One of the things that is common among the climbers we coach is that they are generally motivated to do the work. This is a huge relief to coaches who might also be personal trainers, as I am, because many of the people that hire trainers do so because they do not want to work. They want to show up to the gym, get “worked out,” and then forget about activity until they have to come back in a few days.
Having someone who is psyched and will try hard is both a relief and a motivation. And yet there are downsides to this, too.
If we, as climbers, make a list of the things we need to improve, many of us will have ten major changes written down in the first minute. This is partly because of obsession, and partly because the sport is so complex. It’s also a major issue when it comes to getting better and any one of those ten items.
Most climbers like the idea of a training program that emphasizes different facets of their development over the course of a training cycle. They can see the value in working weaknesses, recovery, and more. But they tend to fall into the same type of session almost every time they hit the gym. The durations are the same, the intensities, and the things they do.
This is where I hope the idea of coaxing and coasting parts of our development can start to make sense. If we truly want to get better at any part of our climbing—and we’re not in our first couple of years in the sport—we need to work diligently at developing this ability to address key features of our ability with different levels of intensity as the year progresses.
This might very well mean doing even more training on one part of your climbing game and barely addressing another. And once we’ve attained a measurable improvement in the part we’re focused on, we can then stop chasing it and simply maintain it with way less work.
Gaining vs. Maintaining
One of the essential struggles with most of us in training is that we gain an ability through hard hours in the gym, and then we go climbing and somehow those gains fall away. For most of the things we’re concerned with developing (I go into more detail on this elsewhere), we should aim to address the quality in training 2-3 days per week for at least two months. The exact number of days can vary, but the takehome is that you’re going to have to go toe-to-toe with hard training 15 or so sessions in order to see lasting gains. The more other stuff you do, the harder it is for your body to gain in the area you’re hoping to improve.
Once these gains are realized, they can easily be maintained at a fraction of the effort. Again, most facets of fitness can be maintained on one session a week at around ¼ to ½ the volume you put in while developing them.
Let’s look at pull-ups. If you want to get better at pull-ups, you should plan on 3x per week of doing 3-5 sets of 3-5 reps. Add load as tolerated, but keep at it for 15 sessions. When you’ve hit 15 sessions, you can pull back to doing them just once a week, and maybe just 2 sets of 3. As long as you can hold the same load, there’s really no need to go back into developing them for some time.
You can do this with every facet of your training: coax a couple parts of your development forward, maintain the rest. When something starts to slip, put the spotlight back on it.
Different Types of Sessions
We build training plans with three session targets in mind:
Developmental Sessions are hard, intense, and aimed at really overloading your system.
Reinforcement Sessions are built around maintaining a certain quality or level of fitness.
Restorative Sessions are very low intensity and are placed in the program in order to let us come back to the harder sessions more quickly.
We can arrange our training with a weekly cycle of several combinations of these three sessions. I think two big Developmental sessions are the most anyone can truly handle in a week, and we should put all of the things we’re chasing into these two sessions. Most of us can add two Reinforcement sessions on top of these, and we can put all the things we’re “coasting” in these sessions. We can even sneak in a couple of our target exercises here (as in our pull-ups, above), but want to keep these sessions shorter and less intense.
Finally, we should all do as much Restorative work as we can. An hour a day of hiking, cycling, swimming, or skiing should do the trick. Keep it easy peasy. If you’re like me, you’ll want to set time goals, distance goals, and even think of pushing yourself in these sessions, but it is essential that you don’t.
Scheduling
I’m going to assume that your weekly schedule is somewhat fixed. If not, you can still follow these guidelines and see improved outcomes.
Keeping with our framework, we will follow a fairly fixed weekly schedule. An example might be like this:
Monday: Developmental - chasing hard on limit boulders, explosive power, and pulling strength.
Tuesday: Restorative - 60 minute walk.
Wednesday: Reinforcement - hard boulders, general strength, lower volume pulling.
Thursday: Developmental - same framework as Monday.
Friday: Restorative - 60 minute bike ride.
Saturday: Reinforcement - maintaining qualities from last phase, lower volume pulling.
Sunday: Restorative - 60 minute walk.
Most of us can follow such a schedule for 3-4 weeks and continue to recover from the load and volume (which keeps increasing). After about a month, you have a choice:
- Back off slightly for 4-8 days and then resume the schedule and see continued progress, or:
- Keep going hard because you don’t feel like you need to recover and get sick, injured, or overtrained. No one is an exception here.
This can be a bit more organic than “rest every 4 weeks.” If your schedule gets really busy after a couple of weeks’ hard training, take a step back. If you have 5 weeks until a work trip, go hard up until you pack your bags. The essential part of this is planning some kind of recovery, and making sure you don’t get freaked out about varying your training.
If all of this is too complicated for you, take this home:
You probably wouldn't have read this far if you haven’t been training for some time. This tells me your development in all the strength and conditioning facets of the sport is probably much higher than when you started. In order to build any one of these to a best-ever level, you need to give it some focus, and the only way to do that is to pull back and coast on a lot of other stuff.
You’ll be glad you did.
STEVE BECHTEL
Steve is the founder of Climb Strong, and is proud to be the worst coach on the Climb Strong team. A climber for nearly 40 years, he has traveled the globe bouldering, sport climbing, and doing first ascents of some of the world's biggest walls.
He lives in Lander, Wyoming, with his wife Ellen, and children Sam and Anabel.