Exercise Selection Is The Last Step In Programming

Why "3 Moves For Ripped Abs" Gets It Wrong

“While training should be relevant to the goal at hand in terms of selecting exercises with relatively similar movement patterns that develop muscles used in the sport, it is neither necessary nor desirable to exactly mimic a sport skill in the weight room.”

― Rippetoe and Kilgore, Practical Programming

I find the fact that the deadlift exercise is controversial among climbers hilarious. Arguing whether climbers should or should not do a particular movement in the gym might be an entertaining way to hone your typing skills, but it is an exercise in silliness. Instead of waging an argument in favor of the lift, I will try to explain that the point is being missed. When we program training, we are trying to elicit specific responses from the body and from the athlete. When good coaches program a deadlift, it’s just an exercise, usually done at high load. The real question is whether very high load total body movements should be done, how often should they be done, and for how many sets.

Anyone who has ever built a training plan should recognize this: exercise selection is the last part of the job, not the first. When building a plan, we should consider several variables, and I think the following order is best:

Repetitions / Time Under Load

This variable determines set length and the “duty cycle” of the muscles. Low reps allow for focused efforts in each movement, and encourage the athlete to use higher loads. In general, lower reps (1-6 reps or isometrics less than 10 seconds) are used for strength and power development, medium reps in the 7-15 range are more useful for hypertrophy training or strength endurance, and high rep sets are best for muscular endurance.

Sets

If we program very high numbers of sets, we build capacity for hard work, and can build muscle mass or endurance depending on the number of reps performed or load. A key issue that many climbers struggle with is the “weight training = bodybuilding” image. Yes, bodybuilders use weights, but their training is quite specialized. Sets, reps, and load in bodybuilding differ substantially from normal strength training programming. We can get very strong on very few sets per exercise, as few as 1-2 per week in some cases. Building mass usually entails many sets at medium loads. If you’re not looking for mass and are not sure about capacity needs, 3 sets is a good starting point.

Loading

High load training helps you get good at using high loads. Seems like a silly point to make, but you'd be surprised by the number of people that don't get it. Again, the load / weight selected is more important than the exercise when it comes to training adaptation. Heavy training taxes your nervous system, connective tissue, and willpower, and is useful “down the line,” as it positively impacts muscular endurance and power, as well. One of the bigger issues in programming is helping the athlete to understand what heavy really is. Basically, if your plan calls for 5 reps and the athlete performs these reps at a load where they could have done 10, the training response is limited. If you call for 5 and they have to fight like crazy to make the first set, they are aimed for injury.

This criteria is essential for advancing in hard bouldering. Again, obvious, but if you never try really hard problems, you won’t develop the ability to do really hard problems.

Muscle Action or Tempo of Movement

We can do all sorts of things with movement to stimulate specific abilities in the body. Let’s take the pull-up for example, since we all love it so much. We can move very fast through the “up” portion to develop power, we can move very slow to develop high levels of force, we can hold the position part way through the movement to develop lock-off strength, we can slowly lower from the top with supermax loads for quick strength gains, we can do one arm at a time, and so on. All of these variations lead to specific adaptations, and should be considered in programming. Speed of movement is a totally under-explored area for most boulderers, and playing with spome speed might unlock some major doors.

Rest Between Sets, Exercises, and Sessions

How much rest an athlete takes between climbs or exercise sets is massively important. Dave MacLeod recommends resting one minute per move between limit boulders, and the old strongman advice was to rest for as many minutes as you could count up to (usually about five!). Strength and power training programs will feature short work periods and relatively long rests, where endurance efforts will often feature rests between sets equal to or less than the work duration. A note: super short rest intervals (i.e. 20 seconds work, 10 seconds rest) are a cheap trick to run athletes quickly into the anaerobic zone and are not particularly effective for long-term improvement in most of the facets of climbing we care about.

Exercises

Finally! Yes, exercises are key to good training. Rule 1: Program exercises the athletes know how to do. The basic human movement patterns described well by Mark Verstegen or Dan John are a super place to start: hinge at the hips, pull with the arms, squat down, push with the arms, and use your midsection. 5 things. Good start. In the bouldering gym, we want to pick problems based on angle, move length, hold type, and difficulty. If we run through a wide variety each session we develop a wide variety of skills.

The pull-up is not somehow magically better than the barbell row, it’s simply a different exercise. Don’t get too locked in to thinking block pulls or levers or ring work are, by themselves, going to unlock new frontiers. It’s load and rest and volume and tempo that have the biggest effect on your performance.