Our athletes will have different goals, but they are all basically the same “naked apes.” Yes, we’re all special, but we all get trained up in relatively the same way. As I sit here, I am thumbing through a book that is a sport performance book for a different sport altogether. I’ll write out one of the off-season strength sessions, and you tell me what sport it is:

20 each of sit-up, v-up, leg raise, twist

Squat 6-4-2-6

Shoulder Press 6-4-2-6

Barbell Deadlift 2-2-2-2

Barbell Clean 6-4-2-6

While you think through sports, I’ll just spoil it.

Tennis.

“But this is not tennis-specific at all!” you say. In fact, it might be an excellent workout for anyone who needs to move their body. Even an alpinist.

When it comes time to train athletes, we look at their sport in terms of demand on the body. I like to run through a list:

• What is the performance environment? What is the temperature? The weather? The altitude? The required gear?

• What does the work involve? What are the movements (least important), and what is the intensity / duration of a typical day (most important)?

• How long is the event / performance? Is it a one-day push in September or are they in the mountains for a month?

• What are the sneaky weak links that tend to show up?

• What tools does my athlete have at their disposal?

• What else does this athlete want to do between now and “the thing?”

Adaptation Times

Athletes need volume and overload like plants need water and sun. Then we wait. As a coach, you want to coax improvements by progressively overloading them for (in general) around 10 sessions before making a major change.

If an adaptation is new to the athlete, such as starting to run long distances having never done so before, they need to develop this ability anew. In such cases, you might need to plan on three or four full cycles of ten sessions (separated by a bit of recovery) to see them acquire that ability.

If the athlete is retraining an adaptation, a single cycle may be enough to get them back to a high performance level.

All this being said, you will need to keep this in mind when planning out the training. For generally fit alpine climbers, 3 months is probably enough to get them expedition-ready. For people new to the sport or who are moving up from lower work capacities, you may need six months. This is essential information for your athlete, who often hopes to “cram” fitness having put it off for too long.

General To Specific

General training is where we start every time. We need to get to where we can squat well before doing weighted step-ups in mountaineering boots. We need the ability to exercise, at all, for any given duration before we do intense and specific training for that duration.

There is certainly no reason to hold your athlete back from rock climbing or ice climbing or big hikes, but plan on a load of general strength training and easy cardiovascular exercise to start.

Let’s say that you’ve got a gym climber hoping to do a big alpine trip next summer. Currently, they boulder and do some routes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then get out on the weekend for a day of climbing and maybe a hike.

We want to add time (at low intensity) first. It is reasonable to add in 2 short strength sessions each week and a bit of walking or easy hiking. Although an athlete might want to go all Rocky Balboa out of the gate, remind them that next week is going to be harder and we need to let recovery take place. You’re going to program things that feel “too easy” at first because we need to set the stage for “too hard” training later.

Intensification Is The Wrong Answer

It’s not about how tough you are for 8 minutes in the gym. It’s got nothing to do with beating a personal record on the air bike. More than any other facet of climbing, big days in the mountains require a super high level of low-intensity endurance and as much strength as you can put on the athlete. CrossFit-style alpine prep programs designed to get you ready for anything and better at suffering might feel good in the moment, but their application in the performance environment is extraordinarily limited.

The reality for most of us is that we don’t get to train in the mountains. The big majority of people that love to go out there and get to the top of peaks spend their days in urban environments, where they do need to train in gyms or in parks or on staircases. This is where the classic model of accumulation, followed by intensification, followed by peaking, or what was once called “actualization,” becomes an excellent training program.

In this sequence, the athlete accumulates a large amount of total exercise time and then makes that volume more intense once they have reached a critical mass of training time each week. Just before their big trip to the mountains, they start to sew together longer and longer sport-specific sessions with big rests in between. Let’s take a look at how that might lay out in the 12 weeks leading up to a trip in the mountains.

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There are a couple of ways to look at this, and the overall message to athletes is to “chill out,” which doesn’t really inspire a lot of confidence from these highly-driven people.

The important thing to remember is that pure strength and power decline only slightly in the first couple of weeks after stopping training. A week at the beach? Don’t worry about it. Two weeks hiking in the mountains? No big deal. Only after 3-4 weeks do we start to see a notable decline. Any strength activity done during this time can help mitigate this reduction in force, so a bodyweight workout in grandma’s basement, a hotel gym session, or even just a trip to climb some fun boulder at a gym can be really helpful.

Aerobic fitness reductions are a bit more rapid. One of the issues with having a high level of endurance is that there are a hole host of factors that need to change in order to keep fit. Although many athletes run or ride or ski every day out of compulsion, there is also a physiological aspect to it. Some aspects of aerobic fitness can start to decline in less than 24 hours!

All is not lost, though. Even if you can’t get on your bike or in a pool, your sport-specific endurance losses can be mitigated by endurance work in another type of activity. Sure, you’d do best to ski if skiing is your sport, but then next best thing is to do something.

A massive trap that catches the majority of athletes I’ve talked to is the feeling that they need to exactly replicate their at-home training, and it derails them if they can’t make it happen. As an antidote to this, I suggest having a set of “road rules” that shape our planning. My own rules are as follows:

1. Do something every day, even if it is just a walk.

2. Make use of hotel gyms, climbing gym weight rooms, or even an empty floor. Leverage these constraints to be creative.

3. Understand that anything shorter than a two-week trip should show no decline in physical potential.

4. Be grateful for the opportunity rather than resentful of the inconvenience.

Assuming you’re a climber, any travel to a different climbing area or gym should be celebrated. Don’t just go in the gym and try to do your block pulls and foam rolling, but make use of what they have to offer. Climb some gym routes. Do one of the boulder circuits. Check out a different training board than you’re used to. Some of my most-fun sessions have been just playing around in gyms wherever I travel.

I think hotel gyms are wonderful opportunities to learn and be creative. Most of them have a set of dumbbells and a bench, so I love to do things like a descending circuit:

Lunges 10-9-8-…-2-1

Push-Ups 10-9-8-…-2-1

Front Squat 10-9-8-…-2-1

Renegade Rows 10-9-8-…-2-1

I’m also a fan of timed sets, where I do, say, three reps of an exercise each minute for ten minutes. I then usually pick a second exercise, do the same, and am out of the gym in 20 minutes.

Or how about some 3-7s? In this one, you’d pick a weight that you could do for about 12 reps, but start out by doing just 3. Then you rest 15 seconds, do 4 reps with the same weight, rest 15 more seconds, do 5 reps. Repeat the same rest, then do 6 reps, repeat the rest for 15 more seconds, and then do 7. After you’ve completed this upward ladder, you then rest for 2 minutes and 30 seconds before repeating it again 2 more times. This takes maybe 10 minutes, and you could do it with two different exercises. This is more aimed at muscular hypertrophy, but you’ll definitely feel like you did something! If you’ve never done a workout structure like this, I would advise doing something that uses fewer muscles the first couple of times, such as bicep curls, rather than pull-ups.

Outside of the gym, I am not a huge fan of trying to hit time or distance when we are on a vacation. What I do think is valuable is to try to spend some time walking around the area where you are visiting and getting to know it a bit differently than you would if you’re just riding in an Uber. Nothing wrong with going for a run or riding a bike, but simply going for a walk is usually the lowest-hanging fruit and is available to all of us.

Activity is super helpful when it comes to maintaining our fitness. The mistake some of us make is to just do nothing on vacation, and then, when we come back, we feel the effects of sloth.

For those of us that are actively headed toward a fitness goal or just want to stay strong, simply alternating days between taking a walk and then doing some kind of strength-ish routine in a weight room is fine. If you’re a climber and you get to climb a couple of times on your trip, that is a huge win.

Stay away from the obsession level mindset when you hit the road (I must find a Moon Board 2016!), and you are probably going to be a lot better off when you are taken out of your normal routine.

If climbing smoothly and controlled were always the answer, Andy would have been among the elite of the elite. Unfortunately, the performance environment in rock climbing requires being able to ride the pendulum between super slow and static movement and hyper-fast, decisive speed.

This is part of the beauty and part of the frustration with trying to be a good rock climber. Many of us are well suited genetically and through training to be smooth or flexible or extremely powerful. On the other end of the scale from my friend Andy is another local climber who has tremendous power but climbs in almost a spastic and out-of-control way. This climber also does well on the boards, but does so for a different reason and struggles to keep it together out on real rock.

Both climbers have mastered one tempo and would benefit substantially from experimenting with different velocities in training. Varying movement speed relative to what the performance environment demands manipulates mechanical load and motor control requirements, systematically improving our power, speed, and our movement economy. No matter what your default speed, you can see some real benefit from training faster or slower than you normally do.

Slower-Than-Normal

Climbing at a deliberate submaximal speed moves the primary adaptation from high-intensity power to neuromuscular motor control and forces biomechanical precision. When we are climbing at normal speeds, movement patterns rely heavily on learned motor programs. As we slow execution, we allow for sensory feedback loops to process new spatial positioning, improving our proprioception, joint alignment, and transfer of energy.

Sport scientist Wolfgang Schollhorn demonstrated that exposing the nervous system to intentional slower variations in movement forces the brain to actively correct movement errors. This builds a more adaptable and robust motor skill and makes us more able to assess movement needs, then always stay at performance speed. He called this method “differential learning.” By simply applying a few sets of slower climbing on a normal climbing day, we can start to see our most basic movement errors where we depend on momentum and maybe finger strength instead of excellent movement skill.

Although adding load to your climbing can blunt motor skill development (such as bouldering with a 40-pound weight vest on), we can see some benefit from overload of basic movement patterns. By adding load to a movement (such as foot-on pulls on a campus board or a basic wall crawl on a spray wall), we can enhance the effect of slower climbing. In practice, we probably want to avoid continually adding load as if we were resistance training and instead pick a load that is somewhere around 5% to 10% of our body weight and do some simple drills with that load. We don’t want to do a whole lot of this training, but a couple of sets in the warm-up or within a bouldering session will probably help us develop better skill quality because we are forced to climb at this slower-than-performance speed.

Faster-Than-Normal

In many sports, coaches program overspeed training using lighter implements, downhill slopes, or even towing bands to increase an athlete’s movement velocity beyond their natural maximum output. In climbing, this can be challenging to implement, but intentional faster training, or even slightly assisted climbing, has been used by climbers for years.

When we do faster-than-normal-speed climbing, there are a few physiological benefits that start to reveal themselves. The the most obvious of these is improved rate coding and intermuscular coordination. When we execute movements faster than our normal speed, we also force faster contraction-relaxation cycles. This improves our fast-twitch muscle fibers’ ability to shorten at high velocities and improves the synchronization between agonist and antagonist muscle groups.

A simple intention to climb a boulder more quickly or to do a speed top-rope lap is probably enough to start helping the athlete make these changes. Once again, you don’t need to go out and do a speed training day or a fast boulders workout. We can start to see the benefits of these by simply putting three or four boulder problems at fast velocity into our training sessions. Most climbers could benefit from doing a fast lap or two at the crag, and the most appropriate place to do this would be in the warm-up. One of my key recommendations is to lead a warm-up-level route, lower from the anchor, and then do a speed top-rope burn right afterwards. If you did this on two of your warm-ups, you would start to see the benefit of improved rate coding, and it would also enhance your overall climbing capacity.

Combination of Speeds

One of the most useful drills that came out of Gimme Kraft was one called Kontrast. In this drill, a climber would do a boulder problem at super slow speed, and then at super fast speed, and then at normal speed. A large body of research supports what sports science calls “paired-velocity training” methods.

A climber can benefit from contrast-style drills, and they also can benefit from implementing drills where their slower speeds are loaded and their faster speeds are unloaded. In practice, this might mean a slightly loaded set of ladders on a campus setup, and then dropping the weight and doing a very fast lap without load, or even with a bungee assist.

As I stated above, it’s easy for a climber to feel like they need to dedicate an entire session to this style of training, but it’s the same as most of the training we do. Regularity and consistency over time start to make a big difference, while a huge volume of any specific adaptation in a single session or two makes very little difference.

The most important factor here is to really be aware of your defaults. I tend to climb a bit slower than my partners, and so more of my practice needs to lead me toward higher velocity and slightly riskier movement. A climber that tends to jump between holds and has the tension of a wet noodle would benefit from loaded movements or super slow versions of the problems that they do quickly.

The really cool thing about playing with velocity is that we don’t have to be on particularly hard climbs to see big benefits from this. Whether we are climbing fast or slow, we open up our ability to improve our movement patterns, and we start to make improvements in our economy, which leads directly into better climbing.

No increase in finger strength necessary.

I had known him roughly twenty years in October of 2006. I had gone from fan, to acquaintance, to climbing partner, to friend in that time. Together, we weathered the loss of friends and family, dreamed of finding the best and steepest rock in the world, and worked to make climbing a life. Most of all, though, we spent hours at the base of crags, in airplanes, and in cars, all in the pursuit of this crazy love so many of us share.

Todd was more than just a great climber. He was a connector, a driver, and a visionary. More than any other climber of his generation, he could see what the future of the sport would become. He knew well that his own hardest climbs would be done in better style and faster, and that one day someone would flash the things that took him seasons to climb. He was proud of his place in this evolution rather than afraid of it.

Todd was a half-generation older than I was and was a bit of a legendary figure when I was coming up in the Wyoming climbing community. In early 1990, he returned to Wyoming after drifting around the globe in search of hard rock climbs for nearly a decade. It didn’t take long before the rumor mill had us all wondering about the limestone climbing outside of Lander and why someone who could live anywhere in the world would pick this place to settle down.

I remember the day that my friend Jed Flanagan and I first drove into Wild Iris in the early summer of 1990. We had heard about the crag, had been told where to turn off of the highway, and we just drove up the road until we saw what looked like climbers’ cars parked alongside of the road. Having been to secret crags before, we were a little bit nervous about actually running into other climbers. We shouldered our bags, walked up the faint path, and went straight to the whitest cliff I’d ever seen.

We hadn’t been there but 5 minutes before Skinner walked around the corner and looked at us with surprise. I had only met him a couple of times in the past and wasn’t sure he would recognize me. I was not at all certain that we would be welcome at the crag.

“Well Goddamn! Took you long enough to get here. Did you bring your drill?” Not only were we welcome, but wanted.

It wasn’t long before I took a job working at Wild Iris Mountain Sports down in Lander and was climbing around Todd and his girlfriend Amy frequently at the local crags. A few years later, I joined Todd on a free ascent of Half Dome, and then we followed that up with the Trango Tower trip in 1995.

Soon we were trying to do an international trip to a big wall destination as frequently as every year and frantically trying to develop single pitch climbs near our home in Lander. Todd and I shared a mission, and both of us believed in building the community of climbers in Lander and developing high-quality routes for them to enjoy.

Looking back, I see that Todd was criticized and reviled for doing the very things that today’s climbers feel are normal: working cruxes, placing bolts, inspecting routes on rappel. Like Dylan strapping on the electric guitar at Newport, Todd dedicated himself to climbing the way he knew people would have to in order to reach the limits of our potential.

So many of my friends wanted to be among the cool kids who held to some kind of trad ethic… lowering after each fall, trying to place bolts on lead, taking risky falls…I just wanted to climb hard routes and go to wild places.

Todd had the drive to go to those places and the ability to finance those trips. And the crew he ended up with weren’t the most talented climbers around, but we were able to get along and to do the hard work. When it comes down to it, big wall free climbing has little to do with top-end climbing ability and a whole hell of a lot to do with being able to put your head down and get the job done.

Ever since that time, I’ve subconsciously filtered climbers for the “wall team” based on how much they complain, how hard they work, and how much they laugh. It’s a good filter for most things.

If you pinned me down to using just one word to describe Todd Skinner, it would be confident. I’ve repeated the stories elsewhere dozens of times, but I have a visceral recollection of being there in the room when it seemed like all was lost and Todd wrestled the conversation to his advantage. Holding eye contact. Speaking clearly. Asking pointed questions. Talking in absolutes.

In January of 1995, we were 5 months out from heading to Pakistan to attempt a free ascent of Trango Tower. Our trips were not the kind that the American Alpine Club would lower themselves to help launch, so we were trying to get money from big companies. Todd was sponsored by Reebok at the time, and we had secured a meeting with them during a trade show in Salt Lake.

To prepare, Mike Lilygren and I had built a detailed budget, printed out photos and topos and written detailed bios of each climber on the team. We’d built out a full sponsor packet to had over at the meeting. After weeks of careful calculations, we’d come up with a number. It would cost just short of $18,000 to launch our trip.

Todd and I walked into the room and I remember feeling like the sweat from my palms was going to soak through the cover of the sponsor packet. We sat down at the table and I waited to see what the pitch was going to be, thinking of how I’d explain that we needed all of the items on my spreadsheet.

“This climb is at the edge of the map in a lot of ways,” Todd started. “It is going to be one of the wildest ascents you can imagine.” We had the team. Luckily, Bobby Model’s schedule had cleared up and he would be able to join us. Mike Lilygren’s wall experience would be key. The permits were in place.

“The only problem is the cost,” he said and then paused for what seemed like minutes.

I readied for my presentation. I could’t imagine asking for almost $20,000 to go climb in Asia.

“We can’t make this happen for less than fifty thousand.”

He started directly at the Reebok representative. He did not speak again. Seconds felt like minutes.

“No problem,” the man said. “We’ll push this though next week.”

I thought we’d end up with a surplus of $32,000 at the end of the trip. My numbers felt solid. They were not.

Sparing the details, we ended up spending every dime of the fifty and then some. In a way, I think Todd knew our numbers were bad but didn’t have the heart to tell us.

The same situation happened time and again, each time Todd getting what we needed, and each of the rest of us knowing we’d have failed, ourselves, if it were up to us.

He lived “the mission” and inspired us to all be better than we were. As we see with so many visionary characters, he didn’t fit well into the confines of what we would all call a normal life. He was over-dedicated to the climbing and under-dedicated to the things that many of us find fulfilling and important. As much as I loved his drive and focus for climbing, I also saw the downside of it. He was larger-than-life but also totally human.

I’m not sure what this piece is about. It’s not a biography. Not a harrowing story of some ascent. Not an obituary. It’s more an acknowledgment that some people can have an outsized place in one’s life. That there are qualities a person has that are worth developing in yourself, and other qualities that you see in them that you should avoid emulating.

It’s an acknowledgement that Todd saw value in each person he met, and did not filter by climbing ability, or money, or “coolness.” Mike and Bobby and Peter and Scott and Shep and Doc and I (and so many others) were just regular people that happened to like climbing and would work hard when the hard work came.

Maybe that’s the biggest lesson I learned in my years of climbing with him. Don’t pick your partners because they are great at climbing. Pick them because they’re great people.

In the weeks after Todd died, I remember a mutual friend confiding to me that he thought that Lander climbing would wither up and die now that Todd was no longer around. Todd was so central to what was going on at that time, such a charismatic figure, that this climber didn’t image the community could continue without him. I’m happy to say that didn’t happen.

I believe that Todd knew his legacy would outlast him. Not just in the routes he established. Not just in the way he helped his friends elevate themselves. Rather, by leading with kindness, curiosity, belief, and burning desire.

More importantly, building power in our training preserves our athleticism as we age. Abundant evidence shows that adults lose power much more quickly than they lose strength. Building a body that is more capable of generating power also means that the body is more capable of absorbing force, such as jumping off of boulders or hiking downhill without injury.

If there is an argument against using power exercises in your training, it is probably simply that power exercises can take slightly longer to recover from than simply doing slow strength exercises. To me, this is a win-win because it seems like if I can get my athlete to embrace doing more effective training and taking the rest that it requires, I am more successful as a coach.

In our quest to develop power, we try to be as efficient as possible. One of the great findings in sports science in the past 50 years is a concept referred to as “the complex method.” Essentially, this method features using a heavy strength exercise coupled with a biomechanically similar power or ballistic movement, back-to-back with no recovery between. For example, you might do a set of three heavy deadlifts followed by five jumps onto a box. The deadlifts are slow, and the jumps are fast.

The actual physiological term for what’s happening during the complex method is called post-activation potentiation. Like all good training, power improvements come along slowly, but by using the complex system, we expose our neuromuscular system to high forces and high speeds, addressing, essentially, both ends of the force-velocity curve.

A 2019 meta study confirmed that these complex sessions statistically increase jump height and sprint efficiency over a training block, and they do so more effectively than just explosive training alone. Athletes also typically see increases in slow strength during these training blocks.

I am going to lay out the way that I would program a 4-week block of complex method training for an athlete alongside a normal indoor bouldering plan. Although you can go ahead and follow along with this program, you can also simply follow these guidelines:

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Clearly, injuries are a thing. If your training or schedule resulted in overuse injuries, you over-used something. This might seem flippant or overly simple, but it’s what happened. Your planning for the next season should address this. Most overuse injuries are due to doing too much volume, not too much intensity, so anything that hurt you should be addressed in your planning.

For example, I used to suffer from medial elbow pain that was exacerbated by (and probably caused exclusively by) pull-ups. At the time, I did pull-ups for 100+ reps a week across three or four sessions. Despite my pain and the knowledge that it was caused by the pulls, I just couldn’t make myself drop them—I thought they were essential to my training.

They were not. After nearly a year off of climbing and lots of pain, I realized I’d have to rebuild carefully. I went close to 8 years with no pull-ups, and when I brought them back it was with purpose. For climbing, I realized, I didn’t need to be able to do 15, I just needed to be able to pull hard once in a while. Now I do sets of two, twice a week, and am just as strong as I was 25 years ago. Also...when I feel like testing, I find I can still crank out 10-15 of them anytime.

Other issues can be scheduling problems. If you found sticking to the plan last year was a chore, moving your days around might be helpful. If you constantly change the plan, push training back, you might look at whether this training really is that important after all. The problem is this: badly executed training depresses our motivation, kills the effectiveness of the program, and creates a cascade of quitting going forward.

It’s much better to under-schedule and then add “bonus training” than to miss out on planned sessions.

Other issues can be phase lengths, weather problems, session logistics in the gym, commute times, and more. Think about what sucked in your plan last year, and address it ahead of time.

What do I want next year / season to look like?

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Most weekends we’d shuffle into my friend, Brian’s basement and set up around his family’s pool table, each of the players with a pile of books, dice, and small action figures. We’d select a “character” to play, and then would be lead through various adventures and use that character’s abilities to address challenges. Often, you’d use the same character for many weeks or months, slowly developing experience and abilities and getting far more powerful as the game progressed.

(I promise this is not all going to be about gaming.)

The problem seemed to always come down to the type of character you chose. A Fighter was good with weapons, but not magic, healing, stealth, or speed. Likewise, a Thief was sneaky, but weak. A Cleric could heal, but wasn’t super useful when the knives came out. And so on.

Near the end of the chapter on choosing a character was a small section on “Multi-Class Characters.” This is where you could choose to be both a Fighter and a Wizard, or a Thief and a Cleric. This seemed to us like the ultimate hack, as you could see yourself being some kind of badass that shot lightning bolts out of your wand from a distance, but when things got heavy could pull a sword out and really do some damage.

And so a few of us picked these combo characters. The downside? The experience points you gained had to be split between two paths, and so it took forever to gain levels. When our friends reached fifth or sixth level, we were still stuck at level 2 or 3. The adventure’s difficulty advanced with the single-class character in mind, and so we regularly got the beatdown...or just died.

The single-class characters had fewer abilities, but they gained noticeably as the game progressed. Where, at first, specializing seemed lame, it became a secret weapon. Even though my multi-class character could do all kinds of stuff, my abilities lagged far behind, and it just got worse as the game went on.

And this is the lesson I now pull from those many hours spent rolling dice and having imaginary adventures. The more qualities you try to develop, the worse it’s going to go.

I am sort of infamous for hating on running (thanks to a quick answer in a podcast a dozen years ago), but what I really said is that training for climbing by running is not as useful as training for climbing by climbing. If I want to be a performance runner, trying to hit personal bests in distance or time, it’s going to be impossible to develop my climbing the same way at the same time. And the same goes for other sports.

Some sports may be more physically complementary, like, say, Judo or gymnastics, but the division of focus is still an issue.

More acutely, if I am trying to develop my ability to climb a lot (capacity), I can negatively affect my ability to do really hard moves (strength and power). Simply put: you can go hard or go long, but not both.

We all know specialists. There’s that friend that seems to always find a wide split-stance position on climbs to remind us how flexible they are. The climber that constantly seeks out super-powerful climbs that have little-to-no stamina component. The climber that seems like they are always doing mileage but without a clear need for it. People who find feet-off beta on almost every steep boulder.

This is not the specialization you’re looking for. What you’re looking for is to bring all of your foundational aspects of climbing performance up to the good-enough level.

If a climber has weak fingers, it doesn’t matter if they can do a one-arm pull-up. If we don’t have the stamina to climb all the way up to the rest position on a climb, it doesn’t matter how dialed-in we are at kneebars. Etcetera.

We all carry with us a fear of losing the qualities we have already developed, or that we hold dear. I, myself, have a high general grip strength, and tend to want to keep it—not because it’s useful to my performance, but because I am prideful of it.

If I want to climb better, I should focus my efforts on small crimps, footwork, or crag tactics. Each of these is challenging for me, and are areas where I get stuck when coming up against my maximum level.

The prescription?

In every week’s plan, put in exercises that address your area of greatest need, as often as they can effectively be trained. Do them early in the session. Break them down into smaller chunks if you’re not seeing progress.

Avoid trying to become good at divergent skills. If you’re going to run or ski or lift weights, or do mileage, you have to do them recreationally. your intention must be to address these as a participant rather than as an athlete aiming for progress.

Remember that the word priority is singular. Never let yourself pluralize it again if you’re looking to improve optimally.

Most of all, you have to be willing to be bad at the weakest part of your training for a long time...which is why we tend to avoid many of these things. If you can master that, you’re going to go somewhere.

If your heart’s desire is to be a good runner and a good boulderer, or whatever, just remember it’s going to take much longer to get better at either of these things, and your single-class friends are probably going to leave you in the dust.

"The irony is that total freedom can be paralyzing, and unlimited resources don't necessarily lead to the biggest breakthroughs." - David Epstein, Inside the Box

I’ve written before about my friend Steve Petro’s apartment in Casper, Wyoming, back in the 1980s. It was, by all accounts, a shithole. He shared the house with another climber named Pat Parmenter, and the two were so cheap that they hadn’t paid to have the gas turned on, but rather cooked on a Coleman stove in the kitchen. They slept on the floor in sleeping bags. Their living room was basically a couch, a small TV, and a freestanding pull-up bar/training apparatus.

At the base of the front door of the house, they had screwed a small 1x4 strip of wood, and the edges of the door jamb were caked in chalk. In an effort to build some kind of endurance, they would stand on the small 1x4 and then side pull their way up the door jams, then across the top and back down the sides. As easy as that might sound, only the first few minutes are comfortable. The couple of times I was lucky enough to train in the house, the protocol called for 5 minutes at a time on the door.

Steve had also built a hand jam apparatus that hung off of the pull-up bar. It was a place to hang and practice jamming and could be adjusted anywhere from about ring lock size to wide hands. An elite-level crack climber, Steve admitted that he could do more pull-ups hanging from the hand jams than he could holding on to the pull-up bar itself. “I can only do about 45 on the bar,” he admitted.

No modern climber would pick this facility as their training environment. The question becomes: how does a climber in the middle of Wyoming with no access to consistent movement or even outside climbing get to be so damn good? How can a person training in a prison cell, or a small basement, or with a single implement like a TRX strap, develop the same strength we see out of athletes in unlimited gym spaces?

Maybe more importantly, why do we not see a consistently better performance out of climbers who have access to large commercial gyms? The more I travel around the world and visit with elite-level climbers, the more I hear about them preferring to train in their own basement, or on the board in their apartment, or on a mobile hangboard, than they do in the largest facilities ever built.

A thought experiment:

If you had unlimited funds, what kind of gym would you build for yourself?

The first time I ran through this experiment, I ended up building something very similar to the biggest gyms around, such as the Front in Salt Lake City or one of the Movement gyms. My dream gym had massive walls, a large bouldering area, a whole mess of fixed training boards, plenty of hang boards, and a weight training area…Only the weight training area in my gym was downstairs rather than up on some hot mezzanine.

My dream gym had constantly rotating sets of new climbs and tons of steep terrain. It was climate-controlled and clean and was never crowded. The more I thought about it, the more awesome it got, and then, when I sat and thought deeply about how I would use this gem, I got a little uncomfortable.

I realized that in many of these large commercial facilities, I tend to get bored, even toward the end of the first day of climbing. If I am in a place where I go back to that gym several times in a short period, I tend to go back to the same few boulder problems and use the hangboards instead of taking advantage of the massive climbing space.

The next time I ran my thought experiment, it didn’t include acres and acres of roped climbing or constantly reset walls. This time, it included a steep wall set with tons of holds and an auto belay for endurance-style training, and then just a couple of fixed boards. It had a campus board and a full hangboard setup, in addition to a large weight training area. Without too much further thought, I realized that even the large training area and multiple fixed boards are more than I would actually use. I also realized that simply getting on and off of an autobelay and spending time getting ready to train in a harness was more than I would be motivated for on a daily basis.

I stripped the weight training area down to a single squat rack with a limited set of kettlebells. Instead of 2.5 lb increments on all of the weights, I would just go with 10, 25, and 45 pound plates. Kettlebell pairs at 16k, 24k, 32k, 40k, and 48k.

I moved to just one fixed board and one hangboard. I kept the campus board, but I got rid of the autobelay.

The closer I got to my ultimate training setup, the smaller it got. It featured some important constraints that would help me train rather than to seek out constant entertainment. It would allow for focused effort rather than constantly being able to adjust loads to my specific preferences that day.

My ultimate training setup would fit in a garage. It would be affordable by almost any psyched climber. Instead of going bigger and bigger and bigger, I found that I could probably get better results by going closer to what Pat and Steve had built way back in the 1980s.

When I am in a large gym, or even in a medium-sized gym like the one I work in daily, I see way too much “exercise dabbling” and far too little training. When we are young or inexperienced, we can make progress with even the worst workouts. This tricks us into thinking that just playing around in the gym is going to continually produce great results for us. It’s only when we come up against personal confrontation that true progress happens.

That personal confrontation might be forcing ourselves to work the same problem on our spray wall in our poorly lit and cold garage. It might mean trying to move from pressing a 35 lb. weight to trying to press a 53 lb. weight without any increments in between. It might mean building the strength of will to force yourself through a bouldering circuit that you have tried 60 times before, instead of always getting to on-site, newly set problems in a clean and well-lit space.

In many ways, I have come to pity the climber that spends their career in a large and comfortable indoor gym. Sure, the day-to-day is going to be fun, but the long-term result of becoming a better athlete is probably harder to come by.

The problem with just going whole-hog into specific strength is that the failure points tend to be out at the ends of our limbs, or when working with loads at the very ends of the range of motion. The big prime movers—the lats, the glutes, the quads, and the pecs, just don’t get much stronger unless they are pushed really hard. We do this by training without stressing the connection to the strength implement, and in normal human ranges of motion.

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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.

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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:

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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:

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“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.

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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.