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

While some downtime is a good thing each year (mentally and in the case of nagging injuries), frequent breaks in training make it very difficult to acquire long-term gains in strength.
    If you are someone who travels a lot on business, or for some other reason frequently misses a week or two of training, you can temporarily delay the detraining by leveraging your knowledge of the lengthened supercompensation period after high-intensity workouts. Since we know that it can take several days to recover from a long, intense workout, performing such a workout the day before the beginning of your break would delay the beginning of detraining by a few more days. Therefore, you might return from the break and be at peak strength even after ten days off. This long period of supercompensation after extremely strenuous training or climbing also explains why the many enthusiastic climbers who are unknowingly overtraining discover a new level of strength after taking a week off from training and climbing.
    Tips for Effective Physical Training
     
    1. Specificity: For an exercise to produce usable strength gains for climbing, it must be markedly similar to the physical action of climbing, including velocity and pattern of movement, body position, range of motion, and type of contraction.
    2. Individualization: There are no other climbers quite like you; therefore, your optimal training program will be different from those of all other climbers!
    3. Overload: To increase physical capability, it is necessary to expose your body to a level of training stress beyond that to which it is accustomed. This can be achieved by increasing training intensity, speed, volume, or by decreasing the rest interval between sets or climbs.
    4. Variation: Since the body adapts to training stimuli, it’s essential to regularly vary training activities and workouts every few days or weeks.
    5. Rest: Neuromuscular adaptations occur during periods of rest and sleep, not during workouts. Therefore, sufficient rest and a healthy lifestyle are essential for making the most of your training investment.
    6. Detraining: Skipped workouts or frequent breaks in a training cycle will make strength gains unlikely and may lead to a loss of climbing fitness.
     
     

Training Methods
     
    Detailed below are the concepts and methods central to effective strength training for climbing. Since the pull muscles are most often the limiting physical factor in climbing, examples of how this information applies to climbing will focus on training these body parts.

Strength Training Versus Local Endurance Training
     
    Strength training results in neural and muscular adaptations that eventually enable muscle action at higher loads. Meanwhile, training local muscular endurance (aka anaerobic endurance) produces different adaptations—such as increased density of capillaries and mitochondria (the little ATP “factories” inside cells)—that will help sustain longer periods of vigorous muscle action (see figure 5.7). Certainly all climbers would benefit from enhancement in both areas; the form of training you emphasize, however, should match the demands of your preference climbing subdiscipline (per the SAID Principle explained in chapter 1).
    Climbing icon Tony Yaniro long ago pointed out that “if you cannot pull through a single hard move, then you have nothing to endure.” From this perspective, strength training could be viewed as more important for all climbers, save big-wall and alpine enthusiasts. This notion is supported by the fact that strengthening a muscle also improves its endurance, because a stronger muscle can use a smaller percentage of maximum strength to execute a sequence of nonmaximum moves. What’s more, a stronger muscle will have a higher absolute anaerobic threshold than a weaker muscle with higher endurance capabilities. Conversely, endurance training will not increase maximum strength one iota.

Muscular Strength Versus Muscular Power
     
    Strength is defined as the force a muscle group can exert in one maximum effort. Your ability to pull a single hard movement or grip a small, difficult handhold is a function of your maximum strength. Muscular power is more complex, because it is the product of force and the distance through which the force acts. Therefore, power is the result of strength and speed. This would be expressed as: power = strength x speed (where speed = distance/time).

     
    Figure 5.7 Physiological Adaptations to