I’ve talked before about my own relationship with the exercise. Struggled with strength as a child. Could not do even one until early high school. The encouragement to try to do a lot of them from older and better climbers. And finally the ability to do way more than was necessary for sport performance.

The pull-up, in fact, is not really the best sport-specific exercise for hard climbing. It is a vertical (or slightly off-vertical) pull of the upper body. In this position, on almost every climb, we’ll have our feet to help us move up the rock. As the rock, and thus our torso, leans to steeper, more horizontal angles, the muscle action required becomes more of a horizontal row. This is a more “essential” strength for climbing, and is underdeveloped in many of us.

Truth be told, the dumbbell row or the inverted row are not very rewarding exercises on their own. Definitely not cool. And so our love of the pull-up remains.

I do feel that climbers should have some serious pulling strength, and pursuing heavier pull-ups for sets of three should be a staple in developmental phases of training. But short of aiming for a heavy single pull or a single arm pull-up, the focus of improvement often slips to doing more reps. Getting to ten. Twenty. Doing your age in reps each birthday.

The problem for most of us comes when we start to trade quality for quantity. Way too often, the last few reps of a set are not pretty and feature some struggling and twisting and kicking. In Terry McMorris’ book Acquisition and Performance of Sport Skills, the author warns against doing bad repetitions of any movement as the athlete fatigues. There is some amount of research that indicates a recency bias in skill acquisition, meaning that our body learns to remember the bad form rather than the good form.

Add to this the fact that going deep into that fatiguing zone ends up limiting the amount of true strength that we gain and extending our recovery duration. We can see that doing too many reps all at once is probably not a great idea.

When I first had the gym, my regular workout partner was an all-around crusher named Nick Czarnecki. He was an engineer by trade but was a fisherman, climber, skier, and more. Nick and I got in early on the CrossFit rage and enjoyed those workouts for close to a year before we started to question whether they were effective or not. We were tired all the time, but neither one of us was getting any better at climbing or getting strong. As we evolved away from that programming model, we continued to dip into specific fitness challenges from time to time.

A memorable session was one in which we tried to do 100 pull-ups as quickly as we could. At the time, I could probably do 15-18 pull-ups in one set. We set the clock and started pulling. Naturally, I tried to get to as close to my max as possible in that first set and probably did 14 or 15 reps. I rested a couple of minutes and then tried again and was only able to do about four reps. I rested again for two or three minutes and then tried again and got the same number. I ended up cranking out lots of sets of two or three, and the challenge ended up taking me well over half an hour.

Much the same way a child goes out hard as they can during a community foot race, I ended up tapping myself out with the very first set. Nick and I decided to repeat the workout, but limit ourselves to just eight reps per set. This worked a little bit better, but it still ended up tapering off toward the end and taking around 30 minutes to complete. The third time we did the session, we were much smarter and planned to do just three repetitions every 20 seconds. The three repetitions took about seven seconds, and then we would have 13 seconds to recover in between. Since the three repetitions never pushed us into that difficult glycolytic energy zone, we felt like we got plenty of recovery during those 13 seconds. We were both able to keep up with the plan of three reps straight through, with both of us finishing in around 11 minutes.

The fascinating thing that came after a few weeks of training harder with fewer reps is that when I jumped up on the bar to see how many total repetitions I could do, I somehow pulled off 21…without ever trying to go to that limit.

Over the years, we’ve seen many variations on this same theme in the gym, but one of the most effective ways we’ve addressed creating more muscular endurance is by asking for more volume at high intensity. A staple of increasing high-intensity endurance and high levels of strength is to do two repetitions of an exercise every minute for 10 to 15 minutes. As an athlete is able to complete all of the prescribed reps at a given load, we will then increase the load very slightly and repeat the session.

If the athlete is patient and willing to go through a series of 10 to 12 progressive sessions, they see significant increases in strength with this crazy side effect of increased muscular endurance as well.

Assuming that the athlete has a goal of muscular endurance, such as winning a pull-up contest, we can start to pull a little bit more focused endurance into the sessions toward the end of a cycle. This can be done by moving up to three reps on the minute for the same duration, or sticking with our two reps but starting to reduce the interval cycle. In this version, we would move to a 55-second clock, then down to a 50-second clock, then perhaps down to a 45-second clock. With these changes, we are not looking to dip into that highly fatiguing middle zone of endurance, but rather encouraging the muscles to improve their “recharge rate,” effectively increasing the available energy more quickly.

For pure muscular endurance, this method works way better than chasing maximum reps in a workout. The biggest problem with getting athletes to train in this way is that it just doesn’t feel right. The work is just not hard enough. We tend to be deceived by our need to feel sweaty and sore and breathing hard when really the building blocks are about being smarter with energy use and maximizing the body’s ability to adapt.

Each month when I review my training, I try to remember what Richard Feynman said about being able to fool ourselves. Just because something destroys me in the gym or I come home from the crag exhausted doesn’t necessarily mean I am going to progress. Improvement needs to be measured by output in the performance environment, not by how I felt on my way there.

The crazy thing about it is that the volume of training per session can be ridiculously low and produce amazing results. The athletes aren’t going to lose out on any of their bouldering training. They’re not going to bulk up, and the only true result they’re going to see is more good days when they’re out climbing.

I’ve experimented with assigning weight workouts on days off from climbing, such as Thursday morning after a Wednesday session and Saturday morning after a Friday session, but I find the compliance just never gets there. This is why I started doing what I call “foundation strength additions.” In these sessions, an athlete can do whatever they care to do in their normal bouldering sessions. I generally stay out of their hair, whether they are doing circuits, limit bouldering, or on the minute or three strikes. It doesn’t really matter in the framework of this session.

What I’m trying to achieve with these is to get them in the habit of adding a small amount of high-intensity strength training to their weekly sessions. What follows is a description of the volume and intensity of the weight work we are looking for, as well as an eight-week example of how this might fit within what a climber would consider a normal training week.

Read more

In the performance environment, things rarely line up the way we want. In reading Jeff Troesch’s book “One Day Better,” (awesome book, #1 recommendation from 2025) I came across Troesch’s A.C.E. scale, where an athlete can grade their ability to manage the things they truly can manage. A.C.E. stands for Attitude, Concentration, and Effort.

How am I showing up today? Am I set off by the crowd at the crag? Poor temps? Something that came up last night at home? On a scale of 1-10, an athlete can grade their attitude that day or that session.

Concentration refers to how well the athlete stayed focused on the effort at hand. Did I keep checking my phone? Get pulled into a bunch of conversations at the gym? Keep thinking about yesterday or tomorrow? Again, this is graded on a 1-10 scale. One is totally distracted, ten is your most focus ever.

Effort is graded on a scale from 1 (didn’t try hard at all to follow the plan or to perform as desired) to 10 (went all in and climbed or trained at the limit). This also can refer to the effort of staying at low intensity when the plan calls for it—showing discipline.

These three numbers are added up, giving us an “ACE score” between 3 and 30, and tracked over time. Often they will drop during times of overreaching or under recovery, and they’ll crawl higher if the athlete is enjoying the training or climbing well.

If we can redirect ourselves to focus on these values, we can learn to quit worrying about the things we can do nothing about. We can buffer our comfort zones, and move into a realm of ownership over actions.

This score relates closely to my recommendation of adding a small star or asterisk to a line in your training log where you were particularly proud of the effort. If you tried hard on a move or pushed yourself on a particular set of exercises, you want to acknowledge that by combining both the star scale and the ACE score for a workout. We start to get a good picture of what we are bringing to our efforts, rather than looking simply at numbers or trying to compare ourselves to other climbers.

Once you’ve decided to do an exercise, you need to determine what kind of load you’ll use and what length of time or number of reps you’ll use that load. A critical follow-up is the rest period you’ll pick between those load cycles. This might seem too elementary to matter, but in truth, we almost always tend to miss optimum training loading because of errors in planning.

For example, say I can do ten pull-ups at bodyweight. I choose to work out at my 10RM (bodyweight for 10 reps), but only do 8 repetitions per set. This slightly-lower-than-max rep scheme will allow me to do multiple sets, and give the muscles multiple good overloads in one workout. Given enough rest, this can be a very effective training session.

If I use shorter-than-needed rests, say, 40 seconds between sets, the fatigue build-up will outpace my ability to perform, even at the lighter-than-possible load. My first set will be 8 reps, then maybe 7, followed by maybe 6, then 5...and so on. I’ll be wrecked. My muscles will be screaming. Less good work will have been completed.

The lie is that I will have thought the training session good because it wore me out. Not so.

If I took 3 minutes between sets instead, I might get five sets across at 8 reps. Over time, I’ll get stronger, and I probably won’t be all that tired from any given session in this phase.

The “Tabata” timing cycles has gained popularity over the last few years because of the high fatigue one can develop in a relatively short time. If you’re not familiar, a typical fitness “Tabata” will feature eight rounds of 20 seconds’ work followed by 10 seconds’ rest, a 2:1 work-to-rest ratio.

Whether it’s squats, swings, burpees, or push-ups, by the end of 4 minutes, you’ll be really fatigued. Certain markers of endurance and buffering ability will have improved. But will you be really well-trained?

The key to gaining fitness, which is the underlying goal of training, is to accurately simulate and overload the needed physical characteristics for sport performance. Just getting wiped out by some hard intervals will only lead to fitness gains if:

Read more

No one who is in their twenties reads my stuff, or even cares about the topics. I can’t tell you how many of these athletes seem to contact me on their thirtieth birthday, though, and are wondering what the hell happened.

I keep hammering this point, but sometimes it feels like the only one worth hammering: exercising is not training. I get stacks of exercise. I hike and climb and lift every week all year long. Despite this, I go from sucking wind on some big hills, to climbing really poorly at the crag, to feeling weak under the bar several times a year. Despite my exercise, performance varies.

It’s no wonder people quit new exercise programs.

There are many metaphors for the process of changing, but the one i love the most is the one from James Clear:

“Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from twenty-five to thirty-one degrees. Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at thirty-two degrees.”

I think the issue is greed—we want to get better at everything, quickly, constantly.

So I am going to remind you of the two things that I always come back to, which are:

1. Be consistent.

2. Aim for progress.

I used to train a retired banker, named Bob, at the gym. He was a wonderful dude, but spent most of his time watching Jim Cramer live on TV talking about the stock market while the ticker flew by at the bottom of the screen. Depending on what the stock market did right before our training appointment, Bob would either be super psyched or completely stressed out. He was watching his retirement fluctuate by thousands of dollars every minute, just depending on the movements of a market over which he had no control.

We all know the wisdom of great investment experts, which is the statement that the stock market has never gone down over the course of any 10-year period, even during the Great Depression. Where Bob failed and where most of us fail is that we are looking at the minute-by-minute data coming at us rather than how things are going over the long haul.

When I talk about aiming for progress, athletes often think that they need to go harder or further or faster every single workout. What really needs to happen is that over the course of several months, we should see an improvement in performance, however slight. How do we make this happen? We come in and try pretty hard, and we do it pretty frequently.

My main job these days is overseeing the training of a couple of hundred climbers. Although I don’t write all of the programs, I consult with most of the Climb Strong coaching team and have the honor of coaching a handful of athletes that I am highly invested in seeing succeed. One thing that comes out in athlete meetings is that every rock climber feels they have many different facets of the sport where they need to do a lot of work. Whether or not this is actually true, the feeling still sits with them... There is just too much training to do. This is an emotional overload, but it’s also a physical overload. If that athlete has 12 adaptations they are trying to make, they are not going to see any progress in any of them because we are spreading the resources too thin.

Do you think you’re too old? Do you think you don’t have talent? Do you think you’re more of an endurance person? Well…come with me if you want to send.

The first step to seeing progression is to rein in your expectations on what you’re going to chase. I suggest you pick one and only one strength exercise in the gym. I suggest that this strength exercise is a big bang multi-joint movement that’s going to train a lot of muscles in your body. You could do worse than to pick the deadlift or the bench press or the pull-up. As weird as it might seem to climbers, I don’t recommend the pull-up as your primary exercise for this test. This is simply a function of the fact that I know you are going to be pulling a lot anyway in your climbing, and I don’t want to overload that one system any more than we have to.

Let’s say you pick the Bulgarian, or what we might call the rear foot elevated split squat. This is one of my favorite leg exercises for climbers, and it’s a really simple one. You assume a split stance position with your foot on a bench or, better yet, an actual Bulgarian squat stand.

Every Monday for the next eight weeks, you’re going to do five sets of three squats on each side. Every Wednesday, we are going to do three sets of five squats on each side. Both Monday and Wednesday, you can rest as much or as little as you want between these squats, and you can put them within other workouts if you’d like. On Fridays, you’re going to do two squats on each side every minute for 15 minutes. During this 15 minutes, you’re not allowed to do any other exercise.

When you can easily do the assigned sets and reps on a day, simply add a little bit of load to that day’s workout the next week. If you’re just getting crushed one week and you can’t figure out why, let’s just back off the load, roll it back 5 or 10 lbs., and then carry on. Over the course of these eight weeks, you will steadily see progress and will potentially get to a level of leg strength that you’ve never seen before. You’ll also note that some days are flat, some days regress, some days don’t feel great but you perform well... It’s all about this jagged, generally upward line.

The point is the jagged line, not the sets and reps of the workout laid out above. You’re going to miss some days. You’re going to blow it on choosing weight. You’re going to have a sore knee and have to back off for one of the weeks. It’s just the reality of being an athlete.

The other part of the reality being an athlete is that you have to get back on the horse and try. Just because something is difficult for your body doesn’t mean it’s wrong. The worst thing that we can do as athletes is to try to be gentle at all times with ourselves. If I want to perform in a world that is not gentle, the last thing I want to prepare for is always seeking comfort.

Show up and do your training. Keep your aim on long-term progress. Don’t be like Bob and worry about these little tiny momentary ups and downs, but look for that 10-year payout, which says, “I’ve been consistent, I didn’t panic, and I kept trying.”

I have related the story of one of my first classes at the University of Wyoming and how each student was issued a bound collection of class notes as well as an emery board. Each day of class, the professor asked the students to gently rub the board on the side of their second index knuckle for a few seconds. The professor would give a start and stop time and then would tell us to put away the boards. A few weeks in, one brave student asked if she could skip the exercise that day, as it was “starting to make a callus on my finger.”

“Exactly!” the professor replied. “You’re adapting to a stressor!”

He then, excitedly, went into how over and under-eating were stressors, how tanning was a stressor, and more.

“Basically anything you want to become better at handling can be done by progressively adding more stress,” he said, and that one statement launched my brain an all new direction. Never in my life had I understood that my own force of will could make me better.

In a way, all programming for performance is about trying to help the body focus on making specific adaptations. If the adaptations are few, we can see progress quickly. If we try to make too many changes—and this applies across broad domains—the progress is slow to nonexistent. There are certainly congruent activities, such as doing several movements in a strength session, where we can see improvements in many ways at once. The hallmark of a great athlete, though, is to chase only one new adaptation while holding ground on all of the others…or even allowing some to slip in favor of the work that is being done.

The Trick Is Not Minding That It Hurts

The problem with doing supplemental training is that we often don’t know exactly what to do and therefore are pretty non-committal. Every day in our gym, I will see a climber that is “exercise browsing.” They do a couple of exercises here, a couple of exercises there. Inevitably, they do some version of a concentration curl and maybe some pull-ups. Although what they might put together is not so bad, they won’t come back two to four days later and repeat it with progression in mind. I don’t want to say that they wasted their time, but individual random sessions that are done on random time intervals are probably best viewed as gentle exercise rather than training.

The solution for most climbers is to pick one exercise that is not pull-ups and to do it regularly and progressively over a 6-8 week period. I think most climbers tend to think of themselves as generally fit and of superior strength, although this might be the case when you are pulling on small edges on a 40° overhang. Experience shows that, by and large, sport climbers aren’t all that hardy.

Without further pigeon-holing myself as “the deadlift guy,” I would suggest that deadlifts, front squats, or Turkish get-ups would all fit the bill in terms of this single exercise. When you pick this exercise, you then would follow four simple rules.

1. Do the exercise two to three days a week.

2. Do the exercise for three to five sets.

3. Do the exercise for three to five repetitions, unless it is the get-up, in which case you will just do one per side.

4. When you can do each set perfectly for all of the prescribed repetitions, add load on the next workout.

It won’t take too long before you’re pushing loads that you really have to work for, and this is where the magic starts to happen. Your progress will start to slow and then it will plateau, and it will take some amount of willpower to consider progressing it even further when the time comes.

Eyes On The Prize

Your tendency might be to pick nine exercises and try to do them progressively over the course of the six weeks, three days each week, but you’re going to fail. If you aren’t in the habit of already lifting weights regularly, the change and the overload are just too much for almost every person. The sweet spot for progression is when the exercise added to your weekly routine feels like no big deal and doesn’t strip time from your schedule in a way that bothers you. I’ve just seen way too many people start strong, get to the middle of a decent cycle, and quit because it’s just too uncomfortable.

This is where I feel like a person needs to be a grown-up and say, “I am going to focus on this one movement for a short period of time and push it to the point that my body changes.” If I am chasing adaptations in three or four different movements and potentially chasing those same adaptations across different energy systems, I am going to end up frustrated, tired, and not a whole heck of a lot fitter.

One of the greatest lessons we can give ourselves when we start into any new program is to do few enough things to see progress. Once you’ve spent eight weeks mastering front squats at the end of each of your bouldering sessions, then you can consider adding in another exercise, understanding full well the value of regular and progressive overload and that you are capable of doing the work until the work is finished.

Although you may not be familiar with the term Alactic Capacity, it is simply the ability to do lots of work in your high-intensity zone. It’s the difference between being able to do 15 attempts at hard boulders in a session and the ability to do 20 attempts. Alactic capacity then naturally leads toward greater output because you are increasing the amount of stimulus your body sustains over time.

Think of it this way: you can improve your capacity somewhat easily, and once your capacity is up, you can improve utilization. If you don’t address capacity first, utilization is harder to come by.

We have power and capacity qualities in each energy system. My favorite way of describing this currently is to imagine a large battery. The utilization or power output of the battery might always be 9V, yet if you double the size of the battery (in our terminology, doubling that battery’s capacity), we can do 9V of work for longer and longer durations. If we want to increase the voltage, that would be training the energy systems utilization or power output instead.

For the purposes of today, we are going to talk about capacity building as the primary adaptation.

In the aerobic system, capacity is lots of pitches per day, while utilization is the effort you can put into single pitches.

In the lactic or glycolytic system, capacity is how many times you can go into the deep pump in a day, where utilization is how hard you can climb with that pump.

In the alactic or ATP system, the output component is correlated specifically with how strong or powerful you are. Capacity, though, is a tougher nut to crack.

This is the ability to repeat high-output bursts with minimal drop-off. Since most of us don’t spend much time developing repeated high-effort capacity, this is highly trainable in many athletes. Through training, you can significantly increase the storage of fuel (phosphocreatine) and the enzymes required to use it.

Physiological Adaptations

When you train alactic endurance, three specific physiological changes occur:

1. Increased Fuel Storage: Training increases resting levels of ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate) and PCr (Phosphocreatine) in the muscles. This allows you to maintain max effort for a few seconds longer in many situations, maybe going from 6 to 8 seconds up to 9 to 10 seconds at a maximum level.

2. Enzyme Efficiency: We increase the activity of Creatine Kinase, the enzyme responsible for breaking down PCr to create energy. This allows for faster energy release.

3. Neural Efficiency: Your nervous system becomes better at recruiting high-threshold motor units rapidly and relaxing them quickly (inter-muscular coordination), which saves energy.

The “Secret” Ingredient: The Aerobic System

This is the most misunderstood part of alactic endurance. The Alactic system does not recharge itself. It relies entirely on the Aerobic system to replenish phosphocreatine stores during rest intervals.

If you have a weak aerobic system, you cannot recover as quickly between explosive bursts.

Therefore, improving alactic endurance often requires improving aerobic capacity (specifically cardiac output) so your body can “pay back” the oxygen debt and resynthesize PCr faster.

We can do this through lower-intensity steady-state methods, such as easy climbing or easy weight circuits. In our gym, though, we have developed a series of alactic intervals that address both the intensity and the recovery needs to improve this system.

3 METHODS:

Read more

“It’s important to note that when you’re doing Norwegian-style interval workouts, they might seem too easy— like you could run each rep a lot faster. But that’s the point. It’s only as the intervals pile up that the session becomes challenging.”

I get a surprising number of messages these days about trying to apply “Norwegian” interval training to climbing. If you’re not aware of the term, this style of intervals has been credited with several world-class efforts in middle distance and endurance sport, and is imagined to be a staple of most Norwegian athletes’ training. Although this might or might not be the case (there are a lot of ways to skin the endurance cat), the idea is a sound one and aligns well with the high-low model we’ve been using for the past several years.

In a nutshell, this style of intervals is about spending maximal time at threshold with minimal muscle damage. The core principle isn’t just to “go fast”—it’s about precise threshold control. Instead of sprinting (or doing boulder circuits) until you collapse, you stay right at the edge of your anaerobic threshold to accumulate a massive volume of high-quality work without burning out.

“The workouts themselves were very doable. I always felt great the next day, I could tolerate frequent doses of threshold work, and I got fitter quickly.”

Instead of a crushing pump like you’d feel at the end of a boulder 4x4 workout, you should finish feeling like you could have done 2 or 3 more sets. As with any mode we are pulling from research in other sports, we have to remember that climbing is not just a power output sport: our interval training should allow us to maintain good climbing movement, and we need to understand that our move-by-move intensity will vary considerably.

As with any workout that takes several minutes of activity, there are practicality issues. Do I do this on a Treadwall? Can I climb up and down a Tension Board? Do I do laps on the classic 12a at my local crag on a busy Sunday?

I don’t have any easy answer, and if you’ve been training for stamina for any amount of time, you’ve run into these same questions.

Read more

You sleep eight hours.

You work eight hours.

You eat for one hour.

Maybe you have to commute for another hour.

You have six hours left each day, what are you doing with them?

If you’re spending quality time with your kids, great. If you’re eating dinner across the table from your spouse, awesome. If you’re out walking your dog, you’re doing well. But—and you know what’s coming—if you’re looking at your damn phone, I don’t want to hear that you don’t have time to train.

Instead of living first hand, we live second-hand. We can sit and stare at a screen and watch other people do almost anything. We can watch them eat, or play video games, or have sex, or go climbing. Very occasionally, we can use this time to learn, but usually it is passive entertainment. We absorb not what we went looking for, but what someone want us to see next. We are fed.

Short of having to actually eat and sleep, we pretty much have the option of sitting and staring at the phone all the time. So, if you only have 30 minutes to train, put your phone down.

Here is a thought exercise, and no, you can’t do it on the “notes” app on your computer. Write down all the apps you use regularly, what for, and how long. Some phone apps actually are really helpful and should be used. But you’ll find (and your phone / phone provider keeps track for you) that you spend a lot of time just swiping your precious minutes away.

Write down the amount of time you think you use them. Write down how much time you spend on social media. Then check it all against your phone’s usage data.

Surely it’s no crime to spend 15 minutes per day on Instagram. It’s OK to keep up on email for a few minutes. But where does the time go? Every hour of our time is basically 7% of our day. Do you really want to give 7% (or more) to feeling left out, envious, enraged, hopeless, or even just mildly entertained?

Your inputs are everything. Everything you consume makes who you are. In this world of unlimited information, you need to filter ruthlessly, avoid any inputs you don’t have great control over, and get to the root of controlling your time.

Every time we open up our phones, we are making a choice to avoid doing the work we so desperately need to do. Train the way we know we can train. Learn a new skill. Write novels instead of posts. Dig deep into ourselves instead of polishing our internet persona.

Imagine what might happen in a year if you simply spent 30 minutes less on your phone each day, and instead dedicated that time to being better.

You have more than 30 minutes. You just have to find it.

For the most part, hosting interns in your facility is a pain, so strength coaching programs are hard to find. I happened to get lucky, though, and randomly call a big health club in Holladay one day. I told the front desk person what I was looking for and she didn’t have any idea who to send me to since the manager was out. It just happened that the head trainer, Tim, was standing near the desk that day, so she handed the phone to him. He listened to my request and asked a few questions, and then said, “Heck yeah, come on down. We’ll see you in a month.”

Four weeks later, I found myself standing in front of a huge facility that included swimming pools, tennis courts, basketball courts, aerobics rooms, and a decent weight training area. Tim was in charge of the personal training department, but really had no managerial oversight at the gym beyond that. Despite that, he had arranged a thorough schedule for me that included time in each of the departments. I had expected to just spend time with him talking about strength and conditioning, I guess, but it turned out that I got to learn about industrial appliance maintenance, resurfacing tennis courts, cleaning the swimming pool, setting up the summer youth program, teaching adult fitness classes, and more. I even had the opportunity to get certified as a step aerobics instructor…a certification that I have failed to keep up-to-date.

Many of my days would find me shadowing trainers in the weight room and working to build a training database that would allow them to program more quickly. Even though I was busy all around the facility, I still tended to have two to three hours a day of downtime. Noticing this, Tim recommended that I continue my education by reading books about training and sports. I wasn’t super excited about this as I had just finished a heavy semester of study, but I agreed. The first book that Tim had me read was Power by Fred Hatfield. I read through it slowly, and probably ten days after I started it, Tim asked if I had finished.

I told him I was almost finished, but in truth I was probably only fifty pages in. I think somehow he saw this and he said, “Okay, when you finish it, we’re going to go out to lunch and talk about it, my treat.” I thanked him and told him I would let him know when I finished, and he followed up that we should make a plan for the next Monday. This forced me to sit down and rip through the book as quickly as I could. If you’ve ever read this book, you would understand that it’s not the kind of book that one rips through.

I read during every available moment while I was at work, and then I read through most of the weekend. When Monday came around, we went out to lunch, and Tim’s first question was, “Based on what you read in the book, how should we change our training system at the gym?” I had really only been prepared to regurgitate some details of Hatfield’s work rather than to actually pull them into a training process. Naturally, I stumbled through my answer, but Tim saved me, and we eventually had a fairly deep discussion about the book.

He suggested that I could only learn so much while following various people around the facility during my remaining time in my internship. His suggestion was that we plan on having lunch every other Monday and discuss a new book. Over the next months, I dove into reading several hours each day and making copious notes. Occasionally, I would buy one of the books, but for the most part I was borrowing them from the library or from Tim’s bookshelf in the office, so I couldn’t do any highlighting in the books themselves.

Instead, I built a habit of outlining the book in a notebook and then writing down the details I learned in each chapter, and then followed that effort with writing a short synopsis so I would be able to discuss it with Tim. I read about strength training, the zone diet, Cooper’s first couple of books on aerobics, and, of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding.

I continued to help with the laundry, teach an occasional group fitness class, and even help with resurfacing the basketball courts. It was the every-other-Monday meetings, though, that helped launch me into the understanding that there was way more to learn beyond the degree I was about to receive. With each book, I learned just a little bit less... So many books on training and fitness are redundant in their basic structure. But what I came to understand was that the learning process could and should continue long into one’s coaching career.

Looking back on it some 30 years later, I now can see that the random call to a random facility for my internship was pivotal in building the learning habits that I have today. When it came time to try to understand training for climbing, I had a base of understanding of so many different sports that I wasn’t just stuck trying to apply strength training principles or running training principles to a sport that is nothing like either of those endeavors.

The intent to learn is essential. Even if it is done in chunks of ten minutes a day, or in a group setting, or by hiring an expert to teach you, every professional should be raging to learn at all times. I had decent training systems five years ago, and decent ones 10, 15, and 20 years ago as well. But now they are better, and the athletes that we train today are that much better off simply because I respected the craft enough to keep trying to get better. Sometimes I think that I might have found this habit on my own, but most of the time I’m pretty sure that every time I open a book, it is related to those early discussions with Tim.

“Comparison is a trap, unless it is against your former self.” - Ken Klein

One of the most attractive things in sport is comparison. It’s why we have competition. It can motivate us to train harder, to try harder, and to reach levels we’ve never seen before. It can also burn us up.

The hardest part of it all is that we dismiss all kinds of factors when it comes to looking at others, such as age, experience, drive, and health. There are versions of healthy competition and camaraderie, and there are the ones that can derail us. So what do we need to look for to avoid these traps? How do we keep from being dragged down by our interest in others?

Over the years, the happiest climbers I spend time with are the ones who avoid these judgements and comparisons, and instead drift toward healthier relationships with the climbers they’re around.

I’m not a psychologist or a sociologist. I’m just a coach who watches people suffer needlessly because their strain gauge numbers aren’t what they think they should be.

Why Do I Care?

I can’t count the number of climbers I’ve been around who are nervous about climbing in front of others or feel like they will be judged by people at the crag. I try to remind them that everyone at that crag is super self-obsessed and probably won’t even remember that other people were there that day, but it goes deeper than that. My favorite John Long quote is, “I don’t care what they’re saying as long as it’s about me.” I try to keep this in mind as a way of flipping the script a bit.

I think a great first step is in observing our own behaviors. Are we interested in judging others while we are at the crag, or are we genuinely interested in their success? I’ve had more than one climbing partner over the years who seemed to thrive on other people succeeding even more than their own performance. When you find yourself feeling envy or rage or jealousy, or even simply judging other people at the crag, it’s important to step back and dig into that.

When you feel feelings like this, it’s not bad to use the mirror trick, which is simply asking, “What exactly is making me envious?” Usually, your envy reveals what you want for yourself. If you’re jealous about their finger strength, it’s a sign that you are feeling that as a limiter. If you’re jealous about how calm they seem while climbing, it’s probably a sign that you are dealing with issues in keeping yourself calm.

Success Isn’t Scarce

Most comparisons come from a scarcity mindset, which is thinking there’s only so much success to go around. It’s important that we counteract this by actively paying attention to our own successes. A good, simple habit is to write down three things you accomplished and improved upon every week, no matter how slight that success might be. We’ve got to remember that the only athlete that we can train for is ourselves, and the only way to move the needle is by doing the work.

Along these same lines, I think that encouraging yourself to congratulate and cheer for other climbers is a great way of tricking yourself into understanding that their success does not diminish yours. This helps us remove the scarcity mindset and creates a more collaborative and positive environment for all of those around us. It might seem a little “woo-woo” but I really do believe in the positive energy of a group. When the people with you in the gym or at the crag genuinely want you to succeed, it helps you.

It’s What Goes In

Too many of us are obsessed with outcome goals and reflection on what we completed at the crag. If we sent a route, we had a great day. If we didn’t send it, it sucked. The truth is you can’t control the outcomes, yet you get to control every bit of the input. This is why I have encouraged many of my athletes to put a small star in their training log next to any effort that they were proud of.

• Was it going for a risky move on the board? Give it a star.

• Was it trying a max weight in the weight room? Give it a star.

• Was it climbing above a bolt that you were afraid to pass? Give yourself a star.

At the end of the month, we look at stars, not sends. The cool thing, though, is that stars start to lead to sends…and more of them.

When we start to look at our behavior in terms of what we gave to our own efforts, the comparison trap starts to fade into the background. Good inputs eventually lead to good outputs. We need to be consistent. We need to be overloaded, and we need to be aware that performance varies while attitude and input are much more manageable.

Why did I believe this? Because I had just read a book about goal setting and was inspired by it. This isn’t an isolated incident. I have written and presented on dozens and dozens of topics that inspired me but, in time, tended to drop in importance. Periodization is cool, but it doesn’t really get you anywhere without attention to day-to-day sessions. A positive mindset might or might not help you. Flexibility is terrible for you, or flexibility might just be the solution you’re looking for.

In today’s world of climbing coaching, we still lack a set of best practices from which to coach. There are coaches who claim that rewiring your brain is the solution to unlocking your potential as a climber. There are those that feel that a breathing in yoga practice is going to get you to that next grade. Many, many coaches believe that developing greater finger strength is somehow going to unlock the sport for most of us. And then there is the coach that just tells you you need to climb more.

It’s not that any of these people are completely wrong. It’s just that the development of a complete athlete is more complex than we would like it to be.

The “Educator’s Strength Default”

Read more

When you are young, it seems you can get away with about anything when it comes to climbing or training or living. You recover quickly, don’t need all that much sleep, and you can burn a lot of junk as fuel. It seems ridiculous to be careful with rest days or with hydration, and a lack of good skin seems to be the biggest problem of them all.

As you age, things change. The hill on the approach seems more a workout than a warm-up. The morning after training, you move slowly and make sure to take it easy that day. You feel slower, tired. Plus, for some reason, you’re always busy with some crap you don’t really want to do. Going for a walk is a real thing.

In middle age, you’re no longer capable of the peak strength levels or powerful movement you’d had in your teens, twenties, and even thirties. Your heart still wants to perform well on the rock, yet doing so requires more attention than it ever did before, and the risk of over—or under—doing it is real. In short, the line between not doing enough and doing too much becomes very narrow indeed.

If we try to hold on to intense training too long in a session or if we try to ramp up too quickly, boom...injury. If, on the other hand, we stick to the vertical walls on the margins of the steep sectors, our ability to climb hard takes a downward turn and might never return. Even with the busy schedule of living, we need to focus even more than we did in our peak years. Staying strong becomes a full-time job.

In order to keep climbing hard, we need to get four things very, very right. Cover these bases, and you can keep up the hard sends for this year, and next, and maybe a few more.

1. Stay Strong. We hate weight training and used to stay plenty fit by just going climbing. Well, those days are over. At forty, you’re in danger of losing muscle mass if you stop activity for any significant duration. At fifty, you are unlikely to maintain it no matter what you do. At sixty, you’re just going to try and slow the loss as much as possible. Two to three times a week, you need to hit the gym to train general movements for strength. This will help hold your overall capacity for fitness, but it will mainly be for maintaining muscle mass, limiting strength loss, and keeping you durable.

2. Stay Mobile. You need to stretch, a lot. This one is easy to implement if you get the environment right. You’re too sore and tired to train all the time like you used to, so set up a place to sit on the floor and stretch in the evenings. Most of us have downtime at the end of the day and watch TV or spend time looking at a phone. Setting up a clean, comfortable open space on the floor in front of the television can be a game changer. You don’t need to be crazy about it, you just need to do it for a few minutes. Hips and shoulders.

3. Keep Grinding. Spending time working on projects or goal routes is key. If you travel, try to get some good and challenging redpoints or sends in rather than just doing the tour of the easy routes. At home, work to send the routes you still haven’t done at your local crag, even though you’ve climbed there for twenty years. Long-term projects are OK, but be aware that the injury risks and fitness drops associated with single-focus climbing are amplified as we age. Or…re-send things you did back in the 90s. They’re still great routes, and you can have a new experience with them.

4. Do Something. You are going to end up not feeling all that awesome a lot of the time. Instead of just taking a rest day, take your training down a notch and keep after it. Can’t hangboard? How about some circuits? Can’t climb? Do weights? Short on time? What about some hill sprints? Beat down? What about a walk and a longer stretching session? Any activity is better than none, every time. An austere recipe for staying fit is to aim at an hour each day.

Things aren’t what they used to be, but you can still have great experiences as you age. Some of my most enjoyable climbing trips came after fifty, and if we can let go of wanting to perform like a teenager, there are amazing things we can still do.

• When things were really hard, it was strength.

• When we needed to move quickly, it was power.

• When we needed to do a bunch of moves in a row, it was power endurance.

• When we did a whole bunch of easier moves, it was endurance.

Although this framework isn’t completely wrong, it doesn’t sufficiently explain how we could prepare to improve our performance.

Understanding that each of our body’s energy systems has both a capability for output and a capability for capacity is helpful in this regard. My favorite analogy at this point is that of a battery. A battery’s output is indicated in voltage. For example, I might have a 9 volt battery. If I have a small battery the size of a coin that puts out 9 volts of energy, it might only be able to do so for a few moments. Yet if I have a battery the size of a small automobile that still just puts out that 9 volts, it would have a much larger capacity, perhaps a capacity that would last several weeks or months.

If a climber is capable of doing really hard boulders but can only do a couple of them in a session, we would see that climber as having a high capability for output but a low capacity. Conversely, if a climber could do pitch after pitch after pitch of moderate climbing but didn’t have the ability to turn it up and do hard moves occasionally, we would say that they are more on the capacity end of things and had a low capability for output.

These capacities and outputs are also specific to the energy systems we are using. A boulderer might have high capacity for doing many boulder problems in a row. This would be called anaerobic capacity. That same boulderer might not have the ability to do lots of climbing pitches because he hasn’t developed his aerobic abilities, and so he wouldn’t have a high aerobic capacity.

If you’re confused, I feel for you... It’s taken me years to get my head around these things. Here is a way of looking at these capacities and outputs in a more traditional fashion:

Read more

Anyone who is experienced in the weight room knows about power training, isometrics, and the like. Even using the same exercises, we can have profoundly different outcomes depending on what we do with that exercise during each set. Simmons outlined three primary ways that his athletes trained in the gym. These three workouts have been so effective and so profound for his powerlifters that they are collectively understood to be the “Westside Method.”

The first of these is what they call the repetition method. This style of training is akin to the training most of us do in the weight room. Exercises are done at a normal tempo, are done for several repetitions, and the outcome is to generally fatigue the muscle groups. At Westside, they used these as supporting sets after using either of the two other protocols noted below.

Very little of what Westside athletes do is addressed via the repetition method. This is because this method plays out fairly quickly for a high-level athlete, and because the nature of the sport that they were training (powerlifting) didn’t require several repetitions done up and down with a moderate load.

The second method that we can learn from the Westside program is what is called the Maximal Effort Method. Using this method, the Westside lifters would spend one day each week focus on taking a single exercise to its max. Athletes would still do a couple of other exercises, but most of those were done on the repetition method or as assistance exercises at high loads.

One of the critical components of using maximal efforts is to teach the central nervous system that the body “wants” to lift more or has to be able to create greater strength, tension, or power. If we continually train at bodyweight-only or at moderate loads, our body never gets the message that it needs to be substantially stronger, and thus pure strength improvements suffer. It is scary to lift to your maximum, so we should take our time in wading into maximal lifting.

The third Westside method is called the Dynamic Method. This method is used to increase the rate of force development and explosive strength in athlete. It ends up taking advantage of what you might call a “Goldilocks zone” of training load, most likely in the 40 to 60% range. A good way of looking at this is to imagine throwing a wadded up ball of paper. This implement is to light to fly very far, and thus the athlete does not develop any power. In contrast, if the athlete tried to throw a bowling ball, it would be far too heavy and would also only fly a few feet.

These two balls represent the extremes, and something like a baseball would probably be in that Goldilocks zone. A person can throw a baseball a long way because it is heavy enough to require high power, but light enough to actually move. This is the essence of the dynamic method. The general idea with these workouts is to lift as quickly as possible. Each and every rep, whether it is moving quickly or not, should be imagined to be moving as fast as possible. Speed, speed, speed is the key.

For a non-powerlifter on a strength program designed to support something like climbing, an austere recipe might be to do maximal lifting one day a week, to do a dynamic method session one day a week, and to support these two workouts with exercises done in the repetition method. Two or three days a week of focused, intense, lifting should be more than enough to support the needs of almost any activity we participate in. Beyond this, almost all of our preparation should be sport specific.

Naturally, just getting to the gym and lifting, at all, is the first step. If you’re an adult, there is overwhelming evidence that this practice will extend life, reduce injury, and enhance sport activity across all domains. If you’ve been at it a while, though…consider trying to tweak your training a little and see what going heavy, or going faster, might do for you.

If you’re interested in how such a plan might work for a rock climber, I wrote the Juggernaut Training Plan with the Westside principles in mind for just such a purpose. I love the variety and the quick progress people see on this plan. It’s flexible, directed, and it churns out results.

There is another limiter. This limiter is far more daunting and far more troubling for most of us. What do we do if we just are too goddamn tired, or wiped out, to train?

For aging athletes, this is often the bigger complaint. Why can’t I do what I used to be able to do? Why can’t I just follow the same training plan I did 10 or 20 years ago? I have the motivation, but I just don’t have the gumption.

The solution for most of us is to just grit our teeth and try hard and then be pissed off by our lack of performance. We default to favorite modes: Trying to run even more or trying to do the same workouts in the gym that we did years ago and that felt so successful. And when we push it for long enough, we end up injured or overtrained. It doesn’t result in some kind of spectacular performance down the road…just more fatigue.

Before I continue, I will be honest and tell you that this is my own major struggle these days. If I had a quick and easy solution, I would have implemented it and wouldn’t feel need to write this. In so many ways, this is a note to myself and a reminder to do a few things that I don’t really like to do.

I’m going to divide this into three sections. The first section is about daily lifestyle habits that can enhance recovery. The second is about training interventions that tend to improve metabolism and overall function. The third is about goal setting and realistic planning.

Livin’ The Vida Tranquila

It’s not the training that gets you more fit, but the recovery from the training. This is one of the great mistakes we start to make as we get older. If we continue to try to exercise and recover as we did as a young person, we risk injury and staleness and overtraining. It’s simply a function of recovery taking longer as we age and training taking more energy than it used to.

About ten years ago, I went to a great presentation on recovery where the presenter outlined over a hundred proven recovery interventions. These ranged from supplements to massage to acupuncture to stretching, and yet the sum of all of the recovery modes paled in comparison to getting enough high quality sleep and enough food.

If an athlete comes to me and is struggling with recovery, sleep is the first thing we talk about. Even if an athlete believes they are getting “good sleep,” we look for an improvement in quality and duration. We all will meet resistance with sleep time, and it’s understandable. It’s a highly habitual thing, and it’s a difficult habit to break.

Step one is to go to sleep 15 minutes earlier every single night. Most of us have some amount of down time in our nightly routine, which might include looking at our phone or watching some TV. Very few people are actually busy in the hours leading up to bedtime, but rather just in a routine. It’s okay to miss out on a little bit of the time you spend in the evenings winding down. It’s just getting used to having less of it.

A second problem with going to bed 15 minutes earlier is that often we will start to wake a bit earlier as well. If this happens, the most important tactic is to just stay in bed until your planned wake time. You might not be able to get this done every single morning, but staying there, focusing on breathing, and trying to stay relaxed can still enhance the recovery we achieve from sleeping.

Sleep quality is a second issue. There are whole books on this subject, but the general idea is to avoid things that disturb our sleep in the hours leading up to bedtime. For me, this shows up in the form of big meals, desserts, or alcohol. If I can reduce the size of my dinner to a reasonable portion and avoid a lot of sugar and chocolate afterward, it feels like I can maintain deeper sleep in the early part of the night. Same for alcohol. I don’t drink a lot, but when I do, it seems best if I drink it with dinner and then have a few hours before sleep without consuming any more.

Experimenting with room temperature, noise, light pollution, and more are other ways that we can address sleeping. The simple truth is that if we can improve our sleep quality by just a few percentage points, things start to line up well for greater energy the next day.

Next, eating.

It seems like every time I give nutritional advice, there is someone that has to jump on a soapbox and tell me I’m full of shit or that I am marginalizing someone, or being mean. I am not a dietician or a nutritionist. I have, however, been studying nutrition since college. I minored in it while getting my degree in exercise science and have a couple of certifications, which basically mean I am probably more confused than the average person.

That being said, my nutrition advice when it comes to recovery is fairly simple:

1. Drink two or more liters of water a day.

2. Eat protein with each meal and,

3. Aim for more than five servings of vegetables every day.

This is super boring and it’s not that delicious all the time, but it tends to keep us in the correct lane. One thing I notice when I’m dragging and having a hard time recovering is that my diet has slipped into eating more simple carbohydrates and not getting enough protein.

I don’t have anything against macro-limiting plans or other restrictive eating beliefs other than the fact that it makes a hard job even harder. The easier it is for us to get all of the fuel and vitamins we need, the less stressful the nutrition piece becomes.

Training To Be A Human

I can spend an hour in the gym doing heavy finger rolls, reverse wrist curls, and squeezing a gripper. I can probably do 30 sets of grip work without feeling the effect from it the next day. This is a reflection of my early focus as a climber, which was to develop my grip in any way possible in the weight room, long before the advent of climbing gyms or spray walls.

My friends would go run for an hour, and I would wrist curl dumbbells. This focus came at a cost, of course, and that cost was a lack of general body strength to help me through the activities of daily living. Could hold on but couldn’t move.

It’s not uncommon for me to test a climber that can pull more weight on a small edge than they can squat with both legs. Sport performance is an excellent pursuit, but not when it conflicts with or limits overall health.

One of the best ways to develop the capacity for daily activity is to do slightly more intense activity throughout the day. For a person that has done nothing except for rock climbing for the past several years, starting out with just a couple of easy weight training sessions a week and a little bit of walking is the prescription. Ultimately, we would work up to two hours per week of resistance training, either in two 60-minute sessions or split it up between three 40-ish minute sessions. We also would do a lot of low-intensity movement, such as walking or hiking or easy cycling.

These sessions should not be so hard that you are negatively affected by them when it comes time to climb or ski or even get out of bed. Coax some strength, don’t chase it.

Admittedly, I tend to default to climbing on the TB2 whenever possible. When I do add even simple strength sets to the end of my session a couple of days a week, I feel better overall and I sleep better. There is abundant evidence of the benefits of strength work, but the key for me is to get short, frequent sessions in, avoid going to exhaustion, and looking for slow gains over longer periods.

Once in a while, things will line up and I’ll do a couple of too-hard days back to back and I end up feeling beat for four or five days. I can’t train hard again during this time, so I try to avoid digging too deep if at all possible. There are older climbers who swear by infrequent but really crushing and long sessions. These people are unicorns, and most of us should not follow their advice.

Plan, Even Though Plans Fail Every Time

There are about a dozen good quotes that speak to this idea, but the most important aspect of this is that the vision is an important component of the program, even if the mechanics of the program change once they meet the real world. I think the mistake most of us make in our planning is to plan the details but to ignore the structure. We might have some specific ideas on exercises we want to do or goals we want to see ourselves hit within the sessions, but we don’t step back and look at the overall structure of our week, the structure of the month, or the specific goals associated with each training session.

At the very least, it is worth sitting down and scratching out a month calendar of training. When we do this, we lay down a vision for not just the days and times of our workouts, but how those workouts should progress session to session. Usually within the first two or three days of the month, you will find yourself having to make an adjustment to the program. Instead of fretting about this, it is useful to simply schedule a review at the end of each week. I put this at the end of my last training session and spend 5 to 10 minutes assessing how I could have better executed the training and what adjustments I need to make for the following week to be sure that that happens.

It’s important to remember that the two fundamental tenets of training are consistency and progression. Questions to ask yourself include:

• How can I be more consistent with the program?

• How do I progress this session in order to see the results I am seeking?

• How can I improve my recovery between intensive efforts?

This last one is of supreme importance for the aging athlete. If we don’t focus on recovery as a primary goal in our training, we risk ending up in big fatigue “dips” where we will spend a couple of weeks just feeling tired and disappointed in ourselves. It is better to chase great recovery, do shorter sessions, and look for progress in the individual performances of exercises than it is to seek out a feeling of fatigue or soreness as a marker of quality training.

Being a middle-aged adult athlete requires you act like an adult. If you can do this—act wise, thoughtful, and thinking in the long-term—you’re going to have a lifetime of continued performance. If you can’t do that, at least you can reminisce about the good old days.

“Sunday: 7 pitches of 5.11 followed by 35 minutes of easy running.”

“Thursday: 65 minutes of strength-endurance circuits and 18 minutes on the hangboard.”

I built my work schedule around these sessions. Trained though illness. Went climbing even if it was snowing. I believed so much in the program that I simply charged ahead, even though my body might say no. My priority was executing the program when it really should have been sport performance.

Foolishly, I thought the two were one and the same. The issue, though, is applying a predictive model (largely based on guesses and hope) months ahead to a biological organism—an organism trying to carry emotions, hold down a job, and maybe start a family.

As work picked up, I had to start moving sessions around. When I started spending time with Ellen, I was happy to switch climbing days to the sunnier ones, and to compromise on where we went. When the kids came along, I allowed for more changes.

This made the organized, plan-following part of me frustrated and challenged. But the climbing-loving and progress part was OK. Why? Because despite not being able to follow a plan down to the minute, I was still sending hard climbs. In fact, I send my very hardest climbs in my 40s, while working full time and often with two kids in tow.

The lesson is this: plans are important as guidelines, but having the ability to be flexible with them is essential.

I used to give the example of planning a cross-country road trip when I’d present on program design. If you’re driving from New York to LA, having a general idea of your route and timeline are important, as is having all the resources necessary for the trip. You can probably make specific plans as to where you’ll gas up before the trip, which ramp you’ll take to get on the interstate, and even where you hope to get to the first day.

Day two and three and four are less certain, and more factors come into play. You get the idea.

Here’s a look at my week a few weeks back:

MONDAY: Rest

TUESDAY: TB2 20 problems - pyramid | 3x each: Pull-Ups x5, Press x5+5, Barbell Step-Up x5+5, TRX Single Leg Curl x5+5, Cope Plank | PM Dog Walk

WEDNESDAY: 10x OTM, 2 reps Bench, 10x OTM 2+2 reps Bulgarian Split Squat | Volume Climb ~ 8 pitches

THURSDAY: Hike Hills, Loaded, 60-75 min

FRIDAY: 10x Boulder links, on 5 min clock | 2x each: Pull-Ups x8, Press x8+8, Barbell Step-Up x8+8, Leg Curl x8, Incline Sit-Up x8

SATURDAY: Mountain Bike Ride with Ellen

SUNDAY: Climbing, Redpoint

Here’s what actually happened:

MONDAY: Rest

TUESDAY: TB2 10 problems - easy-medium | 3x each: Pull-Ups x5, Press x5+5, Barbell Step-Up x5+5, TRX Single Leg Curl x5+5, Cope Plank Health Ins. phone call mid session. | PM Dog Walk Had to cover PM athletes and classes at gym.

WEDNESDAY: 10x OTM, 2 reps Bench, 10x OTM 2+2 reps Bulgarian Split Squat | Volume Climb ~ 8 pitches PCC meeting shifted. Planned to boulder at gym, but forgot about kids’ class.

THURSDAY: Hike Hills, Loaded, 60-75 min Short boulder session at gym - snow / rain outside

FRIDAY: 10x Boulder links, on 5 min clock | 2x each: Pull-Ups x8, Press x8+8, Barbell Step-Up x8+8, Leg Curl x8, Incline Sit-Up x8 | Added 2x 15 min boulder circuits

SATURDAY: Mountain Bike Ride with Ellen Moving gravel and painting instead at house

SUNDAY: Climbing, Redpoint Cleaning and trying routes at new Sinks Canyon crag

They’re not always this far off, but they are never on, either. As we age and collect more responsibilities, the compliance to planned training tends to shift. Some parts of the year, when I am close on a project at the crag, for example, I can push compliance up. I have good support at home and at work, and things swing in favor of training. Most of the time, though, I am doing non-training things that I care about. If my kids want to go biking or skiing or just want to hang out, I will pick that over my schedule any day.

I look to hold the volume of activity within certain bounds each week and aim for as much climbing as I can… so sometimes I get some crazy busy days just trying to keep it all going. Many, many days, I don’t feel recovered or psyched or even capable. The discipline is to always go anyway. I’m not talking manically diving into overtraining, I am talking about holding the schedule and doing something instead of nothing.

Like the tee shirt from Elemental states, “The couch kills.”

There is no time to complain about how your training schedule got ruined last week. No time to despair and think the whole thing is ruined because you had to switch this or that around. Keep planning. Keep anticipating. Keep making the sessions happen.

“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”

In this particular meeting, we ended up talking about some of his higher-level athletes and the struggles that elite climbers were facing. As strange as it may seem, the elite athletes have many of the same problems that your average Joe athlete does... except because of the level of play, the issues become intensified. What you start to realize is that humans all fall into the same traps no matter how good they are at their particular craft. Here are six blunders that keep coming up for athletes that have nothing to do with their finger strength.

1. Thinking You Are An Outlier

   “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” - George Carlin

   Athletes tend to think that they are exceptional. The difficult thing here is to understand how many people fall within the standard deviations of recovery, work capacity, and overall athleticism. Unless there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary, assume you’re average. Average work capacity, average need for sleep, average metabolism.

2. Pushing Your Luck

   Most of us can progress for a month or two with steady overloads or increases in distance. After this point, the biological cost of doing more stuff gets higher and higher until a breaking point is reached. If we are smart about programming, we cycle up and down in the demands on our bodies without hitting a crisis point. A driven athlete is in danger of overtraining or injury at all times. More so toward the end of a training cycle. See point 1, above.

3. Focusing On Easily Measurable Factors…Because The Are Easily Measurable

   Are we training for higher numbers on the strain gauge, or to be better climbers? Just because it is measurable, it doesn’t mean it’s important. Also, the most important factors are often hard to measure.

4. Three Men Make A Tiger

   If one person says there is a tiger in your town, you think they’re crazy. A second says so and you wonder. A third says so, and you’re now convinced. Just because people believe something is true or beneficial in preparation for sport doesn’t make it true. Before buying in on a gadget, diet plan, or new workout, think through it, test it out, and ask a bunch of questions. Novelty is usually just novelty.

5. The Quantifying Trap (McNamara Fallacy)

   This is related to point 3, but the emphasis is that a drive for quantification leads to an ignorance of the subtle qualities associated with progress. I have seen climbers that track what seems like everything, often with little to show for it except anxiety and a lot of time in front of a computer…time I think could be dedicated to better training. I know coaches who avoid programming anything that can’t be easily measured. Digits don’t make strong digits.

6. The Hedonic Treadmill

   Nothing feels as good as we’d like for as long as we’d like. We all know that feeling, and it’s the worst.

These aren’t the only blunders. We’re easily fooled, easily distracted, and hard to teach. Progress in sport requires patience, curiosity, and honest feedback. The important point is this: you can progress if you are willing to let it happen and can get out of your own way.

The mountain is, at best, modestly blessed with climbing. There are a half dozen scrappy granite crags in Garden Creek canyon, maybe 20 of the chossiest limestone routes I’ve ever done (and that is saying something), and a single cliff of Ten Sleep Sandstone along a popular hiking trail.

Most of the granite crags were worth a trip or two for us as young climbers. There was the Hamburger Traverse and a scary 5.11 at a place called Red Rocks. There were a few pretty good 5.10s at Grunt Rock. But there was nothing great about the location, nothing redeeming about spending day after day there. It was only the Sandstone Buttress that pulled us back time after time.

It wasn’t much of a crag. There was a bolted 5.9, a 5.9 crack, a thin 12a toprope called “The Trainer,” and Walt Bailey’s famous “Steak Traverse,” which earned a free steak dinner from Bailey for any successful send. For a couple of years, it was probably the crag where I spent the most time. I eventually locked The Trainer down into a training pitch, did the Steak Traverse (much easier than in the days of Bailey with the advent of sticky rubber), and did what seems like thousands of laps on the 5.9s.

The crag’s main feature, though, was a huge tunnel through which the hiking trail passed. It was mostly devoid of climbing—most of the crag is garbage rock—but at one end, Steve Petro had put bolts up an overhanging wall featured with slopers and thin crimps. He had bolted it, tried it a few times, and deemed it too reachy for himself. He opened the route to the community and told everyone about it.

It just so happened that there were a handful of older-than-me, but still young climbers that started in on it right away. I couldn’t even get off the ground, but I was game. It was one of the first sport routes around and it looked like the steep stone on the photos we’d see in the magazines.

Two or three days a week, I’d make my way up there. Sometimes it was with Matt, sometimes with a friend I’d taught to belay, sometimes with my sister or my dad. As projects do, the moves came together slowly. When I got my second pair of climbing shoes, the La Sportiva Mariacher, I could better use some of the sloped dishes for feet. My fingers got stronger. My ability to link the moves seemed to grow by about one move per session.

My efforts always started from the ground with a big sweeping move to a sloping block, then a pinch and a sideways move to a good hold. This was the hardest move on the climb and usually resulted in a hard fall onto the trail at the route’s base—this was in the days before we used stick clips or pre-placed the quickdraws on bolts. If I made the move, I’d clip the first of the Star-Drive bolts with a sense of relief and make the next couple of easier moves to the second. Knowing what I now know about Star-Drives (and Ten Sleep Sandstone), there probably should not have been a sense of relief at any point on the route!

What’s worse, if at any point I fell, I would tram back up to the bolt that held the fall, then lower and pull all of the draws below off as I lowered to the ground. Each effort would be done with quickdraws on the harness in “redpoint” fashion. When I got to the hanging draw above, I’d take it off the bolt, clip it to my harness, then clip into it as if I hadn’t left it there. It was a colossally stupid tradition that has helped me understand humans better in the years since.

The middle section took a left-facing flake for a couple of moves, the powerful liebacking zapping the arms, even though the holds were good. I’d fall exiting the flake for what seemed like months, but in reviewing my journal, was just four sessions. After the flake, I’d grab a sloping bump on the arete to the right, make a big move to a horizontal band of blocky edges, and then have to roll over onto some sloping sidepulls and vertical terrain for a few more feet to the anchors.

The thing felt like the longest route on Earth to me, but is about 45 feet of pretty juggy climbing. Near the end of September, I was climbing with Matt and was going to try to make it to the bump on the arete that day. We warmed up on the 5.9s, then went over to the tunnel and flaked the rope out.

As happens sometimes, I felt light and flew through the first moves. I remember the flake feeling cool on my fingertips but easy to hold, then the arete move went past and up to the blocky edges. I was a bit alarmed to feel no pump, but moved onto the vertical section and felt the excitement of standing at the anchors having sent to climb. We whooped and yelled. There was something perfect about how climbing felt for me.

Instead of the “Tunnel Route,” as everyone had been calling it, I named it “Whispers of Immortality.” This was the exact kind of name a 17 year-old might give a nowhere climb, and I’ve been a little embarrassed by it as I’ve grown older. I really thought it would be a trade route. Was half sure it was harder than the proposed grade of 12a…maybe way harder.

The crew of older climbers (aside from Steve) didn’t believe I actually did the climb, and instead of telling them to fuck off—as I have now learned is the best option—I went back twice with doubters and re-climbed the route to prove it.

It had a few ascents in the next few years. The grade settled in at 12a, and no one ever called it anything by “The Tunnel Route.” One day, my friend Alex Lowe, was on a training run where he’d stop and do a little bouldering as he looped through the canyon on the Bridal Trail. He stopped at the sandstone and did the Steak Traverse, then onsight soloed The Tunnel Route. He told me it felt “a little cruxy” toward the top. I thought so, too.

Every couple of years, I get into another project that feels like it might be the best thing I’ve ever climbed. Sometimes I think it’s going to be some next-level thing. The build-up in my mind and the focus it asks for drives me to become better that I am, and I love it. Every time, these things just turn out to be rock climbs. It’s a funny way to go through life, following these missions. As crazy as it seems to obsess over climbing this specific chunk of rock with so much energy, I’d rather have it that way than not.

Many of us feel the need for more strength in these positions, but many of the climbers I’ve talked to have missed the mark over the years. What I want to put forth in this plan is the time required for a significant improvement, pitfalls to consider, and the way that specific strength is most effectively developed.

Much more than pure pulling strength or high levels of finger strength, the ability to integrate the two, in varied environments, determines bouldering and climbing performance.

As you look through this information, you’ll be asked to consider principles of training first, and then to apply them in your own sessions.

I include two 4-week programs, The Base Building (BB) Phase and the Peak Strength (PS) Phase. It is essential to understand that the BB phase will take care of around 80% of your results, and the PS will be the “icing on top.”

What Is Really Happening?

Being able to hold position on a climb is essential, and there are a lot of factors that go into it. It’s easy to make the leap from not being able to hold a lock-off on rock to thinking that the solution is pull-ups, yet there are some essential pieces that many of us don’t consider. We need to look at contact with the rock, body position and leverage, rotation of the torso, and the strength of the muscles that stabilize the wrist and shoulder.

Often, a climber has plenty of pulling strength in the big muscles of the back, yet lacks strength in the wrist. Or it may be that finger and wrist strength are amazing, but body positioning is the big issue. I like to remind athletes that we frequently test climbers with a straight-arm peak force that comes in greater than bodyweight—they can deadhang a 20mm edge if hanging from a board—whose peak force at clavicle level is less than 30% of their straight arm number!

Another major issue is the way the torso is rotated during the attempted lock off. Part of why the drop knee is such an effective tool on steep terrain is the position that it helps up put the torso in. It is substantially easier to pull across a rotated torso than it is to pull straight back with one’s shoulder “square” to the wall.

You can download the entire 30 page guide below.

Read more