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)

Read more

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.

I went deep into periodization, looked closely at what the optimum pre-workout supplement mix might be, and have been fascinated by all of the recent discoveries in athlete recovery. In the world of high-performance sports training, we get into the weeds pretty quick, and there are some really amazing and interesting things we see from human bodies being pushed to their limits.

It’s easy sometimes to look at the complexity of all this work and the cool spreadsheets you can come up with and start to get overwhelmed with what to do next. There are so many cool and interesting workouts and so many fun ways to put exercises together that it’s not hard to understand why group exercise programs like CrossFit and Zumba have become so popular. Add to that the fact that our attention spans are dropping precipitously, and it’s easy to understand how we can move away from the simple principles that consistently lead to athletic performance.

I have to remind my athletes constantly that soreness, fatigue, and sweat are side effects of training and not actual desired results. There is one desired result of training, and that is improved performance. If there is a downside to training, it’s probably that we need to do the same general things over and over again in order to teach our bodies to be better. I only say downside because that can be a little bit boring. Truth be told, I think all of us can use a little more boring in our lives.

My daughter is a high school Nordic ski racer and has been doing endurance-style ski training all winter long. Now that the season is wrapping up, she is moving into the gym to start training for next year because she is really excited about the possibility of improving. As we planned out some of her strength training, I reminded her that with each and every workout she needed to try to increase the difficulty of the exercises. If she did that consistently over this entire training cycle, there is no way she would not get stronger.

“Really? Seriously? That’s how it works?”

I think she thought there was something magical to the exercises, or that somehow doing the same exercises at the same loads over and over again would somehow make her just a little bit stronger. We talked through the way that her cross-country skiing season had progressed from shorter days at slower paces, working close to race pace in almost every practice toward the end of the season. I explained that strength training works the same way.

The magical two-way street of overload is easy enough to understand but hard to stay on. If we overload the system consistently over time, we cannot help but get stronger. The flip side is that if we don’t overload the system, we aren’t going to get any stronger.

It wasn’t long after the conversation about strength training with my daughter that I was reflecting on my own training and realizing that so often this past season I had forgotten that. That no matter what, in every single session there would be a way to advance. When I say something like this, it’s easy for people to dig for exceptionalism. By exceptionalism, I don’t mean extraordinary performance, but I mean trying to find their own exception to this rule.

“It is harder for me because…”

“I don’t have time/tools/money to…”

“I have _______ injury so I can’t…”

Here is the formula:

1. Pick one or two exercises that you know how to do and start to do them regularly. I like to see an athlete’s first three or four workouts be “too easy.” If you’re the kind of guy that likes to max out on the bench every Monday, you’ve got a long way to go.

2. If you’re really interested in getting stronger, keep the reps under about eight per set and maybe start with three or four sets of each exercise.

3. Next workout: add load. Obviously, you should only do this if you can do the exercise well and only add load by fractional amounts.

4. Any athlete of any age that is staying with it consistently should be able to continually add load for several weeks. Once you start to plateau and can’t add load in a subsequent workout, simply add another set at the same load.

5. Stick with this workout for 10 to 15 sessions, and you will have gotten stronger.

6. Next, pick a couple more exercises and work on those for the following 10 to 15 sessions.

We can periodize, we can do circuits, we can participate in fitness classes, we can follow workouts of the day, we can look at our wearable devices and ask for guidance, but at the end of the day, no other intervention compares to progressive overload when it comes to improving fitness. Your training should not be your entertainment. If you are like the vast majority of Americans, you are not lacking for things that will entertain you. Training is about teaching your body to become better. The sessions are not intended to be fun. The fun comes when you are out there in the world doing cool stuff and you realize how much the training helped you.

“Love the training philosophy. Now…can you actually tell me how to do it?”

“It sounds like your clients have successful programs. How do you go from the planning you talk about here to sending hard climbs?”

As I look at the arc of my climbing and coaching career, I can see where I slowly transitioned from just wanting to climb as much as I could, to wanting to get a little stronger when I did go out, to getting very organized with my preparation, to, recently, diving into understanding the “why” of training. It’s reflected in most of the articles on my Substack…I have moved away from looking for great exercises and workouts into what one might call “higher level” thinking.

Yet where the rubber meets the road—in the gym—is where I have spent most of my career. It’s also where I’m actually an expert. I’ll be the first to admit that as a training philosopher, I have a lot to learn.

It’s with this in mind that I am starting this new series of posts for subscribers. What I aim to do in these posts is to look at specific workout structures and breakdown. The intended result of these sessions, the kind of climbing or training this session is aimed at improving, and most importantly, how we advance specific sessions in order to achieve optimal results. We will also talk about how to start building into certain adaptations… Far too often we get excited about a particular new workout, go to the gym and push our body to the absolute limit, and not really adapt. Instead, our body treats that work out as a trauma, and we might be 5 to 7 days before we can effectively train again.

I'm going to talk about specific adaptations to training stimuli. I'm also going to build these in a problem: solution framework, so that you all can see if these specific workouts are ones you should be doing or ones you can ignore. I'll also try to connect the pieces of training complementary systems and the big things to look out for.

Most important, we will look at how often a typical athlete will need to revisit a session and how frequently that session should be revisited. Finally, I will do my best to help you understand whether or not the training is working by suggesting appropriate tests. Sometimes pushing more weight in a particular exercise shows that the training has worked. In more performance-oriented situations, it's a little harder to tell if you've gotten better or not.

The first in the Sessions series is a workout we call Low Load Density Training. This is aimed at developing greater anaerobic endurance.

I look at density sessions in two different categories: high-load density and low-load density. The high-load density sessions tend to help increase your ability to handle lots of hard climbing or work (glycolytic capacity), where the low-load sessions tend to increase your ability to do harder climbing in endurance situations (aerobic power).

The idea with density training is to fit more total work at a specified intensity into each training session over a cycle of 4-8 sessions. We save the advancing of grades for other workouts. We don’t add more total duration to the sets. We just work to limit rest to what’s essential, and let our bodies do the rest.

Intended Result: Increased aerobic capacity, increased work capacity

Who is it for?: Intermediate and advanced athletes, climbers lacking route endurance or day-long stamina

How to advance it: Add volume in the form of more problems per unit time. Add intensity carefully - upping the grades can lead to high-load density and a focus on more power endurance than we want.

In the old days, we trained “endurance” by climbing easy moves until we got pumped and fell off. For me, this usually involved doing routes on toprope at Fremont Canyon, or traversing a long flagstone wall near the interstate in my hometown of Casper, Wyoming. The problem was this: Eventually, you got good enough that you didn’t fall off as quickly and endurance sessions ended up plateauing because the time available to climb became the big limiter. You can only get so many pitches done in a normal day of climbing. Likewise, skin and sheer boredom became the major factor in the flagstone traverses. How much 5.6 traversing can one person take?

We switched to 4x4s when we learned about them from our friends in Utah, and the pump was so severe that we thought we’d found the motherlode. The problem was that facing the pain became increasingly difficult 8 or 10 or 12 sessions in, and it seemed like we weren’t getting any better. My friend Bobby Model and I did a full 16 sessions (2 per week) of a 4x4 workout only to find that our endurance got worse progressively after about session 8, no matter how loud we cranked the music and no matter how much Ephedra we took.

I don’t believe there is a solid ceiling to one’s endurance like there is with finger strength or power. I knew then, even as I tried to recover from yet another power endurance smoker, that we weren’t quite getting it right. It wasn’t until maybe the early 2000s that we started trying to increase endurance by other methods. It was around this time we learned about managing the density of a training session, and the game changed forever.

I first learned about density training from the legendary Charles Staley. He found that certain athletes just couldn’t put more load on the bar or more time into given workouts, and he wanted to find a way to help them to continue to advance. Over the years, he developed what he called “escalating density training,” and it involved doing hard but not maximal loads on several exercises in a circuit for a fixed amount of time.

Density training is a staple of muscular endurance training. Instead of trying to increase the duration of your session or to add difficulty to the work sets, you instead try to fit more work at the same difficulty into a fixed amount of time. The first step is to figure out how much work you have time to do. In these sessions, I recommend you do boulder problems, though you could conceivably do a weight circuit or series of hangs or something. This work, however, would fall more into the general endurance category...we are trying to do more climbing during this phase.

Most climbers are capable of doing 45-60 minutes of climbing in the work sets of these sessions. The set up is simple: warm-up for 10 minutes or so (I like a combination of cardiac output work and climbing), then set a timer for the planned duration, and start climbing boulders. The problems should be 2-3 grades below your onsight level. Set firm boundaries here, so you don’t get sloppy toward the end of the workout and start adding in problems that are too easy just to get more mileage. Remember, quality counts.

Track the V grades of the boulders you do. At the end of your planned duration, stop the clock and add up all your numbers. Divide this number by the number of minutes in your session. This will give you a session density number. The goal of these workouts is to push that number higher. Aim to do 4-8 sessions at the most before cycling out and moving on to other training.

The Bouldering-Only Session Progression

This is a six-session progression that is aimed at somebody that is using only boulder problems to develop this level of endurance. In order to accurately load this session, you want to have a good picture of what your onsight level is for the bouldering that you will be doing. You can do this on regular boulder problems in a gym or on a fixed board, but you want to gauge your onsight based on the particular board you are using.

Read more

When building out programs, we look both at where we want to go as athletes and what fits within our current schedule. Although I’ve been really psyched a time or ten and planned for way more training than I could possibly do, the desired result—me leveling up—never happened. I just felt lame and frustrated.

So, step one is looking at your hours each week based on what you really have been doing. We then want to optimize the current schedule before adding additional training, especially when the need for additional training is questionable.

The next thing to keep in mind is the adaptation curve of our training, understanding that after several similar sessions, our improvement starts to level off. As this occurs, any improvement requires much increased training effort. Thus, the training stimulus is best changed at this point to assure continued progress.

The final component of a functioning training plan is the training itself. Does it “feel” right? Does it produce the kinds of things we want from a session? For many of us, the training doesn’t need to be very complex, just hard and progressive.

There are many potential structures for laying out a week or a month of training. Many readers will be familiar with the nonlinear program that we put forth in the book Logical Progression. In such a program, the athlete switch is between strength, power, and endurance stimuli as the week progresses. Although this is an excellent format to experiment with, many of our climbers do best with such a program only during a performance phase, and can see better gains in strength and power with more focus on those specific modes during other parts of the year.

More and more these days, I am apt to program what is called an “alternating linear” program. In such a program, we spend three weeks focused on one outcome, and then spend the next three weeks focusing on a second outcome. During each of these phases, the workouts differ but the general training schedule stays the same.

In the plan I am about to put forth, the training is based around three days a week of gym sessions, and one to two days a week working on projects. Going back to the point above, If you don’t currently train on a similar schedule, this is not encouraging you to scap the plan, instead you should adopt these ideas into your current plan and start from there.

The training is organized into two different blocks of three weeks worth of training. During the three gym sessions, the volume of training is varied. The first session of the week, we do what is called a medium volume session. The second session of the week is done after at least one rest day and is a high volume session. The third session of the week, normally done on a Friday, is a low volume session. This allows for a training stimulus, but the volume is generally so low that you can have a successful climbing day the following day.

Block 1

Read more

My days are not like that anymore. I have hours to work at the gym and athletes to coach. I have presentations to prepare. Articles and scripts to write. A relationship that I really love to put time into. Kids who, despite being teenagers, still need help from their parents—grudgingly and between eyerolls.

This is not a complaint or a brag. I love my life and my work. It’s simply pointing out that when I look at my time each day, there is little leeway. And no matter how much I love the training or climbing, time for it gets squeezed. More and more, if find that it’s not just time. Most of my training is done at the gym where my office is...and I am never without something to do work-wise. So, try as I might, my sessions are interrupted or ended by phone calls, “quick questions,” or by a feeling that I need to get going on my to-do list’s next item.

It lines up with my fatigue. Thirty or 45 minutes into a strength session, I start to feel it. Add that to the siren song of my list and I end up wrapping earlier than I should in many sessions. In the moment, I tell myself that it was a good session and was enough to keep the ball rolling. I fall into the “expert trap” of telling myself I know what I am doing. Later that day, though, I know I should have done more.

I started by trying to solve for time. I would tell myself I would have to strength train for at least x number of minutes or boulder for at least one hour. My issue came when I started allowing time for those questions or calls within that hour. Sometimes I would be chalked up and in the session, but spend 15 minutes chatting in the middle of what was supposed to be my time.

I tried adding more total sessions, but these, too, get kicked around by the schedule. Add to that the fact that the warm-up and prep for training really take significant time, and I realized that I simply have to stick with roughly the same number of sessions most weeks.

What I landed on was almost too simple to see at first. That the progression, session-to-session, needed to be about doing more total work. That with just getting in and doing some exercise, I was slowly dropping my capacity to do the workouts. It’s an easy trap to fall into. Let me explain.

One of the really frustrating things that rock climbers come up against is a feeling that just when they get to a good level of fitness, that fitness starts to decline. What happens with any peak in performance is that we overload the athlete’s ability to go fast / go hard / go heavy, and then they do their best to be fresh for each attempt. In rock climbing, they will start working on a hard project and the closer they get to sending, the more attention they must pay to being fresh for each try.

When I am trying to hit a personal best on a specific lift in the weight room, I will often rest 5 to 10 minutes between attempts. But being fresh for each attempt has a downside… The more I rest the less total work I get in per training session. So just as my intensity peaks, my volume starts to fade away.

This is exactly what started to happen to me as my schedule got busier. I could still lift heavy. Could still knock off a hard boulder or two. But my body got tired earlier and earlier in the sessions. I was tricked by the numbers I was putting up, and didn’t see that I was physically declining.

Although capacity is tied to strength, addressing heavier loads (as we do in strength work) isn’t essential to developing capacity. What I needed to do in these sessions, was to force myself to do a bit more total work, whatever the intensity.

This helped me to reframe what I wanted out of these sessions, and it helped me commit to the training better than simply focusing on working out from 9:15 to 10:30, or whatever.

More

In my bouldering sessions, I typically do about 5 minutes of movement prep, a few hangs on a hangboard, and then a couple of sets of pull-ups. I then do a simple “ladder” of problems, usually 4-5 problems starting at the easiest grade on the wall, with only about 30 seconds between.

Once I was in the session, whether it is a Limit Session or one where I was doing easier problems, I got into the habit of going about an hour. Instead of looking at the time, now, I look to add more total moves or boulders.

The starting point was simply where I ended up in my last few sessions. On a “Hard” bouldering day, where I worked on problems that were slightly harder than I could do first try, I was getting about 20 total problems in. Next session, I aimed for 22, then for 24 the next week, and so on until I was at about 50% more volume than before.

In the weight room, I added sets. My sessions are often 3 sets of around 5 reps for the main lifts. To keep it simple (and survivable), I just added one set to one exercise and progressed it over the month. I still went up in load if the lift was feeling easy, but was more aimed at capacity. It went like this:

Session 1:

Bench 3x5

Bulgarian Split Squat 3x5+5

Pull-Up 3x5

Lever 3x5

Session 2:

Bench 4x5

Bulgarian Split Squat 3x5+5

Pull-Up 3x5

Lever 3x5

Session 3:

Bench 4x5

Bulgarian Split Squat 4x5+5

Pull-Up 3x5

Lever 3x5

...and so on. By the end of the month, I was up to six or seven sets. Importantly, I wasn’t tapping out. It was a combination of committing to the work and rebuilding the capability of doing it.

Let’s be clear: I am in my fifties, so these training volumes might strike you as modest. I am with you...they are modest! But it’s also the truth about where I really am.

One of the things that comes up for me these days is the overall ability to go out and do stuff. It’s not just being redpoint-ready 3 days each week, but instead being able to bike for 90 minutes with my wife one day, being able to hike with the dog the next, and being able to climb the day after that. I still want to be able to carry a full pack all day long while looking for the animals. Or go try to keep up with my kids on skis. And I still like to be able to say “yes” to whatever comes along.

The more I get focused on doing heavy lifts and hard boulders, the more that capacity has a chance to slip away. The intense stuff is where I am most comfortable, but capacity work, doing more stuff, it what keeps me ready for going out the door.

It’s up to each of us to chose the adaptation(s) we want in training. I’ll reiterate that training works, every time. If your preparation is not resulting in improvement, it’s a flaw in your planning or execution. When my boulder and strength sessions did not address what I wanted out of climbing, I had to start changing what I did in the gym. If we commit to the wrong road, we probably won’t like where it takes us.

I remember long seasons of chaining together send after send. It sometimes felt like I’d work a route one day, send the next, and just repeat. When I was in my early 20s, I spent a winter in Railay and it seemed like I redpointed hard routes for weeks on end. I then flew home, started working 2 days a week at a climbing store, and climbed most other days, sending my hardest routes ever, for months.

That memory messes with me. I remember only the feeling of getting solid at new grades, of grabbing a new best-ever a couple of times, and feeling strong and fit the whole time. Only on reflection can I now see why I had more than half a year of peak performance—I wasn’t peaking at all.

I had built up to a high volume of climbing, often getting 30 or more pitches in per week, and on most days, I’d try a route that would take me a few tries to send. Then I’d do another and another at the grade until I’d done maybe 20 and then the next grade started coming easy. It was an accidental good progression brought on by wanting to climb anything and everything in the area. Nothing was all that hard to sort out even as I advanced through the grades. I was, despite what felt like high performance, “climbing medium.”

In the years that followed, I continued to climb the grade ladder, but the overall volume of routes I did started to drop. I started trying routes that would take a week, ones where I had to train for the crux boulder, others where I needed to build fitness to fight fatigue. At one point, I spent a couple of seasons trying to sort out how to get strong for a low boulder on a pitch but then have the stamina for a lifetime-hardest pumpfest above. When I finally did send, I felt like I had finally reached the big time and leveled up to the next tier of performance. It didn’t take even one more climbing day to sort out that I had done a great job of getting very fit for a specific objective. And that it would be almost a year before I sent anything near that hard again.

This is where we, as climbers, need to make a choice. We can build a high level of volume and get a lot of pretty hard climbs done. Alternatively, we can get really strong, find a climb near our limit, and perfect all the parts of our climbing in order to send. Neither is the right choice, and each path has its place. The only issue is when we believe we can do both.

There are the tail ends of the spectrum on either side of these choices, too. These are traps that are easy to fall into, and they appear when we let our fear or ego drive our decisions. At the very low end, we have “eternal base-building,” where a climber will continue to rack up easy pitch after easy pitch, often on toprope, in order to feel fit enough to try harder things. This never happens, so never try this tactic. As a marker, remember that if you can send 4 routes of a grade in a week’s time, it’s time to move on to harder stuff.

On the top end, we have the “eternal project,” which is its own kind of hiding place. This one is a max or supermax-level route that the climber comes back to year after year, building micro progresses in the mind, but generally getting dug into doing only the very familiar and getting very out of condition for anything else. Yes, there are many climbers who will engage with one hard route over several years, but the successful ones also climb other things in the meantime.

For most climbers to find success, they need to do capacity work, but make sure it’s technically challenging—or they need to push hard on a limit route, but be sure it is in the realm of do-able.

Wise programming almost always has a mix of capacity-focused work and intensity-focused work throughout the year.

There are a thousand ways to set this up, and it can get complicated in a hurry. Instead of cracking open a massive spreadsheet, let’s just keep a few rules in mind.

Rule 1. Training Requires Progress

We throw around the term “training,” but training is a special thing. Sometimes we can boulder and get better. Sometimes we can open an exercise app, follow along, and get a little stronger. But anyone who has been at it for more than a few months starts to see these “easy” wins taper off. Training, by definition, is about improving at a specific thing. In conditioning the body for sport, training is about overload.

Whether your goal is more capacity or more intensity, you need to aim for progress in each session. If I can do three sets of three pull-ups in my first session, I need to up the ante next time. Add a 1 pound weight to a belt. Do another rep or set. Slow the movement down. And this needs to happen throughout a training cycle.

The process of training requires that we tell our body, “you’re not good enough, yet.”

Rule 2. Capacity Can Be Painful…In More Ways Than We Think

Sometimes people miss out on the secret of endurance, and that’s the fact that endurance takes both time and a willingness to suffer. When we want to build capacity, the prescription always includes dedicating more time to the effort. The difficulty in building effective endurance or general capacity plans is that the first sessions should be easier than you think and then continue to progress until the last sessions feel intolerably difficult. This requires us to do 8-12 progressive sessions over several weeks…a thing that I believe most climbers have never done.

It’s boring. It’s arduous. It’s about more than just muscular endurance.

I tell the story occasionally about recommending a “Route 4x4” workout to a couple of 5.13 level climbers, and suggesting they start by doing the workout at the 5.9 or 5.10a level. (For those unfamiliar with this workout, it involves athlete one leading a pitch, then quickly lowering and toproping it three more times. The athletes then switch, and athlete 2 does the same. This sequence is repeated three more times, with a day-end total of 16 pitches per athlete.)

I just so happened to arrive at the crag the first day these two decided to try the session, and they had decided my recommendations were a bit soft. Instead, the two decided to start with a pumpy 11c. By the second lap on the first climb, I could see that they were in trouble. Of course they didn’t finish the session. They didn’t even finish the first set. They certainly did not progress into 7-11 more sessions of progressively harder difficulty.

Add more time at low intensity. Progress carefully. The first three or four sessions should feel a bit too easy, the final three or four should feel like a real reach.

Rule 3. If You’re Doing It Right, You’ll Eventually Run Out Of Gas

Some climbers will want to continue to add more and more boulder sessions or endurance sessions or whatever to a program. If you’re overloading, though, you’ll start to feel the plateau building, the power failing, the grind really getting to you. This means you’re doing it right.

It’s not a failure. On the contrary, a climber that gets to the end of a training phase that needs a break from the training is probably on target.

Finish the planned workouts as best you can that last week, and know that a break is both needed and recommended.

Rule 4. Step Off, Don’t Fall Off

Once you hit the end of your ability to go harder, acknowledge that. Look at the progress you made from sessions one to session ten or twelve. Be happy with the progress, and then take some time.

The simplest way to program for this is to aim for a recovery week every fourth or fifth week. This week should be around half the volume of your previous training week, and at a lower level of difficulty. This is a great time to do some other sports, to get out and check out a new area, or to simply climb for fun on routes you’d typically ignore.

After a good week or ten days, you can start in again on another cycle that builds on top of the previous one.

If you are having long cycles of good performance, as I did all those years ago, that’s great. But understand that you might be leaving some amount of performance on the table. A little more focus on trying harder things will see your fitness fluctuate more, but will also see you topping harder climbs.

Remember that training works. The best training coaxes us to slightly better performances, it doesn’t try to whip us into quick shape. Be patient but be persistent. Tomorrow’s session won’t be amazing, but if you do it right, the one thirty days from now will delight you.

I have found that exercise has to be a non-negotiable. It has to be put on the calendar every day, and it has to get done. As James Clear notes, if you don’t have the time, stick to the schedule but shrink the scale. This not only helps physically, but it keeps you in the game mentally.

Ideally, we’d all lift weights twice a week for 60-90 minutes, walk 30 minutes a day, and do one session of interval efforts that really push our limits. We’d be stronger, healthier, and approaching lifespan-increasing levels of general fitness. Alas, we’re too busy living to try to lengthen our lifespan.

So what if I don’t have time for my whole weight session? What if I have just a few minutes?

Many people would suggest pushing that session back, but in my experience, pushing that session means fewer sessions per year. We don’t tend to make them up. So:

If I had only 60 minutes, I’d do the full workout, but instead of doing all the sets of all the exercises, I’d reduce the sets by one. So, if I had planned five, I’d do four that day.

If I had just 45, I would reduce them another set. Anything over about ten exercises in a session is excessive, so I might suggest rewriting the normal session if you can’t get this to work. You’re not hardcore, you’re just not hitting it hard if your sessions drone on like this.

In 30 minutes, I’d do a circuit of four exercises, warming up by doing them with light loads. Pull-Up, Squat, Bench Press, Deadlift. Maybe I’d make 4-5 rounds.

With 20 minutes, I’d Drop the Squat and Bench Press. Two exercises, alternating back and forth.

Ten minutes? I’d switch out to Get-Ups, one on each side, alternated with 10 kettlebell swings.

Five minutes? Just Get-Ups.

Two minutes? Stair sprints.

One? Hell...if I can’t find two minutes, I’m doomed.

The two were in the gym almost every day. Some days they lifted weights. Some days they did pull-ups hanging from ice tools. Sometimes, they’d consult their phones, then it was a marathon session of step-ups with loaded packs wearing brand-new mountaineering boots. Their dedication to the preparation was impressive…and totally out of line with their dedication to the craft.

I have seen this play out multiple times in the nearly 25 years we’ve had the gym. A young climber will get excited about the idea of being an alpinist and will fall into a trap of physical preparation. It’s not really clear where the disconnect comes, but what happens over and over is that this person becomes incredibly physically fit for gym workouts and never applies it in a performance environment. When it comes down to actually driving to the trailhead and throwing a heavy pack on your back and launching into the mountains, your dream or your gear or your gym workout are not enough.

Vern Gambetta emphasized the difference between training time and “go time,” and the people that do go to the mountains know that when we get out there, it’s not usually our fitness that makes us fail. Instead, it is the difference between our expectations of what the mountains will be like and what we find when we are out there. For some it is the wind, the dry air, the hunger, or just the distance back to safety. Whether it’s your lungs or legs or your anxiety that gives you pause, the fact that something came up that shut you down means your preparation wasn’t correct.

I think we’ve oversold the value of gym prep for mountain environments. Go hard in the gym so you’re ready for the world. But the physical is just a part. It seems like hundreds of people read Kiss or Kill, started doing squats and hill laps, and never got past the flash point.

It’s not Twight’s fault. I think it’s an overall belief that being physically “fit” automatically entitles us to success the performance environment. Even obsession over gear, topos, trip reports, and weather are not enough. The map, as we know, is not the territory.

It’s easy to get confused when you look from the outside. Elite alpinist doing hard shit in the gym. Elite alpinist with expensive gear. What we don’t get to see is their hours of thinking about the mountains. The many dozens of days that are spent out there with no fanfare, no social posts. The many days where no photos were taken. The touch that comes from living among the peaks.

Every time you’re out in the hills is developmental, whether you notice it or not. And this time is essential to long-term success.

The method that works for preparation is a simple process:

1. Go experience the environment.

2. Notice where you struggled and consider solutions to those struggles.

3. Go home and address these as best you can.

4. Return to the environment and repeat.

Were your legs trashed after that day? Make them stronger. Were you terrified? Do something about it. But don’t just go to the gym and try to be an animal and hope it will make you comfortable in the cold.

If you read the canon of Twight’s work, you’ll quickly realize there is very little about being physically stronger, and an incredible amount about facing the reality of what’s out there. A look at Dani Arnold’s career will show you literally hundreds of non-noteworthy days in the mountains, lots of dealing with thwarted plans, and relatively little gym time in-between. There are climbers who don’t train at all, but face the monster of the mountains and have hugely successful careers. There are none who only occasionally leave the gym and perform at a world standard.

This is true whether you’re a boulderer who spends unlimited time on the Moon Board, a trail runner who can’t manage to leave the treadmill, or a rock climber who hits the gym three times a week, but dreams of El Cap.

Train, yes, but also get out there.

The pair of dedicated gym alpinists quit coming in as frequently. Then they quit coming at all. Maybe 8 months later, I ran into one of them and asked about his alpine season. “I didn’t really have time to go,” was all he said.

Step one is not to start training. Step one is to go out and see what you’re training for.

Improvements in alactic function are critical to sport performance, but you need to have a fair amount of discipline when it comes time to train, lest you end up seeking fatigue in the lactic “second gear.” Good programming will not only seek to improve your alactic (ATP-CP system) function, but also try to improve the relationship between alactic and aerobic training. This is your “power at the crux” system: you know what trying hard feels like...so train that way.

To increase the utilization or power output of this system (to “go harder”), you want to keep the exercise set length short (3-8 seconds) and the effort very high (close to 90%), with long rests. If this sounds a lot like strength and power training, you’re exactly right. In order to increase the output of this system, we build pure strength or power.

To increase your capacity (ability to do many tries over a day), progress toward longer sessions at close to the high loads above, with efforts at 75% or harder. Longer total work time over a training cycle is key...so don’t shortcut this in favor of easier movement.

Before you jump into some kind of alactic-only training phase, remember that the interplay of training for pure strength and power as well as development of the aerobic capabilities of your muscles is critical. When exploring the ideas that follow on training this system, keep in mind that this will only represent a portion of your training during specific parts of the training year. In general, an athlete should do at least one session of alactic work per week to maintain her ability, and 3 or 4 per week to develop either more power or more capacity.

The Starting Point

In building utilization (strength), we’ve had the most success with doing intervals that are 5-10 seconds of effort, with longer rests of up to 4 minutes. This makes for a long session and it doesn’t feel like hard work. To address capacity, we started pushing different exercises into the sequence and then trying to overload the system by changing the work the body was doing during a shorter cycle. This led to doing work on a rolling 30 or 40 second clock.

The specific starting template is as follows:

0:00 <10 seconds Upper Body Explosive or Edge Hang

0:30 <10 seconds Lower Body / Total Body Explosive

1:00 10 second Edge Hang

1:30 <10 seconds Upper Body Explosive

2:00 <10 seconds Upper Body Strength

2:30 rest full 30 seconds

There is not a lot of time for moving around the gym here. I suggest you grab a couple of tools and set yourself up by the Campus Board. A good specific session is the following (loading is my own):

0:00 Campus Ladder 1-3-5-7-9 (on medium rungs)

0:30 6x Kettlebell Swings (~½ bodyweight bell)

1:00 10 second Edge Hang (bodyweight, 10mm)

1:30 3x Campus Doubles (large edges or jugs)

2:00 2x Power Pull-Up

2:30 rest full 30 seconds

The first sessions are built on doing several rounds of 3 minutes, as described above. A series of rounds will be done back-to-back (usually 3-6 rounds per series), with a long rest between series. It is possible to change a few of the exercises between series, but don’t get carried away with chasing variety. You’ll want to see yourself progress in performance and this is hard to see if you’re changing things too often.

Errors in Progression

Read more

Traverses like this are logistically tough and require a good deal of sacrifice when it comes to what you’re going to bring. Sleeping bags and a tent would be nice, but carrying them on your back while leading pitches would not. Extra shoes, a large rack of gear, and a second rope all fell into that same category. In the end, our gear ended up fitting into two small daypacks, didn’t include rock shoes, a full meal, or even good storm gear.

The traverse starts on the tough-to-access north side of the range. Fifty years before, you could have driven a Jeep to Kearny Lake, but the road had been destroyed by traffic and was now an ATV trail. We talked our friends Jeff and Rick Leafgreen into shuttling us there. We drove up from Lander, dropped my truck at West Ten Sleep Lake trailhead, and then all piled into the Leafgreen’s rig to drive up to Story.

Just west of Story, the ATV trail climbs up narrow switchbacks through amazing bands of limestone. Then there are miles of narrow forested road, through some of the wilder country left in this wild corner of the state. Mike and I each sat behind one of the Leafgreens as we cruised up the trails quickly in the morning air. The trail climbs and dips through the trees and finally crests near tree line at the east end of Kearny Lake Reservoir.

There, we threw on our too-light feeling packs, and started along the fisherman’s trail along the north side of the lake as the hum of the Leafgreen’s ATVs faded away. At the west end of the lake the trail pretty much disappeared, but we were able to follow faint and discontinuous paths up the drainage to Spear Lake, above.

As we skirted Spear Lake, the sun dipped below the ridges to the west. We moved west and south up out of the last of the vegetated drainages and up to the small Bard Lake and then past a couple of smaller lakes above. We paused at the highest one of these, where we filled our Camelbaks, and committed to the bare north ridge of Black Tooth, not quite sure where to stop for the night.

Dark closed in, the clouds gathered, and we marched higher still. Somewhere around 11,500’ we found not so much an overhang, but a huge boulder split diagonally by a big chimney. The upper side overhung at about 45 degrees, the bottom, a slab of almost the same angle, and a floor of small boulders and ice. We were windwhipped and soaked from rain when we crawled inside, and were glad to have the little shelter it provided.

We pulled the foam backpads out of our packs and spread them across the ice. Mike pulled out his small stove and brewed up one of the two tea bags we’d brought. We pulled on our down jackets, which would be our only insulation. We ate bars and jerky and squatted side by side with our backs to the open sky, hoping the Gore-Tex knockoff laminate in our Sierra Designs prototype rain jackets would hold up and keep our down jackets dry.

The rain kept up all night. We “slept” a while, but mostly just moved around to try and keep from aching too bad when the sun came up. I kept wondering what we’d do if it continued to rain. The Leafgreens were back in Lander, and for all intents and purposes, we’d “burned the ships.” The only way out was across the ridge.

Sometime in the night, it stopped raining and the wind came up. It was cold for July, but I knew the wind would dry the peaks fast and we needed that more than warmth. We would have tossed and turned all night if there had been room. Instead we squirmed.

In the morning, Mike rebrewed the tea and we each ate a bar. Mike had bought a bag of red hots candy in Buffalo on the way up, and we each had a handful to start the day. We restuffed our small packs. We put harnesses on and I tied the coiled rope on top of my pack, not knowing when the roped climbing would begin. Apparently, the north ridge of Blacktooth was 5.5. Mike hiked first, moving quickly up talus, then up exposed slabs, and finally into ledgy terrain where falling was not a good idea. He scrambled left and then right, retreating here, committing to a more direct path there.

I followed behind. At times it seemed like it would have been nice to rope up, but Mike was already on past that section...and I was carrying the rope. After maybe 30 minutes of scrambling, the angle eased and we walked up a gentle ridge. We hit the summit of Black Tooth (4th class) about 6 in the morning. The register on the summit showed the last people to sign had been there in 1986, thirteen years before. It was not a hard peak to climb, but the approach-to-coolness ratio was quite high. We drank water, enjoyed the sun, and looked, finally, south along our intended ridge traverse. Cloud Peak, the last of the summits, seemed a very long way away.

We scrambled south on granite blocks and slabs. Eventually, the angle steepened, and we looked for a good place to set up a rappel. Mike moved around the east side of a small block and hollered, “Hey, come check this out.” Wedged in a crack on top of the block was a piece of climbing protection, a chock, but it was made of plastic. Neither of us had ever seen one, but it was not budging, so we clipped into it, backed it up with an aluminum one, and rappelled down into the gully below.

Mount Woolsey, the next peak in line lay across a short narrow gap. It sat slightly east and south of the Black Tooth, and it looked like it would be easy to skirt on the west side. Our goal, though, was not to just get down the ridge, but to hit each summit. Beyond the gap, we found a nice stance, and Mike flaked out the rope. I tied in for the day’s first lead.

The north side of Woosey was near vertical, but was broken up by ledges and cracks. The climbing was a bit wet, but it was easy to protect, and ended up being quite good. I traversed up and left, and left again, and even further left, reaching a large ledge after about 150 feet of easy fifth class climbing. Mike followed quickly, then climbed right past me and up easier terrain to a point at which the angle eased. He set a belay and when I joined him, we scrambled a short distance to the top. A quick photo, handful of Red Hots, and we moved on.

The descent was slow, and with a lot of third class downclimbing and a rappel, we found ourselves at the base of a small pinnacle called The Gargoyle.

Hardly a mountain, we scrambled up easy terrain to near its top, and then roped up to scramble up the spike of a summit, a fifty foot dagger sticking up and leaning slightly over the chasm to the west. It is so slender that it would be difficult to put two people on top. Since it was a named peak, we had planned to climb it, and since we planned it, we did it.

Mike climbed up first, rope trailing behind him. He found no place for putting in gear, so he carefully grabbed to top, rolled up onto his feet on the tiny summit, then reversed the climb back to me. I did the same, and then we coiled the rope and hiked on along the narrow ridge to the three-summit Innominate beyond.

The Innominate is everything ideal about an alpine summit. Hard to reach, technical, jagged. It is a multi-summited fin of a mountain that seems torn from the ranges of Patagonia than where it sits. Like a man’s hand held upright, the mountain is spire after spire with deep and narrow gullies between. Its position in the range makes it a rarely climbed, but often dreamed of, objective.

The first of its three summits was relatively easy, a few short ropelengths that barely ticked into the fifth class category. We hit the top, and quickly rappelled into the col between the first and second summits.

From this narrow stance, the climbing presented more of a challenge than one would hope. We traversed left and then back right looking for an easy way. Not finding it, we committed to a long vertical crack that was, truthfully, harder than we’d expected to run into on a ridge traverse.

I pulled the insoles out of my sticky rubber approach shoes and laced them as tight as I could get them. I gave Mike the Camelbak reservoir to carry—now less than half full—and started up the crack. The rock was cold and damp in places, but the jams were good and there was plenty of opportunity to place gear. Because our rack consisted of no more than ten pieces, I climbed to maybe twenty feet before placing anything. The crack varied between hand jams and fists, but I was grateful for the ease of stuffing my thick shoes into the crack.

At about 80 feet up, I found the crack stacked with loose flakes, and had to toss the dinner plate-sized pieces out one by one from below. Mike crouched close to the wall to avoid any danger, and occasionally yelled up encouragement. We both knew that I’d drawn the short straw of the trip and he was grateful.

Mike followed quickly, and acknowledged the difficulty with a quick raise of the eyebrows upon reaching the belay. We were in it now. We climbed to the flat-ish summit on a couple more easy leads, bouldered to the top of the 20 foot spike that formed the true summit, and then roped up for a careful downclimb into the col before the third summit.

Tame by comparison, the third summit was probably the best overall climbing, with two good ropelengths of solid and fun climbing. We hit the top near noon, and descended south toward Mount Kramer and the end of the technical climbing. Once in the Innominate-Kramer col, we stripped off our harnesses, coiled the rope, and grabbed a quick bite to eat before shouldering our packs for the scramble to top the last two summits.

The remaining work was boulder hopping on wide alpine slopes, and we hit Kramer quickly without even a rest at the top. As the sun set behind the Absaroka Range to the west, we topped Cloud Peak, a summit we’d visited together a few times. We were now in familiar terrain, and it was mostly downhill to the truck, although 11 miles away.

We drank the last of the tea, and ate the last of our food (save some Red Hots) at the summit. As we worked down the long south slopes of Cloud Peak, we knew we had hours of hiking ahead, but the work was all but done.

It is slow going and not “casual,” yet each step was one closer to the end of the day. Each step also took us down in altitude, and my pounding headache was slowly subsiding.

We dropped off the ridge and down along the headwaters of Paint Rock Creek, then into the first green meadows we’d touched all day. A quick jaunt up one small final hill took us to the Solitude Trail, which we found just as the darkness overtook us completely. We walked up around a hill above Mistymoon Lake, past a group of tents lit by headlamps and on down toward lake Helen.

Then it started to rain. It came it heavy and it wasn’t long before we were totally soaked. We moved past Helen and finally into the trees, following the wide and muddy trail a final couple of miles to the trailhead. We got to my truck around midnight, quickly tossed our packs into the back, and drove out to Deerhaven, then down the winding road through Ten Sleep Canyon.

In town at the bottom, we stopped at a roadside Pepsi vending machine for drinks and found the tailgate had been left open the full hour’s drive from the trailhead. By some miracle, both packs still rested on the tailgate of the truck. We made sure to secure the load, then drove on to Worland. It was raining, windy and we were dead tired.

In Worland, we found an open store, and went in for burritos, ice cream, and anything else that seemed like it would fill our stomachs and help keep us awake. This wouldn’t be the first nor last time we drove across the state in the darkest part of the night, either on the front end or back of some huge day.

As I write this some 25+ years later, I value my time in the wild with Mike as one of the great gifts of my life. The days were magnificent, the objectives big, and we both did a good job of keeping our mouths shut when we had doubts. There are turning points in each trip when we are not so sure that what we are doing is a good idea. Neither of us was brash, so we knew it was OK to trust the other when our own motivation slipped.

Mike and I have both gone on to greater ranges and bigger adventures. The Bighorn years, as they now seem to have become, were some of the best.

Just recently, I received a critique of an article I had written where the writer explained that using a counterweight system for one arm pull-up practice would “work better” than my suggestion of taking some weight off by holding a sling, wrapped around the bar, with the other hand.

I asked how he knew that.

He said it made sense because it was more precise.

I asked if it was easier to shoot a flying duck with a rifle or a shotgun.

He didn’t understand what I meant.

James Clear wrote:

“We love to obsess over tactics and strategies that make the last 10% of difference.

For example: Didn’t have a good workout?

Well then, let’s debate all of the reasons why it could have been something other than you. Maybe you need to have your post–workout protein shake 30 minutes after working out instead of 60 minutes after working out. Maybe you need to get a better pair of shoes. Or a belt. Or a sweat–wicking shirt. Or knee sleeves.

What’s incredible is that these are things we actually waste time on! I’ve heard all of those crazy excuses mentioned in conversations. I’ve even said some of them myself.

Why? Because it’s easier to waste time debating the last 10% of improvement than it is to just do the thing that makes 90% of the difference. It’s easier to claim that you need a better diet plan or a new workout template or different gear than it is to admit that what you really need is to not miss a workout for the next six months.

This same idea holds true for diets and nutrition, business and entrepreneurship, writing and art, and virtually any other endeavor we attempt. We want strategies that scale. We want tactics that are optimized. But eventually, you realize that the biggest difference between success and failure comes from mastering the fundamentals.

Maybe a faster computer will make Stephen King a better writer … because he has already mastered the fundamentals of writing every day.

Maybe optimal meal timing will make an Olympic swimmer a better athlete … because she has already mastered the fundamentals of eating healthy and training hard.

Maybe a better guitar will make Eric Clapton a better musician … because he has already mastered the fundamentals of playing consistently.

But for most of us, the final 10% of optimization will rarely lead to the difference we’re looking to achieve.”

Worrying about testing with a strain gauge means nothing if you aren’t effectively training for strength. Testing strength takes 5 minutes and gives us a dopamine response. Training for strength takes several hours each week and sometimes doesn’t give measurable results for months.

Thinking on which program is best and closely following all the social media of those testing out new ways to train might be entertaining, but it’s not going to help you get better. It’s heartbreaking when you learn that just getting to sleep each night by 10 might outpace your BFR gains.

Movement speed, quasi-isometrics, double-regressed periodized cycles, weekly Lattice testing, supplements, fad diets, and even $250 shoes (the best investment in this list) only help a little bit. What does help?

Be fierce.

Be confident.

Be open to doing climbs that don’t suit you.

Be brave.

Try hard.

Get some sleep.

Eat the right things and avoid the wrong things (and if you don’t know these, ask a 3rd grader).

Train hard, at a level you respect, but don’t fear.

Most of all, go climbing.

General Edward Braddock was one of the top military minds of his generation. Coming up through the ranks of the elite British Coldstream Guards, and served in the Netherlands and Gibraltar, as well as spending time as a dedicated military historian. He helped form the successful British battle tactics of the day, and was a natural choice to go and direct troops in the American colonies.

His field experience involved precision, discipline, and large form battalion attacks on fixed fortifications. In the “rank and file” form of combat, no force on Earth came close to the success of the British armies. It was this mindset he took with him when he sailed west.

When Braddock arrived in Virginia in 1755, he didn't see a new world; he saw a world he needed to tame. He looked at the endless forests and saw obstacles to be cleared so he could perform his "proper" drills, rather than a terrain to be adapted to. His years of excellence in the British military system convinced him that the system was universal. He believed that if the environment didn't fit his tactics, he would simply force the environment to change.

Braddock was tasked with the capture of the French Fort Duquesne (modern-day Pittsburgh). He traveled there, slowly, with two regiments of British regulars, but insisted on cutting and leveling a road as they went so that they could march in a disciplined and orderly formation. Needless to say, between the chopping of the trees, the marching drums, the red uniforms, and the slow pace, it was easy to keep track of them.

On July 9, 1755, Braddock’s force was crossing the Monongahela River. Suddenly, they were engaged by a force of about 900 French and Native American fighters. These fighters were not in brightly colored uniforms and they did not line up across a wide field in a “gentlemanly” way. They fought from behind. Hid among rocks. Shot men as they tried to cross running water. Moved in small groups.

They fought the war using the terrain instead of trying to change it.

This is where the “last war” mindset turned fatal. As the British soldiers realized they were being slaughtered from the woods, many tried to break rank and take cover behind trees to fight back on equal terms.

Braddock refused to let them. He reportedly beat his own men with the flat of his sword to force them back into neat, standing rows of red targets. To Braddock, taking cover was “cowardice.” He insisted they maintain a civilized posture, making them easy targets for the enemy in the trees.

More than 900 British soldiers died there, and only about 30 of the French and native fighters were lost. Braddock himself was fatally wounded, and his last words were reportedly, “We shall better know how to do it next time.” I really hope that is true.

We fight the last war when we try to replicate our first year of climbing in our 20th.

We fight the last war when we do the same exact training we did last year.

We fight the last war every time we ignore a changing landscape.

One of my favorite quotes is from Sam Harris. Harris said, “If someone came to me with my list of problems, I would be able to sort that person out very easily.”

To avoid fighting the last war, we have to move from relying on accumulated answers to implementing active observation. There are four strategies that can help us avoid those same mistakes.

1. Assemble a “Red Team.”

   The Red Team is a group (or person) tasked specifically with playing the "enemy" or the "disruptor." Their job is to find the holes in the current plan.

   A coach or trusted friend can help. Imagine presenting your past performance, goals, training plan, schedule, and life situation to this team. They certainly won’t just say, “Looks great. Go for it.” If they are at all concerned with your success, they’ll help you sort out the details.

2. Seek new information.

   What worked for me at age 17 was fun, got me to higher grades, and would be both devastating to my body and totally ineffectual in getting me up hard routes 35 years later. As tactics stop producing noticeable results, we need to seek out new ones. This can be as simple as lifting heavier weights or trying a different style of bouldering.

   In the 1990s, the use of system training walls and campus boards was high among dedicated climbers. These tools helped us with specific strength, explosiveness, timing, and more. Although still useful tools, most of us have moved on to using training boards for the same purposes. These boards tend to simulate climbing better, may have a lower injury risk, and are much more entertaining.

3. Remember the Washington Principle.

   George Washington was a master tactician and had learned well the ways of moving through the terrain of the colonies. He could have helped Braddock succeed because he knew better how to navigate the geography of the New World. He had a better understanding of the French and Native American fighting styles. In short, he knew the performance environment.

   Far too many of us forget to look at what others are doing to prepare.

   Every year, high level climbers travel to my home area of Wild Iris, Wyoming, to try out some of the short and powerful limestone climbs. In preparing for the area, they spend extra time on hard boulders and explosive moves. They may even hang from their middle fingers to prep for pockets. But every year there is a story of a great climber injuring a ring finger on a shallow pocket and leaving the area early to start recuperating.

   Instead of working on explosive strength on small crimps, they might have done well to talk to others that climb there regularly, or that have sustained this injury in the past. “What did you do to prepare beforehand? How long does it take? Once there, how should I progress into harder climbs?”

4. Think in OODA Loops.

   Developed by strategist John Boyd, the OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) is the antidote to Braddock’s 12-foot-wide road through the Virginia wilderness. Braddock focused on force: more men, bigger cannons, wider roads. Instead of building out a huge and detailed 3-year training plan based on what you did last season, think in terms of general direction, intensity, and small changes in addressing weaknesses.

   What does this season require?

   What has changed since I last did similar training?

   What is the simplest way to develop these skills?

   What can I do, today, to make steps toward my next goal?

Familiarity and past successes are easy traps to fall into. IF progress is not coming the way it used to, the first step is to recognize that your past strategies might be outdated or used up. Breaking free of these traps is the fastest way to progress into the next stages of your development.

I had a couple of meetings that ran over, then there was a problem with one of the stationary bikes at the gym, and an old friend stopped by. Each one of these no-so-big things chipped away at my carefully planned day. This is something that comes up a lot, despite my regular focus on how to be more efficient and productive.

And despite the fact that I truly do prioritize the time I dedicate to training, training time is what suffered. I was a little tired coming into the day and the time I had set aside was later than I’d like...so it was super tempting to skip. And it was a Thursday, so I knew I had a hard session coming early Friday.

When I am at the gym (in my office), lacking for time, staring at the to-do list, and feeling my aching joints, my motivation can waver. And so I force myself to move into the “preflight” part of the workout.

Close planner and laptop.

Lock the door of the office.

Shoes off.

Change into shorts.

Drink a pre-workout mix (which I don’t really think does anything, except tell me it’s time to train).

Grab training log.

Go.

So in my 45-instead-of-120 minute session, what do I do? No full bouldering session. No total-body 5x5. No extensive endurance combos. Instead, I just have to “touch” all of the things I’m looking to move forward. Hold the schedule, shrink the scale.

We really push for movement prep with our athletes, but sometimes I just can’t commit fully to it. 10 minutes of my 45 is too precious. Not sure if this is the best practice, but I sort of mush it into the front of the session.

Since I love climbing, I start there. Here’s what Thursday, February 27th, 2025 looked like:

Boulders: V0 vert, V0 15 degrees, V0 30 degrees

2x Pull-Up, 30 sec Toy Soldier, 5 each side Atlas Lunge, 2x Pull-Up

Boulders: V2 vert, V2 15 degrees, V1 45 degrees

5 each side Bulgarian Split Squat, 5x Weighted Pull-Up, 5 each side Bulgarian Split Squat, 5x Weighted Pull-Up

Boulders: V4 15 degrees, V6 30 degrees, V4 45 degrees

Not much for volume. Hardly felt warmed up. Didn’t get to some important exercises.

Wildly successful.

As long as this is not an everyday occurrence, these sessions are great. Sometimes the least you can do is the most you can do.

The Novice plan featured more general exercise, lots of variety, and a whole bunch of trying different boulders. The Intermediate forced a weekly cycle, aimed at developing some specific finger strength, and was more restrictive in the variety than the Novice plan. Finally, the Advanced plan was more restrictive still. It was based on monthly cycling, aiming for micro-improvements, and was pretty focused on just a few things.

Truly advanced trainees are rare. Once you reach the advanced stage, one might think you’re really going somewhere. “If I copy an advanced climber’s program, I, too, will be advanced.” In reality, trying to do an advanced program in order to become advanced would be like deciding to skip ahead to graduate-level calculus instead of learning the basics of geometry and algebra.

This is exactly what happened when I released the programs. I started getting questions about how to modify the advanced program for a V4 boulderer, how to make it more flexible, to add in some pull-ups. It took a while to figure it out, but when I looked at the analytics on the plans, I saw clearly what was up. The Advanced program had more than 10 times as many views as the Intermediate one, and the Novice plan had hardly been opened. It hit me like a freight train: people don’t want to think of themselves as beginners at anything. Further, how can someone who has been climbing for 8 years and doing V10 be considered an intermediate?

My error was in labeling. My error was in not explaining that being a novice or an intermediate, in terms of adaptation potential, is a wonderful place to be. Why? Because more things work to help you get better. Because you can actually feel yourself get better. Because you are building a goddamn sword, not just sharpening the blade a little bit.

For years sports scientists and coaches have cautioned against using specific means to develop general qualities. Being too sport-specific doesn’t let us train at the same high volume and potential for adaptation as general means. Imagine if every movement you do to improve your strength is somehow manipulated to be “sport specific.” Your leg strength is built with climbing shoes on. You do pull-ups, but only while using crimps. We not only risk injury, but we run into the issue of pattern fatigue. But continually stressing the fingers and toes and playing at the end of the kinetic chain, we never reach our full potential for strength. No one can effectively train for maximum pulling strength if they are training for contact strength at the same time.

I suggest looking at all of our activities as a continuum, from general activity (any exercises at all), to general activity that is duration or intensity specific to our sport, to specific training, to simulation, and finally to performance. Let me quickly elaborate on these five factors:

Activity (at all)

If you’re a climber, you probably think the only useful training is hitting the Kilter Board, or boulders, or whatever your current climbing-like training is. But what if you’re visiting your parents? What if you’re on vacation in Hawaii? Don’t be some kind of freak about staying on your exact plan from back home. Going for a hike with dad or a bike ride or getting a workout in at the hotel fitness center can help keep your fitness levels from dropping. It can also be fun. If you’re way out of climbing shape, starting in by adding general activity to your daily routine is a great way to start back. Everything falls into this bucket, and even though we know it only helps a little when it comes time to redpoint, there are times that activity is all you get.

General Training

General training is usually about developing overall strength or power, or it can be about building the endurance systems up for our sport. This training is usually driven by weight training, but could also take the form of swimming or nordic skiing, or other sports. Here, we look to develop our overall ability to pull, push, squat, hold tension, and the like. We try to exceed the performance environment in what our body can do. We look at general training as being duration-specific, such as building the endurance to give high power output for five minutes, or as intensity-specific, such as being able to hold a one-arm lock-off. As I mentioned above, developing these qualities in a general way lets us “hone the blade” with specific training later. This helps us avoid pattern fatigue and overtraining and tissue injury.

Specific Training

This is where we boulder, campus, hang from our tips, and spend time on system board movements. Timed circuits, linked problems, and all the other cool stuff you come up with falls into this category. I like to think of specific training as time in rock shoes, but really it’s any time we are integrating the same groups of muscles in the same way we do when climbing. In this way, climbing on a jungle gym, working with gymnastics moves, and more can be seen as “sport specific.”

Training tends to be both intensity and duration specific. This means that if we are aiming to get good at five minute efforts, our training should address this duration zone. This also means (and this is really tough) that the intensity should be close. All-out efforts on the rock require that our training be similar. We get an idea of intensity through perceived exertion, maybe heart rate, but hitting the mark is a challenge.

Simulation

Simulation, doing as exact a move or sequence as possible, is one step better (yet more limited in its result) than specificity. We all know of the Tony Yaniro stories of building replicas of cruxes, training hard on them, and then coming back and crushing. More and more, we see boulderers quite successful with some exact movement training. It works. The problem is that we’re now really into the sharpening of the sword. Exact simulation gets you well prepared for a hold type, move length, and duration that is on your project, but the development is narrow.

In the alpine world, my friend Mark Jenkins talked about mountaineers who trained to go up Everest in the gym at home. Hours and hours were spent slogging up the Stairmaster, until some were truly as strong going uphill as the worlds best alpinists. The problem? When it came time to walk downhill or with non-flat steps, they were crushed. The movement is totally different, and their quads and calves couldn’t take the loads.

Simulation should be used sparingly, at the very end of a training cycle, and to top-up your conditioning for a project. Otherwise, you’ll get good at too little for it to do you any good at all.

Performance

Performance - actually getting on your project or trying to onsight your goal route, or showing up at a comp - is what it’s all about. It is the ultimate honing of your blade, to stick with our analogy. However, if you haven’t done the base work, you might find that the project will take you way too long. You might find yourself having to get your fingers stronger for a specific hold. Might need to build up stamina for the route.

When you get to your project, you should be above 95% in all of the basic physical traits needed for it. Should be able to climb to the top of a nearby, easier route. Should be able to at least use the holds on the climb. Your time on the route should be able efficiency and economy. It should be able pacing, learning, and most of all about drive.

Performance periods should ride the wave of your fitness, and as you come off the top, you should wrap up the goal, and move back into prep for next time. Trying too hard to stay at a peak can result in staleness or even injury.

All of our preparations will slide along this continuum. Get some activity if your way out of shape, but don’t worry about what it is. If you’re absolutely strong and feeling awesome, go prove it to yourself on something you’ll be proud of.

Chew on that a second.

Whether we decide to train today or not is what we are here to consider today. Do I go to the gym and give it my all? Do I just go for a jog? Do I rest and wait to train tomorrow?

There is science to consider. First off, we really do know how long it takes to recover from training. For strength and power related training (we can assume that unless you are just doing easy alpine ridgelines, your climbing is strength and power related), we generally need 36 or more hours to recover to a point that more training or climbing will be effective. If we shortcut that time, we start into the next session slightly weaker and dig a deeper hole than the previous session.

The long-term result of training too often can be a high level of capacity for doing just that. 95% of the time, though, the long-term result is that you get injured or have to take a protracted rest because you’re bordering on overtraining. So stick with 36 hours to start.

I remember having an injury a few years back that I saw an orthopedic surgeon for. He told me the best course was to massage the injury, get lots of general exercise that didn’t involve pulling with my arms, and to resume climbing in six weeks.

“OK,” I said.

“What’s today’s date?”

“Uhh...the 14th of July.”

“OK, so what is six weeks from today?”

“Uhh...August 25th?”

“That’s right. August 25th. Circle that day on your calendar. That’s six weeks.” He went on to explain that for most motivated people, six weeks turns into about three, and for most of his more sedentary patients six weeks can turn into a year.

So, if you train until 6pm on Saturday, you don’t get to train again until 6am on Monday. That session is a good hard session, too, we’ll assume. You wrap up by 9am, and then need to wait until...when? 9pm Tuesday. Got it?

You can see why the every-other day, roughly training on a rolling 48-hour clock works so well. This way you can recover. And get better. And not just be the tired guy in the bouldering area rubbing his elbows and slamming supplements to try to help stop hurting.

The older you get the longer it takes.

The less sleep you get the longer it takes.

The worse your diet, the longer it takes.

So how do people who train six days a week keep going? How does a professional athlete handle professional volumes? The short answer is to train differently on subsequent days, but there are a few tricks to make it work in your favor (if you need to do it at all).

• Switching Systems. The simplest way to compress more training into your schedule is to do your primary work, say bouldering and finger strength development, on day one. Day two would not be that good for doing even more bouldering, as you’ll have had under 24 hours to recover. Sure, you could do it, but you wouldn’t get the power and strength benefits we want. On a second day of training, we would switch focus from short, intense sets of work to longer sets of more fatiguing work, continuous aerobic activity, dedicated mobility work, or an active recovery session. This way we let the high output systems recharge, and can develop more in another realm.

• Back Off On Volume. You can do less each training day, and train more frequently. If you leave the gym a sore mess each session, you can’t possibly survive daily training. But if you back off to short, focused training, you probably can. This is way that the Easy Strength workouts operate. In the most effective one I’ve seen, you pick five exercises, do five sets of two on one day, do two sets of five at a lighter load the next, and alternate between them five days a week for a couple of months. The volume is reasonable, and we get very strong. This kind of work needs to be approached with caution in finger strength, as the hand and finger structures are relatively weak, and the adaptations in connective tissue are notoriously slow.

• Over-Recover. If you are trying to add more work, it’s only sensible that you’d add more rest. If you really work for better recovery, you’ll see that it is so effective in making you feel and train better that it’s almost a hack. To “over recover,” you’ll go to sleep 30 minutes earlier than usual, aim to drink around a gallon of water (only water, no exceptions) each day, get 20-30g of high quality protein in 3 or 4 meals per day, and go for an easy 30 minute walk after each training session. You need to back off on all other physical activities (no after-work ski laps, or hauling firewood), and eat every vegetable you can put your hands on.

The question comes into my inbox often enough that I feel like there is one person out there trolling me: “What if I can train hard two days in a row?” Honestly, I don’t mean to hurt you, but then you’re really not training hard on those days. Remember, just because it makes us tired, doesn’t make it hard. If you don’t believe me, go do the 100 V1 challenge. No hard. Makes you tired. Won’t make you better at much of anything.

If you’re on a climbing trip or out in the mountains, yes, you climb multiple days in a row, but this is not training. This is performance. This is getting out there and seeing what the training has produced. Long days improve your conditioning, improve your overall capacity for work, and leave you pretty beat up. The primary result of going two days on is that you can climb pretty well two days on. It doesn’t let you climb at your absolute max, doesn’t let you display more power, and doesn’t reduce your chance of injury - which is what we are wanting out of our training days back home.

Going back to the 36 hour guideline, if something is super-intense like bouldering at your limit or chasing 1RMs in the weight room, you might need a bit more. If you’re training for endurance, you might legitimately be ready on the day after. Aside from your general feeling of soreness and fatigue, how can you tell if you’re going to have a good session? You can test your readiness.

This is not an exact science, but it can give you good feedback. The bottom line with testing readiness is to listen to what the test is telling you. This is how it works: Get to the gym on the day you planned to train. Do a good warm-up and movement prep, usually 10-20 minutes, and then do a quick test: try a max pull on the Tindeq or just a simple squeeze on a hand grip dynamometer. You’ll have set baseline numbers earlier.

If I can routinely grip, say 135 pounds with my right and 145 with my left, I should be hitting really close to those numbers. If I hit more than 10% below on either one, it’s not that I magically got weaker - it’s probably due to fatigue from yesterday’s training. You can also add in a quick vertical jump test for the same purposes, though we haven’t seen as much use in this test. It is supposed to give similar information - tired.

So what do you do if your test tells you you’re fatigued and you’re friends are already warmed up and hammering on the campus board? This is when it’s time to be an athlete instead of an amateur. You need to either train a skill or system that is not as taxing on your body, or go home and come back tomorrow. The entire goal of training is to improve top-level performance. If you’re starting in tired, you’re not going to get very far.

If you decide to stay at the gym, switching to a mobility focused session, to simple cardiac output (low-intensity) aerobic session, or a low-intensity skill session will produce the best results. Afterward you go home, rest, and can come back to try the hard stuff again the next day.

The more athletes I talk to and the more I pay attention to my own training, the more I understand that our bodies are quite good at letting us know what’s going on. If I routinely wake up sore, am irritable, and am hungry all the time, I am probably close to my limit on what my body can take. More, harder, and longer training should take place, but only when balanced with aggressive recovery and rest.

The really cool thing about training correctly and recovering well is that we can train our bodies to even do that better! This circles back to Easy Strength, but it comes out in so many practical examples that it’s hard to ignore. We know anecdotal stories of climbers hitting the crag or the gym 5-6 days a week. Dean Potter famously “climbed pretty much every day,” for a couple of years early in his career.

A couple years ago, I had the great pleasure of hearing Peter Croft give a talk about his early years in Yosemite. He, too, climbed all the time. In 1986, John Bachar asked him if he’d like to do the El Cap - Half Dome link-up, which would be around 50 pitches of climbing and a ton of walking. Croft agreed and when they set the day, Bachar had just one direction for Croft: “You have to take a rest day the day before.”

Croft replied, “What’s a rest day?”

He did as directed. He wandered around camp, he tried to nap, he tried to read. He was, in his own words, freaking out about not doing anything. He thought that he’d lose his feel for the rock by taking the day off. Finally, night came, and he slept. The next morning the pair charged up the Nose on El Cap. Croft said he “felt like a god,” and had never had so much energy.

“Maybe there really was something to these rest days after all!”

School sports are similar. You come out of summer, start running, jumping, and exercising three hours a day, five days a week. There’s no 36-hour period between. No Tuesday off. Joining the armed forces, depending on what country you’re from, is much the same. You start and you go hard and you are tired as hell for a while and them eventually, you adapt.

I am not advocating this as your new practice. I am only reinforcing what we’ve seen: if you keep the volume at a reasonable level, keep the number of maximum efforts limited, and you do a good job of recovering after training, there is no problem with training or climbing multiple days in a row.

The enemy is the self. We will want to get our ten pitches in or go until the skin stops the session. We’ll want to see what our max number is. We’ll look for yet another personal record, even though we got one yesterday. If you really want to be out climbing, or in the gym training more often - it is, after all, really fun for most of us - we have to be conservative in what we ask our bodies to do.

We also have to pay attention. If I have dedicated myself to doing a session every weekday and I am thrashed, I need to rest a day. No judgements. No self flagellation. Take a day, eat right, sleep some more, do some breathing exercises, and start again tomorrow. There is every possibility I’ll come back to training feeling like a god.

When we are training for strength or power, we seek out only higher outputs. When we are training for endurance, we too often seek out fatigue.

“If doing 30 seconds of climbing followed by 90 seconds of rest is difficult, then it can only be better training if I decide to only rest 60 seconds. And logically, dropping my rest to 30 seconds will be even more difficult, resulting in even better climbing training.”

Just because it is difficult does not make it good training. Does it not seem ironic that we seek out the highest amount of fatigue possible in the least amount of time while training in the gym, only to turn around and carefully avoid fatigue at all costs, when we are performing at the crag or boulders?

In 2020, my coaches started experimenting with a diminishing interval program. Rather than sticking with a fixed schedule, such as 60 seconds of work followed by two minutes of rest for several rounds, we looked at research that indicated athletes could continue to maintain intensity by dropping the duration of work intervals as the session progressed. What research is finding is that maintaining high levels of intensity is as important, if not more important, then high levels of volume in an interval workout.

In my original article, which was cleverly titled “3:2 Diminishing Intervals,” I outlined a simple session structure. In it, a climber would start with three minutes of continuous climbing, followed by two minutes of recovery. We would then reduce the next work interval to two minutes, followed by one minute and 20 seconds of recovery, following the 3 to 2 ratio, the next set, we would move to one minute of activity, followed by 40 seconds recovery, then to 30 seconds of activity, with just 20 seconds of recovery. This last interval would then be repeated until failure to complete the full 30 seconds of activity. It looked like this:

Read more

Add to this, that the very act of sleeping in a hotel usually means that you are off your schedule, probably tired, and wanting to do something besides spend time in this room. Which is exactly why I force myself to use them every single time.

Constraints are gifts. In my day-to-day dealings with athletes, one of the number one complaints is that they don't have the proper gear or clothing or equipment or set up to have an ideal workout. I've talked about our shrinking comfort zones before. How if the temperature is wrong or the people around you are not the ones you want or if you are not perfectly comfortable in a dozen other ways, you are unable to act.

And this is why the hotel gym is so great. It forces me out of my comfort zone. I have to build sessions based on less than ideal conditions and tools. And even though I will take pictures of the room and send them to Charlie Manganiello with some snide comment, I still value the workouts.

The standard hotel gym has several pieces of cardio equipment. These are largely useless for our purposes, but can be integrated into some pretty fun sessions, but I'll get to that in a second. Almost every hotel gym has a dumbbell rack. They tend to have weights starting at the very light end and if you're lucky you'll end up with a pair of 50 pound dumbbells. You might have a bench, and you might have some kind of cable column. Once in a while, there is a random Physio ball or a medicine ball. And thus we begin building with the tools we've got.

For hotel gym workouts, I tend to go on a clock. Thinking of recommending these same sessions to others, I want to make them a manageable, duration, and to have something that keeps you from thinking about how shitty the gym is. There are three primary formats that work well:

1. Exercises on the minute.

2. Rounds for time.

3. Complexes.

There’s no way you’re going to do your normal session here, so it’s fun to do some novel stuff. I sometimes even find my way to doing something that I’ll take home and implement in my normal sessions.

The key for me is to get in and out in under 30 minutes, so I build the sections to go quick.

Exercises On The Minute

I think this is a great format in any gym, but for the hotel gym it is especially useful. In this one I pick one upper body exercise and one lower body exercise. I do each for 10 minutes, doing a fixed number of reps (3-5) each minute for the ten minutes. I don’t alternate. I just do all ten sets of the lower body followed by all ten sets of the upper. ~22 minutes total. Good combos can include:

Walking Lunges x3+3 | Decline Push-Ups (feet on a bench or chair) x5

Step-Ups x3+3 | Pull-Ups x3

DB Front Squat x5 | Overhead Press x5

The dumbbell availability is always an issue, and if necessary you can do offset loads (a 40# in one hand, a 30# in the other, for example). The main thing here is to make sure the loads are high enough that you can’t do more than about 10-15 seconds worth of work. If it’s too light, this session feels a bit silly.

Rounds For Time

In this session, I’ll usually stick to the same 10 minute clock and do two rounds, or go for 20 minutes and just do one long circuit. The idea here is to do 3-4 exercises at 5-10 rep intensity as a circuit. I’m not trying to “leave it all” on the hotel gym floor here, so I rest as needed and try to hold my focus on keeping the individual exercises hard. In these, I’ll usually go LEG - UPPER BODY - LEG - UPPER BODY. If I do a fifth exercise, it’s usually a core exercise.

Ten minute rounds go pretty quick, so three exercises feel more manageable. And, God forbid there is someone else in the tiny room with you, sticking to three will make you seem less of a crazy person.

10 minutes of:

Back Lunge x8+8 | Offset Push-Up x4+4 | Step-Up x8+8

10 minutes of:

Pull-Up x8 | Long Push Press x8 | Hanging Leg Raises x8

A longer circuit might look like this:

20 minutes of:

Pull-Up x8 | Back Lunge x8+8 | DB Bench Press x8 | Step-Up x8+8 | DB Floor Wiper x8+8

Complexes

The two dumbbell complex is an elegant short workout or warm-up, and yet I get a ton of resistance from athletes on implementing them. The issue is load—in a complex the idea is to do several exercises in a row with the same tool/tools, usually the same reps, without stopping. My athletes take issue with deadlifting such light weights, or trying hard on overhead presses with a weight that feels good for the other exercises. Just do the work and don’t judge the load.

For these complexes, we do a fixed number of reps to keep the brain out of it, and aim for a less-than-20-minute session. It goes something like this:

5 rounds of:

Renegade Row x5+5 | Push-Up on DBs x5 | Romanian Deadlift x5 | Curl and Press x 5 | Front Squat x5 | Rest 45 seconds

Each exercise ends in the start position for the subsequent one, and there is a bit of “flow” between them. You might not get the load right the first time, so be sure to target your weakest one and aim to load that one to a “hard but executable” weight.

I also like a progressive complex with a time limit. For example, you could do the session above, starting at one rep per exercise, rest 30 seconds, then do two, and repeat the sequence on up until you reach a 20 minute cap. You can also go up to the point you reach technical failure on any exercise.

If I haven’t been climbing or have a few days between chances to do so, I will do an old workout my friend Ken Driese and I used to do in the weight room at the University of Wyoming. I’ll do a “rack run” of 15 wrist curls per set (each hand) starting at the 5# weight, and going up the rack’s dumbbells until I get to a weight I can’t hit for 15. I’ll then switch to reverse wrist curls (palm down), and do the same. With these, I fail sooner. If I am still psyched, I’ll then go back down the rack from the weight I worked up to doing wrist curls, but this time, going to failure on each set. I finish with the reverse wrist curls again.

The goal here is not to progress in my normal training plan, but instead to keep kicking the ball down the field. I am still questing for a great hotel gym, but until the Comfort Inn starts to put TB2s in that room, I don’t think I’ll find one.