4 Steps to Better Climbing
Never Snows in Hueco (5.12c) at Eagles Rest
Training for performance climbing is far simpler than you think. Sure, there are general principles that can’t be ignored, but most athletes don’t need anything fancy to get better. In fact, my experience is that motivated climbers underperform because they’ve either overcomplicated their program or because they’re missing an essential basic element that was simply not shiny enough to get their attention in the first place.
It’s easy to think that more is more, but this is far from the truth. Our training programs should seek to capitalize on the minimum effective dose of any given method, which might actually be to simply skip a number of the interventions that we may think are necessary, but are really just filling in the void left by our unwillingness to do the most basic (read: boring) basics.
So, I thought I’d lay out the most essential things to include in any performance climbing training program. Keeping in mind that every athlete has different needs, I do firmly believe that each of these elements provides a long runway of dependable adaptations. These concepts will read as far too simple to most of you, but I wholeheartedly encourage everyone to check themselves. Are you actually implementing these ideas?
My suggestion is to get each step dialed into your routine before worrying too much about the next.
1. Practice Climbing
Yeah, I know you’re here to learn what else you should be doing, but the truth is, actual climbing is the most important element of just about any program. Even the most elite climbers in the world spend a substantial percentage of their time simply climbing. So what’s the rub? If it’s so simple, why do I even have a job?
There’s actually quite a bit of complexity here, perhaps more than all the other sexy modern training concepts that people with more followers than me on Instagram tell you are so important. Building “fitness” whether it be strength, power, or endurance is actually a fairly simple formula. With some basic principles, a bit of hard work, and a dash of patience, just about anyone can coax out these sorts of adaptations.
But climbing well is not simply a matter of fitness. If it was, those yoked Crossfit athletes with the rental shoes on would be cruising your projects. Hard climbing requires an incredible amount of skill, tactics, and emotional control. All of us - you, me, and the best climbers in the world - need to constantly be cultivating the craft through ongoing practice.
Not training.
Not performance.
Practice.
The most essential element of any climbers “training program” is to PRACTICE climbing regularly. Be curious. Become obsessed with getting better. Strive to perfect movement. Prioritize working on moves/styles/routes that you are anti-style or intimidating. Take time to just be with yourself and to better understand the emotions swirling around inside.
For absolute beginners, any amount of time spent moving around on the wall will yield benefits. However, as we get more experienced, effective practice requires higher levels of focus and self awareness. Much of my work as a coach is to help athletes cultivate a practice oriented mindset. Sure, our goals are often performance oriented. We want to send a project or win a comp etc, but if these goals are truly challenging, the lion’s share of our time needs to be devoted to getting better.
First thing’s first. Cultivate a regular and ongoing climbing practice. Before you add anything else to your program, look in the mirror and ask yourself if you’re getting everything you can out of your time “just climbing.”
2. Warm Up
An effective warm up is the first additional intervention to fold in. The warm up creates space to separate ourselves from the rest of the day, focus on the task at hand, and prepare the body for hard work. Essentially, it allows us to go “deeper” into our practice while mitigating wasted effort or worse, injury. Always remember, the first rule of training is to NOT GET INJURED.
There’s numerous ways to warm up for climbing and I do think that over time we all should be figuring out what works best for each of us. However, all things considered, my sense is that a truly effective warm up includes all of the following:
Progressive movement and loading beginning with low intensity and moving towards the actual intensity of the session ahead
Loading of major movement patterns (Push, Pull, Squat, Hinge, Core Stability…)
Loading of the fingers in a slow and controlled manner (hangboard)
Raise heart rate and literally get the body warm
Some climbing skill and/or technique work
Consistent and replicable across all sessions
Every single time I go to the gym, I spend the first half hour or so warming up using the principles above. I also ask every single one of my athletes to do something similar. Yes, it takes a bit of time, but my experience is that the investment pays massive dividends. The loading of major movements and fingers provides a safe, simple and regular signal for strength adaptations. The skill practice brings attention to the subtleties of movement and a practice mindset. The high tempo and progressive nature of the routine ensures that we are actually ready to try hard in the meat of the session. Furthermore, by using more or less the same exact thing every session over weeks, months and years, the warm up becomes a barometer that helps us gauge how we feel coming into the actual session. Then we have the option to adapt as necessary to get the most out of our time.
3. Strength and Mobility
Perhaps a bit more sexy than a nuanced warm up routine, strength training and mobility work certainly looks and feels like “training” the way most people envision it. However, I will again emphasize (this theme is not going away) that simplicity and consistency will yield superior results over fancy workout of the day style approaches.
Strength and mobility is near the base of the training pyramid for a few reasons.
Returning to the first rule of training… strength and mobility help mitigate injury risk. Both types of sessions provide safe and controlled opportunities to expose the body to loads and ranges of motion that are at or beyond what we can reasonably expect to encounter in actual climbing. Appropriate workouts will gradually increase exposure and stimulate tissue adaptations in a healthy sustainable way.
Additionally, strength and mobility training help ward off some of the most challenging aspects of the aging process. So effectively, this work helps extend your athletic career. One of the first things that begins to tail off as we age is our absolute strength. The process begins in our thirties and rapidly accelerates from there. If you want a long career of performance climbing, start getting as strong as you can as soon as you can and then hold onto it as long as you can.
And finally, strength training teaches you how to create force through a variety of motion patterns. The more force you can create, the harder you can push, pull and squat your way up hard moves. Mobility is essentially strength training focused on the end range of motion.
Just like the warm up suggestions above, strength training should cover all the major movements and fingers. You’ll want to lean towards higher loads (maintaining good form and control) and less volume that you might be used to. A few sets of each targeting 2-5 reps or 5-10 seconds of hang time is a great place to start. Once an athlete has cultivated a consistent climbing practice and integrated an effective warm up into the mix, I’ll generally ask them to do strength sessions anywhere from once to four times each week, depending on the season.
It’s also readily apparent that the general entropy of the universe leads to us all getting more stiff and less mobile over time. A good rule of thumb is to be doing a targeted mobility workout once each week for every decade you’ve been alive. So if you are 44, you’ll want to shoot for 4 sessions each week. Most climbers benefit from targeting hips and shoulders, but mobility, perhaps more so than strength should be tuned to individual needs.
4. Intensity vs Volume
If you are practicing climbing at least a few days each week, warming up effectively before each session, and integrating a few strength and mobility sessions each week, you’ve got a better training program than most climbers out there. It’s quite possible that your climbing will continue to improve for some time using just this seemingly “too simple” approach.
However, at some point (months to years in the future), you’ll notice that a plateau that doesn’t seem to be giving way. It may be that you have reached a point where a bit more complexity will help nudge things in right direction. The first intervention that I’ll suggest to folks is alternating their focus in climbing sessions from progressing intensity to progressing volume. The former helps build more strength/power and our ability to climb harder things. The latter helps increase capacity, or the total amount of climbing we can do, which lends itself to greater endurance.
If left to their own devices, most athletes naturally focus on seeking higher intensity session over session in the form of wanting to project and send harder problems/routes. Their sessions end up looking quite similar over time. Warm up on progressively harder problems, and then project things they haven’t sent yet. This works great at first, but eventually it does little more than get folks tired.. So, the idea of alternating between a standard “climb hard things” session and some sort of volume based session like circuiting moderates, doing laps on the same routes/problems, or just targeting a total number of ascents has two primary benefits.
The first is that it simply integrates a new stimulus into the mix and gives the body and mind a break from the same old same old. It’s not that projecting sessions are bad. It’s just that they are a bit played out. The volume session serves as an opportunity to focus on different skills and ask the body to adapt in different ways. Then when we return to a more intensity focused session, we’ll be that much “fresher” and ready to “try hard”.
The second benefit is that building capacity means more hard efforts in the future. Say perhaps you are only able to try hard on a couple problems each session now (and let’s be honest, you were sort of flailing on the last of the bunch anyways….). If you are able to increase the amount of quality climbing you can do in a single session, you’ll be able to get more effective hard attempts during those intensity focused project sessions and/or recover better from those types of sessions. A bit more stimulus and better recovery are a great recipe for jump starting the adaptation process again.
Alternating focus between volume and intensity can literally be as simple as switching between each type every time you climb. The sessions don’t even need to have a specific structure. Your climbing might look something like this:
Session A (Intensity): Project on the new set for an hour
Session B (Volume): Climb 30 problems of any grade
Session C (Intensity): Work on your outdoor project
Session D (Volume): Pick 5 onsight level problems and do 3 perfect repeats of each
Session E: (Intensity): Climb on the Moonboard for an hour
Session F: (Volume): Climb 8 pitches in a day at the crag
Always Begin With Basics
Things can, and perhaps will need, to become more complicated in the future. After many years of effective regular climbing practice some athletes will benefit from block programming with changing focuses over time. There’s certainly benefits to this sort of training plan and I suggest the more complicated methods for plenty of athletes.
However, I will remind all of us that the basics are the first place to look when we are feeling like our progression is beginning to stall out. Are we climbing consistently? Are we truly practicing when we are at the gym or are we just trying to send projects and get tired? Are we warming up effectively? Are we actually doing regular strength and mobility work? Are we being honest about getting an equal mix of intensity and volume focused sessions?
Additionally, we should always be checking with our general health and wellness. Are we getting enough sleep? Are we eating an appropriate diet? Are we drinking enough water? How’s our stress levels? How’s our general emotional wellness?
Don’t short change yourself. You have an incredible amount of power and agency related to your athletic improvement. There are so many ways to improve as a climber without integrating complicated highly nuanced tools, workouts, and programs. The longer I play this game, the more often I return to the most basic elements laid out here. Looking across my own history as an athlete, I can see clearly that my climbing has been at its best when I’ve been able to prioritize consistent high quality climbing practice while maintaining good health outside of my sessions. Certainly easier said than done at times, but for me that challenge provides even more reason to focus and prioritize these basic elements. .