Rough guide to training for rock climbing - page 2 Basic principles – the most important part! Overload - Specificity - Reversibility - Individuality Overload Your body has the remarkable quality of adapting to its surroundings and demands. Muscle is one of the most adaptable tissues we have. The adaptation we are after is for the muscle to get stronger and fitter. For this to happen we have to tell it to adapt (it wont do it on its own because there is a massive energy cost to change your muscle physiology). The stimulus it responds to is being forced to do more work than it is accustomed to. A very simple concept. To become stronger and fitter, you have to do more than last month or last year. This ‘more’ can take different forms, it can be more intense (more force/harder moves) or more volume (more or longer routes per unit time). If you did 10 routes at the wall, three nights per week last winter, are you doing more this winter? If not, you may not be producing an overload on your muscles and therefore not telling them to improve. Specificity This concept is summed up by the idea “What you do, you become”. If you spend much of your waking hours pumped, you will have good endurance. If you avoid taking on large runouts, you will never be good at them. From this principle, you can immediately start to build your own training schedule: Say you want to get better at single pitch traditional climbing. The pitches are about 80 moves long and take over 20 minutes to complete. You will spend an average of 30 seconds on each hold. You normally fail because you get too pumped after a while. So you need to replicate this as closely as you can in your training. If you only climb routes at the climbing wall which take less than 2 minutes to complete, you will get better at 2 minute climbs, but might actually get worse at 20 minute ones. This type of self-analysis of the climbs you are aiming for is what you need to foster. Boulderers are often particularly bad at paying attention to the specificity principle. If you are training to climb problems on real rock, is spending whole winters climbing on large blobby pinches on an indoor bouldering wall really the best use of all your energy and time? Reversibility “Use it or lose it”. This principle refers to the rather irritating tendency for our bodies to let go of abilities (mental or physiological) that we are not using habitually. It is the reason why the large majority of climbers spend a fair bit of time training each winter, yet somehow seem to still be climbing the same grades next winter!. If you train four months of the year (say winter evenings at the wall), well done, you have worked hard. What a shame to let it all slip away because of a summer of climbing outside a little more sporadically and the odd week here or there when you went on holiday or work got a bit much. The reversibility principle has a silver lining though – reversibility maintenance. It turns out that it takes much less effort to maintain the same physical level than it does to improve. In practice this means if you have to train three times a week for an hour on a fingerboard to get finger strength improvements, you will only need one session a week to maintain that level. You can use this feature of our physiology to make sure, with just a small commitment over those busy periods when life gets in the way or circumstances change, to prevent yourself slipping back to square one each year.
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