by Steve Bechtel
If there is one thing in training that I have become obsessed with over the years, it is trying to make sure that sessions are practical and effective. It's easy to write something up on a spreadsheet, build it out with ideal rest periods, exercise sequences, and a variety of movements... but when a workout doesn't get done because it is too long or too complicated, it is a useless session.
It's not just being busy either. A lot of the resistance to getting sessions done occurs because the sessions are just too tiring to do week after week. If an athlete can't do a prescribed session over the course of four to six weeks with slow progress, it's likely that there are improvements being left on the table. As my schedule has become busier and my energy has gone down, I have found that combining strength training in the weight room and bouldering into one session has been extraordinarily effective.
And it's not just for me, the older climber. It seems like I am having great results with climbers across the board who benefit more from full rest days placed in between intensive strength and explosive days. I have a big love of climbing on my tension board too, and I have respect for what the weights can do for me. It's because of this that I started designing strength and boulder combo sessions. Below are five examples that I have built out for myself and athletes over the past few months.
1 Problem + 1 Set of Strength on a 5 Minute Clock
This one is fairly simple: Set a rolling timer for 5 minutes, and then plan on doing one problem and one strength set at the beginning of each 5-minute period.
You can warm up into this one. For example, your first 5-minute period might be a V1 followed by a set of deadlifts at a reasonable weight. The next period would find you do a harder boulder problem and add some load to the deadlift.
Once you have completed 3-5 sets of a particular exercise, then you would switch to a different exercise to combine with the following 3-5 boulder problems.
For most climbers, somewhere around 15 to 20 boulder problems and 3 to 4 exercises is the appropriate starting volume.
It's important to remember that you don't need to work at max loads on the strength sets and to prioritize recovery for the bouldering. If you start to get a sense of fatigue as you come back to the bouldering, it is wise to extend your timer to 6 or 7 minutes.
5 Boulders on a 3 Minute Clock + a “3x3”
In this session, we will do more bouldering without taking a break in between for the strength work. I like to set a 3-minute rolling clock for this one and do five boulders, which takes 15 minutes. After that, take off the shoes, take a short break, and then we'll go do a group of three strength exercises for three sets each as a small circuit. I like to keep this in the 3-8 rep range and normally start with an upper body, lower body, and core exercise as your primary lifts. This three-by-three circuit should take around 15 minutes as well. DB Row / Squat / Ankles To Bar is a good starting point.
After you've completed the strength, you can rest briefly and then go back to doing five more boulders on your rolling 3-minute clock. Once you complete these boulders, pick another group of three exercises and do another three-by-three circuit.
The 15 minutes of bouldering and 15 minutes of strength is a good beginning guideline, but is not essential to the quality of the work. Again, since this is strength-building, feel free to add as much rest as is necessary to feel fresh at the beginning of each effort.
Since each block of boulders and resistance training takes 30 to 35 minutes, most athletes are comfortable doing 2-3 full rounds, for an hour to hour and a half session.
For most of us, going longer than this is not necessary, since that tends to develop more capacity than strength and power.
15 Boulders on a 4 Minute Clock + 15 Minutes of Density
This session is less combined as it is sequential. What I mean by that is we will get warmed up and then do 15 boulders on a rolling 4-minute clock. Like I said, the rolling clock needs to be individualized for you. If you need more than 4 minutes, then feel free to adjust to a longer time. This rolling 4-minute clock tends to work pretty well for most climbers at first, and obviously takes one hour. After an hour of bouldering, I like to take a 5- to 10-minute break and then do a specific kind of circuit, which is called a “density circuit.” In this circuit, you will set a clock for just 15 minutes and then work through three exercises, resting as needed for those 15 minutes.
A good starting point is to pick one upper body, one lower body, and one core exercise, and choose a load that you could do for about 10 reps for each one. When you do the work, however, we're going to plan to do just 4 to 6 reps of each exercise. This will increase the total number of sets that you are able to do (you won’t need as much rest) and keep you from getting quite as much neurological fatigue after the bouldering session.
In a density strength session like this, the goal is not necessarily to push the muscles to absolute fatigue, but to hold the work level high since we are only going to be training strength for 15 minutes.
Boulder Session + One Lift A Day
A variation on the structure above: we can do the full boulder session for an hour to 90 minutes and then stop and rest for 5 to 10. Instead of doing a density circuit of several exercises, we take a page from Dan John's book and do just one strength exercise for several sets.
If you choose to do this sort of session, the single strength exercise you pick should be one that delivers high value, such as a big multi-joint movement like an overhead press, a deadlift, turkish get-up, or a squat variation. For most climbers, 3-5 sets of 3-5 reps of this one lift is plenty of volume.
If you are structuring the Boulder +one lift a day session into your week, it is recommended that you pick two different lifts to drop into the schedule rather than repeating the same lift twice each week. I have had good success with deadlifts on day one and presses on day two, as well as the combination of squats on day one and rows or pull-ups on day two.
AM Strength / PM Boulder
The final variation I'm going to recommend is the Morning Strength and Evening Boulder Split. When we do a split in training, it's always to reduce fatigue rather than to allow for extra volume to be accumulated. I like to ask my athletes to do the strength work in the morning, even though they are prioritizing the bouldering. The reason we do this is to keep people from going too hard on the strength. If we have an evening bouldering session coming up, we aren't going to get crazy and try to hit a bunch of maxes in the weight room that morning.
In this variation, we try to keep the strength work somewhere between 40 and 60 total minutes in the morning, with a variety of exercises and all of them done in that same strength zone of 3 to 8 repetitions, depending on the exercise.
When we come in for the evening session, we do a nice, solid warm-up and then a normal boulder session. Simply be aware of markers of fatigue that are held over from that morning. If the morning session took too much out of you, you want to back off on your total strength volume in the next session.
Weekly Programming
One of the sneaky ways that we tend to plateau is by doing the same volume and intensity across several sessions. Many of my athletes will boulder in the gym two days a week, along with their weight training, and then get out for a climbing day on the weekend. If this is similar to your schedule, you might consider doing the same exact volume of bouldering that you have been doing, but increase the duration of the first session by 20% and reduce the duration of the second session by 20%.
This has a good effect in jump-starting adaptation for many athletes, and it can really make you feel fresh a couple of days after that lower-volume session. Lots of climbers freak out about doing sessions that don't exhaust them, but after a few weeks of success here, you might start changing your mind.
Remember, the goal of strength training and bouldering is not to create exhaustion but to help us get stronger and more powerful. Those two aims are achieved by creating an opportunity for higher intensity and lower fatigue in the training sessions.