If you can climb 16 full pitches just a couple of grades below your hardest flash - especially back to back efforts like this, you are an absolute beast. Good effort. I doubt that aerobic endurance is a limiter for you. I would think you'll want to look at other facets of your training for something that's holding you back.

You can probably go either way. The key will be building toward the needed durations for your intended days first, then toward the intensity you expect.

@@stevebechtel1023 Thank you, Steve! That's helpful to hear.

Hi! Thank you for the kind words. We like to start with strength blocks, or combination strength and power blocks. These are typically followed by endurance blocks, and then blocks more specific to the goal (i.e. power-endurance if you are doing short routes, back to power if you are bouldering, longer endurance if long routes, etc.) The last block is ALWAYS performance, where we do lots of good fun outside climbing and a little bit of maintenance.

Not exactly. Work capacity is a more "global" quality and what you're thinking about would be called local muscular endurance. Although the training can be similar (lots of volume, lower intensities) it is more effective to look at these separately since they manifest differently in performance.

I tend to agree with you on this, although sometimes I like to edit to music also. Often depends on quality of audio captured also, sometimes it just doesn't work out with background chatter, etc. -Nate

I usually love to climb on very small holds, the smaller, the better and it somehow comes naturally now. But when I go back in time, when I was starting and climbing more in the gym than on rocks I was choosing the routes and boulders with the smallest holds and also I was avoiding anything that I consider too big. So in general if there wasn't a specific route I was inventing one from the existing ones. Also I'm still doing hangboarding twice a week, plus Emil Abrahamson's drill for fingers. And very important in climbing on small holds - footwork... I actually suck at overhands with jugs, but I'm good at slabs with 3-4 mm crimps and almost imaginary footholds. All comes from choosing to climb the specific routes you want to get better at. Start from bigger and work yourself down gradually, no rush. And work on placing and weighting the feet.

Fingerstrenght+body positioning. Finger strength is stupid simple. Max hangs, min edge training, find out what works for your skin. New science suggests no hangs and concentric finger work may be valuable too. Body position is impossible to dissect in a single video below five hours

For sure, as long as you can maintain quality and minimize injury risk.

Doing capacity work on days off of climbing is great, with the caveat that you want to be sure you're still recovering. Good suggestion.

The answer is likely "both." I think the downside of training it in cycles would be that you might risk backsliding if you took several weeks away from stimulation this system. The main issue is that we make some pretty profound physical adaptations such as increasing the blood flow to the muscles and the actual make up of the muscles' ability to use oxygen. Once we are doing any kind of aerobic based endurance, the body tends to keep that ability. Thus, a climber might do a focused endurance building cycle of 8 to 12 weeks where they are trying to improve the ability three or more days a week. Then, they could spend a long cycle, focused on strength and power with only a maintenance stimulus for endurance of maybe one session every 5 to 7 days. I generally find that in order to make a relatively permanent change in endurance potential, and athlete needs to do progressive specific endurance sessions 12 to 16 times, maybe taking 4 to 6 weeks.

Doing a critical force test pulling/lifting from the ground rather than overhead is a good option, especially if it is more comfortable for your body. Some climbers have shoulder or other pain with overhead work, and for them, lifting from the ground might be a better option. Lifting from the ground is a little less specific to the positions we use in climbing, but would still be a useful and repeatable method for testing critical force in the fingers.

@ many thanks!

Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Thank Devon!

That would be awesome. So much you can do with a private spray wall, but unfortunately many of us don't have that resource!

Thanks Jerimiah! Hope all is well. Love to catch up sometime!

For the most part, yes. The various sessions are more about what's available to you rather than specific training aims. Look to get the intensity and total duration right, and the rest is pretty flexible.

@ClimbStrongTV Ah that's great. Thank you. 👍

Good question. In general, aerobic training responds best to more overall time working. At the same time, we need to assure we are still climbing efficiently and not digging too deep. To progress from 5x 180:90, you might first go to 3x 180:90, rest 5 minutes, then do another 3x 180:90. From there we can work up to two full sets of 5x 180:90. Over time, longer bouts of climbing, going to 4 min, 5 min, etc. will make sense and make for more time-efficient sessions.

That would be awesome, and a lot of climbers have tried this out. The biggest issue is that our sport is "acyclic," meaning the outputs are not at regular intervals and intensities the way that rowing or running or cycling can be. Secondarily, one of the big limiters is local muscular endurance in the arms, which has little effect on the heart rate. A fun test is to monitor heart rate while burning out on finger rolls with a barbell. Heart stays pretty steady while the forearms die... I do like HR as a general marker for when we are working below the Aerobic Threshold. On route 4x4s and nonspecific circuits, making sure we stay somewhere south of 180BPM minus age is another good indicator (in addition to conversational intensity and feeling of no pump).

@@ClimbStrongTV Awesome, thank you so much for the reply!

This ends up being very goal specific, but to start I'd suggest doing a whole phase of these on the same length of route / number of moves. This way you can manipulate the difficulty of the climbing without having random durations thrown into the mix. Totally flexible, too, i.e. if your routes are 50M, maybe doubles are better!

Aerobic.

@@ClimbStrongTV 🤣

There are 3 main limiters in endurance, whether aerobic or anaerobic. The first is UPTAKE, the ability to breathe fully and get oxygen into the blood. This can be a problem if you are holding breath, shallow breathing, etc. Second is DELIVERY, where you either don't have the blood network or you are occluding bloodflow (as you suggest above). Third is UTILIZATION, where once the blood is delivered to the muscles, the local endurance is not well trained, or the energy supply is of issue. You are probably climbing slightly above your aerobic ability on the project, and simply can't keep the intensity up because too much of the energy is being derived from the glycolytic system. More low-intensity volume will help, but I'd also make sure to focus on solid breathing and climbing very relaxed and loose. You'll get there.

Two paths: 1. Train specifically for your project, home area, or personal limiter. or 2. Do a wide variety of boulders and try to build a wide base of fitness. Neither is necessarily "better," but you should pick one and run it for a whole training cycle of 8-12 sessions.

Awesome to know. Improvements in measured endurance or in performance on the rock? Psyched to see if this plays out for people. At 2 hours per week it sure better!

@ not done anything to measure, just performance on rock. Thankfully I do it in the car so I don’t have to sacrifice any other training.

@@gt4joe That's perfect. Psyched to see people are getting a lot out of this. Now...we just need to figure out how to save you from driving so much!

Can you elaborate what carcing is? Thanks in advance :)

kzbin.info/www/bejne/qZjdgnmMe6uLhqM

The concept of low intensity training done to develop endurance is pretty well researched. Most specific training protocols applied to climbing are not. For most of us, a best guess is a good place to start.

More low-intensity muscular endurance work is generally good for climbers, but isolated endurance might not bring the adaptations we're looking for. It will be interesting to see if high volume gripping plays out for anyone who's really gone all-in on it. We do like intervals with a mobile hangboard attached to a rowing machine, or other creative modes of work. Even a general endurance grip workout integrated with some more total body exercise could work. And yet...being inconsiderate might still be the best option!

As far as i know, the problem with that is that with a higher intensity, you target the anaerobic energysystem (power endurance). Getting pumped is an indicator of your anaerobic energysystem getting tired and therefore you don't get those advantages of training the aerobic energysystem.

@@michamoin1022 This is the idea. Main thing here is that trying to train the more intense energy systems at the same time as trying to develop aerobic endurance is hard to recover from, and the goal is slightly different. We look at this training as developing the ability to AVOID getting fatigued on climbs, where getting pumped develops the ability to HANDLE climbing in a fatigued state.

I guess you could word the answer like this: It´s a good idea for THIS particular session. It might be a bad idea in mid/long term because you need more recovery or get less volume in or get injured. In other words: if you can squeeze in some harder routes, you also could increase the overall grade a little bit or could increase the volume

Potentially. Really depends on your work capacity and overall recovery ability. What you do not want is for the endurance training to negatively affect strength. If you're not getting stronger/better in that part of your session over time, additional endurance might not be wise. That being said, very low intensity aerobic training can be a useful recovery mode...as long as you keep it LOW!

@ awsome, thank you!

Been wondering about this for a long time. Thanks for clearing this up.

Yes, refer to USGS for details.

​@@ClimbStrongTV Must be some sort of locals only reference! BTW- Nice video good climbing, great composition.