The Quarterly Review
Why Custom Self-Testing Might Keep You Climbing Hard
The goal of testing should be about assessing readiness for the performance environment, but should not include “training to the test.” I tell the story about going to a presentation years ago with strength coach Mike Boyle. In the presentation, Mike ran us through his athletes’ movement preparation sequence, which directly mimicked the tests in the Functional Movement Screen. By having the athletes do this sequence session after session, Mike’s team was getting better results on the FMS... and why wouldn’t you? The thing that stood out to me, obviously, was that the FMS was no longer a good test for these athletes.
I think that specific testing for specific goals is a great idea, but today I want to talk about doing general testing for overall athleticism and performance. What I’m really looking for is a check-in to make sure that I’m not ignoring a major part of my fitness just because I am psyched on some specific event or climb.
The essential part of this is that it needs to be custom-fit to the athlete. There are some things I, myself, am interested in measuring that will have no bearing on your own training, and likewise you might have some important factors to look at that won’t matter to me. A great example of this is the body measurement. A person that’s concerned about putting on leg mass would want to measure the legs every time they test. If you don’t care about this, there is no reason to take this measurement.
The first couple of times you do a test, you will see limited value in looking at the data; however, I’ve been doing a quarterly assessment for around 17 years now. I find it fascinating to look back across all of the numbers and see how things play out as I age and train. In order to do this test, I simply schedule it once per quarter and then plan on taking one full training session out of my program and replacing it with the test.
It turns out to be a good workout and it is almost always something I look forward to. Over the course of these years, the things I am interested in testing have changed, and so I end up adding in some metrics and dropping others. Since I recently added the 60 minute Density test, I have split the testing between two days.
The most important thing for me is to notice patterns that might need correction. I also like to see when I post good numbers in a test that I had not expected—if I post a great pull-up number without having done too many pull-ups that quarter, what else might have been at play?
Here is my current personal test:
