The thing you have to remember about training is that it works. It works for the young athlete, for the one that is twenty and gets stronger and faster no matter what he does, and it works even for the very old. It works, but only if you keep your eye on it.
No one who is in their twenties reads my stuff, or even cares about the topics. I can’t tell you how many of these athletes seem to contact me on their thirtieth birthday, though, and are wondering what the hell happened.
I keep hammering this point, but sometimes it feels like the only one worth hammering: exercising is not training. I get stacks of exercise. I hike and climb and lift every week all year long. Despite this, I go from sucking wind on some big hills, to climbing really poorly at the crag, to feeling weak under the bar several times a year. Despite my exercise, performance varies.
It’s no wonder people quit new exercise programs.
There are many metaphors for the process of changing, but the one i love the most is the one from James Clear:
“Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from twenty-five to thirty-one degrees. Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at thirty-two degrees.”
I think the issue is greed—we want to get better at everything, quickly, constantly.
So I am going to remind you of the two things that I always come back to, which are:
Be consistent.
Aim for progress.
I used to train a retired banker, named Bob, at the gym. He was a wonderful dude, but spent most of his time watching Jim Cramer live on TV talking about the stock market while the ticker flew by at the bottom of the screen. Depending on what the stock market did right before our training appointment, Bob would either be super psyched or completely stressed out. He was watching his retirement fluctuate by thousands of dollars every minute, just depending on the movements of a market over which he had no control.
We all know the wisdom of great investment experts, which is the statement that the stock market has never gone down over the course of any 10-year period, even during the Great Depression. Where Bob failed and where most of us fail is that we are looking at the minute-by-minute data coming at us rather than how things are going over the long haul.
When I talk about aiming for progress, athletes often think that they need to go harder or further or faster every single workout. What really needs to happen is that over the course of several months, we should see an improvement in performance, however slight. How do we make this happen? We come in and try pretty hard, and we do it pretty frequently.
My main job these days is overseeing the training of a couple of hundred climbers. Although I don’t write all of the programs, I consult with most of the Climb Strong coaching team and have the honor of coaching a handful of athletes that I am highly invested in seeing succeed. One thing that comes out in athlete meetings is that every rock climber feels they have many different facets of the sport where they need to do a lot of work. Whether or not this is actually true, the feeling still sits with them... There is just too much training to do. This is an emotional overload, but it’s also a physical overload. If that athlete has 12 adaptations they are trying to make, they are not going to see any progress in any of them because we are spreading the resources too thin.
Do you think you’re too old? Do you think you don’t have talent? Do you think you’re more of an endurance person? Well…come with me if you want to send.
The first step to seeing progression is to rein in your expectations on what you’re going to chase. I suggest you pick one and only one strength exercise in the gym. I suggest that this strength exercise is a big bang multi-joint movement that’s going to train a lot of muscles in your body. You could do worse than to pick the deadlift or the bench press or the pull-up. As weird as it might seem to climbers, I don’t recommend the pull-up as your primary exercise for this test. This is simply a function of the fact that I know you are going to be pulling a lot anyway in your climbing, and I don’t want to overload that one system any more than we have to.
Let’s say you pick the Bulgarian, or what we might call the rear foot elevated split squat. This is one of my favorite leg exercises for climbers, and it’s a really simple one. You assume a split stance position with your foot on a bench or, better yet, an actual Bulgarian squat stand.
Every Monday for the next eight weeks, you’re going to do five sets of three squats on each side. Every Wednesday, we are going to do three sets of five squats on each side. Both Monday and Wednesday, you can rest as much or as little as you want between these squats, and you can put them within other workouts if you’d like. On Fridays, you’re going to do two squats on each side every minute for 15 minutes. During this 15 minutes, you’re not allowed to do any other exercise.
When you can easily do the assigned sets and reps on a day, simply add a little bit of load to that day’s workout the next week. If you’re just getting crushed one week and you can’t figure out why, let’s just back off the load, roll it back 5 or 10 lbs., and then carry on. Over the course of these eight weeks, you will steadily see progress and will potentially get to a level of leg strength that you’ve never seen before. You’ll also note that some days are flat, some days regress, some days don’t feel great but you perform well... It’s all about this jagged, generally upward line.
The point is the jagged line, not the sets and reps of the workout laid out above. You’re going to miss some days. You’re going to blow it on choosing weight. You’re going to have a sore knee and have to back off for one of the weeks. It’s just the reality of being an athlete.
The other part of the reality being an athlete is that you have to get back on the horse and try. Just because something is difficult for your body doesn’t mean it’s wrong. The worst thing that we can do as athletes is to try to be gentle at all times with ourselves. If I want to perform in a world that is not gentle, the last thing I want to prepare for is always seeking comfort.
Show up and do your training. Keep your aim on long-term progress. Don’t be like Bob and worry about these little tiny momentary ups and downs, but look for that 10-year payout, which says, “I’ve been consistent, I didn’t panic, and I kept trying.”