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

competition. No doubt some of the best competition climbers also use peaking strategies; I sense, however, that the majority of climbers do not deliberately plan their training in order to produce a peaking effect.
    Really, it’s not that difficult to structure your workout schedule to elevate yourself to peak form for a personal-best (hardest-ever) route or annual road trip. If you currently train and climb a few days per week, you’re already doing the hardest part. All that’s required now is to manipulate the intensity, volume, and rest frequency according to certain guidelines, and then track your progress in a training notebook. Details on all of the above are forthcoming.

Structuring Your Workout Schedule
     
    In this section you will learn to manipulate your workout schedule over the time frame of several days, a few weeks or months, and a full year in order to gain optimal results. In the lexicon of sports scientists, these crucial time frames are known as the microcycle, mesocycle, and macrocycle, respectively.
MICROCYCLE
     
    A microcycle relates to the structure, content, and volume of your training over the course of a given week. Since it is in the microcycle where you choose what to train and how much to train (or whether to rest) on a given day, it is the most important factor in determining the effectiveness of your program. Many climbers’ programs are flawed from the get-go, because they incorrectly prioritize their training during the course of a single workout or week. Maximizing effectiveness requires training the right things in the right way and the right order. Hopefully, you gained a sense of the optimal workout hierarchy in reading the previous chapters. After a complete warm-up, the best order of training and exercise is:
    1. Actual climbing to learn skill and strategy, and improve technique.
    2. Climbing and exercises that target maximum strength and power.
    3. Climbing and exercises that target anaerobic endurance.
    4. Antagonist-muscle, core, and other general conditioning exercises.
    5. Aerobic training activities to improve stamina.
     
    Certainly you can’t effectively train all five of these areas every day. Instead, you must develop a list of short-term goals and an overall mission that narrows the focus of your actions in the microcycle. Whether you plan to train in two, three, or four of these areas, it’s vital that you execute the training in accordance to this hierarchy. For instance, a beginner who plans to work on skill and strategy training as well as perform some general conditioning exercises would do so in that order. Similarly, an advanced climber might boulder to train skill and the mind, then proceed to training maximum strength and power, and conclude with some antagonist-muscle training. Working out in conflict with this hierarchy will severely compromise the quality of your training and results.
     
    Planning Adequate Rest: There are two crucial rest phases within the microcycle: rest between exercises (or climbs) and rest between workouts. For the enthusiastic climber, it’s quite easy to fall into the trap of under-resting—between climbs and between workouts. Therefore, it would be prudent to rest more than you want or think you need.
    The length of rest taken between individual exercises and sets plays a primary role in the training stimulus. Rest periods of less than a minute or two (between climbs or exercises) result in high blood lactate concentrations and thus train anaerobic endurance (that is, muscular endurance). This mode is the hallmark of the highly effective interval-training strategy covered in chapter 7. Conversely, resting three minutes or more between sets allows for greater recovery and, therefore, higher quality and intensity of training. Longer rests are best used when training technique (new skills), maximum strength, and power.
    The optimal amount of rest between workouts is more difficult to gauge. Depending on the intensity of training, it could take anywhere from twenty-four to seventy-two hours (or more) to fully recover and benefit from the training stimulus. Low-intensity general exercise or easy climbing that produces little muscle soreness can be done up to five or six days per week. The highest-intensity training (complex and hypergravity training), however, might require up to ninety-six hours for full supercompensation, limiting workouts to twice per week. Chances are, you will be training somewhere in between these