The title of course comes from the great Wolfgang Gullich, whilst he didn’t invent training for climbing, he is certainly the person who used it to skyrocket the grades of the time. I mention this as this morning a friend came round for some ‘training’ advice. Now I am not the sort of coach that often writes out a training plan for anybody. Instead I like to give people a framework that they can use to judge their own schedule.
The reason for this is so many things can get in the way of training and climbing, and for most having a 8 week program laid out is somewhat daunting experience. They feel like they should follow it to the letter, Whereas life isn’t like that. If your ill or have to have a few days off because of work/life commitments, the plan basically fails.
Instead I try to get people on board with finding there weaknesses and spending 4 weeks focusing on developing those weaknesses before reassessing them and moving on. There is a performance profiling system on my icoach climbing website for this exact purpose.
When training those weakness I also recommend that you either mentally or physically record each session. The sole purpose of this is that going to a wall and doing the same session over and over will not result in any change. We have to push ourselves at every oppotunity to improve. That could be through more routes, the same number of routes but harder grades, a greater number of route per hour, more trainign days a week and a whole host of other factors that can overload the body and make us build muscle for strength, power endurance or stamina.
Far more important in my mind is apply overload to every single session you go to the wall. If your not feeling strong go for more easy routes. If your feeling good go for difficulty. If you haven’t got long focus on bouldering. Having a piece of paper with a strict program to follow will soon become dull to most, mix it up, remember your there for fun as well as training and adjust what you do dependant on how you feel or even who you are climbing with will help you stay motivate and focused on small gains between every session.