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

indoors or climbing a personal-best route outside, the ability to accelerate recovery is tantamount to elevating your absolute level of performance. In the gym faster recovery between exercises or climbs translates to higher-intensity stimuli or faster learning, respectively. On the rock hastened recovery at a marginal rest may make the difference between a brilliant on-sight or hardest-ever flash and dangling on the rope in frustration.
    On the pages that follow, you will learn fourteen powerful techniques for accelerating recovery and, thus, improving the quality of your training and climbing. But knowing is not enough—you must apply these strategies with the same dedication and resolve as when pursuing your endeavors in the gym or at the crag.

Accelerating Short-Term or Intraclimb Recovery
     
    Your capacity to perform difficult moves or exercises repeatedly, with only short rest breaks, is directly proportionate to your recovery ability in the short term. Described as the recharge period above, only certain recovery mechanisms come into play during the first ten seconds to thirty minutes following strenuous activity. The goal during this time is to help expedite the recharge process. This is done by minimizing the magnitude of fatigue (in the first place), enhancing forearm recovery with the G-Tox and active rest, and engaging in pre-exercise hydration.

Limit Fatigue by Climbing More Efficiently
     
    Let’s start off with the most simple, yet powerful method to enhance short-term recovery—limit the magnitude of fatigue, as much as possible, through economy of movement and optimal climbing technique. Obviously, you will use less ATP and CP, as well as produce less lactic acid, if you can lower the intensity of muscular contraction and the total time under load. In this way you immediately reduce the magnitude of the fatigue you must recover from, and you will return to baseline strength more quickly.
    It’s in this area that the average climber can realize a windfall of unknown capability. The fact is, most climbers move too slowly, possess less-than-ideal technique, and stop to place gear or think when they should be pushing on to the next rest. While lack of experience and technical ability are the real limiting factors here, slow climbing and hesitation will lead you to believe that a lack of strength is the primary problem.
    If any of this sounds familiar, then some dedicated technique-training practice will go a long way toward elevating your game (see chapter 4). By learning to move swiftly and accurately through hard moves, and by relaxing your grip and lowering tension in the antagonist muscles, you will use less ATP and CP on difficult sequences and produce less lactic acid. In this way you immediately reduce the magnitude of the fatigue you must recover from at a midclimb rest position, and you will return to baseline strength more quickly between attempts or sends.

Enhance Forearm Recovery with the G-Tox
     
    The dangling-arm shakeout is the technique traditionally used to aid recovery in the commonly fatigued forearm muscles. A few seconds or, hopefully, a few minutes of shaking out provides some recovery, but often not enough. The effects of a full-on pump can take frustratingly long to subside, and when hanging out at a marginal rest, it’s possible to expend as much energy hanging on with one arm as is being recouped in the other. Such a zero-net gain in recovery does nothing to enhance performance—in such a situation you would likely have fared better by blowing off the so-called rest and climbing onward.
    Luckily there is the G-Tox, a shakeout technique that I developed, to accelerate recovery of finger strength while hanging out at a midclimb rest. For more than fifteen years, I have been promoting the benefits of alternating the position of your resting arm between the normal dangling position and an above-your-head raised-hand position. This simple practice provides a noticeable increase in recovery rate. I named this recovery technique the G-Tox, because it uses gravity (as an ally, for once) to help detoxify the fatigued muscle and speed recovery.
    The discomfort and pump that develop in your forearms while climbing are largely the result of accumulating lactic acid (LA) and restricted blood flow. As described in chapter 5, LA is a by-product of the anaerobic metabolism of glycogen, an energy pathway that comes into use during extended contractions of greater than about 50 percent