UKC

I'm looking for some Indoor training advice to get me through the winter months, and would appreciate some advice. I've been going online and looking through various websites but to be honest I'm just confusing myself.
Any websites that you could recommend or apps (I've seen a few but not sure if they're any good or not).
To give you an idea of my climbing level I'm onsighting most E2's, bouldering around font6C (although have bouldered up to 7B in the past) and don't really lead indoors but reckon I could get into the low 7's with not too much effort.
I'm in Sheffield so have good access to good quality bouldering and lead walls and also have a beastmaker. I am also good at listening to my body regarding injuries and am used to climbing daily.
My goals would be to get up to 7A/7B strength for the grit bouldering season and get stuck into E3/E4's when I'm trad climbing properly in the spring.

Sorry for the long winded post but thought it would be best to get all the information out there.
Thanks
Deacon

In reply to deacondeacon:

You're a better climber than I am, but here are some of the training websites I frequent;

http://www.onlineclimbingcoach.blogspot.co.uk/
http://www.trainingforclimbing.com/new/articles.shtml
http://climbstrong.wordpress.com/
http://mountainathlete.com/

In reply to frqnt:
Thanks for the links. I had looked at a them before but mountainathlete is new to me
I think my main issue is that I have a lot of motivation to climb but struggle to find the best way to structure my time.

In reply to deacondeacon:

I recently read Eric Horst's Conditioning for Climbers and he lays down structured regiments if you're disciplined enough to follow them.

That might be less confusing than taking part information from different online resources and creating your own routine?

In reply to deacondeacon:

How about:
Over the winter just boulder lots to get strong, and intersperse that with fitness sessions (or pack low end fitness training in after youve bouldered) where you lap routes, varying it from doing tons of toprope laps on easier stuff with very short rests and a low intensity pump through to doing lead laps where you take slightly longer rests, do harder routes, and fall off after maybe 4 laps with screaming rock solid forearms. If you aren't going to the wall one evening then fingerboard if you think you are recovered enough.
As the grit season ends and you want to get on routes then do more of the fitness sessions (and maybe throw in some redpointing of hard routes too to really boost power endurance) and less of the bouldering and pack in outdoor mileage to let you use your strength and fitness efficiently outdoors.

In reply to deacondeacon:

Hey. I did a coaching session with Adam at The Edge which was well worthwhile - he assessed my strengths and weaknesses and gave some good advice on training. As you know, my goals are pretty similar but less bouldering focused (I just wanted to maintain bouldering grade while working to better trad).

I enjoyed having a structure to my indoor climbing - way better than going to the Works when it's incredibly busy and getting bored and frustrated with all the tosspots therein while aimlessly climbing the most appealing problems. After all the aerobic stamina training, 4x4s and PE sessions (redpointing) I was better at indoor climbing and was "onsighting" 7as and doing some 7a+/b in a few goes.

The only problem was that it really didn't help my trad at all. On grit, there's basically nothing you can do IMO except climb more grit. On 90% of routes, stamina is pretty much irrelevant. No amount of training is going to help with unjammable cracks (remember that miserable failure on Quietus after months of training; a couple of weeks later I had a similar experience on Handrail, also unjammable), or committing to scary/unpredicatable moves with crap gear. All the training would have helped with Pembroke, but by the time I got there I hadn't been climbing enough long routes as it had rained nearly every day for months and all the training benefits had gone.

I think training probably applies well to bouldering and sport climbing but the unless you're at the level of trad where you're actually falling off pumped (I'm not, I always fail 'cause I'm scared), it's not that great. But I still much prefered going to wall and doing 4x4s etc and having structure, as you can see a bit of improvement and it feels purposeful.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

A good reminder that the type of training you do has to be relevant to what you want to train for. If its not then the benefits will be massively reduced.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

I've thought about a coaching session but i've had one crap one (related to training) and one good one (related to trad) so have been a little dubious to go on one without recommendations.

If i'm honest with myself it's the bouldering strength that i'm most frustrated about, i have lost a lot of strength due to trad climbing all year and I don't want to spend the whole winter getting back to the same level.
I'm also concerned that I won't have any endurance when I'm climbing on other rock types next year, I can imagine climbing hard, bouldery mid E's with safe crux's on grit but on a sustained route at Pembroke i'd have no chance.

Perhaps trying to train both aspects (bouldering and routes) at the same time is futile and I should bias it to bouldering for the winter then routes in the spring as AJM advised.

Anyway, I went to the wall for the second time this year and was nervous of falling above the clips so perhaps I could do with some coaching

In reply to deacondeacon: if you climb at Manchester, Harrogate or Reading climbing centres you can log your routes on www.climbstar.com as they've joined forces to make all of their routes available online. You can track you progress to see if the training program's are paying off! I've started using it this week, looks pretty useful so far.

Good luck with training!

In reply to AJM: Thanks AJM these are the sort of plans I'm thinking of but trailing through pages of websites proves to be confusing me.
If I do something along these lines would I be right in thinking that I can do the 'low intensity pump' parts by doing easy circuits on a bouldering wall? I think i'd rather do that than make someone belay me for 10 minutes at a time.

Also I have monthly membership at a bouldering wall which I could change to the climbing wall in the spring

In reply to deacondeacon:


I certainly wouldn't say I'd suggested only training for one at a time! I see the winter bouldering and basic aerobic fitness training as an integral part of the route training program - I only boulder because I know it's what I need to do to keep improving my sport redpointing, but I'll still have an indoor bouldering focus for most of the winter.

A base phase of strength and basic aerobic fitness training followed by a peak phase of power endurance fits quite well with some of the current training models, and the fact it ties in with a grit bouldering season followed by a trad routes season which really kicks off in the spring (for most people and most places at least, ignoring bouldering-esque grit routes where you still do them in the cold and that sort of thing) is even better.

Even when training one type you should be doing some maintenance of the other.


You don't need coaching, you just need to do what you probably already know you need to do - get out there and get falling

In reply to gritstoneking: Thanks for the tip-off but I don't use any of those walls. I have just downloaded an app that allows me to log my progress though. http://climbcoach.org/
I have no idea if it's any good or not but It looks promising.

In reply to deacondeacon:

I only mentioned routes because you did in your post. I do essentially all of my training unroped - the easy aerobic stuff I do as laps round a big bendcrete boulder at my local wall, aiming for a few continuous laps at a time (a lap is just under 50 moves) or for 10-20 minute stints, I do a kind of "mix and match" training where you hit aerobic and anaerobic systems at the same time by linking different difficulty circuits on a circuit board or doing a circuit and then shaking on a jug and lapping it, and I do hard power endurance stuff by trying to redpoint hard circuits. I do think there's value in roped stuff in that it replicates more closely what you're aiming for outside, in particular speed of climbing, having to hold positions to clip and so on, so I probably should do it more than I currently do, but I know people who climb very hard on routes but train exclusively unroped

There's also unroped exercises like foot on campus which are good for power endurance too - 50 moves or so on the rungs, feet on, rest starting as equal to climbing time but gradually decreasing over time.

In reply to AJM:

No, I think my post didn't come across very well. I was agreeing that training both at the same time with a bias towards the one that matches the season would be the most beneficial.
I'd never really thought of it like that and have always just tried to get boulder strength through the winter.
Yep, I'll be fine with the falling after a couple of sessions

In reply to AJM:

Thats good to know as I'm much happier training on my own.

Looking forward to getting stuck in now.

In reply to AJM:
I've set up a training plan which is 80% bouldering 20% routes, and fairly fingerboard and campus intensive at the moment.
I have also sorted out a lap on the circuit board which was just harder than my onsight limit. I managed 1.5 laps by the end of the session and can see myself getting up to 3-4 laps at a time hopefully.
The hardest thing for me to get used to was all the resting, my boredom threshold was suffering. A few months of this feels pretty daunting but I'll be interspersing it with outdoor bouldering too.
I'm going to start posting in fit club too, which should give me a bit more motivation.
Thanks for the advice all