Why Strength Training Isn't Making You Climb Harder | Part 2
If you missed Part 1, be sure to check out Why Strength Training Isn't Making You Climb Harder.
Getting stronger is a lot of fun. It can feel like you’re pulling back a curtain to reveal possibilities you didn’t believe were meant for you. You feel stronger, fitter, less injury prone, and best of all, you can climb harder things without having to try harder.
And therein lies the problem.
Strength training, when done well, should be a stepping stone to performing better while continuing to use great tactics, a strong mental approach, technical proficiency, and a high degree of effort. When done poorly, strength training can be used as a crutch to replace those foundational pillars of performance.
The first time you ignore everything else and solely focus on strength training, it actually works really well. You don’t have to try very hard to send the next grade. It feels too good to be true. Why haven’t you been doing this forever?
As you become more well trained, the benefits become less pronounced. A single phase of hangboarding doesn’t jump you a full number grade anymore. Is that it? Is this as far as strength training can take you? It isn’t enough. You were supposed to keep going. What do you do now? Do you climb less and train even more to see if that restores the deluge of strength gains? Maybe you need more complex training? Are there any new methods out there that could bring back that feeling of effortless advancement?
No.
You’re not a beginner anymore.
That initial injection of ability can give us a false sense of destination. We made it. That grade that used to feel really hard feels comfortable. This is our path forward now. This is the path forward now. Why isn’t everyone doing this? We’ll just keep getting stronger and the harder grades will keep coming from this alone.
Unfortunately, we have to come back to reality at some point.
Our early encounters with strength training can lure us into believing that this is all we need, all we ever needed, to improve. If you want to reach your potential though, you’ll have to continue leveling up your mental, technical, and tactical games. More than anything else, you’ll have to keep trying hard on the wall, too.
Get strong. It’s absolutely worth it. Don’t stop there, though. Use strength to leverage every other aspect of your climbing, not replace them.
One of the most common places things start to fall apart is at the very beginning of the move.
We know spending time on a finishing link is smart tactics for hard climbs. So why not apply the same concept to individual moves?
Learning when and how to compensate for a weakness is a skill. And skills need to be practiced.
Lowball boulders, while not as proud, can still teach us new movement, new ways to utilize tension, and force us into finding new techniques.
I never thought I’d be recommending this, but some of y’all should be putting less effort into becoming technically better climbers.
Training principles are important, but when they creep into performance, your climbing will suffer. Nearly every time.
We have become collectors of dots. But there’s one major thing that happens when we connect dots that is entirely lost in mass dot collection: critical thinking.
Do you really have terrible willpower? Or are you surrounded by distractions and obstacles?
You have a climbing trip coming up. The rock is different. The style is different. Your pre-trip time is short and the number of days you’ll be climbing, even shorter…
Giving artificially low grades to climbs increases their perceived value for our training and development. The more something is mis-graded the more we naturally want to prioritize it.
Discussion around grades can be so polarizing that many of us avoid the topic.
Climbing starts off as this self-feeding cycle that has you wishing you could climb seven days a week. What happens when this cycle stops bringing improvement though?
Look, it’s important to not let things get overcomplicated. Hunting for elegant answers keeps us from getting bogged down with minutia. But when we take it too far, we lose sight of the bigger picture.
Use strength to leverage every other aspect of your climbing, not replace them.
If everything you do is a finger workout, then when do your hands get a chance to recover?
There is a common theme between a grilled cheese sandwich and good training advice.
The more accurately we define our problems, the more approachable it will feel to find solutions.
Maybe the most understated way of getting better is to build fallback successes into your plan.
How much time should climbers spend becoming more well rounded vs. improving their strengths?
As cool as assessments and standards are, they can easily leave people settling for “good enough” when they have the potential to do much more.
Being able to quickly recognize familiar sequences is a crucial ingredient to harder climbing.
The difficulties of a task should be such that they help the learner translate the skill to performance.
It’s far more comfortable for us to blame ignorance for our lack of progress than it is to blame our own efforts.
You’re watching your client, student, partner, or bestie struggle. And you want to help. But how? It entirely depends on the goal.
Use strength to leverage every other aspect of your climbing, not replace them.
If everything you do is a finger workout, then when do your hands get a chance to recover?
Climbers will dedicate years to getting “strong enough” when what they really need is to learn how to apply the strength they already have.
Nate provides more depth to the reasoning behind many common finger training methods.
A simple, repeatable, and highly effective system designed to give you the best chance of building core strength that transfers to your projects.
Short climbers are good at getting scrunchy, and tall climbers are good at climbing extended, right? Wrong.