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

eliminate any training practices that might increase the size of your legs. The same goes for any weight-lifting exercise or practice that produces a bulking-up effect in any other part of the body. This subject was covered in chapter 5, but it’s worth pointing out again that strength training must be extremely specific in order to transfer to climbing. Heavy squats, maximal bench presses, and other traditional body-building exercises such as biceps curls are of little benefit for many high-level athletes since they lack absolute specificity (Bell 1989). And for climbers, these exercises are surely counterproductive since they will result in hypertrophy and weight gain.

Strategies for Optimizing Body Composition
     
    Certainly there are genetic limitations to how much you can change your body composition through training and diet. Some people are naturally going to carry a little more body fat; others naturally have a larger frame and bulkier muscles. Still, many novice climbers can improve their body composition significantly in a way that will benefit their climbing. The two key strategies are improved dietary surveillance and increased aerobic training.
    Performance nutrition will be discussed in depth in chapter 9, but for now let me state the obvious—reducing body fat is possible only if you create a net calorie deficit over the course of many days and weeks. Simply put, burning more calories than you consume causes the body to tap into and burn fat reserves. Crash dieting is unhealthy and dangerous, especially for a serious athlete. Instead strive for, at most, a 500-calorie deficit per day. Over the course of a week, this would add up to a 3,500-calorie deficit and equal the loss of one pound of body fat. Surely the bathroom scales will indicate that you’ve lost more weight, but this additional weight loss is all in the form of water and glycogen. This nonfat weight loss will return next time you eat a surplus of calories that can replenish the muscle glycogen stores.
    Your daily calorie deficit is best created by a combination of reduced calorie intake and increased calorie expenditure. For burning fat, nothing beats aerobic activities such as running, biking, and swimming. Given a healthy back and knees, select running as your choice activity since it will not result in muscle hypertrophy (growth in size) in the legs. Moderate-intensity swimming and biking on relatively flat terrain are the next best alternatives. Unfortunately, mountain biking over rugged terrain is a leg-muscle builder. No matter what you choose, make it your goal to perform a minimum of thirty minutes of sustained moderate-intensity aerobic activity at least four days per week.
    If your schedule is too busy to accommodate this two-plus hours of aerobics per week, recent research indicates you can get a similar (and possibly better) fat-burning effect from shorter, high-intensity interval training (King 2001). For instance, after a three-minute slow warm-up jog, alternate a minute of sprinting with a minute of jogging for an additional twelve minutes. This vigorous fifteen minutes of interval training may burn less fat during the actual training than the slow thirty-minute run, but its metabolism-elevating effect will have you burning more calories for the rest of the day. Regardless of your chosen mode of aerobic training, you can maximize the fat-burning effect by doing it first thing in the morning and before eating breakfast.
    Tips for Optimizing Body Composition
     
    1. Use a combination of dietary surveillance and exercise to lower your percentage of body fat.
    2. Strive for four, thirty-minute (or more) aerobic workouts per week.
    3. Adjust calorie intake to produce approximately a 500-calorie-per-day deficit. See chapter 9 for more nutritional tips.
    4. Reduce aerobic training activities (and reinvest the training time in climbing-specific exercises) as you approach your optimal percentage of body fat.
    5. Do not obsess over body composition—do the best you can given your genetics, and remember that climbing is two-thirds mental and technical. You can climb at a high level despite less-than-ideal body composition.
     
     
    Upon reaching your desired percentage of body fat, cut back somewhat on the aerobic training and refocus your efforts elsewhere. Slowly reintroduce more calories incrementally and watch your waistline and body weight. The goal is to find a level of calorie consumption equal to your daily energy use and