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”

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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:

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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.

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Energy expenditure doesn’t work exactly this way, but it’s worth considering in this way, especially when we start to go flat. Over the years, I’ve run into so many athletes that were “getting it all right” but still not progressing. On digging into their previous weeks of training a bit more, though, something always crops up. Bad sleep. A crumbling relationship. Money problems.

Other times, it’s additional training. I remember at one point writing a nonlinear program for a climber, which involve three days of hard training plus a climbing day at the crag on the weekends. He made no progress, and so we scheduled a review meeting. It turns out he had decided to also do a hangboard protocol from The Rock Climber’s Training Manual at the same time since he “needed more finger work.” It reminded me of the old Dan John quip, “I was on a diet, but I was always hungry. So now I’m on two diets.”

Too often, people see the path to athletic success as work. Just do more, and surely you’ll get fit. If I am getting tired at the end of a run, the solution must be more running. If my strength is not where I want it to be, another day in the gym has to be the solution. Although there is a possibility that these solutions are correct, I find, more and more, that people are not showing up to the training in a trainable state. In short, they are showing up pre-fatigued, sometimes from all the other workouts they are doing, sometimes from doing a crap job with managing stress, and sometimes from terrible recovery practices.

This is why I like to imagine these hundred units of energy. If I am sick that week, guess what? Some of my hundred units get spent on recovering. And the week after, when I am compelled to “make up” some training? Still just those 100 units to play with.

Sick kid, yard work, fight with partner, late night Friday, pick-up basketball game, early alarm, skipped breakfast, big project at work, anxiety about money…

Everything eats into that 100 units.

And yet our ego tells us we are different. For us, just trying a little harder will surely work. For us, work stress has nothing to do with physical output. For us, stress helps us focus.

Athletes hate when I say this, but if you’re not getting stronger, your strength program is not working. Same goes for endurance or flexibility or dealing with fear. If it’s not getting better, you need to go back and look at where your planning is flawed.

Are you recovering enough between sessions to allow the body to improve, or are you tired enough that you just get back to baseline each time?

Are you training at a level where you can add load, or distance, or speed, or duration to a session, progressively, over 4-6 weeks? Or are you, instead, going hard from session one, and basically just doing the same thing over and over for ten sessions?

Do you end up skipping or shortening sessions toward to end of the week because you’re tired?

The point here, longwinded as it may be, is that you can only put so much on the output side of the scale in hopes of improving. If you truly want to do more, to add more to your hundred units, the focus has to be on the other side. Input.

There are a thousand “recovery” tools from massage, to supplements, to crazy woo-woo crap, to dipping yourself in hot water or cold water or whatever. Although there are a few of these interventions that might have some effect, the only two that really matter are eating and sleeping.

For athletes serious about recovery, getting high levels of a variety of nutrients is essential. Trying to limit calories or drop weight while you are also trying to increase your capacity for work is an exercise in frustration and never, ever, ever pays out.

I think sleep is something that we continue to get wrong. It’s such a habitual thing, and we have a lifestyle built around our sleep and wake times. Taking care to eliminate things that affect your sleep negatively, as well as doing things that enhance the quality of your sleep, is a big job, but it might be the best thing you can do for your health and fitness over the long term.

The final thing I am going to say on this is that you can also look at trying to improve the quality of what you are doing with your 100 units of energy. Instead of just filling it with junk work, do higher skill training. Focus a lot of energy on performing the parts of your sport correctly, rather than just trying to exhaust yourself doing them badly.

There should be a reason for every exercise we do. There should be a clear goal with each training session. Targeting specific adaptations in our fitness is the only viable long-term driver of improved performance. It’s almost never about just doing more stuff.

Although Matt moved on from Climbing Magazine when it was swallowed up by the Outside conglomerate, I still felt that I had some good general training articles to write, many from the original list Matt and I made during our time working together. With this in mind, I contacted the current editor and suggested we try to get a few published. Although I can obviously publish here or on the climbstrong.com site, I like to write articles with a bit broader sweep that can, hopefully, help more climbers get their heads around what good training looks like.

I was surprised when the editor’s response to my suggested article ideas was, “You make great points for adopting strength training to supplement one's climbing. However, without any new insights/studies to reference, I worry that an article about strength training will feel duplicative of the other resources we currently have on our site. We'll pass on your pitch for that reason.”

I had to go look up what duplicative meant.

Research. New research is the last thing people need when it comes to planning training. What they need is insight into why it’s important. They need clarity on where to start and how much to do. Most of all, they need help making sure they can check the two essential boxes of strength training: consistency and progression.

"If more information was the answer, then we'd all be billionaires with perfect abs." - Derek Sivers

If I write an article about some subtlety of strength training that is sorted out using a dozen college freshmen in Alabama, it might help one really well educated dude who was wondering about, say, the optimal bar velocity speed in the pull phase of a hack squat.

If, instead, I write about strategies and examples of integrating strength training with a bouldering-focused program, including suggested exercises, loading parameters, and problem-solving tips, dozens of real climbers might make real progress. The problem with research-based training is that it is reductive. We are fools to base everything we do off of current research.

Research is question-asking. It’s usually looking at a very small part of training. It’s often looking at explaining a process that, frankly, we don’t need to understand. Let me explain.

We don’t need to explain how the training works. In fact, exercise science seems to keep changing its mind on the details...we just need to know that it works. This is called the cybernetic, or “black box” approach.

Whatever happens in the box doesn’t really matter. All we need to know is that when we hang by our fingers 3 times a week for a few minutes, they get stronger. If a coach can help athletes schedule, plan, execute, and track this, they succeed… no new research necessary.

“How does it work?”

“You hang by your fingers and they get stronger.”

“Why?”

“Because you are weak.”

“No, I meant why do they get stronger.”

“Because you ‘asked’ them to get stronger.”

No need to explain ligamentous structure, tendon stiffness, CNS stimulation, or muscle physiology. Chances are we’d get it wrong anyway…

I remember hearing someone say that waiting for research is a delaying tactic. I think it’s more than that. I think sometimes we are hoping that something will come along and make things easy. I used to hold hope that, with each new climbing shoe purchase, my footwork would somehow improve. That by simply buying and warming up with a portable hangboard, my performance at the crag would leap forward. And for more years than I can count, hope that Medicine and Science in Sport and Exercise would unlock something for me. I never really did.

Instead, I see the greatest progress in athletes who find ways to show up more consistently. Who have the maturity to objectively look at their training and back off when the alarms start to ring. And who, despite their fear or discomfort, find a way to eek out progress across long training cycles.

I think that specific testing for specific goals is a great idea, but today I want to talk about doing general testing for overall athleticism and performance. What I’m really looking for is a check-in to make sure that I’m not ignoring a major part of my fitness just because I am psyched on some specific event or climb.

The essential part of this is that it needs to be custom-fit to the athlete. There are some things I, myself, am interested in measuring that will have no bearing on your own training, and likewise you might have some important factors to look at that won’t matter to me. A great example of this is the body measurement. A person that’s concerned about putting on leg mass would want to measure the legs every time they test. If you don’t care about this, there is no reason to take this measurement.

The first couple of times you do a test, you will see limited value in looking at the data; however, I’ve been doing a quarterly assessment for around 17 years now. I find it fascinating to look back across all of the numbers and see how things play out as I age and train. In order to do this test, I simply schedule it once per quarter and then plan on taking one full training session out of my program and replacing it with the test.

It turns out to be a good workout and it is almost always something I look forward to. Over the course of these years, the things I am interested in testing have changed, and so I end up adding in some metrics and dropping others. Since I recently added the 60 minute Density test, I have split the testing between two days.

The most important thing for me is to notice patterns that might need correction. I also like to see when I post good numbers in a test that I had not expected—if I post a great pull-up number without having done too many pull-ups that quarter, what else might have been at play?

Here is my current personal test:

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Youth sports hold the function of keeping kids active, creating stronger social bonds, helping them learn skills, and maybe helping them perform well in a sport. Few coaches or parents expect high performance in the first years of a child’s involvement, and mostly want the kids to love the sport and movement in general.

I came into climbing before there were teams and coaches. I found the sport as an outlet for exploration and adventure, and very quickly was hooked by the performance aspect of it. The path to doing more striking climbs with more grace in wilder places was through improving. My mentors at the time were on the front end of training-focused climbing, and it just made sense to follow them. If I acted like an athlete; trained, ate right, focused on details…I, too, could climb those wild routes.

And that’s how I got here. My job exists because adults want to be better at climbing. In many ways, coaching adults is almost the opposite of coaching kids: they’re not in it to learn a new thing and they’re not particularly interested in the fun or social aspects of the coaching.

With an adult, the training detail is usually through the roof, and performance is a deal breaker.

When an adult hires a coach, it’s usually as a last resort.

They listened to podcasts and didn’t get the whole picture. They read books and couldn’t sort how to apply those concepts to their circumstances. The already tried “just climbing more” and just climbed the same grade. And so they contact us—the climbing coaches.

It’s a tall order. How do I sort out what this athlete needs in order to improve? The obvious and simplest path is to test some facet of their strength that they find tangible, say their ability to pull on a crimp, get a baseline, train that position over a month or two, test again, and “voila” you’ve been a good coach. The issue is that training to the test almost always works, and that translating testing improvements to performance rarely does. I can almost promise that I can improve an athlete’s peak load (finger strength) by a fair margin in a relatively short time. At the same time, I should also promise that the climber will show no performance improvement.

Why? Because they are still wearing ill-fitting shoes, or don’t rest enough between boulders, or don’t remember beta, or get stressed out climbing in front of people, or they aren’t eating/sleeping enough, or they are hung up on always working limit-level projects.

Thus, being a strength coach is not enough. It’s also a trap: if I see everything through the strength lens, then everything is a strength problem. The same goes for movement coaches, yoga instructors, full-time boulderers who “coach” by sessioning with a “client,” and mental performance professionals. And thus the adult climbing coach needs to understand a lot of aspects of performance and avoid prejudice toward any one.

This has been the challenge for me and for the team of coaches I work with over the past many years. Yes, they are top strength coaches. Yes, they climb a whole lot. Yes, they push their own limits and have the tools to assess. And many of our coaches are coached themselves. But adult sport performance starts to be more than getting to 13b or V10 or 8000 meters.

We start to walk the line between injury and output, with people that are increasingly motivated and driven to try hard. We have to hold back as often as we push. We have to consider lifetime health, and thing of training first as preventing injury rather than getting better. And we have to help these athletes navigate a 100% inevitable decline. They say that “age is just a number,” but that scale tops out pretty quickly. We have to help athletes find their way out of the sport, sometimes, too.

The adult athlete lives a life of frustration. Plans have to adjust constantly. They have to reduce the fun elements of training at times. Have to do a lot more un-fun stuff with each year. And the window of performance often drops from a period of months to a period of days. It’s here that the great coach thrives.

It pays poorly. Takes a lot of time. Ends badly sometimes. Makes you question your methods constantly.

And sometimes is the coolest job in the world.

I keep harping on the first principles of training, which are consistency and progression. If we can’t achieve both of these, something is off in our training. Even though the changes needed to restart progress might not be that fun—often doing less of something we really like—we can restart progress every single time with good programming.

One of the hallmarks of a modern training program in climbing is the presence of intense practice (hard bouldering) as well as intense supplemental training (campusing, hangboard, weights) in the same training cycles. It makes sense: we have to keep our edge by trying hard movement, and strength seems to sprint away from us every time we turn our back. Since most of the climbers I run into are highly driven and tough, we often see way too much hard stuff happening in any given week.

One of the solutions to addressing the intensity-on-and-off-the-wall issue is to take a week of, say, two bouldering sessions and two strength training sessions (4 hard days!) and to combine them into just two sessions. To achieve this, we need to have a decent weight room in the same building as our bouldering. We also need to be willing to switch gears from our habit of just sitting in front of the Tension Board for hours between burns.

In the Integrated Bouldering sessions, we combine high-level bouldering with intense, low-volume weight training. By building sessions like this, we can reduce the total number of hard sessions in a week, and, I argue, get better results.

Intended Result: Increased strength, increased skill development

Who is it for?: Intermediate and advanced athletes, climbers who struggle with positioning or generating tension

How to advance it: Add load. Increase rest.

We use strength-focused boulder problems in these sets. A strength-focused problem is one where difficult holds, hard body positions, or tension are the limiters. Avoid power-oriented, balance, or excessively long problems. Steeper walls with small holds rule here. Remember, the idea is to continue to develop finger strength and upper body strength.

This is an excellent time to train specialized resistance. I like the following three forms of exercises:

1. Unilateral Strength: Exercises done with one limb or side at a time. These are typically more core-intensive than bilateral exercises and help develop balanced strength.

2. Isometric Strength: Holding static positions under load. Holding a difficult position is a great way to build strength quickly, but ideally you’d do just one or two isometrics per session. 5-10 seconds holds are a good place to start, and a drive to exert maximum force is key to progress.

3. Concentric-Only Strength: In climbing, we are often pulling down hard under load, and then reach up with an unloaded arm to grab the next hold. This is a different load than we apply when doing typical exercises. An example of training this in the gym would be to do a pull-up, but instead of lowering from the top, stepping off onto a box. This is less taxing than a full up-down cycle, but strength gains are similar.

A typical Integrated Boulder group looks like this:

• 2x Strength-Focused Boulder Problems

• Unilateral, Isometric, or Concentric-Only Exercise

• Mobility or Flexibility Drill

The session set-up would look like this:

3 sets of each group, done circuit-style:

A1: 2x Strength-Focused Boulder Problems

A2: Deadlift with Drop, Mid-Thigh Pull, or Single Leg Deadlift, 2-5 reps

A3: Hip Mobility, 60 seconds

B1: 2x Strength-Focused Boulder Problems

B2: Single Arm Push Up, Isometric Bench, or Single Arm Overhead Press, 4-6 reps

B3: Shoulder Mobility, 60 seconds

C1: 2x Strength-Focused Boulder Problems

C2: Pistol Squat, Step-Up, or Squat Hold 4-6 reps

C3: Hip Mobility, 60 seconds

All told, you’d complete 18 boulder problems throughout the session. The climbing and the switching of shoes, not to mention the moving around the gym takes some time. If your sessions are limited to an hour or so, you can shorten these workouts by dropping from 3 sets of each group to two.

The Integrated Boulder Session Progression

This is a ten-session progression built on an A/B format. This means that there will be five A sessions and five B sessions that are alternated in the training. The typical prescription is to do one of each per week, but an athlete with high capacity might be able to do ABA week one and then BAB week two. This choice is incumbent on whether the athlete can continue to make progress at this level of volume.

Session 1 (A)

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As we move from general training to specific training, we need to look at it not as a switch, but a transition. Some general exercises are somewhat specific to a sport (such as inverted rows in climbing), so they may be present in both general and specific training modes.

When it comes to specific training for a sport, we need to remember that it is not simply execution of the sport. Doing the sport is called performance. It is also not exact mimicking of a route or a comp set up. This is called simulation.

Specific training for a sport involves using the same movement patterns or muscle groups as we use in the sport as well as addressing the same loads and durations. We call these movement specificity and metabolic specificity, respectively.

For example, bouldering is movement specific to route climbing, but is not metabolically specific; the durations are too short. Similarly, climbing on a treadwall might be close to metabolically specific to route climbing, but probably falls short of being quite movement specific due to the easy footwork and fixed plane of movement.

When we go into the gym, then, we can do a decent job of doing some specific training, even if we can’t actually climb. We simply have to make sure we check the boxes on movement or metabolism. But there is even more to specificity than that, if we really want to get into the weeds.

Yuri Verkhoshansky describes ten facets of specificity:

1. Type of muscular contraction. Think about it. Do we climb the way we lift weights in a concentric-eccentric rhythm at a roughly 2 second tempo? No. Climbing is largely concentric movement, followed by a few seconds of isometric hold, followed by a totally unloaded and quick eccentric as we reach for another hold.

2. Movement pattern. Is your indoor bouldering really like route climbing or outdoor bouldering? Likely not. Almost all indoor climbing defocuses core tension and footwork. It doesn’t do a good job of simulating subtleties in wall angle, etc. In this respect, a bouldering wall is better than a system wall, which is better than a campus board, which is better than a hangboard, etc.

3. Region and range of movement. Are your reaches as long indoors as out? Are you using the same groups of muscle? Are you doing full range on exercises where you need full range? Are you holding isometrics in the right positions?

4. Velocity of movement. One of my big beefs with campusing to build power is that it is markedly slower than a dynamic bouldering move. The unloaded arm moves very quickly when reaching to the next rung, but the loaded movement is understandably slow. Similarly, we’ll boulder fairly quickly indoors when jumping between big purple blobs, but can’t quite do the same on the slopers at Fontainebleau.

5. Force of contraction. Are you pulling as hard in your training as you do in your sport? Are you tension as much as your goals problems require? We typically are less fired up for training than we are for performance, and it shows up in the lower training loads those of us choose.

6. Muscle fiber recruitment. If your intensity, duration, and load are not right in your training, you’ll use different fibers in the muscles than you do in performance. This is an essential part of getting things right in the gym, and one of the main reasons people can’t translate their indoor bouldering sessions to real rock.

7. Metabolism. “Metabolism is very specific to the intensity and duration of the sporting event, to the extent that excessive development of one type of fitness may have a profoundly detrimental effect on another type of fitness.”

8. Biochemical adaptation. Related to metabolism, this is the enzymatic adaptation that occurs in the system. If we work toward repetitive cyclic endurance activity in the legs (running or cycling) we stimulate a profoundly different “endurance” adaptation than we do in a stop and go sport that requires high levels of local muscular endurance like climbing.

9. Flexibility. Just getting more flexible in one movement doesn’t translate to function in the performance environment. If all of our stretching is done on a 1/2” mat on a heated floor, it might not apply that directly to movement across a roof boulder problem.

10. Fatigue. “The effectiveness of any training program and the type of fitness produced depends on the specificity of fatigue as an after-effect of training.” Just making sure you’re whooped after a session in the gym doesn’t mean much when you’re trying to be good for pitch fifteen. This one is huge. Training for climbing needs to take into account the way fatigue is produced in the performance environment.

So we know that an athlete can switch between general and specific training phases. We know that most athletes like the specific training more. This is natural, they are climbers who train, not trainers who climb, after all. And beyond specificity there is simulation.

Simulation is mimicking as exactly as possible the performance environment in training. I am going to talk at length about that in a minute, but first want to step back and advocate for general training one last time. Let’s look at our training as if we were master swordsmiths. This is a simplistic analogy, but it’s one that keeps coming back to me as I train through my own programs. It makes the goal of the training stay clear in my mind.

General training is forging the sword. It’s heating the metal and hammering it into the shape of a blade. It’s the bulk of the work and it’s the part of the work where we see the most development into a tool that looks like a sword. Specific training begins when the blade is shaped like a sword. It’s honing. It’s making sure the edges are symmetrical and there are no nicks in the blade. It is sharpening the blade and it must be done over and over and better each time.

And then there is simulation. It is the finest sharpening step. It is where we remove tiny burs from the blade and put on the micro bevel. It is what makes a great sword better than a good one. To close the loop on this, the quality of our specific and simulation training both depend fully on how well the blade was forged in the first place.

Tom Randall says that simulations in climbing work so well that they can almost be considered cheating. What he is describing is our bodies’ ability to really learn to use a certain hold type or adapt to an angle of climbing or use a given technique. But the breadth of learning is limited to our simulation. The better bet for most of us, most of the time, is to just get better at lots of hard bouldering movements. Or get ALL of our fingers stronger. Etcetera.

Simulation should be done once you’re pretty fit, and have the specific fitness needed to avoid injury and execute an effective simulation session. When ramping up to simulation, you want to think in all the terms of specificity, then get micro-detailed.

Back in the early 1990s, the legendary Tony Yaniro was in the midst of his big comeback to climbing after a few years away from the sport. He was developing routes in Idaho and climbing across the American west. One of the routes he set his sights on was Scarface at Smith Rocks. Short on time to actually spend at Smith, he famously took aluminum foil and stuffed it into the pockets and edges on the route to later build molds of those holds. He measured the wall angle, and the distances between the holds. And then he went home and built the cruxes.

He trained at home, and practiced his simulation, and later came back and sent.

When we are simulating cruxes, we need to be as targeted as possible in our practice. Wall angle, hold size, what shoes we will be wearing, how fatigued we are when we get to the crux, how long it’s been since we could chalk, wearing the same clothes, or tape, or kneepads.

We need to do the simulations in sets, rest a lot, and take notes. Adjust and test. It’s best to ramp up for 3-4 weeks of progressively more focused efforts, and then give it a rest, whether we send or not. And we need to use this tactic sparingly.

Remember that it is the general and specific that gets us to the point that simulation works. If we look at a whole season, we might aim for general training 7 or 8 months of the year, while still doing some climbing and bouldering. Another 3 months of the year, we’d really dive into specific adaptations for goal climbs or to address our personal limiters. Maybe one month a year, a psyched climber might start working a simulation to “turbocharge” their chances of sending.

Consistent progression over a training cycle is hard to get right. The key is in starting at the right intensity level, which is not super simple to determine. The challenge is that most of us go into the gym or out to the crag and we go as hard as we possibly can that day. The next time we repeat this workout, we might or might not be able to go one harder. As we continue through the training cycle, we cease to see progress after even just a few sessions and instead see a leveling curve of improvement that looks very much like a plateau in the second, third, fourth, and fifth weeks.

One of my favorite stories about this trap is one where I recommended a workout called “Route 4x4s” to a pair of climbers. In this workout, a climber will lead a pitch, clip the anchors at the top, and lower quickly to the bottom. They then immediately top rope the route three more times for a total of four laps. The athlete is then asked to rest for a duration equal to the time they had just spent climbing. If two climbers are working together on this workout, it’s pretty simple to just take turns doing blocks of four climbs at a time. As indicated in the name, this would be repeated four times for a total of 16 pitches. This is a big workout for almost anyone.

The two climbers in question are capable of climbing 5.14, but that is for a single pitch at a time. Since I’ve seen a lot of people try to work through this particular session, I recommended that they start at the bottom end of the 5.10 grade. For anyone familiar with these grades, it might seem that 510 is way too modest a level, but with the volume of the training, it certainly isn’t.

It just so happened I arrived at the crag when these climbers had decided to start this workout. Instead of starting at 5.10, however, they decided that a more fatiguing and respectable 5.11c pitch would be appropriate to start. Climber one led the pitch with no problem, lowered down to the ground, and then started up his second lap. By the time he had reached the top of that route, he was breathing hard and trying to fight off a pump in his forearms. He was unable to complete the third lap. If the two were going to continue this workout, it would have been a really long day. Needless to say, he stopped after pitch three and let his partner try the same, with similar results.

To my knowledge, they never tried this session again and probably thought that my recommendations were off.

Start Too Easy

Any time we start with a new overload, new exercises, or a new loading pattern, it is helpful to be a bit conservative at the first part of the training phase. Our tendency to “go hard or go home” can derail long-term progress. With this in mind, my recommendation is always to start with two to three sessions that feel way too easy and maybe even ineffective to the athlete. About the fourth session, we get to a level that feels right to the athlete and lets them think that they are making appropriate progress.

For the next few sessions, we add load or duration in slow, steady increments. At the eighth or ninth session, the loading or duration progresses and it’s usually to a level that the athlete feels uncomfortable with. Often the athlete will talk about how the sessions are getting “too hard.”

We stay with this intensity for a couple of more sessions before switching the training cycle to another focus, and starting in again. By forcing the athlete to do a bit of training that feels under the appropriate level and a bit of training that feels over the appropriate level, we get an important cycle of changes in loading that keep the athlete from going stale.

Depending on the particular adaptation we are looking for, these cycles can range from around 10 training sessions all the way up to 25 before substantial adjustments need to be made.

The athletes that I have coached who have come to me and lamented their “permanent plateau” state are too numerous to list. With athletes who have been stuck at the same level for way too long, simply varying the intensity from too light to too hard unlocks progress nine times out of ten.

I don’t believe in hard plateaus. I believe athletes lack creativity and self-confidence.