I have been amazed with the Olympics and my studies into performance physiology and sports psychology has made me more aware than I ever was before as to the efforts and challenges that these athlete face just to turn up on the start line of a heat for the Olympics.
Whilst climbing has not featured in the Olympics (fingers crossed and hoping it will), I did notice that during the games that there were at least two athletes I heard of who had used climbing as part of there preparation. Whilst these athletes were generally using climbing as a way to develop upper body strength as a form of cross training.
What I think is interesting is that I rarely hear of climbers using another sport for cross training. I mean just look at those gymnasts, I had shoulder envy from both the men and even some of the women. The Taekwondo competitiors had the flexibility that many climbers would die for and who wouldn’t want the power endurance of Phelps.
So as a coach one thing I want to take away is that when training for climbing using cross-training can’t be a bad thing. Also as a climbing coach, I am wondering whether it would be interesting to partner up with local swimming or gymnastic coaches and do some skills sharing when trainign young climbers, swimmer or gymnasts. With gymnastic being an early specialastion sport compared to the late specialisation sport of climbing, it would seem to me an obvious choice as a sport to encourage promising young climbers to participate into avoid the problems of over training in young climbers.
Just a thought anyway.