In reply to guy127917:
> Dandan82: Great update. Ring dips definitely forces your body position to be more vertical than bar. For OG planning- once you have a plan post it on the reddit group with questions and Stephen will probably comment on it (he is super active).
Thanks as always Guy, I'm not sure i'm young and hip enough to use Reddit, but i'll investigate because my OG plan is low on pulling exercises as I feel the climbing covers that base, be good to know if he would agree.
The Crimbo eating challenge reminded me of a food based anecdote I heard, it was on a recent training beta podcast with Paige Claasen, she said that while in Flatanger where she ticked
Odins Eye (8c+), she ate a very high protein diet which she felt really helped keep her energy up and her recovery times short. I know excess protein is not a good thing in the long term but does anyone have any opinion/experience of using it like this for a short period (on holiday for example) to maximise recovery? Her reasoning to do it was more due to the local availability of foods, i.e mostly meat, but she was convinced it had an effect.
I had a good week, another net gain in terms of elbow health, it's almost got to the point where it is not hurting at all while climbing and is only a post climbing annoyance, which is fantastic. I still need to keep a lid on things though, as I think excessive hard volume was the cause of the whole problem so I need to ease back into pulling hard slowly.
M: I think I did some more adjustments to the OG session plan, then did most of the session not including the ring dips as the DOMS had barely subsided from last time.
Decent handstands with a couple of long holds and a lot better shoulder endurance, ring press ups improved significantly after only 1 session, comfortable sets of 8, nice and deep.
I did a back lever progression move called 'skin the cat', basically hang from a bar and kick your legs up between your arms like you would in the playground on a monkey bar, then you keep rolling over backwards and lower your feet down as close to the floor as you can, into a position called a German hang. It's a very alien position for me, I think climber's shoulders are just not stressed in this way as I found it pretty agonising and couldn't bring my feet down very low (I'd guess my torso was barely past horizontal and the diagrams indicate I should be able to get it nearly vertical!).
Front lever progressions concentrating on *perfect* form so I have to bend both legs to hold a good position.
The muscle up progression was eccentric muscle ups, so starting at the top of the motion, dipping down then rotating into the chin-up position then lowering. The transition for me feels completely free-falling, there is just no strength there at all, I studied a bunch of videos to check the technique and did find some pointers but there is still a lot of work to be done here.
T: Insane DOMS from the 'skin the cat', my biceps felt like they'd been through a wringer!
Indoor boulder; I emailed Tom about doing endurance work without too much volume and he suggested carefully trying 1 on 1 off as the best bet. I did it on the traverse wall at the Project and actually my endurance didn't feel as bad as I feared, I did it on the blue holds which i'm pretty sure I was using 3 or 4 months ago. Elbow survived well.
W: OG session; I want to do this 3 times a week, Mon, Wed, Fri, but to ease in I skipped this session as my biceps were still ruined! I did do the warm up and handstands though and got another new record, 23 seconds!
T: Indoor Boulder; Did endurance again, and as per usual, I tried to push things a bit, so did it on the harder pink circuit, planning to drop to the blue if it felt too hard. I got through the whole thing on pink, the elbow complained a little but it was all good, it was really nice to be able to actually try hard for a change, also it seems my endurance isn't completely dead because I struggled to do 10 reps of this circuit before the elbow problems began!
F: OG session; I'm sure I began this with the intention of doing the whole thing but never got to the rings stuff.
Handstands were abysmal, no holds over about 6 seconds, proper let down.
Skin the cat felt possibly harder than last time, it really feels like it's on the ragged edge of something tearing loose! I'll be careful with this.
Front levers were ok.
I think perhaps the elbow was feeling it after the harder endurance session the day before so I did what comes so hard to me and sacked things off early.
S: Very little that I can recall. Stretching, but I just can't seem to repeat the feeling of release on the calf nerve that I managed a couple of weeks ago. Hamstring stretching is still really hard and painful with very little progress and almost no progress carried between sessions, it's pretty frustrating.
S: Indoor routes; went to Calshot where they had run a lead comp the day before so there were actually some new, semi-hard routes up! I didn't try the men's route (supposedly 7b+/c) as I heard nobody topped it so I knew I'd likely wreck my elbow trying to onsight it. It'll keep for a few weeks.
I did however onsight the ladies and boys problems which were both supposed to be about 7a+. One seemed about 7a+, the other more like 7a, but the important thing was I really comfortably cruised up them. It seems my endurance is doing alright, at least for 2 minute burns. Perhaps the poor performance on 6c last week was a blip, I'm very happy to find some endurance still hanging about. If the Project would open up their flipping Lattice board for public use already I could test it to be sure.
More of the same this week, I'm getting quite excited that I might be able to do some hard stuff in Margalef in January now, I just have to keep going steady for another month!
I've done some more work on the Margalef logbook page, nearly 250 extra routes added now along with 5 or 6 new sectors, and I've still got a chunk left to do! It's quite useful going through the crags in such detail, it really gives you a chance to see what might be worth a visit even when it's not immediately obvious.