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

this investment, the time these climbers spend training or on the rock should mimic the performance demands of their preferred focus. Boulderers should dedicate more of their mesocycle to maximum-strength and power training, while multipitch and big-wall climbers would want to spend many more weeks of the mesocycle on training anaerobic endurance and stamina. Sport climbers possessing a high degree of technical skill, however, would do best to cycle their focus back and forth between maximum strength/power and anaerobic endurance. As they become more advanced, the 3-2-1 Training Cycle described earlier would be ideal.
    Clearly, the best training program for you will change over time as your technical ability and your physical strengths and weaknesses change. For this reason, active self-coaching, with regular self-assessments and course correction, is critical in maintaining a successful training program. The time invested in plotting your program intelligently and striving to stay on course over the long term will pay huge dividends in how far and how fast you progress in this sport. You might also consider hiring a personal climbing coach (visit USAclimbing.org for a list of coaches by region) to help guide your training—the objective analysis and expert guidance can be a real wild card in obtaining the most rapid gains in ability possible.
IMPORTANCE OF A HOME WALL OR GYM MEMBERSHIP
     
    Regardless of your ability, nothing beats indoor climbing for sport-specific, time-efficient training, any time of the day or year. Hopefully, there is a good commercial facility within a reasonable distance of your home or workplace. If so, join the gym and use it at least twice per week—this is the number one thing you can do to improve climbing ability and fitness. Many of us are less fortunate (the nearest climbing gym to my home is about an hour away), however, so it’s vital to invest in a home wall in place of that gym membership.
    If your space is tight, simply build an 8-foot by 8-foot fifty-degree overhanging wall with a small section of ceiling climbing atop it. While this setup has obvious limitations (physical and mental), it will enable you to get an excellent upper-body workout as well as help improve some aspects of climbing movement and body position. If a larger space is available, it would be wise to construct three additional sections of wall: a less overhung wall (twenty to thirty degrees past vertical), a supersteep, sixtyfive-degree overhanging wall, and a slightly overhanging (about five degrees past vert) traverse wall. A garage with a high ceiling offers a good location for your home wall, especially if there is a way to control the climate in the summer and winter; however many homeowners feel it’s more practical to build their home gym in the basement.
    Another excellent strategy is organizing a community wall. Recruit five or ten energetic climbers to pitch in a couple hundred dollars each. Rent a garage or some similar structure that has room to build several hundred square feet of climbing surface with a variety of angles, and then complete your facility with a campus board, HIT System, and fingerboard.

Designing an Effective Personal Training Program
     
    Obviously, there is a limit to how precisely I can prescribe an optimal training program for you via the static format of a book. On the pages that follow, however, I lay out the basic, fundamentally important guidelines that you should follow in developing your training program. Do so, and you will be far better off than the typical climber who trains in a haphazard, trial-and-error manner.
    Most important, you must adopt the appropriate training template for your current ability level. Over time you can tweak this program according to the results you experience and in line with the good training sense you’ve developed from reading this book. As long as you act in ways consistent with the principles and concepts described throughout this text, you will remain on course toward your goals.
    One of the most basic and powerful concepts in this book states that you must train in the manner best suited to you and not do as others do. Remember, to outperform the masses, you must do things they aren’t doing! Toward this end, this section provides training guidelines for three basic groups of climbers—beginner, accomplished, and elite. These categories are defined in table 8.1.

     
    Table 8.1 Climber Classifications for Training