Climb Strong

Q+A: Forced Rest Periods

Steve Bechtel — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:45:34 +0000

Steve,

I recently injured a tendon in the end of left middle finger (the A5 pulley I believe). At first I was bummed. Then I realized, I haven’t taken a substantial break from climbing in a couple years. I have developed stark muscle imbalances and instabilities. My elbows have minor tendinitis, shoulders do not have great ROM and occasionally click, etc, etc. Due to the nature of this injury, I feel like I can use this time wisely and help my body recover from the abuse of “overtraining” and climbing without sufficient rest periods.

What are some exercises one can do to strengthen antagonist climbing muscles and are there any exercises that will prep my body for when I begin my new training cycle? Do you have any ideas on how best to use this “forced rest period”?Thanks,
Graham

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Hi Graham,

It’s going to be of great benefit that you look at this rest like a good thing. Injuries are like the girls you liked back in school; if you flirt with them long enough you’re likely to get them. There are two pieces of advice I keep in mind with all my athletes. The first is that unless you fell down or got hit by something, it’s an overuse injury. The second is one I got from a physical therapist friend, who said the 100% best way to get over an injury is to stop doing what you did to get injured. It’s surprising how hard that can be.

Longer breaks from climbing can be very good for your future performance. There are several highly accomplished climbers that take 2-3 full months off from climbing each year. I’m not recommending quite that much, but a 1-month hiatus each year can do wonders not only for your body, but your mind.

I think the first priority in this time off is to rest. Eat enough, get some sleep, maybe even do some other sports. If you’re interested in training during your time away from the rock, then make sure you have a clear and measurable goal to aim for with this training phase.

In your case, I’d build a training plan to strengthen your antagonists and shoulder girdle. Along with this, I’d plan 20-30 minutes within each training session to work on mobility. An example workout:

Alternating Dumbbell Shoulder Press 3 sets of 5 reps, combined with 45-60 seconds of “Wall Slides” for shoulder mobility.

T-Push-Ups 3-4 sets of 5-8 reps on each side combined with PVC shoulder “dislocates” for 45-60 seconds.

Inchworms for 3 sets of 5 to 8, combined with 10-12 “Ankles to Bar”, our favorite non-climbing exercise.

Want to know what you should be able to do? The experts say a well-balanced athlete should be able to chin (underhand pull-up) the same weight that they bench press. I don’t know about you, but I see many climbers that can do a 1-arm chin…do you think they can bench 2x bodyweight? Most “football dudes” are imbalanced the other way. I’m not sure bench pressing is a recipe for shoulder health, but bridging that gap is probably a place to start.

I’d also recommend going snowboarding, playing basketball, or doing some MMA…just something different. Although I love cycling and running, the last thing most people need to do is put in more volume going in a straight line.

And finally, mobility. Mobility, or functional flexibility, in the hips and shoulders is paramount to good health, not just climbing performance. Stretching is hard to motivate for. We don’t see measurable results and we don’t feel “worked” afterward. This might be the single best thing we can do for a longer climbing career, and it’s unlikely that it will hurt your fingers.

Filed under: Tissue Work, Flexibility and Rehab

Leg Strength as a Limiting Factor, Revisited

Steve Bechtel — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:15:04 +0000

This is a re-post of my article “Leg Strength as a Limiting Factor” published in 2009. I’ve updated it with a few more ideas and a couple of videos that better illustrate the exercises.

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Sure, your fingers peel off the hold and you fall, but is it always the fingers’ fault? How strong must your fingers get before they are “strong enough?” For novice climbers, finger strength and arm strength are real and legitimate limiters, often holding the climber at a low level of performance until these facets of strength catch-up with the rest of the body. For most intermediate and advanced climbers, finger strength is pretty well developed. The fact of the matter is that until the angle of the climb hits horizontal, you’re doing the heavy lifting with your legs. At least you should be…

See, your legs are much stronger than your arms; in an average person, the legs are able to push roughly four times as much weight as the arms can pull. What’s more, the legs have an even better advantage when it comes to endurance. Give this a try, just so you see where I’m coming from: See how many pull-ups you can do in five minutes and compare that to the number of unloaded squats you can do. This should give you a good approximation of the endurance ratio. If you’d like to test out the strength ratio, switch over to one-leg step-ups on a bench or step a little higher than knee-level. See how many of these you can do with just one leg. Then go ahead and do as many one-arm pull-ups you can do in the same amount of time.

It’s a really rare climber that can do more with his arms than with his legs in either one of these tests. We all know the legs are strongest, but are they strong enough? Could you stand up right now, put your foot up on the desk, and stand on the desk using only that leg? How many times have you placed a foot on a good edge (or ledge) and still had to pull like crazy to stand up on it? The legs are capable of doing lots of work, so let’s make sure they are doing everything possible to save that precious and limited arm strength.

A good place to start is with good old squats and step-ups. If you’re one of the many climbers that get stuck in a weight room for much of their training you can do these exercises there. Since we never use both legs in the same plane and at the same load in the real world of climbing, I prefer the following unilateral exercises for building leg strength:

Step-up

One-Leg Squat

Rear-Foot Elevated (Bulgarian) Split Squat

For building strength, you’re going to want to stick with low reps and full ranges of motion. Take your time working up to heavy weight if you’re not used to training like this.

Secondarily, we can look at the strength of the lower leg, foot, and “posterior chain,” most notably the hamstrings.

For strengthening these assistance groups, we use similar loads, but different exercises.

Calves and hamstrings don’t see a lot of concentric movement in climbing, but they do see some. For these groups we aim for slow, controlled repetitions or even static holds.

The exercises:

Calf Raise (+Calf Raise with hold)

Deadlift (or Romanian Deadlift)

Suspended Leg Curl

How often should you do these? My quick answer is only often enough to continue to progress. If you need it in terms of days per week, I’d say 2-3. How many sets? A couple. How many reps? Start with 4-6 per leg. Your best strength gains will come with lower reps, but if you haven’t been training strength, you’ll want to spend some time learning the movements under lighter loads.

Once you’re in the groove getting strong, start applying it to climbing. Try to think about how to use the big strong legs you’ve found to take weight off your hands. One of the most valuable things I’ve ever done in my climbing is to watch how my wife does a move and to then try and replicate it. Although she is very strong, she doesn’t tend to waste this energy when she can be more economical by using her legs. Just this trick alone led me to my first major step up the grades in over ten years.

It takes about twenty sessions of climbing with “use your legs” in the front of your mind before you can do it without thinking. Once you reach this point, you’re better already and can move on to fixing other weak links, and I’m willing to bet it’s not weak fingers.

Filed under: Strength Training

Strength Training for Rock Climbing, part two

Steve Bechtel — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 12:41:03 +0000

In part one of this article, I talked about why many climbers should consider supplementing their climbing-specific training with resistance training. In this article, I’ll talk about how. First, let me say that I think resistance training is terribly misunderstood and misused by climbers. When we talk about strength training with weights we are not talking about bodybuilding and we are not talking about conditioning. When we train for strength we want to:

address sport-specific motor patterns
address sport-specific metabolic pathways
progressively overload the system to cause an improvement in force generation
avoid doing anything that will negatively affect our climbing

There are myriad popular group training programs available today that utilize many of the strength training exercises you’ll end up using as a climber. While the exercises might be the same, the framework in which they are used differs. Understand that developing a high level of non-specific work capacity will not help most climbers. This kind of workout may be appropriate for novices who are unfit and in need of general conditioning and for expert-level climbers that have maximally developed their climbing technique. For most of us, the damage done by random, high-intensity “workout of the day” efforts is huge; you might not get injured, but you are likely diminishing your climbing ability.

If you elect to do training directed by someone else, check their qualifications. A weekend seminar does not make a good strength coach. Ask some questions. Make sure the training they are asking you to do is tailored to your goals. Ask them to explain how their program is going to help you develop strength specific to rock climbing. Anyone who talks “elite fitness” or scalability within a general plan as a method of improving your climbing should be fired immediately.

OK. End of rant.

Getting back to specificity, we like to use movement patterns similar to what a climber might experience on the rock. This is called motor specificity. We also want to use exercise durations, muscle actions, and loads that lead toward our end goal of strength. This is called metabolic specificity. Exercises can be either motor specific, metabolic specific, or both. The more of both you have, the better.

To develop appropriate strength for climbing we want to use complex, multi-joint movements at loads high enough that the body will adapt by getting stronger rather than getting bigger. Remember that there is a huge misconception that heavy training leads to bulk. Not so. It is high-volume, medium-load training that is most effective for building size (i.e. 8 sets of 12 reps).

There is a clear and incontrovertible relationship between increases in body mass and a reduction in relative strength. Since climbing is all about relative strength, we need to be obsessive about staying as light as possible. Once we get you good and strong, I will put together an article series on fat loss and ideal body composition, so we can work on the other side of the equation.

I mentioned progressive overload. Don’t skimp on this. Strength training does not happen one session at a time, but rather over a prolonged period of weeks and months. The more advanced you are in your athleticism, the longer it will take you to see an improvement in strength.

As a general outline, our athletes train strength on this kind of schedule:

Off-Season (several weeks out from performance climbing): 3 sessions per week, 3-5 exercises, 4 sets each, 1-4 reps (working at 85%+ of 1RM)

Pre-Season: (in the 4-6 weeks before a “peaking” time): 2 sessions per week, 2-4 exercises, 3 sets each, 1-4 reps (85%+ of 1RM)

In-Season: (during a peak climbing time): 1-2 sessions per week, 2-4 exercises, 2-3 sets each, 1-6 reps (75%+ of 1RM)

Often, these sessions take less than 30 minutes, which seems like a very short time to spend in the gym. We usually combine this training with a climbing gym session, as we have both a weight room and a climbing gym in our facility. I understand that this is not always the case.

We pick the specific exercises based on movement patterns rather than “muscle groups.” In general, we opt for ground-based exercises using free weights. When setting up the workouts, we always look for the bare minimum of weight-training time that will still yield results; unless you love weightlifting, gym time runs counter to what most climbers really enjoy.

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The movements we pick are pretty simple. We look for 4 basic patterns in each of our sessions:

1. Upper Body Pull – This is usually a rowing motion. Pull-up type exercises also qualify for this group, but I think they are inferior to the row for rock climbers.

2. Upper Body Press – This can be a bench press, push-up variation, dip, or an overhead press.

3. Lower Body Multi-Joint – For climbers we like lunges, step-ups, and single-leg squats. Bilateral exercises such as squats and front squats are fine, but harder to do correctly and are somewhat less specific; you very rarely press with both legs on the same plane at the same time.

4. Hip Hinge or Posterior Chain – These exercises help balance the strength of the quadriceps, as well as developing the strength of the low back and hamstrings. We like deadlifts, Romanian deadlifts, and even some kettlebell movements for this part of the workout.

To make things efficient, we set up a typical 4-exercise session, doing bi-sets (supersets). An example:

Do 3 sets each of the following pairs:

A1: 4-6 1-arm inverted rows
A2: 4-6 1-leg squat

B1: 4-6 dumbbell bench press

B2: 2-4 deadlift

Rest 30-60 seconds between exercises and 2-3 minutes between groups.

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When we set up strength programs, we are looking at what gives us the greatest return per unit of training time. Many people look at a plan like the one I’ve listed above and comment that it looks easy, that the sets are too short to be very hard. Any climber that’s tried a V-double-digit boulder problem knows that the “short=easy” mentality is flawed.

The training ideas listed above are designed to help climbers create greater full-body strength, which can then lead to better technical execution of specific climbing movements. This style of session is not a replacement for climbing movements.

Filed under: Articles

Strength Training for Rock Climbing, part one

Steve Bechtel — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:47:11 +0000

Although rock climbing is my favorite sport, my day job is that of a strength coach. At our facility, we train athletes of all walks of life, and the majority of what we do is strength training with weights. We also have a climbing gym at our facility, and we often get questions from our climbers on how much, if any, resistance training they should be doing.

For the most part, I am reluctant to prescribe weight training for climbers. I think its too easy to confuse a hard workout with effective training. What’s more, adding strength to poor technique is simply a way of reinforcing that poor technique. With that being said, I will now outline which climbers should do supplemental strength training, when they should do it, and I will outline some basic programs.

Looking at other sports can be a useful tool when it comes to knowing how to train climbers. The problem is, many of us look to the wrong sports for comparison. Climbing is nothing like triathlon or distance running; it’s more like wrestling or gymnastics or even short-distance running. One of the most important lessons we can take from elite performers in sport similar to rock climbing is that there are no top-level athletes that simply use their sport as conditioning for that sport. In this regard, rock climbers that don’t do supplemental strength training are about 100 years behind elite-level athletes in similar sports. This is clearly evidenced by the fact that the best climbers of today can still perform at a world class level in multiple disciplines.

Understanding that a maximum level of strength and power cannot be maintained even by doing the most intense climbing does not contradict the principle of specificity, but underscores it. The reason we do strength training outside the arena of climbing is because climbing’s multi-faceted nature doesn’t allow for sufficient focus on strength alone. When high levels of the sport are reached, training must become “partitioned” in order for the climber to advance. The hardest moves on rock simply cannot be correctly executed without sufficient strength.

This is especially true for any climber who is not an under-30 male. Because of the hormonal profile of athletes outside this group, we recognize an even greater need to increase and maintain strength that cannot be achieved at the crag.

The mechanism by which supplemental strength training helps climbers should be understood. The basic idea is that for any given move, a stronger climber will use a smaller percentage of his maximum strength, and will thus be better able to climb with technical correctness and will be more resistant to fatigue. Elite-level climbers rely heavily on ATP-CP energy systems, the energy that is present and most-readily available for muscular work. These systems are best developed by increasing strength. Elite level climbers don’t rely as heavily on glycolytic (lactic) metabolism, which allows for quicker recovery at rest stances and better day-long endurance. (This is a critical distinction and will warrant an entire post in itself.)

How much supplemental strength training is appropriate? Depending on the time of year, I like to see my climbers do anywhere between 2 and 4 short strength sessions per week. During a preparatory or off-season period, building strength is a priority. Many athletes train strength at this time, only to see decreases in strength as they move into a peaking or performance phase. With this in mind, we plan on maintaining some level of strength and power training throughout the year.

Training that increases muscle size and strength can be useful, but building maximum strength for minimum size is the most important training goal. By careful planning, this is fairly straightforward. By avoiding hypertrophy, we create an increase in relative strength, making for a more efficient climber.

To make this a bit more clear, we can look at it this way:

Absolute Strength is the maximum possible force a muscle could generate. Maximal Strength is the maximum force that can be initiated in athletic movements, usually 70-90% of absolute strength. Finally, the Strength Deficit is the difference between the two. Strength training (some climbers are fond of calling this recruitment training) is the method of reducing this deficit.

How do we train strength? We train with compound (multi-joint) movements through a full range-of-motion. We work at very high loads (no toning and fiming here!). Most important, we train strength as an adjunct to developing the skills of the athlete.

In part two of this article, I will cover the specifics of planning and implementing strength training in a climbing program. I will also go over the weight-training exercises best used by climbers, and why. Finally, we will review both why and how climbers must both increase strength and avoid any change in mass.

Filed under: Strength Training

Fear, Fatigue and the Inability to Learn

Steve Bechtel — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 04:05:42 +0000

As much as we might like to train, improving at climbing takes a lot more than being strong. I like to make fun of people that train to a point they can do a 1-arm pull-up but still can’t climb 5.13. It’s like putting a lift kit on a Hyundai.

Climbing is about coordination, control, rational thought, athleticism, mobility, and problem solving. It is a magical soup with a thousand ingredients and no fixed recipe. But no matter what you put into it, the learning curve starts steep and gets steeper every step of the way.

When you boil it down, climbing is about motor learning. And motor learning is (I quote this from memory…I had to memorize it for a class in college, and it’s the only thing I remember from the class) the relatively permanent change in behavior potential that occurs as a result of reinforced practice.

Whether it’s holding a small edge, placing a foot, fiddling in some small gear, or hucking a dyno, our ability to do the thing depends on learning motor patterns. This is the subject of many books, and I am far from qualified to write about it. What I will write about, though, is two major inhibitors of motor learning that climbers face every day.

1. Fear. Fear is a normal part of climbing. Everyone feels it. If you’ve got problems with fear (manifested in an extreme fondness of the toprope, or a need to stick to climbs you’ve got wired) you need to read " target="_blank">Maximum Climbing or the " target="_blank">Rock Warrior’s Way. If you get rattled occasionally, you’re normal, and should think about this: high levels of anxiety inhibit motor learning. This means that you’ll do better learning movement bouldering or sport climbing than, say, onsighting on grit. Don’t let this advice make you think I am advocating toproping. I am not. Toproping is to climbing as hiring a prostitute is to sex. Sure you end up the same place, but you feel so dirty afterward…

2. Fatigue. Tired equals sloppy. We’ve all been there: pumped at the end of a route and right when you need your perfect technique, you feel like you’re climbing in clown shoes and mittens. It happens, but this should be a rare occurrence. Problem is, many of us train for endurance by pushing right to that point time and again. And we learn sloppy movement. And we learn that when we get pumped, the game is over. And we learn to be too dynamic. And we wonder why we continue to suck…

If you want to get good, keep learning. Learning plateaus pretty quick if you don’t keep after it, so keep after it. Training is nothing if your movement is no good. Learn where you can get a lot of learning in. Don’t be afraid, and don’t get tired.

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One other thing. We just started a Facebook page to announce the updates and new articles.

Filed under: Training Articles

The Simplest Climbing Training Plan

Steve Bechtel — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 13:31:21 +0000

For the last few months, almost all of my emails from the climbers on this site have been about periodization (periodisation if you speak real English, but you have to admit that Zs are cooler than Ss) and planning. In all these conversations and in studying the stuff for the past several years, I figured out two things.

1. Organized training plans always work better than random workouts.

2. Most people would rather not follow an organized training plan.

With these two truths in mind, I present a real-world training plan that really works. Many dedicated climbing training enthusiasts would rather stick to a traditional “linear” periodized plan as popularized by Bompa* and Matveyev. There are clearly defined phases where one works on strength, hypertrophy, power, etcetera. It’s very organized,but maybe too organized – my suspicion is that about one in a hundred climbers could actually follow such a plan completely. This plan is not that organized, and that’s why it’s better.

Most climbers fall on the other side of the fence. They’re the boulder-until-tired-and-repeat type. This isn’t the worst kind of training for climbing, but it fails these climbers in a couple of major ways. My plan fixes these problems.

Taking a step back into the periodization stuff, remember that linear periodization is based on focusing one’s efforts on one or two facets of training for a short time (usually a month to 6 weeks) and then switching to another facet. More popular, and probably easier to follow is a non-linear plan, where one alternates between several different styles of workouts on a weekly basis.

Research shows:

That repeated overload with similar stressors causes adaptation.
That adaptation to these stressors plateaus after 3-4 weeks.
That exposure to too many stressors suppresses adaptation.

Are you ready? The simplest (effective) training plan I could come up with goes like this: Train three weeks of intensity-focused bouldering, followed by three weeks of volume-focused strength-endurance climbing. Repeat.

The bouldering is progressed by adding harder problems or more, hard problems with each training session. The strength-endurance (call it power-endurance if you want) is progressed by adding more total medium-difficulty mileage to a fixed time-frame. This is represented by a simple formula: number of problems (or links) x difficulty of problems / minutes in workout. This number should increase slightly each workout for all 3 weeks before switching back to intensity-focused training.

Example:

Intensity Phase:

Workout 1: V4 V5 V5 V4 V5 V4 V6 V4 V5 (total v-sum:42, avg. difficulty:4.5)

Workout 2: V5 V5 V5 V4 V5 V4 V6 V4 V6 (total v-sum:44, avg. difficulty:4.9)

Workout 3: V5 V6 V5 V4 V5 V4 V6 V4 V5 V6 (total v-sum:50, avg. difficulty:5.0)

Workout 4: V5 V6 V5 V4 V6 V4 V6 V4 V5 V6 (total v-sum:51, avg. difficulty:5.1)

Workout 5: V5 V6 V7 V4 V5 V4 V6 V4 V5 V7 (total v-sum:53, avg. difficulty:5.3)

Workout 6: V6 V6 V5 V5 V6 V7 V6 V7 (total v-sum:48, avg. difficulty:5.3)

Workout 7: V6 V6 V5 V5 V6 V7 V6 V7 V6 (total v-sum:54, avg. difficulty:5.4)

Strength-Endurance Phase (using 2 sets of 4x4s) :
Workout 1: V3-V3-V4-V4 / V3-V3-V4-V4 (48 minutes). Total difficulty (28/48)=.583
Workout 2: V3-V4-V4-V4 / V3-V4-V4-V4 (46 minutes). Total difficulty (30/46)=.652
Workout 3: V3-V4-V4-V4 / V3-V4-V4-V4 (44 minutes). Total difficulty (30/44)=.681
Workout 4: V3-V4-V4-V5 / V3-V4-V4-V5 (46 minutes). Total difficulty (32/46)=.695
Workout 5: V3-V4-V4-V5 / V3-V4-V4-V5 (43 minutes). Total difficulty (32/43)=.744
Workout 6: V3-V4-V4-V5 / V3-V4-V4-V5 (41 minutes). Total difficulty (32/41)=.780
Workout 7: V3-V4-V4-V5 / V3-V4-V4-V5 (40 minutes). Total difficulty (32/40)=.800
Workout 8: V4-V4-V4-V5 / V4-V4-V4-V5 (42 minutes). Total difficulty (34/42)=.809

That’s it. You don’t even have to keep this kind of notes – just go hard in one direction 3 weeks, then switch. Don’t let yourself try to over-control this one. How many days should I train? It doesn’t matter. Push yourself. How does “real” climbing fit in? Whenever and wherever you’d like. What about ARCing, and hangboarding? Don’t waste your time with the former and put the latter in with your other sessions if you’d like.

Keep it simple. Overload the system, then switch the type of overload before you go “flat.”

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*Ironically, although Bompa’s book Periodization-5th Edition: Theory and Methodology of Training contains 12 pages of citations, none of the studies actually look at the effectiveness of traditional linear periodization.

Filed under: Training Plans for Climbing

Pull-Ups Are A Waste of Time

Steve Bechtel — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 16:15:24 +0000

There’s nothing like a title almost everyone disagrees with. It’s a sure-fire way to make sure people at least look at the article. So, now that you’re looking, I’ll be more clear. If you’re interested in actually improving your climbing ability, you’d be wasting your time if pull-ups were a major part of your training. It’s not that the movement is inherently bad, it’s just not specific enough to what we do on the rock to justify spending valuable training time developing it.

Think about it a little. The pull-up is biomechanically a “vertical pull” movement, one where resistance is encountered along the same vector as the vertical torso. When this vector is encountered in the real world it’s on vertical or slightly less-than-vertical rock, a situation where (if you’re any good at all) the much stronger legs are doing most of the work.

When rock gets steep (and routes generally more difficult), the vertical pull is vastly diminished. Rather, the movement of the arms becomes that of a horizontal pull, or a rowing motion. Force is directed perpendicular to the torso, and the use of the legs is somewhat compromised. In climbing, this scenario plays out multiple times on each route. Try this: set up an Olympic bar in a rack and do a horizontal pull-up a.k.a. inverted row (like in the photo below, except with your shirt on. When you get to the top, release one hand and see if you can hold the position. If you can’t…well that’s something you can work on that really will help your climbing.

Now, think about this: Its rarely the raw strength of the lat and arm that fails a climber anyway. When a climber can’t pull a move, more likely than not its a neurological inhibition of that muscle group, which can’t be overcome no matter how strong your pull is. Since the nervous system will only “allow” the body to work up to the strength of its weakest link, the hand (and the hold it is using) determines how much you can actually pull.

Now lets talk about time. Unless you’re some rich trust-funder sponsored by The North Face, you probably don’t have a lot of it. With a sport as complex as rock climbing, building raw strength in an arguably non-specific movement should be considered a waste of this resource. Outside of general work capacity training, then, we can see that running, weight lifting, and the like are not good uses of our training time. Climbing is a performance sport and the only measure we really use is how well a climber performs. It’s not like we’re all sitting around the crag watching some dude flail on “The Madness” thinking, “Wow, he sucks at climbing, but you should see him do kipping pull-ups.”

I’d venture to say that anyone who even talks about how many pull-ups they do is trying to cover up for knowing their climbing is weak in a major area. It’s like the crappy father who always counters with a comment on how much money he makes…lots of dough, still a shitty dad.

The advice always goes the same way: assess what’s really holding you back, and get after it. 999 times out of a thousand, pull-ups won’t be on the list.

Filed under: Training Articles

More on Periodization

Steve Bechtel — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 12:00:10 +0000

I remember the first time I learned about classic periodization plans. The whole idea of planning out my training according to easily defined phases which would lead to spectacular results appealed to the eternally plateaued climber in me much the way x-ray specs appealed to me as a nine-year-old. I tried a few different variations on the idea (which takes many, many months) and saw decent results. Decent, but not spectacular. And although the appeal of switching from strength to power to endurance leading up to my few glorious weeks as a superhuman was strong, my desire to climb better, more often, was stronger.

In 2002, I wrote an article on periodization for Climbing Magazine (as a side note, it’s the first of three training articles I wrote for them and the only one they ever bothered to pay for. I know, I’m an idiot). Don’t bother looking up the article…the model I suggested doesn’t work all that well. Udo Neumann’s classic example is much better. I’ll argue, though, that it’s still not the best we can do.

One of the reasons classical models of periodization are attractive is that they make intuitive sense. Start with a broad base of fitness, hone it to a sharp peak, and you’ll improve. The really cool thing is that they work; almost every training plan, followed to its end, results in positive changes. But for advanced athletes, and almost every climber that decides its time to start training should be pretty advanced, classical models start to fall apart.

For those unfamiliar with the classic model, it features a shift from general physical preparation to specific training while moving from low intensity to high intensity and from simple movements to complex movements. Visually, it might look like one of the graphics below:

And that’s when we started seeing problems…

The Problems with the Model

1. Volume (or the lack thereof): As a climber and a coach, I couldn’t figure out how to tell myself or athletes to increase their intensity and reduce the amount of time climbing, all in the hope that hard redpoints would result. The massive reduction in volume (explained by proponents of classic models as needed to decrease CNS [central nervous system] fatigue) ran counter to what I saw every day at the crag. In the real world, more volume, or at least sustained volume, was needed to perform better.

In a classic model, one trends from high-volume / low-intensity training to low-volume / high-intensity training. In many classic models, we’re looking at a total drop in training time of up to 90%…do any of us really want to go from doing 3000 moves per week to just 300? These reductions in load are so severe the climber faces a real problem with fitness in order to develop maximum power and strength.

One thing we can see in almost every elite-level climber is that they put in the time…a lot of it. Perfection of movement requires a lot of movement, and at a high standard. Climbing loads of 5.10 will not translate well to climbing 5.14. A top-level climber (or one who has been hovering at the same grade for a long time) will not receive enough practice at high levels with just one or two months’ work a year near his limit. Clearly, finding a way to spend longer cycles at high-levels of load are critical to one’s progress. Elite climbers in our sport don’t waste very much time at all with anything except hard climbing.

2. Retention of Fitness: One of the great things about concentrated training, i.e. working exclusively on one facet of your fitness for 4-6 weeks, is that you see substantial improvements. The big drawback? When you stop working on that facet and move on to the next, your fitness in that facet gradually declines. In general, the more highly-intense the exercise, the more quickly the gains are lost. This is of paramount importance to climbers and should be a major concern in any training plan.

If a climber performs maximum power training only twice per year for, say, 4 weeks, there is every indication that power gains made during these brief periods will be completely lost by the next phase, resulting in a zero-gain season to season.

3. The Curve: By the curve, I mean the very rapid increase in intensity that is prescribed in the classic plan. Although some ground-based sports such as soccer or baseball might allow one to intensify their training this rapidly, the demands of climbing most definitely will not. Since much of the prescribed training in a classic build-up is low to medium intensity, we’re asking climbers to start pulling on little holds a whole bunch once the intensity phase is reached near the end of the training cycle. Again, going from big holds, close together, on less-steep walls doesn’t prepare us well for the opposite. Two or three rapid increases in intensity per year are almost certainly a recipe for injury, and likely will lead to CNS overload, which leads us to a shorter performance window.

A beginning climber would probably benefit from this model, having a need for both strength and volume, and having a lot of room to “grow.” But when you’re a veteran and your multi-season goal is an advance of one letter grade, you’re wasting serious time hanging out on the easy stuff. If an athlete is capable of climbing 5.12s without needing a terribly long time to recover, they’re wasting time climbing lots of 5.10 and 5.11 routes.

4. Injury: Climbing stresses the delicate tissues of the hand and upper extremities in ways that no Eastern Bloc weightlifting coach could have possibly comprehended when the classic models were first planned. The intensification curve at the end of these sequences is too much for the small muscles of the forearm to handle, let alone the tendons of the fingers and hand. We’ve got to understand that there is a disconnect between the intent of the model and the way climbers apply it. Follow Bompa’s model, and you’ll either undertrain or get hurt.

I know, there’s nothing worse than somebody telling you what’s wrong with a plan and then leaving you hanging. What you’ve got to do is make logical decisions when it comes to your plan. This is the second in a series we’re putting together on planning training seasons, so look for better information on what does work in the next articles.

It’s imperative that climbers realize the magic in training is not the plan but the execution, not what happens on Excel, but how hard they can push when it comes time to push.

Filed under: Planning and Periodization

Accumulation, Intensification, and Transformation

Steve Bechtel — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 12:00:49 +0000

Sometimes it seems like climbers are all either engineers or hippies. Some of them love the intellectual side of the sport, assessment, risk calculation, and managing their performance on spreadsheets. Others love the freedom, the connection to the earth, movement. Highly regulated, periodized training plans rarely are attractive to the latter. Maybe, just maybe, all of us would benefit more from loosening up on the controls and simplifying our training a bit.

It is indisputable that cycling one’s training works. Just how rigid the cycle has to be is the only real question. Strength coach Dan John has a great take on the idea of cycling a program, an advance beyond the Poliquin idea of alternating accumulation and intensification. In his book Never Let Go, John explains the AIT formula: accumulation,intensification, and transformation. Naturally, training with weights is fundamentally different than training for rock climbing, but the same general idea can be applied to our sport.

Accumulation is the idea that you should do as much climbing of as many different styles as possible. This means multiple rock types, lengths of climbs, angles, everything. Gravitate toward the things at which you really suck, and this is even more effective. Go so far as to explore bouldering, slab climbing, crack climbing, and ice climbing. The idea is to do what you haven’t been doing to learn new movement skills and techniques to shore up your deficiencies. If you really want to go for it here, try some other sports to help build your base of movement and fitness.

After you’ve accumulated a bunch of volume (best measured in hours per week) and this number is higher than it used to be, it’s time to make it harder. Let’s face it, you’ve only got so much time. Intensification simply means making all those weekly minutes of volume more difficult. It means, as Dan puts it, doing more of what you say you need to do. Stronger fingers? More endurance? All you spreadsheet-loving engineers out there will hate the lack of specifics here, but here’s the deal: go harder than last week. Do this for a month or so, and then look at transforming this into more “usable” fitness.

Transformation is application. You want to back off, way off, on the amount of activity you do each week, and you want to focus all your energy on climbing. All of it. And forget about training for God’s sake. Just go out, go hard, and quit when you get tired. When things start to feel hard, when you’re not doing your hardest redpoint ever each weekend anymore, stop, rest, and then start accumulating again.

Filed under: Planning and Periodization

More on Climbing Intervals

Steve Bechtel — Thu, 05 May 2011 20:09:04 +0000

By far the biggest question we get about training for climbing is how to improve endurance. There are a million answers to this one, in fact, there’s probably a different one for each climber. The most important rule is to figure out if endurance is really your issue. More likely than not, it’s really your technique, positioning, or your weak mind that’s leading to the pump. Fix the cause, cure the symptom, as they say. So, if endurance is really your weak link, read on.

I’ve been asked a lot about the “climbing intervals“ presentation I did in 2005-2006. In this presentation, I lined out several different methods of developing specific facets of endurance, from Rumney-style short strength-endurance to the all-day route endurance required for in-a-day wall climbs. In an effort to answer all of the questions at once (which probably won’t work), I am posting up the reference chart we use to determine interval duration, intensity, and volume. Please check out the Climbing Interval Overview .pdf in the link below.

Enjoy.

Climbing Interval Overview

Filed under: Interval Training