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

since the pulling muscles naturally grow stronger from regular climbing.
    Despite this conservative approach to training, most preteens will progress rapidly in bouldering, indoor climbing, and sport climbing, developing the foundation for becoming successful all-around climbers in the future if they choose to do so. Some preteens—most likely those with the best coaching or natural ability—will experience a meteoric rise in ability and apparent strength, all without any training outside of climbing.
TRAINING FOR JUNIOR CLIMBERS (AGES THIRTEEN TO SEVENTEEN)
     
    The greatest gains in strength and power come during the period of the adolescent growth spurt—around thirteen for girls and fourteen for boys (Bloomfield 1994). Still, anthropometric changes may have a positive or negative impact on performance. Teenagers lacking strength and power can begin some climbing-specific training, including some of the finger and pull-muscle exercises covered in chapter 7. They should not engage in the most stressful forms of training (campus training, hypergravity, HIT), however, until age sixteen or seventeen, at the earliest.
    Still, the training emphasis should remain focused on developing good technical and mental skills. Teenage climbers would benefit tremendously from exposure to an expanding range of climbing activities such as traditional and alpine climbing. Some individuals may naturally gravitate toward competition climbing, though this should be the youth’s choice, not that of an overbearing parent.
    As teenage climbers transition into young adult-hood (age seventeen or eighteen), they can begin a more serious and formal training program for climbing. Many of these late-teen climbers will already be accomplished or elite, and they can now engage in the elite training program as outlined earlier in the chapter.
    The most common setbacks for teenage climbers are overuse injuries in the tendons, joints, and bones of the fingers, including stress fractures and damage to the growth plates. Juniors experiencing chronic pain in the fingers (or elsewhere) should cease climbing for a few weeks and consult a doctor if the pain continues. As a hard-and-fast rule, climbing and training must be limited to an aggregate of four days per week. The guidance of an adult climber or coach is extremely beneficial both in helping structure workouts and in monitoring rest and nutritional habits.

     
    Youth climbers should focus on developing technique and skills while doing only a modest amount of strength training. Here thirteen-year old Alyssa Sullivan sails up 5.10 terrain at Mount Lemmon, Arizona.
    ERIC J. HÖRST
     

 
    Jasmine Caton jamming up the “enduro corner” on Astroman (5.11c), Yosemite, California. RICH WHEATER
     

    CHAPTER NINE
     
    Performance Nutrition
     
    Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.
    —The Dalai Lama
     
     
    The foods and beverages you consume play a primary role in determining your mental acuity, physical performance output, and ability to recover from vigorous training or climbing. Therefore, a thoughtfully designed diet will provide a noticeable edge in performance, whereas engaging in a “see-food diet”—you see food and you eat it!—will continue to hamper your performance in a covert way that you may never recognize.
    While it’s impossible to say exactly how big a part diet plays in climbing performance, I estimate that most climbers can realize a 10 to 20 percent improvement in their training, recovery, concentration, energy, and overall climbing performance if they dedicate themselves to improved dietary surveillance.
    As a serious athlete and performance coach, I follow the changing trends in nutrition with great interest. In the late 1980s high-carbohydrate, low-fat diets were the rage; in the mid-1990s high-protein diets were in vogue; and in the early 2000s the high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets are what sold the most books and got the greatest hype. Interestingly, all these diets are backed by scientific studies showing that they worked (in producing weight loss) to some degree given that you execute them exactly and presuming you are faced with one or more of the health issues common to obese Americans. For a reasonably fit athlete, however, there is no need to engage in one of the fad diet regimens—nor any benefit. Proper performance nutrition is not that complex a subject; in the pages that follow, I will provide you with basic guidelines that will