As climbing coaches, we tend to first focus on training for the kind of climbing we, ourselves, want to improve. We learn about getting stronger fingers or putting some endurance in our arms. Yet, as professionals, we have to start to diversify. We need to plan training for the brave and the meek and the strong and the weak and for competitors and for people that just want to get in shape for this one objective next year and be done with it.
Our athletes will have different goals, but they are all basically the same “naked apes.” Yes, we’re all special, but we all get trained up in relatively the same way. As I sit here, I am thumbing through a book that is a sport performance book for a different sport altogether. I’ll write out one of the off-season strength sessions, and you tell me what sport it is:
20 each of sit-up, v-up, leg raise, twist
Squat 6-4-2-6
Shoulder Press 6-4-2-6
Barbell Deadlift 2-2-2-2
Barbell Clean 6-4-2-6
While you think through sports, I’ll just spoil it.
Tennis.
“But this is not tennis-specific at all!” you say. In fact, it might be an excellent workout for anyone who needs to move their body. Even an alpinist.
When it comes time to train athletes, we look at their sport in terms of demand on the body. I like to run through a list:
What is the performance environment? What is the temperature? The weather? The altitude? The required gear?
What does the work involve? What are the movements (least important), and what is the intensity / duration of a typical day (most important)?
How long is the event / performance? Is it a one-day push in September or are they in the mountains for a month?
What are the sneaky weak links that tend to show up?
What tools does my athlete have at their disposal?
What else does this athlete want to do between now and “the thing?”
Adaptation Times
Athletes need volume and overload like plants need water and sun. Then we wait. As a coach, you want to coax improvements by progressively overloading them for (in general) around 10 sessions before making a major change.
If an adaptation is new to the athlete, such as starting to run long distances having never done so before, they need to develop this ability anew. In such cases, you might need to plan on three or four full cycles of ten sessions (separated by a bit of recovery) to see them acquire that ability.
If the athlete is retraining an adaptation, a single cycle may be enough to get them back to a high performance level.
All this being said, you will need to keep this in mind when planning out the training. For generally fit alpine climbers, 3 months is probably enough to get them expedition-ready. For people new to the sport or who are moving up from lower work capacities, you may need six months. This is essential information for your athlete, who often hopes to “cram” fitness having put it off for too long.
General To Specific
General training is where we start every time. We need to get to where we can squat well before doing weighted step-ups in mountaineering boots. We need the ability to exercise, at all, for any given duration before we do intense and specific training for that duration.
There is certainly no reason to hold your athlete back from rock climbing or ice climbing or big hikes, but plan on a load of general strength training and easy cardiovascular exercise to start.
Let’s say that you’ve got a gym climber hoping to do a big alpine trip next summer. Currently, they boulder and do some routes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then get out on the weekend for a day of climbing and maybe a hike.
We want to add time (at low intensity) first. It is reasonable to add in 2 short strength sessions each week and a bit of walking or easy hiking. Although an athlete might want to go all Rocky Balboa out of the gate, remind them that next week is going to be harder and we need to let recovery take place. You’re going to program things that feel “too easy” at first because we need to set the stage for “too hard” training later.
Intensification Is The Wrong Answer
It’s not about how tough you are for 8 minutes in the gym. It’s got nothing to do with beating a personal record on the air bike. More than any other facet of climbing, big days in the mountains require a super high level of low-intensity endurance and as much strength as you can put on the athlete. CrossFit-style alpine prep programs designed to get you ready for anything and better at suffering might feel good in the moment, but their application in the performance environment is extraordinarily limited.
The reality for most of us is that we don’t get to train in the mountains. The big majority of people that love to go out there and get to the top of peaks spend their days in urban environments, where they do need to train in gyms or in parks or on staircases. This is where the classic model of accumulation, followed by intensification, followed by peaking, or what was once called “actualization,” becomes an excellent training program.
In this sequence, the athlete accumulates a large amount of total exercise time and then makes that volume more intense once they have reached a critical mass of training time each week. Just before their big trip to the mountains, they start to sew together longer and longer sport-specific sessions with big rests in between. Let’s take a look at how that might lay out in the 12 weeks leading up to a trip in the mountains.
