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Why capacity can be key to progress.
I remember waking up some days to the sun streaming in my bedroom. It would be eight or nine, or later, and I would look at the ceiling and wonder what to do that day. Did I feel like going climbing? Reading a book? I wasn’t on the schedule at work, so the day was mine.
My days are not like that anymore. I have hours to work at the gym and athletes to coach. I have presentations to prepare. Articles and scripts to write. A relationship that I really love to put time into. Kids who, despite being teenagers, still need help from their parents—grudgingly and between eyerolls.
This is not a complaint or a brag. I love my life and my work. It’s simply pointing out that when I look at my time each day, there is little leeway. And no matter how much I love the training or climbing, time for it gets squeezed. More and more, if find that it’s not just time. Most of my training is done at the gym where my office is...and I am never without something to do work-wise. So, try as I might, my sessions are interrupted or ended by phone calls, “quick questions,” or by a feeling that I need to get going on my to-do list’s next item.
It lines up with my fatigue. Thirty or 45 minutes into a strength session, I start to feel it. Add that to the siren song of my list and I end up wrapping earlier than I should in many sessions. In the moment, I tell myself that it was a good session and was enough to keep the ball rolling. I fall into the “expert trap” of telling myself I know what I am doing. Later that day, though, I know I should have done more.
I started by trying to solve for time. I would tell myself I would have to strength train for at least x number of minutes or boulder for at least one hour. My issue came when I started allowing time for those questions or calls within that hour. Sometimes I would be chalked up and in the session, but spend 15 minutes chatting in the middle of what was supposed to be my time.
I tried adding more total sessions, but these, too, get kicked around by the schedule. Add to that the fact that the warm-up and prep for training really take significant time, and I realized that I simply have to stick with roughly the same number of sessions most weeks.
What I landed on was almost too simple to see at first. That the progression, session-to-session, needed to be about doing more total work. That with just getting in and doing some exercise, I was slowly dropping my capacity to do the workouts. It’s an easy trap to fall into. Let me explain.
One of the really frustrating things that rock climbers come up against is a feeling that just when they get to a good level of fitness, that fitness starts to decline. What happens with any peak in performance is that we overload the athlete’s ability to go fast / go hard / go heavy, and then they do their best to be fresh for each attempt. In rock climbing, they will start working on a hard project and the closer they get to sending, the more attention they must pay to being fresh for each try.
When I am trying to hit a personal best on a specific lift in the weight room, I will often rest 5 to 10 minutes between attempts. But being fresh for each attempt has a downside… The more I rest the less total work I get in per training session. So just as my intensity peaks, my volume starts to fade away.
This is exactly what started to happen to me as my schedule got busier. I could still lift heavy. Could still knock off a hard boulder or two. But my body got tired earlier and earlier in the sessions. I was tricked by the numbers I was putting up, and didn’t see that I was physically declining.
Although capacity is tied to strength, addressing heavier loads (as we do in strength work) isn’t essential to developing capacity. What I needed to do in these sessions, was to force myself to do a bit more total work, whatever the intensity.
This helped me to reframe what I wanted out of these sessions, and it helped me commit to the training better than simply focusing on working out from 9:15 to 10:30, or whatever.
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In my bouldering sessions, I typically do about 5 minutes of movement prep, a few hangs on a hangboard, and then a couple of sets of pull-ups. I then do a simple “ladder” of problems, usually 4-5 problems starting at the easiest grade on the wall, with only about 30 seconds between.
Once I was in the session, whether it is a Limit Session or one where I was doing easier problems, I got into the habit of going about an hour. Instead of looking at the time, now, I look to add more total moves or boulders.
The starting point was simply where I ended up in my last few sessions. On a “Hard” bouldering day, where I worked on problems that were slightly harder than I could do first try, I was getting about 20 total problems in. Next session, I aimed for 22, then for 24 the next week, and so on until I was at about 50% more volume than before.
In the weight room, I added sets. My sessions are often 3 sets of around 5 reps for the main lifts. To keep it simple (and survivable), I just added one set to one exercise and progressed it over the month. I still went up in load if the lift was feeling easy, but was more aimed at capacity. It went like this:
Session 1:
Bench 3x5
Bulgarian Split Squat 3x5+5
Pull-Up 3x5
Lever 3x5
Session 2:
Bench 4x5
Bulgarian Split Squat 3x5+5
Pull-Up 3x5
Lever 3x5
Session 3:
Bench 4x5
Bulgarian Split Squat 4x5+5
Pull-Up 3x5
Lever 3x5
...and so on. By the end of the month, I was up to six or seven sets. Importantly, I wasn’t tapping out. It was a combination of committing to the work and rebuilding the capability of doing it.
Let’s be clear: I am in my fifties, so these training volumes might strike you as modest. I am with you...they are modest! But it’s also the truth about where I really am.
One of the things that comes up for me these days is the overall ability to go out and do stuff. It’s not just being redpoint-ready 3 days each week, but instead being able to bike for 90 minutes with my wife one day, being able to hike with the dog the next, and being able to climb the day after that. I still want to be able to carry a full pack all day long while looking for the animals. Or go try to keep up with my kids on skis. And I still like to be able to say “yes” to whatever comes along.
The more I get focused on doing heavy lifts and hard boulders, the more that capacity has a chance to slip away. The intense stuff is where I am most comfortable, but capacity work, doing more stuff, it what keeps me ready for going out the door.
It’s up to each of us to chose the adaptation(s) we want in training. I’ll reiterate that training works, every time. If your preparation is not resulting in improvement, it’s a flaw in your planning or execution. When my boulder and strength sessions did not address what I wanted out of climbing, I had to start changing what I did in the gym. If we commit to the wrong road, we probably won’t like where it takes us.