Route fitness, part 2


Old image of mine from Red Rock National Park, Nevada, USA. Fitness for routes like this!

Following on from my previous post, I thought I'd update a bit more, and clarify, what I'm doing. For anyone who hasn't looked, there's two great responses from Dave and Ian here.

Anyway, as Dave mentioned in the commments, if you do follow a rough plan like this, I should have clarified that it's not entirely about the grade - if anything forget about whatever arbitrary grade your local climbing wall has graded the routes and find two that test YOU. Both of the routes I mentioned in the last post are not accurately graded in comparison to an outdoor route, but the whole point is that they test me enough that when I first started I couldn't do 5 sets of doubles on them. I can now so I'll find two routes to replace them, and obviously they'll be a bit harder. It's a permanent cycle which is what is so fun about it as every 4 - 8 weeks, I usually get to move onto something else.

On a side note, if you only have access to a bouldering wall, that's fine too. I originally started doing this on my local wall's bouldering wall and set it for about 30 moves (maybe 1-half to 2 mins climbing time) in a figure of eight pattern. If anything, I saw quicker improvements from that than doing it by routes, as I could define an exact 3 min rest between each go also. The only trick I made sure on this was to ensure that the downward climbing wasn't that hard, I wanted most gains for an upward manner :)

The other secret sauce is WHO you're climbing with! This routes lapping obviously won't work if you don't have a like-minded partner. Judging by the number of readers of this blog, I can only assume that there's a lot of psyched imbers out there so why not think about hooking up?!?


Any more questions? I know lots of you are saying these are of interest by email, but not giving me directions on what queries you have :)

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