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Strength is fundamental to athletic performance. Many climbers get it, and they hit the weight room regularly. The problem with most weight training is that it only addresses one speed of movement, and most of us select bilateral exercises for most movements. By training in such a narrow path, we miss out on a lot of movements and speeds of contraction that can be really useful to climbers. In the standard Full Combination workout, we train five different facets of strength in five different movement patterns. The idea here is to break the habit of doing a single tempo in resistance training - which most of us adopt unconsciously. We train the same pace in squats and lunges and presses and pull-ups...and our muscles learn to work according to those rules. When we hit the rock, though, things change.

A few years back, I was asked during an interview how important running is to climbing performance. Somewhat reactively, I said, “Running is as important for climbing as climbing is for running.” Over the years, I’ve received more than a fair number of messages and emails about this statement. Although there are some exceptions, I stand firmly behind this sentiment.

Feel the burn. If you’ve ever worked to a pump that made you feel nauseous, sprinted so hard you had to lie down, or could taste the acid on your breath in a session, you know what maxing out the anaerobic lactic system feels like. In hard climbing, this is the system where we always end up right before we fail... and we make the mistake of trying to spend too much training time here because of it.

Movement is the basis of climbing up rocks, and in order to move, we need to supply our body with energy. Since any and all movement can occur at multiple speeds, in different directions, and over different durations, our bodies have evolved to handle supplying the energy for moving in several ways. In short, the body seeks to deliver Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP) - the body’s energy currency - to the muscles in order to keep them going, no matter what energy source is available at the time. Some ATP is created as needed, some is stored in areas outside the muscles, and some is stored in the muscle cells. The Anaerobic Alactic System (AA), also called the creatine phosphate system, or the ATP-CP system, deals primarily with the quick supply of ATP for fast and powerful movements. Because it relies primarily on the little ATP that is already present in the muscles, supplies run out fairly quickly, and fast and powerful movement drops off after just a few seconds. You can test this with a simple all-out sprint test; go outside, sprint down the street at full speed, and note how your movement slows after 5-8 seconds. Even the fastest in the world will slow in the final meters of the 100M sprint.

Too frequently, we try to over-categorize our training. Long-time athletes and coaches learned about training for climbing by reading about and practicing training that came from other sports. We all understood that strength and power and endurance were different entities, some of us going so far as to train all of these different qualities at different times of the year or in discrete sessions. Although most of our training is focused on the need for high levels of strength and stability in climbing, we understand that strength must be paired with skill, with capacity, and with power. Power is the primary physiological need of performance rock climbing. In sports-science terms, power is simply strength displayed with a speed component, or popularly viewed as strength x speed. Power is important in sports from heavy weightlifting to baseball, with all power movements falling somewhere along the force-velocity curve.

If you haven’t heard by now, the way you get better at doing harder things is to do harder things. If you are constantly playing it safe, building volume, and avoiding discomfort, well guess what - you’d better get used to doing the same routes over and over again. For those who want to advance, there are some obvious questions that come up and sometimes the answer isn’t so obvious. In training (and by training I mean working on the hangboard, weights, campus board, etc.) it is generally easier to quantify, and thus progress, training values.

Sports science defines endurance as the ability to sustain a given power output for a prescribed duration. This can take the form of high power outputs for relatively short periods - what we might call power endurance - or it can take the form of fairly low power output over greater durations, what climbers might call pure endurance or stamina. In Physiology of Exercise for Physical Education and Athletics, Herbert Devries laid out a encyclopedic framework for looking at the factors affecting endurance. I am going to list these below, and then we’ll look at how each can be manipulated, and by how much, for better climbing.

Foundation is the hard-earned strength you don’t want to pay for twice. Getting strong is a real chore and can take years and years. Staying strong, well, that’s the key to being able to do all the specific stuff. If you don’t have to worry about strength, conditioning is a snap. Foundation strength is what you do every week. It is not forced, it is coaxed. It is the kind of strength that you can’t fake, and it’s the kind you want to prioritize in every phase of your training.

In the old days, training “specifically” for climbing was almost unheard of. You either just climbed or you were one of the few climbers who trained in the weight room and did some door jamb pull-ups. Over the years, things changed. As climbs got hard and more physically challenging we sought out ways to beat the pump, many of which derived from the tricks of old time strongmen and gymnasts. Exercises such as dumbbell work, rope climbing, and even nail bending found their way into climbers’ routines. In the 1980s, climbing-specific training devices began to hit the market. The Metolius Simulator, various grip devices, and even rudimentary climbing walls appeared all over Europe and North America. By the end of the 1990s, we were all training on steep walls covered in plastic holds - converting our training into almost a perfect mimic of the sport.Knowing the value of specificity in training, defined as patterning training after the movement and metabolic demand, many of us plunged full-on into “climbing to climb” as our sole form of training. Although this is a general rule that represents a good step forward in the sport, I think we may have stepped too far.

As a young climber, I would frequently talk to my parents about climbing. They were genuinely interested, and my father even did a few climbs with me early on. They wanted to know enough to be sure I was safe and careful, but didn’t need to know more. As I improved, I started to talk route beta and movement with them and I usually missed the blank stares when it came to jargon they didn’t understand. They had no idea what a gaston was or a smear or a flash pump...and didn’t really care to know. It didn’t stop me from sharing, though.Years on, I started teaching training techniques to athletes and although many of them understood the language of fitness, many did not. It wasn’t until the blank stares I’d remembered from my youth registered that I realized that we weren’t speaking the same language. Over the past few years, a large portion of the questions I get about my books have to do with simple notation. The error is mine - assuming someone understands how to read a workout or a plan is the worst first mistake. If they can’t even read the thing, how can we expect them to do it?

Training is the thing that makes you stronger. Warming up right is the thing that makes training work. For most of us, warming up has an intuitive "feel" to it - we start easy, and after a few minutes of gentle activity we feel ready to go. Younger athletes do, and need, less warming up. Older athletes sometimes joke that warming up is all they do. The warm-up functions as a way to get the body working right for hard activity. It increases blood flow and respiration, runs the body temperature up a couple of notches, and gets the mind in the right place. In climbing we usually just climb to get going, but there is probably a better and more effective ways to prime yourself for a good session. The warm-up should be tailored to the requirements of the session.