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“What Gets Measured, Gets Managed.”
This quote, variously attributed to everyone from Aristotle to Peter Drucker, is one of those pithy reminders to keep track of stuff. I’ve probably repeated it in five articles over the years, and have written it in the header of dozens of training logs. It’s got good intentions, but we need to remember that what we measure also can change what we do. If we start to keep track of the wrong things, we can get off course really quickly.
A couple of years back I did a training meeting with a high-level boulderer who was struggling to have success on anything but the most savage power problems. Once he was on a boulder for more than about 30 seconds, his performance declined precipitously. And when he put a rope on…forget it. In fact, his max V grade was four numbers higher than his max sport grade (V15 versus 5.11). But when he asked for my advice, he wanted to know if I could help him increase his critical force…not his endurance.
He had watched videos of the testing of critical force, and connected that a greater critical force number is associated with a greater local muscular endurance in the forearm (or more specifically in the ability of the finger flexors to sustain repeated pulls on an edge), and he then considered that if he could improve the ability to execute this test well he would then stop struggling with longer climbs.
And although doing a training procedure to improve the performance in the test itself might improve performance in the real world, the true test would be whether he could climb a 5.12 or a 40 second boulder. What he needed was not the ability to improve his testing, but his performance.
Similarly, in the world of sport performance, there is a screen called the Functional Movement Screen. In this screen, athletes are assessed by their ability to perform seven different tests. These tests are aimed at assessing whether the athletes have the ability to perform the necessary movements for sport, including deep squatting, shoulder mobility, hip mobility, and more.
Because athletes that could not pass the screen were advised to avoid heavy movements in those patterns where they’d failed, a few strength coaches started doing specific warm-up sequences aimed at improving performance in the exact patterns tested by the screen. As these athletes improved at the warm-ups, their numbers in the screen also improved. The question is this: were those athletes now better at handling the movement demands of high performance sport, or were they just very good at the screen?
So when I start to track parts of my training, I need to be very careful about how I interpret those numbers. It is the easiest thing in the world to start chasing improvement in minor qualities. For example, if I do a 4 mile hike once a week as a recovery exercise, I need to be careful about trying to improve my time, or do it with more load, or go further. I simply need to go move. The value is in its ease, not its difficulty. Just because I can test it and improve it does not mean that I should chase it.
Aiming for more pull-ups is fine, but what is my desired outcome? If, for some reason, I feel that moving from a maximum of ten to a maximum of 12 is a critical aspect of my program, then it makes sense to keep close track of frequency, load, and volume of my pull-ups. If, on the other hand, I recognize that upper body strength is a key to performance climbing, I simply need to regularly overload my pulling muscles, and not get too bogged down in worrying about whether I am really progressing there.
We need to build our metrics based first on sport performance and second on improving the few key factors closely associated with that performance. Obviously, sport performance is all about climbing well. There are a few ways that we can easily assess improvement here:
- Redpointing / sending a higher grade
- Sending more routes at higher grades consistently
- More total hard sends in a day/period of time
- Greater ability to maintain strength and power over the course of a competition or day of climbing
There are also some non-performance training factors that are fairly well associated with the potential to translate them into performance gains:
- A higher work capacity (ability to do just about anything) will mean you can do more specific activity when the time comes.
- A higher level of general strength (in a variety of exercises) will mean greater potential for specific strength.
- An ability to execute when fatigued, doubtful, or nervous translates well to climbing.
- Greater mobility and flexibility are associated with more efficient movement and might rescue our chances of injury.
If I want to get stronger, I should track load and perhaps volume of high intensity work. If I want more capacity, I should pursue more training duration. If I want to be better at commitment and execution, I should look at how well I do during moments of doubt and fatigue in my training.
If I am measuring steps and heart rate and how many times I stood up during the day, I am probably missing some useful things in lieu of things that are simply easy to measure.
I’ll leave you with this: The simplest measure of all is “Did this behavior align with my goal of _____?” If it didn’t, it’s time to change.