Training for Climbing, 2nd: The Definitive Guide to Improving Your Performance (How To Climb Series)

is unique among sports, however, in that it requires a near-equal balance of mental, technical, and physical prowess (see figure 1.1). So you can argue that genetics do play a significant, though not primary, role in determining your level of performance in this sport.

     
    Figure 1.1 Relative Demands of Various Sports
     

Genetic Factors Relating to Climbing Performance
     
    So just what genetic factors might be helping or hurting you? I bet they are different and more subtle than you think. Height and weight seem to be what most climbers consider their blessing or curse, but it’s likely a number of less obvious attributes that help make possible the incredible 5.14/V14 ascents of climbers like David Graham, Chris Sharma, and the Nicole, Huber, and LeMénestral brothers.
    While the aforementioned climbers exhibit a variety of body shapes and sizes, they all possess unusually high maximum grip strength, upper-body power, and/or local (forearm) endurance—beyond that which can be acquired by the average climber training “perfectly” for many years. The genetic gifts enabling these feats probably relate to hard-to-observe factors such as tendon insertions (where they originate from and insert into the bones of the hand and arms), lever length (length of bones), muscle fiber type, and hormone profiles.
    With regard to tendon insertions, a slight shift in the location compared with normal provides additional leverage that gives a few lucky folks more grip strength (off the couch!) than others could achieve through years of training. Similarly, your innate ratio of fast-twitch to slow-twitch muscle fiber determines whether your natural aptitude tends toward high endurance, high strength, or neither. Finally, we each have unique hormone profiles (testosterone, cortisol, and so forth) that vary with age and sex, and this plays an underlying role in our response to training and recovery ability (Bloomfield 1994). Because of this, some people can climb hard three days in a row or respond more dramatically to training, while most of us need far more rest in order to perform well, and our training adaptations are more gradual.
    If you still aren’t convinced that genetics play a role in determining who will be the very best climbers, consider the three pairs of brothers mentioned earlier. Frederic and François Nicole, Alex and Thomas Huber, and Marc and Antoine LeMénestral have all climbed at the fringe of maximum difficulty. This is not coincidence, but instead a screaming message that genetic makeup is a factor in climbing performance.

Your Genetic Potential as a Climber
     
    If you’re beginning to sense that you might lack some or all of the above genetic gifts, don’t be depressed! As I stated earlier, odds are that you’re “normal enough” to climb 5.12 or even 5.13. Because of the large role that mental and technical skill plays in climbing performance, you can push very high up the grade scale by maximizing your capabilities in these areas. The bell curve (see figure 1.2) shows that most of the population falls in the middle of the bell, in the area representing near-average genetic characteristics. A much smaller number of folks—call them outliers (say, one in ten)—have somewhat better or worse genetics than average. Then there are the extreme outliers (say, 1 in 1,000 or more) who have the potential to be brilliant if they discover their gift and apply themselves completely.

     
    Figure 1.2 Genetic Potential
     

    The fact that most of us fall somewhere in the middle of the bell curve can be uplifting or depressing, depending on your perspective. If you dream of climbing 5.15 or V15, the chart shows that even if you do everything right and dedicate your entire life to it, the odds are low that you have the genetic potential to make this dream a reality. But if you currently climb 5.5, 5.10, or what have you, you should be psyched that 5.12 is likely within your reach!
    A few recent studies support this idea. One study (Barss 1997) divided a group of twenty-four recreational climbers into two groups based on climbing ability. With the exception of a straight-armed hang endurance test, there was no statistical difference in the performance of a wide variety of general and sport-specific tests between the “less skilled” group (those climbing 5.7 to 5.10a) and the “more skilled” group (those climbing 5.10b to 5.11b). Therefore, at the intermediate levels (5.7 to 5.11b), there’s a poor