UKC

I believe my priority for physical training next year on trad is to increase PE & local endurance.

As part of my training around these two targets I want to increase strength purely because I've read that a stronger muscle has a higher aerobic threshold.

I'm assuming that by "stronger" it is increasing the size of the muscle that gives the higher aerobic threshold (e.g a large muscle can sustain more capillaries). I don't see how keeping the same size muscle & simply improving the recruitment of the muscle can lead to a higher aerobic threshold. If anything I can imagine it is detremental as the higher recruitment simply means you can over grip & shut the capilaries down easier.

Hence I'm considering only hypertrophy training & no recruitment training. Any advice?

P.S. yes I know I should be climbing harder before I bother to worry about this kind of stuff but I'm a geek.

In reply to leon:

I reckon you're probably right. You're never going to need that extra recruitment on trad, not really, and it won't help your endurance which is probably the biggest demand trad will have.

I meant to say on fit club btw - your sport grade pyramid - I would have thought for hard E3 you would want to be onsighting more than redpointing, and probably onsighting 6c+ or 7a (which is probably a lot harder than working 7a+) if you intend on getting on hard E3s that are probably 6c before you account for gear placement. Either that, or your head will really need to be absolutely in the right place treating wires a lot like bolts in terms of your confidence climbing above them...

In reply to AJM:

I agree, figured the best way to improve my onsight grade was to redpoint harder than I needed to. To onsight 7a I rekon I'd need to get to a level where I could redpoint 7b+ first. Next year sounds like a lot more hard work than I was imagining.

In reply to leon:

Depends on the person I imagine, but I need regular onsights and attempts at them to get my head fully in the zone for hard onsights whatever the discipline.

Regardless, coming from a base strength level of V7 I would hypothesise that 7b+ isn't unachievable - the boulder problems at the cuttings that get a split trad/sport grade are in the region of v7-8 or so (I think), so it would be quite easy to find a 7b+ whose crux you could do easily especially if you look at more staminaey routes that would be more beneficial for trad anyway. Hell, I can have a crack at them whilst struggling up V4 indoors and failing on V4 outdoors, so they can't be too bad...

When it comes down to it, just get on the routes and see what happens - even if you get fully spanked it's a learning opportunity to improve for next time...

In reply to leon:
Sounds like you're planning on increasing mass but not really strength.

Think of it like this: stamina is expressed as a proportion of maximum contraction. If a muscle is required to exert a 8kgf say 20 times when its max contraction is 10kgf, you'll need extraordinary levels of fitness ie sustaining an 80% contraction. If on the other hand maximal contraction were say 15 kgf, you'd be looking to sustain contraction of around 50% - much more achievable.

Although trad tends to have a much greater stamina bias because of the time spent placing gear and route-finding, there can still be hard moves, and the logic stays the same.

It seemed to work for Jerry.

In reply to leon:

I'm in the process of putting a training plan together for next year too.

From my reading on the subject, you should always follow hypertrophy with recruitment as you're teaching the muscle how to work and recruiting as many of the new muscle fibres as possible. This stage should also lean these new muscles down slightly as well.

Happy to be corrected!

In reply to leon:

Say your anaerobic 'threshold' is @ 70% of max effort and to pull off a eng tech 6a move that's what you have to use.

If you increase the max strength of that muscle you may only have to use 60% of it's max strength to pull off an eng tech 6a move. This leaves you below the anaerobic threshold and you will not get pumped. Simples ! Whether it's due to the drop in fibres recruited or the inc size of fibres or chemical changes seems to be the topic of some discussion. It's probably/possibly a combo of all 3.

If you hypertrophy only you will miss out on much of the benefits. Recruitment increases strength and also helps train the body/mind to pull hard and co-ordinate through crux moves whether it's on trad or sport or bouldering. It also adds strength without weight.

Having said that if you hypertrophy properly it's not exactly going to hold you back as any inc in mass is lean tissue that should also be adding strength.

Your argument of " i don't want to be too strong in case i over grip " is a little bit daft if you don't mind me saying :0) If you are stronger and grip harder, again say at 70%, you now have a higher max str and a higher threshold so you can grip harder and still be fine. However in reality your extra grip strength should give you the confidence to tackle harder routes knowing you can hang on longer and harder. Over gripping in a technique/mental issue not a physical issue. Also max finger strength is quite seperate to hypertrophy and fitness of the forearm, although everything is linked obviously. It is trained through max hangs i.e. recruitment.

Basically train everything for the biggest benefits as conditioning, local endurance, strength endurance, max strength and power all complement each other.

In reply to leon:


That is basically my understanding of it. Serpico gave me some advice on the same subject last year - apparently there is a case to be made that recruitment training will to an extent reverse gains made in local aerobic capacity, and vice versa.

This is also relevant and perhaps something to think about though (is the recruitment/hypertrophy model an oversimplification and is it possible/easy to train the latter without training the former?)
http://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/t.php?t=385179&v=1#x5588288

re. redpointing. I don't know about you but personally I don't find improvements in redpoint grade transfer directly into onsighting. Sure they get you used to pulling harder moves but if you do it at the cost of ignoring your onsighting, you achieve those gains through painstakingly piecing together at-your-limit sequences which is a very different process from hanging on and figuring it out first go. The skills you learn would definitely be very different to the skills you need for a trad onsight.

FWIW personally I am at the point where successive redpoints are taking such a long time to put together that I am being forced to work on my onsighting to speed up the process. If your aim is onsighting (trad or sport) I would definitely avoid opening up too big a gap between your onsight and redpoint grade by thinking that by pushing your RP grade your onsight grade will follow on its own. Definitely don't think you need to RP 7b+ to do E3, and I think being solid at 6c onsight would be much more directly useful.

That being said if you are bouldering V7 then as AJM says, if you pick the right 7b+ it should fall pretty quickly. Lots of 7b+/7c out there with nothing harder than V4 or V5 on.

Hope some of that helps.

In reply to plexiglass_nick:



To be honest I've never redpointed a route, just an assumption that redpointing would be the quickest way to improve the onsight grade. I guess I can start by trying to onsight at 6c and see how things go.

In reply to leon:

If you're truly a geek then you have lots of reading to do!

I'm not sure that I understand your reasoning that a larger muscle will have better aerobic properties, where did you read this?

Increasing muscle mass without recruitment would leave you with larger (heavier) muscles that aren't well trained at pulling hard, which seems like it'd be no good for your goals.

The point of raising your aerobic threshold is to aide recovery on easier sections of of the climb (or delay cross over into the anaerobic system). I find it unlikely that someone could climb the short PE routes (at and around their limit) in the UK only using their aerobic respiration systems regardless on how long they worked on their aerobic endurance. They'll cross over into anaerobic for the most part.

Your section where you mention that higher recruitment means you can overgrip and force shut capilaries easier is an odd thing to mention. With or without high recruitment, you're squeezing your capilaries shut in a forceful contraction.

And your logic that you'd try to redpoint hard routes to improve your onsighting seems counter-productive. The only way to get better at onsighting is to attempt to onsight routes. It's not just strength that's taking place during an onsight, there's alot of route reading going on which is the main reason people hang around too long and fail on an onsight attempt.

Read up on improving your anaerobic endurance (pulling lots of hard moves continuously without rest) as I think that should be your main priority. Agreed?

In reply to leon:

Don't get me wrong, I think onsighting and redpointing are complementary and a well rounded climber should do both. Sorry I didn't mean to suggest there's no point redpointing - It's a fantastic way to get used to climbing harder sequences and it's really rewarding and satisfying in itself. I think it does improve onsighting grades indirectly through improved strength, fitness and movement but unless you are also doing lots and lots of onsighting, in my experience it doesn't necessarily transfer through directly or over a short timescale.

I can think of one exception which is if you habitually onsight well within your physical limit, in which case redpointing something 2 or 3 grades harder can have a massive psychological boost to all your climbing when you realise how much harder/further you can climb when you discover how hard you can push yourself.

In reply to plexiglass_nick: I think the point about onsighting improving your redpoint performance is an interesting one. Not something I'd considered but I can see the logic.

I think trying to redpoint something would improve my redpoint performance...

In reply to cha1n:

Good. I love geeking out on books. What would you recommend?


I didn't read that. What I read was a stronger muscle can pull a larger force before moving into the anerobic threshold (Performance Rock Climbing) & this is because the stronger muscle doesn't squeeze the capilaries as much for the same force. The way I understand it a muscle becomes stronger by either growing or by being able to recruit more fibres. So what I am wondering is, what is it about a stronger muscle that means it doesn't shut down the capilaries for the same force that a weaker muscle would? Is it recruitment, size or both? I don't see how a higher recruitment would help. However I can see how a large muscle, producing more force with less muscle recruitment wouldn't squeeze the capilaries as hard (because less of the muscle is squeezing).


I think the muscle strength increases by 60% when the muscle doubles. The muscle mass is a tiny % of the weight you are hanging off the hold (i.e. the rest of your body), whilst the muscle holding the hold can now produce 60% more force, this seems like a significant improvement in power to weight ration. I wonder here if you trained exactly the same muscle for 4 weeks on recruitment & then go back & spend the same 4 weeks training hypertrophy what the respective strength gains would be?


I was thinking more from the point that a stronger muscle can pull larger forces before it uses anerobic energy. Hence maybe I could get to the point where most 5b moves were aerobic for me so when I get to the 6a/6b crux I am fresh.


Each muscle fibre requires energy during recruitment. If you can recruit an extra 20% of fibres per seond you are going to burn an extra 20% of muscle energy per second (I'm guessing here). This is why I think high recruitment can be disadvantage.


I was thinking that redpointing would give me experience on the moves required to onsight at the grade.


I'm not convinced yet. Post some links & I'll have a read.

In reply to leon: There's only one thing you need to do - more volume of climbing. If you look at what you're doing, there's far too much emphasis on stuff that's at your limit in bouldering and too much mid-intensity routing.

Get down a lead wall 2 x week and aim to do 20-30 route per session at around 6a to 6b - do this for 2 or 3 months and your climbing will improve massively. Fail to do this and you'll find it hard to improve quickly in my experience.

In reply to leon: In order to make decisions on your training based on the details of muscle physiology, you'll need some more detail about what recruitment means in terms of muscle contraction in real muscles in real movements.

In practice, 'recruitment' is more that just a muscle fibre firing or not. It's the timing, coordination and frequency of fibre firing as well as just the proportion of fibres activated. There's also the types of fibres that fire at different intensities of contraction. Recruitment training doesn't just mean that you have access to more fibres for force production, it also means that they are better coordinated and timed. In other words, contraction is more efficient for what you are asking it to do.

Doing long sustained endurance routes trains recruitment - it trains it to make more coordinated and efficient contractions with the minimum of force.

But the title of your thread is a good question. When it comes to recruitment in the sense of maximising force production it's true that climbers who spend much of their time trying to learn to pull as hard as possible on boulder problems end up pulling harder than they need to on long routes. They fall off pumped before even reaching the crux that they could easily do. The flip side is that endurance feinds who hate bouldering simply cannot deliver the kind of maximal contraction to get through a powerful crux. So they cruise up to the crux and fall off totally fresh!

Trad routes are often not as steep and sustained as limetsone sport routes and often have very bouldery cruxes. So if you don't train to be able to pull down like a boulderer at the crux, you'll probably lose out. It comes back to the specificity principle - look at the routes you want to do and let them inform the training decisions. Unless you know the muscle physiology inside out you quickly run into trouble.

In reply to Tom Randall - Lattice Training:


It's only really possible for me to get down the wall 1 day a week and I cannot always get a partner. The rest of the time I have to train on my home bouldering wall. I guess if I cannot lead then volume bouldering would be the next best thing, even if the volume bouldering is on a small number of routes on my home wall?

In reply to leon: Yup, if you're stuck for facilities, then that's really quite hard. I'd actually be tempted to say if your main facility for training is bouldering, then dump the route goals. Just go bouldering for a year or more until your circumstances change.

That's unless you're very, very disciplined and have a high boredom threshold. In which case, get rid of at least 50% of the high intensity stuff you do and raise the volume considerably. You can do this on your wall at home, but it'll take focus!! Good luck.

In reply to Tom Randall - Lattice Training: You hearing this Watson? Tommy says give it up and go bouldering......

In reply to Tom Randall - Lattice Training:
For my ARC training I use a piece of my wall that is about 8 foot wide & spend 30 minutes going backwards and forwards on it, it seems like I go backwards & forwards 100 times every minute..... I think I have a high boredom threshold.

I take it the reason for the volume is purely for technique? If you say 20 routes per session then I guess 60 boulder problems per session?

In reply to Robertostallioni: Yeah Stallion, bouldering is the new routing. Give it up old man.

Leon - yeah 60 ish boulder problems would do it - need to be a low intensity though or it won't work as well.

In reply to leon: Oh and try to go up and down and much as possible, rather than left to right all the time. Better specificity.