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

route, any climb known to possess injurious hold types (one-finger pockets, extreme crimps, and the like), or high-intensity training techniques such as campus or hypergravity training. Of course, individuals recovering from recent finger injuries should tape their fingers during the early stages of returning to climbing.
4. PROCEED CAUTIOUSLY THROUGH DANGEROUS MOVES.
     
    An important sense to develop is that of knowing and managing movement through inherently dangerous moves or sequences. In recognizing that you are entering a dangerous sequence (say, a one-finger lock with poor feet) and in sensing that you are near injury on a move, you are empowered to either disengage from the move or cautiously navigate the sequence as expeditiously as possible. Clearly you need experience in such situations in order to develop this sense, but you can foster this important skill by knowing your body and the sensations you feel on various types of movements.
    As a final note, a climber will often escape injury on the first attempt or pass through some heinous move, then get injured by attempting or rehearsing the painful move repeatedly. This is obviously a very unintelligent approach—no single route is worth getting injured and, possibly, laid up for months over. The bottom line: If you find yourself climbing into a move that feels overly painful or injury-scary, simply lower off and find a better route to enjoy.
5. DON’T CLIMB TO EXHAUSTION.
     
    There is nothing I enjoy more than occasionally maximizing a day of climbing fun by pulling down right into the evening twilight. As a regular practice, however, this is a prescription for injury. This chapter covered a range of overuse injuries that are largely caused by accumulated stress beyond what the body is capable of handling—that’s why they call them overuse injuries!
    Knowing when to say when is one of the subtle climbing skills that you can’t learn from a book or video, but only through experience. Obviously, the best strategy is to err on the side of ending climbing early in the day versus right after you feel that finger tweak. The chapter on strength training hammered home the idea that quality training stimulus is far more important that the quantity of training. In strength training, less is often more.
    When climbing, the right decision on when to call it a day is much less clear, since you want to maximize climbing fun and achievement without getting injured. In this situation only you can decide what’s right for you. Don’t be swayed into another burn on a strenuous route if you are approaching exhaustion and think your climbing technique will not be up to snuff. Keep in mind that many injuries occur late in the day, when you are tired and climbing sloppily.
    One rule of thumb you might adopt is to call it quits early when planning to climb again the very next day or if you are already on your second day of climbing. In this way, you will limit undue accumulation of stress. Conversely, when sandwiching a single day of climbing between two rest days, you can feel better about packing in as many climbs as possible before dark.
6. DON’T CLIMB OR TRAIN MORE THAN FOUR DAYS PER WEEK.
     
    In most cases it’s counterproductive to climb and train for climbing more than a total of four days per week. Consequently, if you are climbing four days a week on the rock, in the gym, or both combined, you should do no other sport-specific training during the three remaining days of the week. Even with three days’ rest out of seven, your body will struggle to repair the microtraumas incurred to the tendons and muscles during your four climbing days. For this reason, it is wise to incorporate a training cycle that provides a complete week off every month or two. This is valuable catch-up time for your biological climbing machine!
    In a pure strength- and power-training program (such as in focused off-season training), you may only be able to train two or three days per week while resting four or five. Earlier in this chapter I presented several studies that indict overtraining (or under-resting) as one of the most common causes of overuse injury. Don’t set yourself up for failure by succeeding at overtraining. Listen to your body and, when in doubt, favor over-resting.
7. ALWAYS WARM UP AND COOL DOWN.
     
    Anyone with experience in traditional sports knows firsthand the importance of a proper warm-up and cool-down. Unfortunately, I have observed more than a few