Skills
3-2-1 Boulder
Tags: Bouldering, Finger Strength, Skills, winter training
3-2-1 Boulder – by Steve Bechtel Sometimes you just need some simple guidance. There is so much training “noise” these days, it’s hard to tell what you need to be doing to get better. In the interest of making things less confusing and simpler to progress, I am suggesting a 3-2-1 plan as a weekly…
Rachel’s Momentum Drills
Tags: drills, Movement, Rachel Speer, Skills, tension
By Rachel Speer I’ll be the very first one to admit it: I hate dynos. I would much prefer to figure out a way to do a move statically, even if it takes ten times the energy and strength than it would to just… for lack of a better word… yeet myself up the wall….
Rachel’s Body Tension Drills
Tags: drills, Movement, Rachel Speer, Skills, tension
By Rachel Speer Imagine this: you’re climbing on an overhang, gather up your strength and lob for the next hold that puts you in just a bit of a stretched position. You successfully grab the hold, but before you can even begin to move on, your hips sag away from the wall and you find…
Rachel’s Footwork Skills
Tags: drills, footwork, Movement, Rachel Speer, Skills
By Rachel Speer Last time I wrote an article on skill drills, I talked about the benefits of dedicated practice. The foundation of skill practice should always be footwork. The overly muscled boulder dude who crushes overhanging roof routes, but gets shut down hard by anything on the slab wall. The doubter tapping their foot…
Polar Skills
Tags: drills, Movement, Rachel Speer, Skills
By Rachel Speer When I first started climbing, I learned quickly how to balance my body on the wall, I got stronger, and I rocketed through the grades, improving rapidly. For a few years I coasted on the easy gains until I came upon my first plateau, at the upper end of the 5.11 range. …
Fundamental Skills: Precision, Execution, and Balance
Tags: Andrew Caraballo, Balance, drills, execution, Practice, Skills
by Andrew Caraballo, PCC, NSCA-CPT These days, a simple Google search will bring up every climbing skill drill imaginable, but there lacks a framework for progressing those skills over time. In this article, we’ll discuss three major overarching climbing skills that will build on each other. These are balance, precision, and execution. Some famous…
Skills and Cues in the Gym
Tags: cues, optimizing training, Skills, tension
by Steve Bechtel We prescribe training. We write down a list of exercises, hand them off to climbers, and the climbers go off to the gym and follow the instructions. Some of them come back and are pleased, some are underwhelmed. Some of them get great results, and some stay flat. It’s not necessarily that…
In-Depth: Inside High-Step Drill
Tags: drills, in-depth video, Skills
In-Depth: Inside High-Step Drill from Climb Strong on Vimeo.
Get It Exactly Right
Tags: Assessment, Habits, Movement, Planning, Practice, Skills
by Steve Bechtel You’ve heard it many times – when someone sends their hardest it feels effortless. We talk about it as the “flow” state or as having an out-of-body experience. No matter what you call it, it’s a performance state you’d like to recreate as often as possible. We usually see ourselves get to…
Don’t Train – Practice, part 2.
Tags: Motivation, Planning, Practice, Progress, Quality Training, Skills, Talent, Training
by Steve Bechtel The first article on practice covered the general idea that you should consider your climbing practice, and some general ideas on what that meant. In this follow up, I’ll answer questions that the first article raised, and give some specifics on how to re-structure your training sessions to include a focus on…
Don’t Train – Practice.
Tags: Feedback, Habits, Planning, Practice, Quality Training, Skills, Talent, Training
by Steve Bechtel “You can practice shooting eight hours a day, but if your technique is wrong, then all you become is very good at shooting the wrong way.” – Michael Jordan The term “training” is over-used. People refer to any and everything they do in climbing as training, yet training is a very specific…