[Dave Thompson]

Hi OliverL,

Performance for each of the three: climbing projects; supporting high exertion recovery; long outings in the mountains, all are supported by your baseline steady state.  That steady state is specific to each activity. So training to support your climbing projects will likely not help you for long outings in the mountains such as you’ve described, and vise-versa. Accumulating volume below your limit level — for whatever your goal is — gives you capacity to try hard more often.  It is normal to only have a handful of good attempts on a climbing project that is at your limit. This will not likely change. What does change is your capacity, strength, and efficiency… and also the grade at which you consider a ‘project’.

Steady-state foot-based aerobic work of an intensity that you could do day-in and day-out can aid in all of the other more specific training that you do. Long second and third-class scrambles in the mountains will not make you better at fifth-class climbing (your limit climbing projects), but it will make you more efficient at moving in mountain terrain, and is good general aerobic training for the mountains. The tricky thing is to modulate your intensity from day-to-day, and week-to-week. A goal of 3-8 hrs of aerobic base work would be a good range to try to hit.

Climbing base work: focusing on 3rd and 4th tier and below terrain is a great way to train climbing endurance. There are a lot of ways to do this, and your projects can be interspersed with this volume. ‘Tiers’ here meaning a 1st tier route being something at your limit, on down to as many tiers you’d want to define. The ARCing that you are referring to can be a waste of time if it doesn’t include skill building, that is why I often recommend building lower tier volume where the climber can incorporate skill building and efficiency. This is all to say that building volume in an as specific way possible to your goals will take you farther faster than abstracting your activities away from those goals. So swimming can be a nice recovery activity, or perhaps can help general whole-body endurance capacity, but it will not make you better at climbing.

Hope this helps.

[Dave Thompson]

The more specific you can make speed and power recruitment to climbing the better. For this reason if you had to choose only one modality, a climbing wall would be most preferable.  I think this post addresses how to increase speed and power for climbing on the wall: Bouldering is a fantastic power-building exercise. The key is choosing boulder problems that have movements that are uniquely powerful for you. Power here being defined as the generation of force with respect to time. There are many power exercises for climbing that are less complex than bouldering — campus boarding being one example. But the nature of climbing movement involves the generation of power using almost infinite combinations originating in all joints of the body. So simply focusing on the upper body (campus boarding) has it’s limitations. There is a relationship between power and coordination during the execution of climbing movement. Often the more coordination gained for a specific set of climbing moves, the more efficient the execution of power becomes. For this reason it is important to do movements and boulder problems where there is a need for accuracy that results in a net gain in coordination. This results in powerful movements being less ballistic and more in ‘control’. So when you can do a particular boulder problem that was once very explosive and ballistic, that has become more static and controlled, it is best to move on to different boulders that require ballistic and explosive moves that you can become more efficient on in the process outlined above.

One thing I would add is that doing these movements safely involves choosing movements that require accuracy. For this reason, powerful and high recruitment moves don’t always have to be big movements. If you desire to be able to execute big moves efficiently then it is best to choose movements that begin with bigger target holds and progress to smaller target holds.

[Dave Thompson]

Bouldering is a fantastic power-building exercise. The key is choosing boulder problems that have movements that are uniquely powerful for you. Power here being defined as the generation of force with respect to time. There are many power exercises for climbing that are less complex than bouldering — campus boarding being one example. But the nature of climbing movement involves the generation of power using almost infinite combinations originating in all joints of the body. So simply focusing on the upper body (campus boarding) has it’s limitations. There is a relationship between power and coordination during the execution of climbing movement. Often the more coordination gained for a specific set of climbing moves, the more efficient the execution of power becomes. For this reason it is important to do movements and boulder problems where there is a need for accuracy that results in a net gain in coordination. This results in powerful movements being less ballistic and more in ‘control’. So when you can do a particular boulder problem that was once very explosive and ballistic, that has become more static and controlled, it is best to move on to different boulders that require ballistic and explosive moves that you can become more efficient on in the process outlined above. Hope this helps.

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