[Sasquatch]

How much climbing is enough that you're better off doing something else to acheive gains? Dave Mac contends that most climbers would be better off climbing more, rather than doing weights, etc.  I've read Dave's book but don't have a copy now, so I can't see what he says.  I'm curious as to what other people think.

I'm just coming into a long off season (no winter rock up here in AK, and not looking at doing any trips this winter), so I have about 7 full months before I can realistically touch rock again.  I have access to both a gym and a home wall, so I can theoretically climb as much as I want. For the last two years, I've focused on finger strength and will continue to work on that, but how much is enough climbing? 20hrs, 30 hrs, 500moves, 1000moves, etc.....

My primary focus is bouldering, but I'm also looking at starting towards a few LTG's that are 8b+/8c routes.

[ghisino]

if i remember my training classes correctly, the logic is:

1-find out the intensity below which climbing loses its training value (for your objectives...)

2-at least in volume oriented phases, do as much climbing above that intensity as skin, fingers, elbows and shoulders allow. Supplement with strenght exercises and non-traumatic activities* if needed

if you want a figure, i remember that for french lead competitors it was no more than 20 hrs, excluding rest times of course, but including campusing and deadhangs. Less than that for comp boulderers (around 15 hrs???).

*the lecturer was not keen of running, for instance. "Too harsh on the knees, light jogging is better"

[SA Chris]

Bust out the ice axes??

Do you get full 24 hour night at any point by the way? Like for 30 days? If so I'd be shitting it.

[Nibile]

The "climb more" advice tipically comes from people who can dedicate all their time or lots of it, to climbing. They often leave for a trip out of shape, then get into shape during the trip, which is often quite long.
They often overlook the fact that many people can dedicate the smallest part of their time to climbing. So, the fingerboarding sessions, the weights, the system, are not only a good way to pack something into small sessions, but also something to fight boredom and lack of psyche when we can't touch rock or where there is no "new" rock. Over time, going on the same problems over and over is a psyche killer even though you repeat hard stuff.
No climbing is too much as long as you enjoy it.

[Sasquatch]

Thanks for the replies - In spite of training for years and doing many sports, this is sort of new to me for climbing.  I'd like to take my training in a different direction and see if I can continue making gains....

1-find out the intensity below which climbing loses its training value (for your objectives...)

Any idea how to do this?  I've never really thought about it this way before....

Bust out the ice axes??

Do you get full 24 hour night at any point by the way? Like for 30 days? If so I'd be shitting it.

I've done the ice thing, and while it's great for a forearm pump and pullup strength, it translates quite poorly to hard rock IMO.  No 24 hr night where I'm at, that's at the Arctic circle, and we're a bit south from there.  I was curious so I looked it up, and Anchorage(where I live) is about 25 miles further north than the most northern point in Scotland (the Shetland Islands). 

Nibs - I can usually manage to dedicate about 15-20 hours a week to training during the winter if I'm motivated and have a plan. 

[mrjonathanr]

Surely the correct answer is
-" Too much is never.."?

[ghisino]

1-find out the intensity below which climbing loses its training value (for your objectives...)

Any idea how to do this?  I've never really thought about it this way before....

i am sorry i have no precise or "scientific" answer (others might help?)

anyway, my personal beliefs:

-"1st warmup intensity": only useful for technical drills or for one day just to get the feel back (as when switching from bouldering season to route season, adjusting to a new rock kind, coming back after a prolonged stop, etc)

-around consistent flash/OS grade, known routes/boulders that feel neither hard nor piss easy: big volumes of this seem good for building "trainability", all day fitness, or confidence (highballs, scary leads etc).

-anything harder: ok, we can safely assume it has a training value.




i have a couple of external examples coming from what i've seen at "pole france entrainement":
-young wads Janicot and Aglaé almost never seemed to have an easy time. Always seen them fall a few holds from the the top (routes) or suffer hard on circuits. They rested accordingly and basically spent most of their afternoons resting on a couch in front of the wall, in order to get their 10 to 15 laps done, @1 or 2 letters below their max redpoint grade.

-the lecturer, a former french head coach, basically believes that as long as you are a technically accomplished adult climber and a decent athlete, there is no point in doing anything at "medium" intensity. Even if you are doing 15 minutes laps on a board, it should be hard enough that during the last minutes you are close to throwing up.

[krymson]

Interesting. this sort of lines up with some recent thoughts about training from power company, at least in terms of avoiding "middle" intensity.
http://www.powercompanyclimbing.com/search/label/High%2FLow%20Training

i guess it's not an entirely new concept, even within climbing.

The difference is that they are advocating also doing the lower intensity training for movement value,  conditioning and building and maintaining endurance.

[jwi]

Thats clearly crazy.

Hard sport-climbing is just about strength endurance.  Lots of really good boulderers are totally shit on route climbing, despite being world class climbers.

[ghisino]

i think there is a high potential for misunderstatement here.

one thing is talking about the perceived intensity of the individual moves.
a totally different one is talking about the perceived intensity of the "exercise", be it a route, a boulder problem, a campus routine, a 4x4, etc...

for instance, a perfectly steady 20-move route whose moves feel "medium intensity" in isolation will porbably feel very intense as a redpoint.

(i was referring to the intensity of the exercise, and i think the powercompany blog too)

[jwi]

Not what you wrote ghisino, makes perfect sense.

The main error climbers who wants to train strength endurance make is that they train at too low intensity. Because training strength endurance is really painful

[Sasquatch]

So I've done a fair bit of training for running, and the concept of avoiding the "middle ground" is pretty well established there, which is very similar to the ideas in Krymson's Link.  However, what is not expressed in his idea of High/Low is that High (95-100%) is  a relative intensity based on what you're training.  A running example is if you're training for a Marathon, you do a tempo run (fast pace) of 3-6 miles at just below your goal race pace.  If you're training for a 5K, this would never work, instead you do a tempo run of 2x1mi at race pace.  This gets your body accustomed to the race intensity. However, you generally do this only once a week, certainly not every day. 

i am sorry i have no precise or "scientific" answer (others might help?)

anyway, my personal beliefs:

-"1st warmup intensity": only useful for technical drills or for one day just to get the feel back (as when switching from bouldering season to route season, adjusting to a new rock kind, coming back after a prolonged stop, etc)

-around consistent flash/OS grade, known routes/boulders that feel neither hard nor piss easy: big volumes of this seem good for building "trainability", all day fitness, or confidence (highballs, scary leads etc).

-anything harder: ok, we can safely assume it has a training value.

.....

-the lecturer, a former french head coach, basically believes that as long as you are a technically accomplished adult climber and a decent athlete, there is no point in doing anything at "medium" intensity. Even if you are doing 15 minutes laps on a board, it should be hard enough that during the last minutes you are close to throwing up.

I don't know of any "Scientific answers", so no worries. 

Based off of your "personal" intensities, would you say the former french coach is advocating skipping the middle intensity completely?

The main error climbers who wants to train strength endurance make is that they train at too low intensity. Because training strength endurance is really painful

I don't think I've ever had this issue, as I tend to enjoy the suffering. 

[ghisino]

Based off of your "personal" intensities, would you say the former french coach is advocating skipping the middle intensity completely?

yes he was advocating something like that, especially for lead competitors who are likely to walk the qualifiers
(as in the qualifiers you have some element of "middle intensity" and incomplete recovery in between routes)

he justified his position on the fact that in semis and finals you are fully rested and ideally warmed up at the start of the route, then it's pretty much an all-out effort,
starting hard and finishing harder.
There is no "middle ground" or element of recovery in between 2 pitches involved, and the training should mimic this.
Of course one should build good "trainability" beforehand, but his opinion was that this can be better done with lots of varied non-specific work than with "middle intensity" climbing.
(trainability= in this case, the ability to endure 10 hard tries a day X 5 days a week without injuries or overtraining, instead of 3x3)

Just to make sure i then asked if, thinking about outdoor climbers, these guidelines always applied.
He more or less said
1)yes if all you care about is having few "a muerte" redpoints on climbs of steady intensity where there are no rests or they are very poor anyway.
2)No if you're more after a feeling of "consistency" and you want to perform at a good level during big days at the crag or on a multipitch, also no if you are redpointing long, complex pitches with cruxes, easyish yet pumpy bits, good and poor rests...

[Sasquatch]

That makes alot of sense.  Specificity of training. 

[Ti_pin_man]

It reads like sprint intervals done in cycling, max out for say 8-10 reps at 30 seconds, rest between of 2-3 mins.  Do 2 or 3 times a week for six weeks.  All based on a core of long steady miles building the engine bigger.

[Sasquatch]

So the cycling thing is very different (yes I've done a bunch of bike racing as well , even won a 200 mile race a while back) as you're training for a long day of sitting in a peleton and not getting dropped.  You end up doing small stints at the front so you need a certain level of max power/output, and then the ability to just go steady but fairly easy for a LONG time.  If you look at cycling training for time trialists or triathletes where you are solo, the training is VASTLY different. 

[webbo]

So the cycling thing is very different (yes I've done a bunch of bike racing as well , even won a 200 mile race a while back) as you're training for a long day of sitting in a peleton and not getting dropped.  You end up doing small stints at the front so you need a certain level of max power/output, and then the ability to just go steady but fairly easy for a LONG time.  If you look at cycling training for time trialists or triathletes where you are solo, the training is VASTLY different.

I don't know what level of road racing you've done but my experience of riding in the bunch in a road race is not one of riding fairly easy for a long time. Most time time trialists on starting to ride in a bunch cannot cope with the frequent changes in pace i.e rapid accelerations. Also unless you are planning on winning the bunch sprint, you will need to able to sprint off the front of the bunch then be able to at least ride at the same speed as the bunch.
So back to the training which is basically interval training no matter what sort of cycling you are doing. Its the length of the efforts, intensity and the rests that are different thats all.

[Sasquatch]

Top local riding, including winning some races/tours, but not a chance of taking it to the next level.  Big fish in a small pond type of thing (Alaska might be big, but not many people )  Anyway, I know what you're saying, and every bit of cardio type training I've ever seen is based on some mix of interval training, adjusted for the actual racing time/intensity.  I also feel like maintaining in the peleton/paceline is more mental than physical.  Once I learned how to read what was happening, it became easy to stay in the pack.  I always found the hardest part of road racing was being on that mental edge for hours is grueling.....
  

[krymson]

Thats clearly crazy.

Hard sport-climbing is just about strength endurance.  Lots of really good boulderers are totally shit on route climbing, despite being world class climbers.

Hi JWI,

Yes High/Low sounds crazy at first. If you read the set of 3 posts though, it makes more sense.

And as for the results? The blog author says he's had better anaerobic endurance than ever. I've been doing it for a month and a half and my own experience has been the same.

Sasquatch, you should look into it, it's perfect for your situation from what I can tell

[Sasquatch]

The High/Low idea is one that I've been doing myself for quite a long time.  I don't call it that, but I've been doing a FB/high intensity day followed by an easy/active recovery day for the last couple of years.  I don't think it's really been helpful for training PE or Endurance though.  I do think it has shortened my recovery times from a hard FB workout from 48 to 36 hours, so I could get in two Hard FB workouts plus a day outside bouldering in a week.  The easy/Active recovery day is also helpful for remembering/reinforcing good movement, balance and flow on the wall.

So I think I understand the high/low concept very well, and I think that for those with good PE/End it helps because you're actively training power.  I don't think it helps those who already have loads of power, but little to no PE/End.  Hence my problem.  Coming from almost exclusively bouldering for the last 3 years, my PE/End is severely lagging compared to my power.  I can still OS most 5.12's, but that's because the holds are all good and I can shake out and recover the whole way up. 

Anyway, What I'm currently looking at doing is destroying myself with volume for the next 8-12 weeks:
Week 1 - 1 FB, 1 PE(foot on campusing 2x(2x1.5min), 1 Volume Bouldering day(60+ problems v5-v9), and 1 Volume End Day (8 x 15min on 5.10)
Week 2 - 1 FB, 1 PE 2x(3x1.5min), 1 Volume Bouldering day, and 2 Volume End Day
Week 3 - 1 FB, 1 PE 2x(3x1.75min), 2 Volume Bouldering day, and 2 Volume End Day
Week 4 - 1 FB, 1 PE 2x(3x2min), 1 Volume Bouldering day, and 1 Volume End Day - Recovery Week
Week 5 - 1 FB, 2 PE 2x(2x2min), 2 Volume Endurance
Week 6 - 1 FB, 2 PE, 3 Volume Endurance
Week 7 - 2 FB, 2 PE, 3 Volume Endurance
Week 8 - 1 FB, 1 PE, 3 Volume Endurance - Recovery Week

Hard sport-climbing is just about strength endurance. 

Didn't really notice this, but I disagree.  I think to sport climb well, you need all three - Power, PE, and End.  Some sport routes are short power fests (hubble, AD), some are mid-range PE monsters, and some are endurofests with no hard moves, then you get the ones that are easy climbing to short hard section(either PE or Power) to easy climbing...

Now, trainig for hard sport may be all about stength endurance, but that's a different debate, and one I would argue depends on your starting point...