[mrjonathanr]

It's 60 minutes and I think you're mixed up; you can output a higher power for less time. You reduce your 20 minute power output by 5% to predict your (lower) FTP that you can sustain for 3x as long.

No i think we mean the same thing, apologies if I am coming across as muddled. Training Peaks suggested that less trained vs more trained athletes might cycle for 45 vs 60 mins, but 95% of the average power output in a 20 minute burst was a standard way to calculate it. Thanks for clarifying. Any thoughts on how that might look in a climbing context?

[Paul B]

I think I made most of my points on the Tindeq thread; it's all very interesting but currently there isn't really a way of someone being informed that they're operating in the correct range (as soon as you're off a rung with a strain gauge built in) and when that's the case then it's just a perceived effort affair and for that I don't think you can beat the Barrows PDFs or even the Lattice workouts for descriptions of what you're aiming at. Even if you could scale it from a measured test on the rung, stepping away from that  and onto a circuit board you're just back to trying to remember how that feels. If you then consider all of the factors that influence how something feels (fatigue, caffeine etc.) then I personally doubt how effective that might be. The best quote of my last cycling holiday was "I think my power meter has gone out of calibration" on the last ride of a week which included 10km of ascent (nothing to do with the totally battered legs then  ).

Again if you jump back to cycling you can buy a trainer for not that many FAs that keeps you within 5% or less of the power your workout requires of you. Speed up and it'll back off. Slow down and it'll up the resistance (there's a grim spiral at the end of a ramp test where you fail so you slow a bit and the trainer reacts so you slow some more until it feels like you're wading through treacle). That's a much harder thing to develop for climbing.

I think as it's massively interesting (and I'm very guilty of this in all sport so please don't take this as criticism) it's easy to get sucked into trying to get everything perfect where in reality it's probably not all that important compared to consistency over a sustained period of time.

[mrjonathanr]

in reality it's probably not all that important compared to consistency over a sustained period of time.

Yes, consistency is the key, 100%. (Speaking as someone who is consistently very inconsistent through injury). I do like to understand things though, and I suspect a lot of what passes for climbing training is likely to be very inefficient, so keen to get a better grip on what is productive. Your wattage machine put me in mind of a climbing treadmill, but as was pointed out upthread, uniformity (eg foot on campusing) misses a lot of what is essential for climbing well. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

[MischaHY]

My recent training so far has been:

1) long boulders ~15 moves/45s duration. x4 reps per set. 2 mins rest between reps, 5 mins rest between sets.

2) short boulders ~6-8 moves:
2a) 6 sets of 3, 30s rest between reps and 5 mins rest between sets.
2b) 3 sets of 6, 1min rest between reps, 5 mins rest between sets

Sounds about right to me. I wouldn't do more than 2x ancap sessions a week; I can't recover enough to do more. Probably could when I was 20, but then I could do a lot of things when I was 20 that I can't now.

Naively I would think the best way to stimulate the glycolysis system is stress it fully, allow sufficient recovery, rinse and repeat. However, most training methodologies don't leave sufficient recovery between reps. Or is that the point?

Stressing the system as hard as possible isn't necessarily the best way of training it, otherwise (for example) we'd just do aeropow and not aerocap/arc! I think most exercises aim to go to (near) failure but not necessarily per-rep. If you went to failure each rep you'd need long rests, but not so if you aim to approach failure each set.

Another question. The cycling methods are based around Functional Power Threshold. This is a measure of average top output over 45-60 mins (albeit measured in a 20 minute burst). This has nothing to with the timings of most boulders or sport routes, so what is the climbing equivalent measure?

[edit: what follows is totally OTT geekery and is just me musing for fun. If you just want to know what to do for ancap training I strongly advise ignoring it]

The climbing equivalent of FTP would be our equivalent of critical power, which is Dave Giles' critical force. It's not exactly the same thing, but fundamentally, they're both attempts to measure the maximum amount of effort that can be sustained long term, and primarily depend on aerobic ability.

Where I think there is a lot of scope to improve climbing training is that at the moment, most workouts seem based on a % of max strength (for the fingerboard) or "standard" durations for intervals (i.e your 45s ancap intervals).

But an aerobic workout should have an intensity based on your critical force, not your max strength, and some % of critical force/FTP is not a sensible way to calculate the intensity/duration of an ancap workout.

The approach some cycling coaches take is to try and construct a "power-duration" curve. The duration managed at a given power output should closely follow a standard curve, predicted by the critical force/power model. However, when you measure real people you find that there are durations/intensities where they underperform. The basic idea is to target these areas in training.

In a climbing context measuring a power-duration curve would involve something like doing 7:3 repeaters to failure with a range of added weights. The duration you manage at each particular added weight is recorded and compared the expectation from a critical force model. Areas where you do badly are emphasised in training.

This makes a lot of sense to me, but I haven't come up with a way of gathering the data that is easy enough to make it worthwhile. But imagine for a second you had someone who wanted to spend a whole week measuring time to failure when dead hanging, and they came up with the following results:

Weight added   |  Duration Managed | Expected Duration
               10 kg | 2:20                         | 2:10
               15 kg | 1:00                         | 1:25
               20 kg | 1:05                         | 1:05
               30 kg | 0:50                         | 0:43
               40 kg | 0:30                         | 0:32

This climber "underperforms" in efforts just over 1 minute, but does OK at 45s efforts. Arguably, they'd be better off doing their ancap on longer circuits that take 1:00-1:20 rather than the "standard" 15 move circuits.

Funnily enough Stu it was a very vague version of this fingerboard based testing you described that got me training ancap in the first place this winter.

In Siurana in October I kept falling off projects without any pump but just feeling like I didn't have enough beans to pull through a specific move. I could do these moves reliably off the draw but they felt hard and needed precise technique. Most people I was climbing with reckoned it was fitness related because I could do the moves but it seemed bizaare because I wasn't pumped at all - in fact I'd been onsighting really well all year and felt like I could hang around on ok holds for ages.

Anyway fast forward to back home in November and I did some messing around trying to figure out where the weak link was. I found out by using the whole % of max hang idea that I could reps for ages at 60% but burnt out much quicker than expected at 70% and 80%.

I also realised I was often in the position where I could hold onto small holds quite easily but struggled to move from them.

So I found it really useful to test like that, even though it wasn't very precise in the grand scheme of things.

With all this in mind I decided to focus the plan on the 4 day training week I mentioned before with a mixed focus on power and Ancap.

The maintenance aero session is interval style on the 30 board so I defined a 22 move 7a/b circuit for laps and started with 1:2 work to rest ratio. Currently reduced this to 1:1.5 and will keep nudging it down over the next few weeks.
 
The final observations were that I had fairly poor bicep strength so included 2 sessions of offset pulls to help with lock strength and hypertrophy. Actually really surprised by how fast these improved and managed to add around 2.5kg per week the last mesocycle.

@mrjonathanr in general this did feel like a lot of high intensity sessions, but on the other hand I'm being very careful about the volume and doing no other finger training - so no fingerboard etc. I'm also splitting the loading between a few different types of board (homeboard: very fingery, kilterboard: very powerful, spray wall: good mix and some bigger holds) and this really seems to help facilitate the volume. Last week I did 3 sessions on the home board due to necessity and definitely felt a lot more fatigue in the fingers!

Apologies for the essay but I thought it might be a useful addition to the discussion to have an example of how a (very rudimentary) form of testing can be interpreted and applied.

[Stu Littlefair]

Funnily enough Stu it was a very vague version of this fingerboard based testing you described that got me training ancap in the first place this winter.

In Siurana in October I kept falling off projects without any pump but just feeling like I didn't have enough beans to pull through a specific move.

Nice anecdote! I guess it's an example for Paul about how more advanced testing might be useful. Although, to make Paul's rebuttal for him:

1) What you describe above is a pretty classic sign of an underpowered anaerobic system, also called "trad climber's syndrome".
2) If you hadn't been training ancap at all, it was likely a-priori to be a weak spot.

So, maybe you didn't need the testing after all 

[abarro81]

I think for lots of people you don't need testing that much to know where your weaknesses lie.. but I do think for some it can be useful. For example if you want to work out whether someone is poor at a certain style/format of route (whether that's endurance, or hard moves, or short PE, or dropping cruxes despite not being pumped and doing the crux ok off the rope)  because of a physiological weakness or because they're bad at that executing on that style (e.g. not relaxing enough, not being able to turn it on enough, struggling to turn on-off in succession, climbing sloppy etc..). You can get a good idea of this from testing on an edge with  strain gauge in a way that might be tricky to work out otherwise (especially if, for example, you're a coach and have limited time with a client to assess their climbing)

[Paul B]

Nice anecdote! I guess it's an example for Paul about how more advanced testing might be useful. Although, to make Paul's rebuttal for him:

Exactly. My point is that you don't need 4DP to predict whether I'm a sprinter or better at dancing on the pedals going uphill. Anyone care to take a guess (36yr old male; 5ft 6; 57kg)? By observation I think you/a coach could easily point to the weak link in someone's energy systems (via qualitative assessment).

[abarro81]

Exactly. My point is that you don't need 4DP to predict whether I'm a sprinter or better at dancing on the pedals going uphill. Anyone care to take a guess (36yr old male; 5ft 6; 57kg)? By observation I think you/a coach could easily point to the weak link in someone's energy systems (via qualitative assessment).

See my reply above. I know two climbers who are not super on enduro style. For both I wasn't sure if they were poor at relaxing and climbing that style or genuinely unfit. On a CF test climber A came out as a low CF, climber B had a surprisingly good CF... so climber B needs to learn to climb that style whereas climber A genuinely needs to get fitter. For strength this is often obvious (e.g. if you can 1-arm the lattice edge and climb 7A you clearly have an issue with climbing not strength) but for fitness I think it can be harder to tell just from watching

[Paul B]

But this would show on other assessments where the 'technique' element is removed?

I think for lots of people you don't need testing that much to know where your weaknesses lie.. but I do think for some it can be useful.

TBH I don't think we're too far apart.

[abarro81]

Yeah, agreed, but then you still need benchmarks for where someone "should" be at on the lattice board or a certain foot-on-campus set up to evaluate whether they have good/bad critical force, and picking apart why someone did well/bad on a certain protocol isn't always trivial... so doing it on a rung and getting an actual estimate in kgs, % of weight and % of max seems like a nice way to do it to me... [though I speak as someone with access to the lattice testing setup if I want it, obviously others may find other methods much easier from a practical POV]

[MischaHY]

Funnily enough Stu it was a very vague version of this fingerboard based testing you described that got me training ancap in the first place this winter.

In Siurana in October I kept falling off projects without any pump but just feeling like I didn't have enough beans to pull through a specific move.

Nice anecdote! I guess it's an example for Paul about how more advanced testing might be useful. Although, to make Paul's rebuttal for him:

1) What you describe above is a pretty classic sign of an underpowered anaerobic system, also called "trad climber's syndrome".
2) If you hadn't been training ancap at all, it was likely a-priori to be a weak spot.

So, maybe you didn't need the testing after all 

Now I agree in theory but in practicality I was so much in doubt that I could be right about the issue that it was great to have a test confirm it. I'd spent too long misassociating strength with power and aeropow with ancap and only recently cleaned up these definitions - this actually caused a two year plateau whilst I trained the right things at the wrong intensity and got absolutely nowhere.

This was no doubt influenced by many people in my social circle who also had the wrong understanding constantly telling me how I clearly just needed to improve aero endurance because I was evidently strong enough due to being decent on an edge. I also had a tendency to open crimp everything because this was my strongest grip type but obviously was pretty shit for doing powerful moves on steep terrain, something else I wish someone had told me a few years ago (thanks to Ned's book that I finally learnt what I was doing wrong there). My ability to pull on small crimps (10mm>) improved by a ridiculous degree in the space of maybe 4 weeks after I started consciously using a proper crimp grip on the board and whilst climbing. I had to ease into this because in the beginning it felt like my fingers would explode (the main reason I never used it in the first place) but after the adaptation phase there was an exponential progression and I went from barely being able to hang a full crimp with two hands to being able to bodyweight one arm on the BM2K middle rung for a few seconds. I was absolutely blown away by this and am still amazed nobody ever pointed it out to me in ten years of climbing.

The point of all this being that I think checking in on standardized tests can have a really positive effect on learning just by pointing out obvious weaknesses in a way that can't easily be ignored or misinterpreted so for me it's been incredibly valuable. It's not that I lay any specific value to the methodology but rather that as Barrows pointed out, considering these aspects in a very simple format allowed me to be sure of what I needed to work on and not convince myself that I needed more technique/aero/pointless dieting or whatever other random shit the anxious mind cooks up. I've the kind of mind that has a lot of intrinsic psyche but also feel much more comfortable doing long-form sessions as these feel like 'hard work' so it's been a challenge to reel this in and honor the short/intense session volume. 

I'm really curious how next season on rock will feel to be honest!
Really interesting thread as well

[Fultonius]

Funnily enough Stu it was a very vague version of this fingerboard based testing you described that got me training ancap in the first place this winter.

In Siurana in October I kept falling off projects without any pump but just feeling like I didn't have enough beans to pull through a specific move.

Nice anecdote! I guess it's an example for Paul about how more advanced testing might be useful. Although, to make Paul's rebuttal for him:

1) What you describe above is a pretty classic sign of an underpowered anaerobic system, also called "trad climber's syndrome".
2) If you hadn't been training ancap at all, it was likely a-priori to be a weak spot.

So, maybe you didn't need the testing after all 

Now I agree in theory but in practicality I was so much in doubt that I could be right about the issue that it was great to have a test confirm it. I'd spent too long misassociating strength with power and aeropow with ancap and only recently cleaned up these definitions - this actually caused a two year plateau whilst I trained the right things at the wrong intensity and got absolutely nowhere.

This was no doubt influenced by many people in my social circle who also had the wrong understanding constantly telling me how I clearly just needed to improve aero endurance because I was evidently strong enough due to being decent on an edge. I also had a tendency to open crimp everything because this was my strongest grip type but obviously was pretty shit for doing powerful moves on steep terrain, something else I wish someone had told me a few years ago (thanks to Ned's book that I finally learnt what I was doing wrong there). My ability to pull on small crimps (10mm>) improved by a ridiculous degree in the space of maybe 4 weeks after I started consciously using a proper crimp grip on the board and whilst climbing. I had to ease into this because in the beginning it felt like my fingers would explode (the main reason I never used it in the first place) but after the adaptation phase there was an exponential progression and I went from barely being able to hang a full crimp with two hands to being able to bodyweight one arm on the BM2K middle rung for a few seconds. I was absolutely blown away by this and am still amazed nobody ever pointed it out to me in ten years of climbing.

The point of all this being that I think checking in on standardized tests can have a really positive effect on learning just by pointing out obvious weaknesses in a way that can't easily be ignored or misinterpreted so for me it's been incredibly valuable. It's not that I lay any specific value to the methodology but rather that as Barrows pointed out, considering these aspects in a very simple format allowed me to be sure of what I needed to work on and not convince myself that I needed more technique/aero/pointless dieting or whatever other random shit the anxious mind cooks up. I've the kind of mind that has a lot of intrinsic psyche but also feel much more comfortable doing long-form sessions as these feel like 'hard work' so it's been a challenge to reel this in and honor the short/intense session volume. 

I'm really curious how next season on rock will feel to be honest!
Really interesting thread as well

I agree with this ^^  also, you could get an inconclusive result and be even more confused than had you not bothered!  I've dived into AnCap this year (mainly based on never really having done any focussed training on it).  Might try Stu's test at some point and see how I fair.  I take it that, given I don't have access to any data to compare against, you just do a best fit curve and see where the peaks and troughs are?

Bit annoyed at the lack of response from Lattice tbh. 2 emails, no reply so far....

[spidermonkey09]

I like to think I'm fairly clued up about training in a reasonable amount of ways but these threads make my brain explode!

Good effort to those scientifically minded enough to get stuck in, but on the flip side I do find the increased 'sciencification' of it slightly off putting. I think its partly due to my irritation with that aspect of it that I've been much more freestyle with my approach to training the last few years out of a desire not to overcomplicate things unnecessarily. I don't really know what point I'm making; think I'm more in Paul's camp that sometimes the tests can seem like a convoluted way of stating what is often reasonably obvious. That said, it can clearly get results and if was obvious to Mischa it sounds like he would have made changes a few years back, so clearly not that obvious!   

[Stu Littlefair]

edit: deleted because whilst mathematical models of physiology are OK, the quote system always beats me

[Stu Littlefair]

edit: deleted because whilst mathematical models of physiology are OK, the quote system always beats me

[Stu Littlefair]

I agree with this ^^  also, you could get an inconclusive result and be even more confused than had you not bothered!  I've dived into AnCap this year (mainly based on never really having done any focussed training on it).  Might try Stu's test at some point and see how I fair.  I take it that, given I don't have access to any data to compare against, you just do a best fit curve and see where the peaks and troughs are?

Bit annoyed at the lack of response from Lattice tbh. 2 emails, no reply so far....

If you want to do the tests, I'm happy to analyse the data and send you a brief summary. The easiest way to do this test is probably to devote a full day to it. Warm up well and then do the following:

1) Find your maximum two-arm hang weight on the edge you use. Rest 10+ mins.
2) Do 7:3 repeaters to failure at 50%, 60%, 70% and 80% of your max weight*. Rest 20+ mins between these efforts.
3) Send me the times from each hang and your max weight (incl bodyweight).

*don't forget bodyweight! So if you weigh 70kg and you can add 20kg, your max weight is 90kg. A hang at 70% of 90kg is 63kg, so you'd have to remove 7kg for this set.

From those four hangs I can estimate your critical force and see if any of the efforts above are under predicted by the CF model.

Offer open to anyone who wants to waste an afternoon...

[teestub]

How long for the max hang Stu, 7 seconds too?

[Fultonius]

edit: deleted because whilst mathematical models of physiology are OK, the quote system always beats me

 

You're on. I guess I can maybe just kind of spread it through the day while working, given each test will only be a few minutes?

[Stu Littlefair]

How long for the max hang Stu, 7 seconds too?

yep

[Stu Littlefair]

You're on. I guess I can maybe just kind of spread it through the day while working, given each test will only be a few minutes?

Seems reasonable, though you'll need to warm up each time if you've had a long rest.

[mrjonathanr]

Good effort to those scientifically minded enough to get stuck in, but on the flip side I do find the increased 'sciencification' of it slightly off putting.

Couldn’t agree more! Very pseudo sports science sounding stuff when what I want is to just get out there and get stuck in. Very difficult for me to do that this year however because of time constraints, hence going over to the dark side and looking properly at training. Figured if that was all I was going to do, I might as well do it well.

I'd spent too long misassociating strength with power and aeropow with ancap and only recently cleaned up these definitions - this actually caused a two year plateau whilst I trained the right things at the wrong intensity and got absolutely nowhere.

Me too; I found it all very confusing. I read Alex’s pdf. Understood it okay. Put it down and realised I didn’t really understand it all. So the only way I would understand it was if I took the time to grasp (at a simple level) the science it’s based on. And I spent a large part of Christmas reading and rereading articles about how we generate energy till it made a bit more sense.

Also I don’t like being unable to judge if something I am reading is good or bad and without some scientific understanding that simply isn’t possible.

Those blog links on the first post are excellent for this. Once you get that 3 energy systems are continually in play, interact with each other and have very specific parameters for providing energy the rest ( and irritating terms like aeropow) make perfect sense; they are a statement of the obvious. So props to Alex for publishing that in the first place, especially as a good understanding of energy systems is only really from the last couple of decades.

And I want to avoid falling off

[jwi]

I agree with this ^^  also, you could get an inconclusive result and be even more confused than had you not bothered!  I've dived into AnCap this year (mainly based on never really having done any focussed training on it).  Might try Stu's test at some point and see how I fair.  I take it that, given I don't have access to any data to compare against, you just do a best fit curve and see where the peaks and troughs are?

Bit annoyed at the lack of response from Lattice tbh. 2 emails, no reply so far....

If you want to do the tests, I'm happy to analyse the data and send you a brief summary. The easiest way to do this test is probably to devote a full day to it. Warm up well and then do the following:

1) Find your maximum two-arm hang weight on the edge you use. Rest 10+ mins.
2) Do 7:3 repeaters to failure at 50%, 60%, 70% and 80% of your max weight*. Rest 20+ mins between these efforts.
3) Send me the times from each hang and your max weight (incl bodyweight).

*don't forget bodyweight! So if you weigh 70kg and you can add 20kg, your max weight is 90kg. A hang at 70% of 90kg is 63kg, so you'd have to remove 7kg for this set.

From those four hangs I can estimate your critical force and see if any of the efforts above are under predicted by the CF model.

Offer open to anyone who wants to waste an afternoon...

There is an online adaption of the calculations in The Determination of Finger-Flexor Critical Force in Rock Climbers by Giles et al (https://doi.org/10.1123/ijspp.2018-0809) on this link:
https://strengthclimbing.com/critical-force-calculator/

I have not looked into these calculators at all.

Based on the video analysis I have done of uncut ascents, I simply do not believe that 7:3 s repeaters are very similar to climbing, but I would love to be wrong.

[Paul B]

I like to think I'm fairly clued up about training in a reasonable amount of ways but these threads make my brain explode!

Good effort to those scientifically minded enough to get stuck in, but on the flip side I do find the increased 'sciencification' of it slightly off putting. I think its partly due to my irritation with that aspect of it that I've been much more freestyle with my approach to training the last few years out of a desire not to overcomplicate things unnecessarily.

If you care:

NSFW  :

I think it's fairly straightforward to grasp if you look at cycling and if you read the below interchanging CF or even just thinking of a grade it should be fairly clear.

Borrowing from Trainerroad:

Functional Threshold Power (FTP) is — quite simply — a measure of fitness.

FTP represents the power (measured in watts) that you could theoretically maintain for about an hour, and it's the single metric we use to scale each of your workouts in our shared quest to keep your fitness growing.

With regards to what's taking place within your body and the muscles themselves, riding at your FTP pushes you right up to that limit where pushing any harder will drastically limit the duration of your ride.

But as long as you stay just below that acidic tipping point where your muscles light up and uncomfortably tolerable minutes become barely tolerable seconds, your muscles are in balance with the workload - for about an hour, anyway.

Imagine being able to take a measure (this being your FTP) and applying % reductions/increases to accurately determine which energy system you're training. The curves Stu speak of are a little more complex but ultimately they're just suggesting that the % determined based on a single FTP measure don't accurately reflect the physiology of everyone i.e. those who might naturally tend towards being good in a strength setting vs. those that might be best in an endurance setting.

Now consider that in cycling (unlike climbing) you can measure your power output (in Watts) when on a bike (be it a static bike at home or the one you're riding). That measurement removes any climatic effects (the impact of a headwind for instance) and any other factors that might make you feel you're trying harder/less hard than your workout might required (i.e. being tired, caffeine etc.). Thus, it's better than other indicators such as perceived effort or heart rate.

Take it another step and you can buy devices for not that much cash that you can literally select a workout plan (Lattice stylee but free) and as long as you show up and sit on the damn thing, you can't fail to perform within 5% or so of the workout's target (ERG mode). Before starting you do your test (or tests depending on how you've approached it) and the whole thing will scale automatically. If you re-test mid season, again, everything will automatically scale to keep your workouts correct. The slightly more expensive devices also have the ability to tell you if your pedaling technique is shit.

This has also been looked at in a normalised form and there's a famous table basically telling you the W/kg you need to output to be at a given standard.

For climbing, you can measure CF and as Stu suggests you can get some kind of a curve (although I'd imagine for the majority of people this will tell you something that's blindingly obvious) but in my opinion due to the technique aspect of climbing and the inability to measure (and ensure) a given output, CF is limited in offering 'snapshots' of your various energy systems and its application becomes a bit niche (useful for coaches and the ultra-committed in its current form). I think there's a lot of 'perfect' getting in the way of 'good enough' on FB groups on this subject. However, that's just my opinion.

I also can't personally visualise something with a sufficient technique element such as a circuit board, being able to measure force output. However, I've never struggled to find someone near a circuit board to tell me my technique is a bit shit so at least that's covered.

[rjtrials]

Based on the video analysis I have done of uncut ascents, I simply do not believe that 7:3 s repeaters are very similar to climbing, but I would love to be wrong.

What sort of hanging parameters would you suggest?

[jwi]

At a guess, a work:rest ratio of 8:1, unless someone can convince me that 7:3 is a better predictor of performance on sections of sustained hard climbing. 🤷🏼‍♂️