Training
The best thing you can do to get better at climbing is just to climb. Hands down. Especially if you are new to the activity, climbing through the grades and learning to navigate different styles and terrains should be the first tool of choice towards getting stronger and better. Not only learning them, but making them part of your natural repertoire. But those who choose to make climbing a regular part of their life over multiple years will get to a point where they hit a plateau and find they’re having trouble breaking into the next grade. A plateau is an indication that a climber needs something a little more to get to the next level.
Personally, I hit a big plateau after four or five years of being a climber, once I was pushing into the upper 5.12/V5-6 grade and also wanted to move into the 5.13/V7-8 grade. I needed to get stronger, especially to gain power to access these grades, more than what climbing alone had given me.
I needed to work on my weaknesses, which is what training is, in essence— figuring out what your weaknesses are and tackling them.
At the time (back in the days of yore), there weren’t many options for training specifically for climbing out there— just climb until your arms fall off. There were tools like the fingerboard, which I did hangs and pull ups on, but without much direction, and the campus board, which seemed to be more for upper end climbers than for me. I dabbled aimlessly with these tools for a while, but what really got me turned-on to training were our friends Paul and April.
Paul and April were from Pittsburgh and climbed at The Climbing Wall but moved to Arizona and made Hueco Tanks their local climbing area. They trained extra for climbing strength but also for overall fitness. They made up insane hour-long HIIT and hanging core workouts that I couldn’t even begin to do. They went on long trail runs up in the foothills around their Tucson home. They lifted weights and used their campus board and had raucous woody sessions on their home climbing wall. They programmed things strategically throughout the week, and then climbed at Hueco every single weekend during the season. They both got much stronger.
They also had a ton of fun with it and reveled in the suffering that sometimes came along with all that work. Plus they loved talking about it and were very convincing. I figured if I did even a quarter of what they were doing it would help me.
Around the same time, my partner Brian discovered Steve Bechtel’s website ClimbStrong, and everything he wrote about supported what our friends were doing. So over some years these practices began to seep into our own climbing time, and we got stronger too.
Specifically, I began to lift weights and do more pull-ups and dynamic core exercises (hanging leg lifts, and TRX exercises, for instance). My friends shared their ideas with me, and I did as much of it as I could. We also began bouldering outside a lot more and started to go to Hueco yearly. I saw an increase in the grade number that I could send each year we went back. I was able to send multiple V8s. Training and bouldering also helped me send my first 5.13. Not too shabby for a mom with two kids. In fact, these were my strongest years ever.
From using my friends’ ideas, I moved on to things a little less wild, or, things that needed less of my own decision-making energy. I was no good at the programming part of training, and by that I mean, what you do and when, and how it should coincide with your outside climbing goals. When it was up to me to decide what to do when and how much, I always felt like I was either doing too much and tired all the time or too little and making no progress. Even 10-15 years ago when we were reading Steve Bechtel’s early articles on ClimbStrong, there were so many options that I was overwhelmed and couldn’t decide on one and would try too many different things; or, I was super inconsistent; or, I tried the wrong things for me.
And then I happened upon TrainingBeta.com where you could sign up and get a packaged training plan that took care of all the programming for you. I thought this would be the perfect solution! And it worked for a little bit, but I also injured my shoulder in the midst of some Kris Hampton strength training for bouldering hoo-ha, with exercises and weight loads that weren’t ideal for me. I won’t blame that training program for my injury, but it sure didn’t prevent it.
So be careful with the cookie-cutter programs. Also, read this woefully too short article recently put out by Climbing magazine on not following the climbing super-stars’ training regime because it is not for you!
If you know your body well enough— and even long-time climbers can still have some major blind spots— you can probably avoid doing exercises that will lead you down the path of no return, namely injury. Part of the problem with my personal need to check off the boxes is that sometimes I do an exercise at the wrong weight for too many reps and ignore the discomfort I feel just because I think I have to do it.
Someone said somewhere that if you complete 80% of your program, it’s good enough. Some things are meant to be skipped or modified. Listen to your body— yada yada yada.
It’s very important to understand and remember that you can train too much. Even the ClimbStrong team has learned over the years that actually, for most of us, less is more. If you don’t currently train, and you add even just one new thing to your weekly climbing routine— like a fingerboard workout or weighted pull-ups (or even regular pull-ups if you can only do 1-2) or a hanging core workout— it will make you stronger and less likely to get hurt as long as you are consistent.
Coaching
About a year or so after my shoulder injury, Steve Bechtel became my climbing coach. I needed an expert to cobble together a custom-made training program for me that would result in me getting strong again and not getting hurt. Most importantly I trusted him and his training philosophy, and therefore the ClimbStrong team, because he was way more experienced and older than me. I needed to follow someone who held this set of beliefs.
Hiring a coach may seem a little frivolous. Only the really serious and good athletes who are sending hard things need coaches, right? Only the youth teams who compete, right? Not necessarily. Amateurs in a lot of different sports often hire a coach.
Sometimes we need another human to give us perspective since our own can get blurry and our perception of our own abilities lopsided.
Another human can get to know you and then expertly pinpoint what you need. They can tweak a program template for exactly where you are, what your body needs and can handle. Also, as an aging climber (back when SB was coaching me, I was in my mid 40s), I needed to invest in longevity— to keep climbing and stay strong without injury. I needed help not giving up on myself. I needed help not being aimless.
A coach provides encouragement.
The coaching I received through ClimbStrong was long distance. It was based on 30-minute phone calls a few times a year through different cycles or phases of training that were tailored to my wants and needs. It started out around $100 an hour to start and then increased to $125. This cost was not monthly, so for a long time I was able to justify the expense. At some point, as climbing outside began to fade out of real life, having a coach to get better at it began to feel a little rich to me, a little too frivolous. I wasn’t seeing returns because I never had a full season of climbing outside anymore. Life does that to you sometimes.
Since I still felt the need to have a plan deep in my bones, this winter I took a little detour for a few months with ModusAthletica’s (experienced fem coaches who follow ClimbStrong’s tenets, for the most part) Group Coaching Membership. I signed up when they offered a 3-month deal which made it extremely affordable, around $30 a month. MA gave me structure and a weekly plan of things to do in the gym, and I wondered if it would make a difference having fem coaches who were well-seasoned (I think both are in their early 40s and strong). I liked the program alright, but I didn't get the most out of the “group” aspect of it and missed all the group coaching video calls. If I had been a better participant, I may have experienced the benefits of being coached by other women. But I cancelled the membership after the three months were up.
And now I’m back with ClimbStrong. They recently launched a new way to train using an app called Sequence. Steve has written a bunch of training pdfs, and he said in a conversation I had with him this summer, “now there is this whole generation of people who don’t want to read, and have been asking for access to these plans digitally. So all of those training plans have been updated, and we have an app called Sequence that’s really sick for analytics. Sequence does a really good job of tracking work load and things and is really fun to work with (if you like that sort of nerdy climbing data). You can go in and say, I want a 3 day-a-week bouldering plan, and it populates it out on the app that you can follow and make adjustments schedule-wise and whatever else.” All this for $12 a month.
Now the thing here that is lacking is one-on-one coaching. There is an option to have a 20-30 minute conversation with a coach for a one-time fee of $75 when you sign up for the Self-guided Training subscription to help you get your bearings. I’ve been using the Sequence app with access to a bunch of different training programs for a few months now. I have plans to go sport climbing outside more this fall and have specific goals, and so I’ve gone through the CS Strength and Power for Sport Climbing 4-week plan three times now. To start, I had a phone conversation with Joel Unema, one of the CS coaches, and a sort of rock star himself (IYKYK), and he walked me through how to use things in the app and also helped me figure out how to tweak the program for my specific goals.
I’m already seeing the benefits. At the end of the summer, I sent the first out-of-doors 5.12 since millions of years ago, and I have high hopes for working back through the grade and maybe, possibly, back up to 5.13. But even if that doesn’t happen, the plan is at least getting me stronger on boulders in the gym— so watch out for me at the Steel Town Throw Down in December! Ha ha…
I think the ideal coach is someone who is local and in person. The greatest benefit of having a good local coach is that they can watch you climb in real time, see how you move, and visually detect your weaknesses. This is possible via virtual coaching too, if you’re willing and able to take a bunch of videos of yourself, and there is a good platform for sharing them, but it’s kind of a pain— well, I’m no good at this kind of technological skill, anyway.
Did you know that ASCEND has coaches and personal trainers that you can get one-on-one sessions with? I recently sat down with Martson Leff, the new Director of Coaching to ask about details. It is true that the coaches at ASCEND are currently focused on group training— you see them with the youth climbing team and the kids who come to summer camps. They also run group classes for adults. Most of these classes are for the newer climbers out there.
However, if you no longer consider yourself a “noob,” check out ACT, the ASCEND Climbing Training group class. It’s “a members-only training program centered around becoming a better climber…. ACT is not a replacement for personal training or private one-on-one instruction. Think of it like an adult team, of sorts, where individual ambitions can be bolstered via a group format.” Or maybe you’ve been climbing inside for a long time and are ready to shift what you know to the outdoors— there are programs for that too.
Marston has future hopes to expand the one-on-one coaching opportunities at ASCEND; but for now, if there is something you want to work on— a weakness that you’ve noticed, or how the heck do you do those confounding coordination moves anyway?!— you can fill out this form, and the best coach/personal trainer for the job will respond.
So, are you ready to take your climbing to the next level?
