Sessions: Low-Load Density
Progressions for Power Endurance
“Love the training philosophy. Now…can you actually tell me how to do it?”
“It sounds like your clients have successful programs. How do you go from the planning you talk about here to sending hard climbs?”
As I look at the arc of my climbing and coaching career, I can see where I slowly transitioned from just wanting to climb as much as I could, to wanting to get a little stronger when I did go out, to getting very organized with my preparation, to, recently, diving into understanding the “why” of training. It’s reflected in most of the articles on my Substack…I have moved away from looking for great exercises and workouts into what one might call “higher level” thinking.
Yet where the rubber meets the road—in the gym—is where I have spent most of my career. It’s also where I’m actually an expert. I’ll be the first to admit that as a training philosopher, I have a lot to learn.
It’s with this in mind that I am starting this new series of posts for subscribers. What I aim to do in these posts is to look at specific workout structures and breakdown. The intended result of these sessions, the kind of climbing or training this session is aimed at improving, and most importantly, how we advance specific sessions in order to achieve optimal results. We will also talk about how to start building into certain adaptations… Far too often we get excited about a particular new workout, go to the gym and push our body to the absolute limit, and not really adapt. Instead, our body treats that work out as a trauma, and we might be 5 to 7 days before we can effectively train again.
I'm going to talk about specific adaptations to training stimuli. I'm also going to build these in a problem: solution framework, so that you all can see if these specific workouts are ones you should be doing or ones you can ignore. I'll also try to connect the pieces of training complementary systems and the big things to look out for.
Most important, we will look at how often a typical athlete will need to revisit a session and how frequently that session should be revisited. Finally, I will do my best to help you understand whether or not the training is working by suggesting appropriate tests. Sometimes pushing more weight in a particular exercise shows that the training has worked. In more performance-oriented situations, it's a little harder to tell if you've gotten better or not.
The first in the Sessions series is a workout we call Low Load Density Training. This is aimed at developing greater anaerobic endurance.
I look at density sessions in two different categories: high-load density and low-load density. The high-load density sessions tend to help increase your ability to handle lots of hard climbing or work (glycolytic capacity), where the low-load sessions tend to increase your ability to do harder climbing in endurance situations (aerobic power).
The idea with density training is to fit more total work at a specified intensity into each training session over a cycle of 4-8 sessions. We save the advancing of grades for other workouts. We don’t add more total duration to the sets. We just work to limit rest to what’s essential, and let our bodies do the rest.
Intended Result: Increased aerobic capacity, increased work capacity
Who is it for?: Intermediate and advanced athletes, climbers lacking route endurance or day-long stamina
How to advance it: Add volume in the form of more problems per unit time. Add intensity carefully - upping the grades can lead to high-load density and a focus on more power endurance than we want.
In the old days, we trained “endurance” by climbing easy moves until we got pumped and fell off. For me, this usually involved doing routes on toprope at Fremont Canyon, or traversing a long flagstone wall near the interstate in my hometown of Casper, Wyoming. The problem was this: Eventually, you got good enough that you didn’t fall off as quickly and endurance sessions ended up plateauing because the time available to climb became the big limiter. You can only get so many pitches done in a normal day of climbing. Likewise, skin and sheer boredom became the major factor in the flagstone traverses. How much 5.6 traversing can one person take?
We switched to 4x4s when we learned about them from our friends in Utah, and the pump was so severe that we thought we’d found the motherlode. The problem was that facing the pain became increasingly difficult 8 or 10 or 12 sessions in, and it seemed like we weren’t getting any better. My friend Bobby Model and I did a full 16 sessions (2 per week) of a 4x4 workout only to find that our endurance got worse progressively after about session 8, no matter how loud we cranked the music and no matter how much Ephedra we took.
I don’t believe there is a solid ceiling to one’s endurance like there is with finger strength or power. I knew then, even as I tried to recover from yet another power endurance smoker, that we weren’t quite getting it right. It wasn’t until maybe the early 2000s that we started trying to increase endurance by other methods. It was around this time we learned about managing the density of a training session, and the game changed forever.
I first learned about density training from the legendary Charles Staley. He found that certain athletes just couldn’t put more load on the bar or more time into given workouts, and he wanted to find a way to help them to continue to advance. Over the years, he developed what he called “escalating density training,” and it involved doing hard but not maximal loads on several exercises in a circuit for a fixed amount of time.
Density training is a staple of muscular endurance training. Instead of trying to increase the duration of your session or to add difficulty to the work sets, you instead try to fit more work at the same difficulty into a fixed amount of time. The first step is to figure out how much work you have time to do. In these sessions, I recommend you do boulder problems, though you could conceivably do a weight circuit or series of hangs or something. This work, however, would fall more into the general endurance category...we are trying to do more climbing during this phase.
Most climbers are capable of doing 45-60 minutes of climbing in the work sets of these sessions. The set up is simple: warm-up for 10 minutes or so (I like a combination of cardiac output work and climbing), then set a timer for the planned duration, and start climbing boulders. The problems should be 2-3 grades below your onsight level. Set firm boundaries here, so you don’t get sloppy toward the end of the workout and start adding in problems that are too easy just to get more mileage. Remember, quality counts.
Track the V grades of the boulders you do. At the end of your planned duration, stop the clock and add up all your numbers. Divide this number by the number of minutes in your session. This will give you a session density number. The goal of these workouts is to push that number higher. Aim to do 4-8 sessions at the most before cycling out and moving on to other training.
The Bouldering-Only Session Progression
This is a six-session progression that is aimed at somebody that is using only boulder problems to develop this level of endurance. In order to accurately load this session, you want to have a good picture of what your onsight level is for the bouldering that you will be doing. You can do this on regular boulder problems in a gym or on a fixed board, but you want to gauge your onsight based on the particular board you are using.
