UKC

Has anyone else out there experimented with climbing more than two days on? In the past I used to do one day on/ one day off or one day, interspersed with two or three day (or more) rest periods when I was tired to allow total recovery.

Dave McCleod proposed a different approach in his nine out of ten book. This is longer training blocks broken up by larger rests. This is the method I have been using. I climb for up to five days in a row. My sessions include; bouldering 4x4s outside, shunting routes, or just lead climbing. I also  do supplementary weighted pull ups, hangboarding (repeaters and max) on some of the days. I don't climb for more than one hour, in a shunt session I might do five to fifteen laps. Bouldering - I will do 3 x 4 x 4. 

Will I break? Or have other people found this worked for them?

 

 

In reply to ringostar:

Worked for me on Kalymnos last year for about a week.

Went for two weeks planning to do two on - one off. Got away with three on - one off for the first week, so stuck with it, but by the second week I was definitely fading badly. More rest days (or fewer loukamades) might have helped.

In reply to ringostar:

How you respond to longer training blocks will very much depend on how you have previously trained, your current level of conditioning, genetic disposition regarding speed of recovery etc etc.

My advice would be to do 2 days on/1 day off which allows for 5 days training a week whilst still offering  a decent amount of rest. If you can hack the 5 days then sure but I don't really see the point when you could be resting more, the likelihood is that the training quality will be higher with more rest. 

Rest is where the gains happen (somehow). 

In reply to ringostar:I'm not sure what you climb in a shunt session of 5-15 laps but are you doing any days 'to the Max's?  It sounds like you're doing a lot of light sessions.

 

In reply to ringostar:

So despite climbing 5 days in a row, you are only climbing for 5 hours in total? 

Unless all of your climbing is at your absolute max or you are completely new to training, I don't think you need to worry about this breaking you.

In reply to ringostar:

For me it varies considerably throughout the year. In the late autumn and early winter I tend to prioritize maximum strength to try and up my bouldering. So that's generally one day on, one day off with some endurance work just for maintenance. 

In the late winter and spring I tend to do loads of laps and some strength work to prepare for routes. If I've got a trip ahead, I try to do a lot of volume in the month ahead with often climbing 3 days on as this is what happens on trips. For example, if you can climb say a 7b indoors on your third day on, it serves as a good mental reminder that you might do the same on a trip as your body is accustomed to it.

I've never really tried consistently training more than 3 days on as I just feel I won't get the optimum recovery but who knows until you actually try it.

In reply to SDM:

 

"So despite climbing 5 days in a row, you are only climbing for 5 hours in total?"

Yes, five to seven hours of training. I'm aiming for quality. 

Intensity is an interesting point. It varies, some days are intense for example shunting routes at my limit, as I'm working them for red point. Bouldering 4x4s are of course about power endurance and so tiring. Hangboarding and weighted pull are also about max effort. Consider that shunting sessions are also *very* efficient compared to normal climbing days. Think about how long it takes the average person to lead a route. At the weekend I abbed down a 20m route and had climbed it in the time a party turning up had taken to set up at the bottom of it! 

I agree that rest is where the improvements happen, and I'm not advocating non stop training. In fact the point where I find that power decreases I stop training and rest for a couple of days.

Could I compress the training load into fewer days? I probably could, but would it increase training quality? One way to think about it is that by spreading it across several days you have recovered somewhat for the next small training load. 

I'm not dead set that this is *the* way to train, or the only way, or the best way. I'm just trying an experiment on myself and am interested to find out other peoples experiences.

One other thing that led to this has been my experience going on a surf or snowboarding trip in years past. Where you would spend a whole week doing an activity at a relatively high intensity for a week. For example surfing six hours or more for seven days straight. Naturally, it gets to day three and you hit the wall, and six hours actually ends up being more like two hours! But then the next day you are ready to go and the fitness is kicking in! By the end of the week you probably end up resting for a few days but you have unmatched fitness.

I experienced this earlier this year on a trip to Spain. I climbed seven days on at varying levels of intensity. On return I had a full week off, but was in great shape after this.

 

In reply to ringostar:

Without knowing a few things it’s hard to say...

What kind of grades are your limit and what kind of grades do you train at? How long you been climbing? When you say shunting a route, do you mean 4x4s on it? What are your aims?

In reply to AlanLittle:

I suspect most people climb far more often than normal whilst on holiday.  On most of my climbing holidays, I climb solidly for a 6-7 days, have a day of rest, then another 6-7 days to the finish.  But for me, holidays are about maximising exposure to an area; lots of on-sighting / in-a-day RPs at a variety of crags.   What can be sustained for a week would likely be ruinous for producing a long-term improvement in performance. 

Personally, during the Spring-Autumn UK climbing season I tend to climb outside on weekends, with perhaps one or two short woodie / fingerboard sessions midweek.  I find that if I do any "training" within 2 days of a crag day, I feel sub-optimal - maybe strong enough for mid-grade routes but well off a limit RP.

In reply to ringostar:

I worry about people who do all this training; cyclists and runners are the same. Do they ever actually do the sport for simple enjoyment and not competitively?

My regular buddy being injured and my son having glandular fever, I cycled alone last Saturday and absolutely loved being Billy-no-mates on an uncompetitive ride where I stopped several times to yarn with people I met.

In reply to ringostar:

5-7 hours a week isn't enough load for adaptation unless you're working maximal strength, and even then it'd be low. If you want decent progression then 15 is a reasonable place to start - this breaks down into around four short sessions or 3 longer ones. 

1 hours training means you're not warming up properly or stretching afterwards as well which is obviously not going to go well in the longer term. 

If you want to get some decent progression going I'd recommend 2-3 hour sessions comprising of a good warm up followed by fingerboard, PE bouldering (4x4s or similar on 60-80% of max) and some aero laps on easier circuits. This will result in steady progression as long as you adjust the intensity as it becomes easier. Obviously there's much more to training but this isn't the worst place to start. 

Oh, and core. Core is great. Do more core! 

Personal opinion: Training is for the gym. Lapping easier routes is a great way to polish crags and reduce the experience of the route for others. Not saying nobody should ever shunt a route but doing lap after lap is just silly IMO. Plastic can be reset, crags can't. 

In reply to Rigid Raider:

Training is pretty cool because it allows sessions at the gym to gain some structure and thereby brings progression to your climbing as a whole. Personally I like a challenge and long-term goals motivate me and offer an incentive to work hard in other areas of my life. If you're just doing it to relax then there's really no need, but if you're looking for a challenge then more structure and goal setting makes sense. 

In reply to ringostar:

What page?
or at least
What chapter?

I don't recall seeing that idea in the "9 out of 10" book.

 

In reply to kenr:

Page 147 - page 148

"If you are seeing your sessions as training, the best gain in the medium term will be from a sustained period of sessions with limited rest. This should be enough to depress your strength level noticeably, but it should be fairly stable"

Regarding starting from a arbitrary base level of V12:

"During a training ohase you might only be able to manage V10, but maintain this for 10 to 15 session with limited rest days. This sustained loading is the sort of string stimulus that makes real progress in strength"

"It's not possoble to do this forever though, Sooner or later your performance will start to fall steadily" - raises risk of injury here - "A good few rest days will refresh the body"

In reply to ringostar:

Ive experimented with different train/rest periods during the winter and for me longer rest periods definitely works although I am 57 now so maybe that makes a difference. At first i was training 5 days a week, usually Monday to Friday for approximately an hour and a half using a hangboard and doing various types of pullups and hangs  in sets and then some core training using a trx trainer. This worked and i was getting stronger but feeling knackered. I then dropped it to four days a week, still getting stronger but less knackered in between. After much more experimentation i'now do three days a week, same hour and a half period but train for a couple of months and then take a week to two weeks off, this seems to work best for me and my finger and pull up strength has improved dramatically over the last couple of years, i'm now finding i can climb problems  i could do in my twenties which for a long time wasn't possible.

In reply to ringostar:

If you 'step back' from the detail of 'climbing training' and look at other sports training programmes you could of course train higher volume and less rest. You could do a 6 or 7 day block, with lots of very easy climbing and only a couple of 'strength days', followed by a days rest, then repeat etc.

I suspect the complexity comes in working out what you are training for and what you need to achieve that. If you are singularly looking at a pure strength based activity (a bouldering route of a few moves for example) then you are predominantly training just strength and will require more rest to avoid overtraining and allow adaptation to occur. If it is an hour long trad lead then a different approach will be needed. 

Over time you should get a good idea of what you can do, and when you might need to rest, this should also be overlaid with any time based goals (a trip, or a holiday or whatever) where you might want to maximise performance. 

Sorry not to be specific with the detail I don't know enough about the specifics of strength training for climbing to feel I can comment on that.

In reply to ringostar:

It's a good question though of course there are many other factors that come into play apart from just rest days. How intense are the sessions? How long are they? How do you feel at the end of each session?

Dave's thoughts represent a break from the older philosophy about supercompensation where you train each time only when you are fully recovered and go from peak to peak. I think about this more in terms of a single exercise, like say pull ups. The old way might be to do say 5 sets of pull ups 3x per week. But the question is would it be better to 3 sets of pull ups 5x per week? I think the suggestion is that that way is slightly better. This seems to tie in with Greasing the Groove type training.

However climbing isn't simply pull ups. Climbing is largely a skill based activity and it's generally thought that to train skills it's best to train as often as possible, while remaining as fresh as possible. When Alex Megos was visiting he sometimes trained two or three times per day so I wondered if that was his philosophy too.

I think there is a definite distinction to be made between bouldering and routes. For routes I think you can definitely train at a high volume. I've trained 5/6 days per week for 2-3 hours per day and made really quick improvement in terms of endurance, which is very useful. Aside from the physical aspect the high volume also gets you climbing well too. That is you are well focused and can flow and climb in a good relaxed headspace because of the familiarity.

For bouldering I'm not so sure. I've made good progress doing limit bouldering climbing day on/day off. More recently I've been bouldering more frequently and not seen such good gains but that could be to do with being older or something else.

Ultimately I suppose there's a strong personal component to this. How much free time do you have? What kind of training do you enjoy? Which style do you find you progress at best? What aspects do you most need to train to improve?

Will it break you? I think the biggest danger for injuries is climbing in a fatigued state. One guy on here posted that he'd just completed his 500th day of climbing in a row so it obviously depends on what you do.