Blog

Talking About Training

• February 2008
• Training Uncategorized

Hi Steph!
I am happy to be emailing you, since when I read your wonderful book I had never climbed before and now I have climbed and I have questions! Before I get to it though I’d like to say that I loved your book and I love your blog and really appreciate how well-kept and updated it is. Your voice as a writer is very familiar and friendly — I love that it’s there whenever I feel like reading about all the exciting activities out there to try, along with great advice and an unabashed positive attitude.

Anyway, my question today pertains to training.

I’m super new to climbing, but I’m already obsessed. It’s all I can think about and I just want to do more more more, but it being a rainy winter in San Francisco and my gym’s rock wall not being open every day I am in need of supplemental training. I’m wondering what sort of weight training/cardio exercise etc. you do in order to bolster your climbing skills when you’re not actually climbing. So the question is: How do you get your body in shape for climbing when you aren’t climbing?

Thanks so much, again, for all of your writings. They’ve been incredibly helpful, inspiring, and entertaining. I hope you, Dean, and Fletcher are thriving whatever it is you’re up to today 🙂
Love,
Abbey

Dear Abbey,
Thanks for your nice email! And it’s great to hear how excited and motivated you are feeling. I have to say, I think it’s lucky that the gym is not open every day…..because often when one is super excited about climbing in a gym, a finger injury soon follows! Please be careful, and realize how intense gym climbing can be on the fingers, especially when you just start climbing. Cross training for fitness is a very smart plan, and will help you keep from overtraining on your fingers!

The best things I do for climbing are yoga, weight lifting and skate skiing (in winter), trail running in summer. I think that climbing on plastic is a great training device, so I do that as well, and end my sessions with a finger board workout, and I also end every yoga session with a core stomach sequence.

If you are new to yoga, I recommend going to a class at least a few times, to learn some of the poses. After that, a great book to get is B.K.S. Iyengar’s “Light on Yoga,” and you can gradually pick the poses you like the most (or find the most challenging) and do your own yoga session by practicing those. When I finish my yoga session, I do row situps (picking my legs and my upper body off the floor simultaneously), first a set of ten full-motion, slow situps, then a set of ten small ones from the raised position. I try to add another set every few days. After I finish with those, I do crunches with my feet raised in the air: twenty to the left, twenty to the center, twenty to the right, and then do about forty bike-pedal leg crunches. I notice that doing this daily, or every other day, really improves my core strength and helps a lot in climbing.

If you like lifting weights, this is a good alternative to a climbing workout, and is a nice way to mix things up. Be really careful with the fingerboard workout, especially if you are climbing in the gym a lot. It really is easy to hurt your fingers when you least expect it. Recently I’ve been doing a pyramid fingerboard workout–right now I do 7 pullups on the big sloper on top of the fingerboard. Then I move down to a big crimp hold, and do 6. Then I move to the next smallest one and do 5. I run out of small crimps on my board when I am down to the set of 4. So for the 3-2-1, and 1-2-3, I do two-finger pockets with different fingers. (PLEASE be careful, if you do this!) and then go back up the holds to the final 7 pullups on the big sloper. It’s really important to make sure each pullup is slow, done to the full extension, and with no thrutching. After a few workouts of “perfect” pullups, it might be time to increase the pyramid by starting with one more pullup on the first set. (I was doing a pyramid of only 4 when I started doing this workout last month.) I have definitely noticed the increase in crimp strength from the fingerboard. The workout doesn’t take long, and I don’t seem to be doing that much, but it seems to show results.

I have heard different things about cardiovascular training. I’ve heard gymnasts say that any cardiovascular training beyond ten minutes is actually destructive to performance! And I would imagine this should be true as well for bouldering or sport climbing. But for me, I’ve found that the more active I am, the better I feel. So I can only tell you what I do, which is to run or skate ski every other day, at least. If I’m doing the type of climbing which involves a ton of hiking, like in Yosemite, then I don’t have the energy for additional exercise. But staying in motion seems to give me more energy and help me climb better, overall.

I hope this helps! And have a great time!
xx Steph