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

climbing before engaging in strength-training exercises.
    • Commit to training the antagonist muscles twice per week. These are critical for maintaining muscle balance and preventing injury.
    • Work on becoming a more mental climber. Practice mental-training strategies throughout the week, and strive to leverage all your mental tools when you step onto the rock.
     
     
SAMPLE MACROCYCLE
     
    The average accomplished climber gets outdoors twenty or more weekends per year and may go on as many as two to four extended road trips per year. Therefore, careful macrocycle planning is vital to maximize conditioning for these trips and to help produce peaking for an extreme project or personal-best ascent. Use the blank macrocycle in appendix B to structure an effective long-term training plan that accounts for your travel plans, the best outdoor climbing season, and when you choose to take your month off from climbing.

Elite Climber Workout
     
PRIMARY MISSION
     
    Identify and correct any technical weak spots or energy leaks (no matter how small) that compromise climbing performance. Constantly evaluate and refine mental skills—you can always improve more in this area! Work to eliminate subtle forms of self-sabotage by narrowing your focus onto the process of climbing and letting go of any outcome-oriented thinking. Fitness-training workouts must be highly specific to your preferred climbing subdiscipline (bouldering, sport climbing, multipitch, or big walls), and they must stretch the limits of what you are currently capable of doing. Sound performance nutrition is critical for accelerating recovery from severe workouts and to ensure maximum supercompensation.

     
    Figure 8.7 Workout Time—Elite
     

WORKOUT GUIDELINES
     
    Unlike the mass of climbers, the elite performer needs to spend a disproportionate amount of training time on strength training (see figure 8.7). For boulderers and sport climbers, several weeks or even a month or two at a time may be dedicated to strength/power training and hard bouldering with little or no actual roped climbing. Multipitch and wall climbers must invest a large amount of time into actual climbing—climbing for volume, exercising to build muscular endurance, and stamina-training activities are what it’s all about. Frequent training with the elite-level exercises in chapter 7 is essential to achieving further physical gains.
    Access to an indoor climbing wall, boulders, or crags is absolutely necessary for elite-level training. Use of the 3-2-1 Cycle can be highly effective for both on- and off-season training, although many elite climbers will train intuitively. With many years of climbing and training under his or her belt, a mature elite climber can often intuit the right amount of training stimulus and rest. Still, the microcycles, mesocycles, and macrocycle described herein offer useful guidance for such intuitive training. Finally, brief but regular bouts of antagonist-muscle training, copious rest, and proactive performance nutrition are vital to accelerate recovery and help stave off injury and overtraining.

     
    Table 8.6 Elite Climber Workout
     

    Summary of Training an Elite Climber
     
    • Plan and execute an optimal—not maximum—strength-training program that targets your personal weakest link. The goal is to maximize grip strength, upper-body power, and anaerobic endurance.
    • Constantly evaluate your technique and mental performance to identify subtle flaws that are preventing further gains. Economy of climbing movement is paramount, and it’s your mental, technical, and tactical skills that determine your fuel efficiency. Make the mental strategies described in chapter 3 into life skills that you employ 24/7.
    • Err on the side of over-resting instead of overtraining. Use performance nutrition and generous amounts of sleep and rest to enhance recovery and maximize gains from training.
    • Be a compulsive planner of training, travel, and rest. Try to leave nothing to chance, and avoid trial-and-error training or getting drawn into some else’s (flawed) training routine.
    • Evaluate all you do in your daily life with this question: Is it helping me reach my goals or holding me back in some way?
     
     
SAMPLE WORKOUTS
     
    Table 8.6 provides two highly focused workout templates, one for training maximum strength and power and the other for building anaerobic endurance. You will need to modify the volume of training as well as exercise selection