[cjsheps]

Dear sages of UKB,

After the summer, it seems that I'm a rare case of just needing to get stronger to break into a new level with my climbing. Because of this, I'm planning on doing a fair amount of physical conditioning over the coming months.

I've written a long list of exercises I could do for each movement/muscle group, working different energy systems on different apparatus. As far as I can tell, there seems to be a conflict in the available literature between varying the stimulus and sticking with a set of exercises for long enough to see gains.

For example, for finger strength you could train on a campus board, 45 board or fingerboard, in addition to bouldering. All have various subdivisions e.g. the CWP fingerboard plan, Eva Lopez stuff, repeaters etc. It seems unlikely that trying to do them all in a more or less random fashion would be too confusing to your body for it to adapt. On the other hand, doing Ab Ripper X twice a week for three months doesn't seem very smart.

My (pretty uninformed) plan of attack as it stands would be to do one particular type of session (e.g. sets of repeaters) at least once a week for around a month, and then move on to another variation (e.g. campus ladders and snatches). How does this sound in terms of varying stimulus?

Thanks in advance, and apologies for the sprawling post!

[bendavison]

Sounds good to me! You might find you adapt faster/better to some methodologies than others, so pay attention to that, and if you're doing the same methodology once or twice a week then you'll probably be seeing improvement every week, so adjust the sessions as necessary to force the improvement.

I don't really know how sticking with one methodology compares to randomizing. All I can think of is that sticking with one is more measurable. With finger boarding, I tried doing two methodologies at once in a week (2/3 repeaters and 1/3 either CWP or a more intense variation or repeaters for the first month then vice versa after a month on the board) and that seemed to work.