the gym, then, we can do a decent job of doing some specific training, even if we can’t actually climb. We simply have to make sure we check the boxes on movement or metabolism. But there is even more to specificity than that, if we really want to get into the weeds.
Yuri Verkhoshansky describes ten facets of specificity:
- Type of muscular contraction. Think about it. Do we climb the way we lift weights in a concentric-eccentric rhythm at a roughly 2 second tempo? No. Climbing is largely concentric movement, followed by a few seconds of isometric hold, followed by a totally unloaded and quick eccentric as we reach for another hold.
- Movement pattern. Is your indoor bouldering really like route climbing or outdoor bouldering? Likely not. Almost all indoor climbing defocuses core tension and footwork. It doesn’t do a good job of simulating subtleties in wall angle, etc. In this respect, a bouldering wall is better than a system wall, which is better than a campus board, which is better than a hangboard, etc.
- Region and range of movement. Are your reaches as long indoors as out? Are you using the same groups of muscle? Are you doing full range on exercises where you need full range? Are you holding isometrics in the right positions?
- Velocity of movement. One of my big beefs with campusing to build power is that it is markedly slower than a dynamic bouldering move. The unloaded arm moves very quickly when reaching to the next rung, but the loaded movement is understandably slow. Similarly, we’ll boulder fairly quickly indoors when jumping between big purple blobs, but can’t quite do the same on the slopers at Fontainebleau.
- Force of contraction. Are you pulling as hard in your training as you do in your sport? Are you tension as much as your goals problems require? We typically are less fired up for training than we are for performance, and it shows up in the lower training loads those of us choose.
- Muscle fiber recruitment. If your intensity, duration, and load are not right in your training, you’ll use different fibers in the muscles than you do in performance. This is an essential part of getting things right in the gym, and one of the main reasons people can’t translate their indoor bouldering sessions to real rock.
- Metabolism. “Metabolism is very specific to the intensity and duration of the sporting event, to the extent that excessive development of one type of fitness may have a profoundly detrimental effect on another type of fitness.”
- Biochemical adaptation. Related to metabolism, this is the enzymatic adaptation that occurs in the system. If we work toward repetitive cyclic endurance activity in the legs (running or cycling) we stimulate a profoundly different “endurance” adaptation than we do in a stop and go sport that requires high levels of local muscular endurance like climbing.
- Flexibility. Just getting more flexible in one movement doesn’t translate to function in the performance environment. If all of our stretching is done an a 1/2” mat on a heated floor, it might not apply that directly to movement across a roof boulder problem.
- Fatigue. “The effectiveness of any training program and the type of fitness produced depends on the specificity of fatigue as an after-effect of training.” Just making sure you’re whooped after a session in the gym doesn’t mean much when you’re trying to be good for pitch fifteen. This one is huge. Training for climbing needs to take into account the way fatigue is produced in the performance environment.
So we know that an athlete can switch between general and specific training phases. We know that most athletes like the specific training more. This is natural, they are climbers who train, not trainers who climb, after all. And beyond specificity there is simulation.
Simulation is mimicking as exactly as possible the performance environment in training. I am going to talk at length about that in a minute, but first want to step back and advocate for general training one last time. Let’s look at our training as if we were master swordsmiths. This is a simplistic analogy, but it’s one that keeps coming back to me as I train through my own programs. It makes the goal of the training stay clear in my mind.
General training is forging the sword. It’s heating the metal and hammering it into the shape of a blade. It’s the bulk of the work and it’s the part of the work where we see the most development into a tool that looks like a sword. Specific training begins when the blade is shaped like a sword. It’s honing. It’s making sure the edges are symmetrical and there are no nicks in the blade. It is sharpening the blade and it must be done over and over and better each time.
And then there is simulation. It is the finest sharpening step. It is where we remove tiny burs from the blade and put on the micro bevel. It is what makes a great sword better than a good one. To close the loop on this, the quality of our specific and simulation training both depend fully on how well the blade was forged in the first place.
Tom Randall says that simulations in climbing work so well that they can almost be considered cheating. What he is describing is our bodies’ ability to really learn to use a certain hold type or adapt to an angle of climbing or use a given technique. But the breadth of learning is limited to our simulation. The better bet for most of us, most of the time, is to just get better at lots of hard bouldering movements. Or get ALL of our fingers stronger. Etcetera.
Simulation should be done once you’re pretty fit, and have the specific fitness needed to avoid injury and execute an effective simulation session. When ramping up to simulation, you want to think in all the terms of specificity, then get micro-detailed.
Back in the early 1990s, the legendary Tony Yaniro was in the midst of his big comeback to climbing after a few years away from the sport. He was developing routes in Idaho and climbing across the American west. One of the routes he set his sights on was Scarface at Smith Rocks. Short on time to actually spend at Smith, he famously took aluminum foil and stuffed it into the pockets and edges on the route to later build molds of those holds. He measured the wall angle, and the distances between the holds. And then he went home and built the cruxes.
He trained at home, and practiced his simulation, and later came back and sent.
When we are simulating cruxes, we need to be as targeted as possible in our practice. Wall angle, hold size, what shoes we will be wearing, how fatigued we are when we get to the crux, how long it’s been since we could chalk, wearing the same clothes, or tape, or kneepads.
We need to do the simulations in sets, rest a lot, and take notes. Adjust and test. It’s best to ramp up for 3-4 weeks of progressively more focused efforts, and then give it a rest, whether we send or not. And we need to use this tactic sparingly.
Remember that it is the general and specific that gets us to the point that simulation works. If we look at a whole season, we might aim for general training 7 or 8 months of the year, while still doing some climbing and bouldering. Another 3 months of the year, we’d really dive into specific adaptations for goal climbs or to address our personal limiters. Maybe one month a year, a psyched climber might start working a simulation to “turbocharge” their chances of sending.