Coaching Adults
I have great reverence for youth coaches, not only for their patience and skill in teaching, but for the fact that they are generally poorly paid and sacrifice huge parts of their own climbing to give something to the next generation. I’ve only peripherally coached kids, usually as a substitute teacher for a day or two, and the idea of programming and running these programs is daunting.
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.