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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MONDAY: Rest

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

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

THURSDAY: Hike Hills, Loaded, 60-75 min

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

SATURDAY: Mountain Bike Ride with Ellen

SUNDAY: Climbing, Redpoint

Here’s what actually happened:

MONDAY: Rest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Thinking You Are An Outlier

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

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

2. Pushing Your Luck

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

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

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

4. Three Men Make A Tiger

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

5. The Quantifying Trap (McNamara Fallacy)

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

6. The Hedonic Treadmill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Is Really Happening?

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

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

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

You can download the entire 30 page guide below.

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

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

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

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

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

Everything eats into that 100 units.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had to go look up what duplicative meant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How does it work?”

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

“Why?”

“Because you are weak.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is my current personal test:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And sometimes is the coolest job in the world.

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

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

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

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

Intended Result: Increased strength, increased skill development

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

How to advance it: Add load. Increase rest.

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

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

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

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

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

A typical Integrated Boulder group looks like this:

• 2x Strength-Focused Boulder Problems

• Unilateral, Isometric, or Concentric-Only Exercise

• Mobility or Flexibility Drill

The session set-up would look like this:

3 sets of each group, done circuit-style:

A1: 2x Strength-Focused Boulder Problems

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

A3: Hip Mobility, 60 seconds

B1: 2x Strength-Focused Boulder Problems

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

B3: Shoulder Mobility, 60 seconds

C1: 2x Strength-Focused Boulder Problems

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

C3: Hip Mobility, 60 seconds

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

The Integrated Boulder Session Progression

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

Session 1 (A)

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

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

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

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

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

Yuri Verkhoshansky describes ten facets of specificity:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Start Too Easy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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

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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.

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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

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