Overall training plan for 2010 - route fitness
This post links into my previous, discussing reflections on my previous year's climbing.
To start with, I'm asking that this is a two-way discussion - if you think I could be doing something better, harder, less often, whatever, please comment or email me to air your thoughts. I know far from all the knowledge there is on training methods so share with you all so you can feed back in return! And if there's any pro coaches that want to take me under their wing, you know where to find me :)
Secondly, this is transferable to trad, my primary focus right now is for sport routes. Imagine reducing the amount of pump you get while on that trad route?!?!?
Before planning exactly what I was doing each week, I basically take a rough draft of what trips I'd planned for the year:
mid-February: Turkey
mid-April: Spain
Summer: unknown, but multi-week trip somewhere
October: bouldering?
Following on from this, I was able to judge that I had roughly 6 weeks from the beginning of January, then another 7-ish weeks till April, and then another similar time-frame before the summer. There's another trip planned after this, but I'll decide the 2nd half of the year closer to the date once I re-evaluate my performance.
Obviously Christmas was a nice excuse for a break, so I tied onto this that I would start off with a consolidation phase to begin with for my endurance - I've been climbing relatively consistently for the past few months so was happy with by-passing a month of just easy mileage as I essentially did this after my lay-off in October - get a good grounding and prepare for higher-intensity work from the return after the first trip. This has mainly involved two sessions a week of double laps on a grade (not including a warm-up route or two) that I'm relatively solid on, but would push me a bit.
For me, this is a 7a-ish route - a grade I can onsight comfortably more often than not - and mixing it across three different routes at the wall. One slightly overhanging crimpy, one steep and one slightly overhanging pocket-y. I was not getting the full 10 routes immediately, maybe about 7 (especially if I was doing a lot of the crimpy one which pumps me stupid) but fell off the last hold of the last route for the first time on Tuesday (6 steep 7a's and 4 of the crimpy routes). So, I'm seeing progress.
In short, if you can do it all on the first night, you've probably set it soft. If you can barely manage the first route, let alone two back-to-back, you might want to give your ego a kick up the arse and be realistic :) Expect to use one, maybe two, nights just getting the balance right....
These sessions normally fall on a Tuesday and one of the weekend days. Alongside this, I've been bouldering on Thursdays for definite, on the other weekend day (outdoors if the weather is being kind), and using the fingerboard twice a week - 5/6 days (I find one of the fingerboard sessions can be mixed in on an evening of bouldering) in total. I'll elaborate more on this in the next post....
Once this period is up and it's mid-February, i.e. (after next week), I'll then start just projecting hard routes until Siurana. Close to my limit and aim for 3-5 goes on it per night.
And once Siurana is complete, I'll then be hopefully projecting routes outdoors by then so will just continue to consolidate in this fashion, although probably with something similar to my January session, only on harder routes.
Lessons Learned from previous climbing:
- I've tried doing easy 30 min laps (then rest 10, and repeat for 2-3 hours) of a climbing wall (just traversing) as basic arm fitness at the start of a training block and found it quite a nice way to kick off a batch of training, if a little boring if you forget the ipod and a bunch of music and podcasts :) For anyone who does want a nice basic level of fitness, this can be pretty useful - I'm sure it'd transfer to big multi-pitching very well. Many of those who started climbing with me will remember this is vaguely comparable to what we used to do at DCU's climbing wall by attempting a number of traverses back-to-back.... I don't feel I need it right now as I haven't had a long enough lay-off so I skipped this block.
- I used to turn up with just a goal to do as many routes as possible in a night and of any grade. In the end, you spent most of your time chatting, and picking the easier routes cause you flash pumped on the first route of the night :) Nowadays, I always turn up with a set grade range in mind (e.g. currently 6c+ - 7a+).
- Make sure your belayer is keen on the same sort of session, or else just doesn't mind belaying you if they only do single routes - if not, you'll get nothing done either. Having said that, if you DO find someone who's intrested, you'll both feed off each other and see some fab gains by the summer months......
Any questions?
Good training books from Amazon:
9 Out of 10 Climbers Make the Same Mistakes: Navigation Through the Maze of Advice for the Self-coached Climber
Performance Rockclimbing
Self-Coached Climber: The Guide to Movement, Training, Performance
The first is that you need to work every single day at being great at that one thing if you want to be great....taken from an amazing post on BrazenCareerist.com about being expert
To start with, I'm asking that this is a two-way discussion - if you think I could be doing something better, harder, less often, whatever, please comment or email me to air your thoughts. I know far from all the knowledge there is on training methods so share with you all so you can feed back in return! And if there's any pro coaches that want to take me under their wing, you know where to find me :)
Secondly, this is transferable to trad, my primary focus right now is for sport routes. Imagine reducing the amount of pump you get while on that trad route?!?!?
Before planning exactly what I was doing each week, I basically take a rough draft of what trips I'd planned for the year:
mid-February: Turkey
mid-April: Spain
Summer: unknown, but multi-week trip somewhere
October: bouldering?
Following on from this, I was able to judge that I had roughly 6 weeks from the beginning of January, then another 7-ish weeks till April, and then another similar time-frame before the summer. There's another trip planned after this, but I'll decide the 2nd half of the year closer to the date once I re-evaluate my performance.
Obviously Christmas was a nice excuse for a break, so I tied onto this that I would start off with a consolidation phase to begin with for my endurance - I've been climbing relatively consistently for the past few months so was happy with by-passing a month of just easy mileage as I essentially did this after my lay-off in October - get a good grounding and prepare for higher-intensity work from the return after the first trip. This has mainly involved two sessions a week of double laps on a grade (not including a warm-up route or two) that I'm relatively solid on, but would push me a bit.
For me, this is a 7a-ish route - a grade I can onsight comfortably more often than not - and mixing it across three different routes at the wall. One slightly overhanging crimpy, one steep and one slightly overhanging pocket-y. I was not getting the full 10 routes immediately, maybe about 7 (especially if I was doing a lot of the crimpy one which pumps me stupid) but fell off the last hold of the last route for the first time on Tuesday (6 steep 7a's and 4 of the crimpy routes). So, I'm seeing progress.
In short, if you can do it all on the first night, you've probably set it soft. If you can barely manage the first route, let alone two back-to-back, you might want to give your ego a kick up the arse and be realistic :) Expect to use one, maybe two, nights just getting the balance right....
These sessions normally fall on a Tuesday and one of the weekend days. Alongside this, I've been bouldering on Thursdays for definite, on the other weekend day (outdoors if the weather is being kind), and using the fingerboard twice a week - 5/6 days (I find one of the fingerboard sessions can be mixed in on an evening of bouldering) in total. I'll elaborate more on this in the next post....
Once this period is up and it's mid-February, i.e. (after next week), I'll then start just projecting hard routes until Siurana. Close to my limit and aim for 3-5 goes on it per night.
And once Siurana is complete, I'll then be hopefully projecting routes outdoors by then so will just continue to consolidate in this fashion, although probably with something similar to my January session, only on harder routes.
Lessons Learned from previous climbing:
- I've tried doing easy 30 min laps (then rest 10, and repeat for 2-3 hours) of a climbing wall (just traversing) as basic arm fitness at the start of a training block and found it quite a nice way to kick off a batch of training, if a little boring if you forget the ipod and a bunch of music and podcasts :) For anyone who does want a nice basic level of fitness, this can be pretty useful - I'm sure it'd transfer to big multi-pitching very well. Many of those who started climbing with me will remember this is vaguely comparable to what we used to do at DCU's climbing wall by attempting a number of traverses back-to-back.... I don't feel I need it right now as I haven't had a long enough lay-off so I skipped this block.
- I used to turn up with just a goal to do as many routes as possible in a night and of any grade. In the end, you spent most of your time chatting, and picking the easier routes cause you flash pumped on the first route of the night :) Nowadays, I always turn up with a set grade range in mind (e.g. currently 6c+ - 7a+).
- Make sure your belayer is keen on the same sort of session, or else just doesn't mind belaying you if they only do single routes - if not, you'll get nothing done either. Having said that, if you DO find someone who's intrested, you'll both feed off each other and see some fab gains by the summer months......
Any questions?
Good training books from Amazon:
9 Out of 10 Climbers Make the Same Mistakes: Navigation Through the Maze of Advice for the Self-coached Climber
Performance Rockclimbing
Self-Coached Climber: The Guide to Movement, Training, Performance
I'm heading to font in about 8 weeks, for the easter break. Last year a friend of mine went on a coaching trip with Neil Gresham, and I got a copy of the training guide that Neil handed out, it's got an 8 week phase for prepping for font. I'd not been doing much bouldering at all last year, so I've decided to try to follow this preparation guide for the next 8 weeks.
ReplyDeleteThe big goal is to climb La Marie Rose. It's not super hard, but I've never succeeded on a font 6a in font before, and I really really really want to do that one problem, it's such a historic and beautiful line. Anyway, training it seems to be going well, I like the aspect of having a trip to motivate me. For the next few weeks I'm doing volume pyramids, 5v0's 5v1's 5v2's and then reverse, with a minimum rest between. I've found a few people who don't mind joining in, so that makes it a lot more fun. I've done more bouldering in terms of volume in the last few weeks than I did in the entire second half of last year.
I got a lot of motivation from Dave Mccloud's book to just try to schedule in more and more considered time just climbing. I think a key thing is to be mindful in your training sessions, to be asking questions like 'What am I hoping to achieve with this session?', keeping tabs on the mental dashboard that is feeding back info on balance, pump, on confidence and on one's emotional state.
Sounds like your training plan is pretty solid, sounds like I need to arrange another trip for myself for later in the year!
I look forward to reading about how you approach/structure fingerboard sessions. Always interesting to hear different ideas and to read about what works and what doesn't for different people.
ReplyDeleteNice post dude!
ReplyDeleteOne critisism though... "Fab" C'mon dude... FAB? :o)
Haa!
But seriously - interesting reading - and even though we've talked so much about our training i can still pick up (or clarify) things that we're both doing without each other knowing it. Like your 6 steep and 4 crimpy routes this week - last night we hit the wall and it marked the first time i got my target laps in on the big barrel in Liverpool and on the crimpy 7a's on the 10 degree! Spooky!
All i can add to this so far is that i always tend to avoid training routines that base everything on grades. V0's, 7a's whatever - maybe being lanky and weak has soured me to them or maybe it's just the wild difference in grading from wall to wall or from wall to rock - i can't say. All i know is that grading is subjective and represents a very vauge overview of a routes difficulty. For me i like to train with something more measurable - I use time or hold type or wall angle etc... Saying that, the foundry seems very much geared towards training so i'm guessing you're yarding on calibrated routes - keeping things varied, keeping it consistant and staying injury free seems to be my overall aim for this year.
Oh and i'm using the trips as landmarks too - Nice!
nice words from all everyone! great to see some really interesting replies.
ReplyDeleteIan, keep it up, sounds like you're on the right track :) Like you said, a lot of the time is actually just MAKING the time for climbing and putting in the hours. 10,000 hour rule and all that, right?
Paul, as ever, I'm swamped with work and keeping up climbing so this blog sits down the pile. Having said that, the posts are partially written so expect it in the next 2-3 weeks....
Dave, great point on the graded routes for training. I should have clarified that point - the routes I'm on aren't really that grade anyway, I just know they work me to that perfect point where it took me quite a few sessions to do them all. You know what I mean by your own comments :)
I always time my fingerboarding sessions (both in length and timed training sessions - more on that later) but when it comes to routes, I'm not as precise. I do know however that it takes me 115 - 125 seconds to top out on UCD's wall, and about 170 on the Foundry wall so I suppose I am keeping tabs without realizing it......psyche!!!!!
Good post man, fully interneted up so playing catch up. Got a training calander and with renewed energy setting out for summer. Will spend a week setting goals and a plans then I'll post these for all to see. As with dermo I would love to do pascals by the meet and the 7b on the back of the Rasher boulder in glenmac.
ReplyDeleteSounds like you're keen this year Tim, keep it up! and enjoy :)
ReplyDelete