Turbo Charged New Year’s Training Resolutions

With the arrival of the New Year, now’s a perfect time to plan your rock climbing objectives for 2012 and develop a training program that will help achieve them.

These objectives can be anything from doing your first E1, increasing your climbing grade from 7a to 7c or doing a specific route.

Using a Scoring System

To help you design a training program a good place to start is to look at your current ability. Try honestly (if you can’t be honest get a friend to do it for you!) giving yourself a score between 1 to 10 (1 being given to your worst attribute and 10 to your best) for each typical climbing characteristics such as finger strength, explosive power, lock off strength, power endurance, stamina, technique, body fat percentage etc. So for example if you find that you are getting pumped fiddling in wires on a E1 or making those clips on a 6a, but can crimp your way up Font 6c boulder problems, then score yourself a 3 for stamina and a 10 for finger strength.

Then consider your objectives/target routes for this year. Let’s look at two approaches. One where you have specific routes in mind and another where you want to improve your grade to a certain level.

Targeting Specific Routes

For the specific routes, what type of climb are they? Are they long Gordale stamina test pieces or crimpy Peak power endurance routes? How do these routes compare with your key strengths and weaknesses? It may be helpful to score the routes with a similar system that we did for ourselves, with a 10 for the dominant route climbing characteristic and a 1 for the least dominant. Let’s try this with a typical Peak District sport climber wanting to peak for a holiday in Spain. The objective for the holiday is to a do 7b+ steep tufa stamina test piece. The scores may be something like the following:

Description	Climber	Route
Crimp Strength	10	1
Sloper / Pinch Strength	6	8
Explosive Power	8	4
Lock Off Strength	5	7
Power Endurance	7	5
Stamina	1	10

Clearly we have a mismatch in the key strength attributes. To achieve success on the route, the climber is going to have to include much more stamina training on overhanging rock and include more bouldering/route work using pinches/slopers with long locks. Building these elements into your training program now will maximise the possibility of success on your chosen route.
Remember that the scoring system is specific to the climber or route concerned. So if a fingery 7a is your maximum grade, then you won’t get up a stamina 8a, by focusing on just your weak elements. You will also need to make gains in your strong areas, however these can be done at a lower level than your weak points.

If you have specific information about the route then you are at even more of an advantage. At this time of the year you need to be looking at replicating the types of moves found on the route within your training program. For example if the hard sections of the route are primarily small layaways, then create a systems type model using layaways or boulder problems with layaway holds.
If you have access to your own training board then you can be even more creative and build a replica of the types of moves found on your project.

Targeting a Specific Grade

There are two approaches to improving your climbing grade. The first is to use a balanced training program to improve all your climbing attributes. The second way is to focus your training effort improving specific attributes which will allow you to skip a number of grades.

Creating a Balanced Training Approach

This is the slowest way to improve your climbing grade but does result in a more balanced climber and one who is capable of operating across all the different route types within their grade.
To achieve this it’s important to develop a training program that has a mixture of all the different climbing attributes. The program must be specifically tailored to place strong emphasis on the weak areas. Remember to still train your strong areas, otherwise you will find yourself in a position where you just become good at your previous weak elements!

Focusing on Specific Attributes

When looking at your score you may have one or two attributes that are particularly strong. For example you may be one of those lucky people who have naturally strong fingers, but have to put in a lot of work to make gains in stamina.
So why not focus on these strong attributes and select your routes carefully so you play to these strengths. Using this approach it’s certainly possible to jump your grade from 7a to 8a, with a good winters training. However the resulting climber will be fairly specialised in a certain style of climbing and the number of routes they can do at the new grade will be limited. You may well find yourself in a position where on some types of routes, that focus heavily on your weak points, that you still climb at your old grade.
To correct this at some point you will need to spend time focusing on the lower scoring attributes, before you will be comfortable at this new grade.

Over the next few months we will look at different training techniques to help you achieve your climbing goals and show how these can be incorporated into your training programs.

We will also provide our readers with advice on how they can best achieve their climbing objectives. Please post your comments at the bottom of this article and our contributors (including myself) will offer guidance on how you can improve your climbing.