Part of the allure of a random workout fitness program like CrossFit is that you don't have to think about what you're going to do, you just have to show up and do the work. If you can thread the needle between injury and overtraining and don't really care about sport performance, it can get you pretty strong and fairly well conditioned for general activity. It’s fatigue-seeking, which is the opposite of how we’d want to spend any time in a sport situation.
High performance, then, is on another level. When we're at our limit in any facet of improvement, we really want the brain involved. We really want to care deeply about the session. And we need to stick with progressive exercises that complement each other.
This borders dangerously on routine and the trap of sameness that kills motivation, especially if we're not seeing improvement. So how do we find a middle ground between just being "fit" and being prepared for a specific performance environment? Put another way, how do we find improvement in very specific qualities without doing the same exact progressions over and over?
Every few weeks, a new member will join our gym and seem to be there every day. This person might be following a plan on their phone, or doing their old workout from high school, or simply hitting the cardio equipment, but the result is sadly often the same...they burn bright then burn out. There are many reasons this happens and they are both psychological and physiological. The result I see is a person that once again got the feedback that exercise doesn't work or that they are no good.
Neither are true, and it falls to the obvious conclusion that consistent exercise without too much attention to intensity is always more effective than doing it the other way around. Even a week of epic perfect workouts means nothing if the next 51 weeks see you back on the couch.
The solution is to find the intensity where you can make the training happen regularly enough to let your body adapt. This is where I use the suntanning analogy: Will I get more tan if I “get after it” and lay on the beach for six hours on day one, or if I slowly add time over several weeks, a few minutes at a time? I'm not advocating for tanning here, but it's an easy concept to understand.
Your sessions don't need to be the exact same, either. The most effective training is built around consistently addressing a movement pattern and the desired intensity of effort. A runner should run, but the duration required for their training can vary. If I am a distance runner, a bunch of high-speed sprinting is not necessary, and if I am a sprinter, I don't need to pull two-hour steady states to get good.
As climbers, we can get lost in trying to perform at the gym each session rather than building out consistent overload over several sessions. I love limit efforts, but simply doing limit efforts in the gym is fast road to a plateau, and unless Thursday night bouldering indoors is our performance environment, there may be more to what we do in the gym.
Ask:
What does performance look like for me? Am I training for sport climbing? Outdoor boulders? Long-duration comps?
What movements and skills does performance require?
Where are my failure points? Movement? Tension? Attention? (It is almost never finger strength)
Most importantly, how can I get into my training, and consistently show up over the next several weeks? How can I find progression over that entire period rather than just killing myself starting week one and inevitably tapering off? Also, how do I avoid the plateau that comes from sameness?
Denali, Not Trango
I often suggest that climbers look at their progression more as a profile of Denali than Trango Tower. If you're not familiar with these two mountains, Denali is a wide, rounded, and high summit. Trango Tower, on the other hand, looks like it is out of a fantasy drawing of Mordor. It is crazily steep and sheer. In training, adding more intensity ramps our fitness up quickly, but that fitness tends to drop off quickly on the backside.
If we slowly add fitness, that fitness is slow to go away. The lesson then is to not go into the gym day one and try to do the world's best workout. Instead, consider taking 8 to 12 sessions to build up to that world's best workout. Slowly, and overtime, add load or volume to your training and watch an all new level of persistent fitness manifest.
Perhaps I could go to the gym today and do 10 sets of 10 pull-ups. I would certainly be sore from it, and there is a good chance that my elbows would be painful for many days afterwards. The problem would be that I could not go back and do that work out again anytime soon. I also could not teach my body to progress beyond that. I would simply be recovering from a trauma.
If, instead, I went to the gym and did five sets of two, I might not even feel it. The next day, I could do some different exercises or even some more pull-ups if I like. Two days later, I could progress my pull-ups to six sets of two or five sets of three. Like I said above, I could slowly progress up to where my 12th session, somewhere maybe a month into my training cycle, I hit that 10 sets of 10. If I was consistent getting to this point, I could launch on to more sets or more reps or even take a week off without much loss in strength and fitness. By the time I have done the work, my body has become adapted to doing that work well and efficiently. And that, is the goal of training.
One of my favorite quotes comes from Chris Sommer. He said that, “there is no training you can do today that will make up for a well-planned week.” It's worth scribbling this in the front page of your training log. Put it on a sticker. Use it as a mantra. And if you're a tattoo person, have that permanently embedded in your skin. It will serve you better than a barbed wire tattoo around your biceps.
Don't do a workout that you can't repeat tomorrow. Don't burn so bright that you can't keep this up. Adaptation is slow and we need to find a way to play on that level. The key, then, is to start conservatively and keep chugging.