"Get In Touch When There's New Research..."
Better results, no lab coat needed.
I started writing for Climbing Magazine when I was in high school. It was in the form of “Basecamp” reports on new routes being done in my home climbing area. In college, I started writing about training and performance for the magazine, and continued to publish articles every few years. By and large, these were my best-edited and best-written work, thanks mostly to good editing. In the late teens and early 2020s, I wrote several well-received articles with the help of then-editor Matt Samet.
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.