"The irony is that total freedom can be paralyzing, and unlimited resources don't necessarily lead to the biggest breakthroughs." - David Epstein, Inside the Box
I’ve written before about my friend Steve Petro’s apartment in Casper, Wyoming, back in the 1980s. It was, by all accounts, a shithole. He shared the house with another climber named Pat Parmenter, and the two were so cheap that they hadn’t paid to have the gas turned on, but rather cooked on a Coleman stove in the kitchen. They slept on the floor in sleeping bags. Their living room was basically a couch, a small TV, and a freestanding pull-up bar/training apparatus.
At the base of the front door of the house, they had screwed a small 1x4 strip of wood, and the edges of the door jamb were caked in chalk. In an effort to build some kind of endurance, they would stand on the small 1x4 and then side pull their way up the door jams, then across the top and back down the sides. As easy as that might sound, only the first few minutes are comfortable. The couple of times I was lucky enough to train in the house, the protocol called for 5 minutes at a time on the door.
Steve had also built a hand jam apparatus that hung off of the pull-up bar. It was a place to hang and practice jamming and could be adjusted anywhere from about ring lock size to wide hands. An elite-level crack climber, Steve admitted that he could do more pull-ups hanging from the hand jams than he could holding on to the pull-up bar itself. “I can only do about 45 on the bar,” he admitted.
No modern climber would pick this facility as their training environment. The question becomes: how does a climber in the middle of Wyoming with no access to consistent movement or even outside climbing get to be so damn good? How can a person training in a prison cell, or a small basement, or with a single implement like a TRX strap, develop the same strength we see out of athletes in unlimited gym spaces?
Maybe more importantly, why do we not see a consistently better performance out of climbers who have access to large commercial gyms? The more I travel around the world and visit with elite-level climbers, the more I hear about them preferring to train in their own basement, or on the board in their apartment, or on a mobile hangboard, than they do in the largest facilities ever built.
A thought experiment:
If you had unlimited funds, what kind of gym would you build for yourself?
The first time I ran through this experiment, I ended up building something very similar to the biggest gyms around, such as the Front in Salt Lake City or one of the Movement gyms. My dream gym had massive walls, a large bouldering area, a whole mess of fixed training boards, plenty of hang boards, and a weight training area…Only the weight training area in my gym was downstairs rather than up on some hot mezzanine.
My dream gym had constantly rotating sets of new climbs and tons of steep terrain. It was climate-controlled and clean and was never crowded. The more I thought about it, the more awesome it got, and then, when I sat and thought deeply about how I would use this gem, I got a little uncomfortable.
I realized that in many of these large commercial facilities, I tend to get bored, even toward the end of the first day of climbing. If I am in a place where I go back to that gym several times in a short period, I tend to go back to the same few boulder problems and use the hangboards instead of taking advantage of the massive climbing space.
The next time I ran my thought experiment, it didn’t include acres and acres of roped climbing or constantly reset walls. This time, it included a steep wall set with tons of holds and an auto belay for endurance-style training, and then just a couple of fixed boards. It had a campus board and a full hangboard setup, in addition to a large weight training area. Without too much further thought, I realized that even the large training area and multiple fixed boards are more than I would actually use. I also realized that simply getting on and off of an autobelay and spending time getting ready to train in a harness was more than I would be motivated for on a daily basis.
I stripped the weight training area down to a single squat rack with a limited set of kettlebells. Instead of 2.5 lb increments on all of the weights, I would just go with 10, 25, and 45 pound plates. Kettlebell pairs at 16k, 24k, 32k, 40k, and 48k.
I moved to just one fixed board and one hangboard. I kept the campus board, but I got rid of the autobelay.
The closer I got to my ultimate training setup, the smaller it got. It featured some important constraints that would help me train rather than to seek out constant entertainment. It would allow for focused effort rather than constantly being able to adjust loads to my specific preferences that day.
My ultimate training setup would fit in a garage. It would be affordable by almost any psyched climber. Instead of going bigger and bigger and bigger, I found that I could probably get better results by going closer to what Pat and Steve had built way back in the 1980s.
When I am in a large gym, or even in a medium-sized gym like the one I work in daily, I see way too much “exercise dabbling” and far too little training. When we are young or inexperienced, we can make progress with even the worst workouts. This tricks us into thinking that just playing around in the gym is going to continually produce great results for us. It’s only when we come up against personal confrontation that true progress happens.
That personal confrontation might be forcing ourselves to work the same problem on our spray wall in our poorly lit and cold garage. It might mean trying to move from pressing a 35 lb. weight to trying to press a 53 lb. weight without any increments in between. It might mean building the strength of will to force yourself through a bouldering circuit that you have tried 60 times before, instead of always getting to on-site, newly set problems in a clean and well-lit space.
In many ways, I have come to pity the climber that spends their career in a large and comfortable indoor gym. Sure, the day-to-day is going to be fun, but the long-term result of becoming a better athlete is probably harder to come by.