Around the Internet

I miss the blog era of rock climbing. Every day I would go to an RSS feed of hundreds of climbers (Kris’s original Power Company blog included) to see who had written something new. We were regularly given a more intimate look into the everyday actions of other climbers and coaches. As much as I enjoy the high quality photos and the volume of content that social media gives us today, I miss the long form content.

This recent post from the Tension Climbing crew gave me that same feeling of being connected to these people for more than a single photo and a quick caption. Thank you to Kerry, Will, and Quinn for being so open with their writing and sharing this. This was some of my favorite climbing writing of the year so far.

While I’m on the topic of the Tension Crew, here are two videos that they put out recently that I’ve found myself sending to my clients on a regular basis.

Crux Drills with Angle Variation

Crux Drills with Hold Variation

A common question I hear is, “How long should I rest between attempts on a boulder?”. The answer, as usual, is “it depends”. One aspect of this question that doesn’t get enough attention is whether we are looking to train or to perform in that moment. If you take a full ten minute rest between every attempt on a hard boulder then you’ll set yourself up well for a good performance. However, taking that much rest will lead to a terrible training stimulus unless you have six hours a day to train.

If we want to improve our strength as well as our climbing skill we need to be concerned not just with the quality of our efforts, but also the quantity of them. Fewer efforts and more rest can give high quality attempts, but that comes at the cost of fitness as well as practice time. I don’t care how high-quality your training efforts, if you only pull onto the wall 20 times per session then you’re going to get out of shape. At the same time, If we don’t rest long enough, our efforts will be low quality and we won’t see as good of strength or skill development from that either.

This article from Renaissance Periodization is about forearm hypertrophy, but I really liked the general outline they used to define what rest between sets should look like. It isn’t a perfect 1:1 with rock climbing. With how technically demanding climbing is we need more rest between attempts than we would if we were doing wrist curls like this article discusses, but I still believe there are some great points here that will give you something to stop and consider. Generally speaking, most sport climbers that I boulder around tend to rest far too little between attempts, and the people who nerd out on training the most are extending their rest periods a little too long during training sessions.

From the article:

When determining how long to rest between any two sets in training, our goal is for enough rest to be taken such that the next set is at least close to maximally productive. How can we ensure this? By answering 4 basic questions about our recovery status:

1. Has the target muscle locally recovered enough to do at least 5 reps on the next set?

2. Has the nervous system recovered enough to remove it as a limiting factor to target muscle performance?

3. Has the cardiorespiratory system recovered enough to remove it as a limiting factor to target muscle performance?

4. Have synergist muscles in the exercise being performed recovered enough to remove them as a limiting factor to target muscle performance?

It might take only 1-2 minutes to recover very well (let’s say, 90%) on all of those factors, but because set to set recovery is asymptotic in nature, it might take another 3 minutes to get to 95% recovery and another 10 minutes more to get to 99% recovery. Since you only have so much time to spend in the gym, 10 “90% recovered sets” in 45 minutes of training is a much more anabolic stimulus than only 3 “99% recovered” sets in that same amount of time. Thus, our recommendation is to make sure you can clearly check all 4 boxes of recovery above, but to not wait much longer than what can be considered “very good” recovery in the incredibly inefficient quest for “near perfect recovery.” 

Here’s an example of what can be considered “very good” recovery between sets of forearm training.

There are many things that make rock climbing unique compared to other sports. One aspect that I find most fascinating is that so many of the greatest defeats and near misses in our sport go undocumented and often unmentioned. If a huge upset happens in basketball we have endless media and discussion around it. In climbing, we mostly see the wins. Even the videos that show failure or “the process” all lead up to the grand success in the end.

A few months ago I was talking with a friend about this idea and we were wondering about what the most incredible performances in climbing that nearly happened were. It makes me think about the video (no longer available unfortunately) of Jimmy Webb flashing double-digit boulders up to v13 in Rocklands for 13 straight minutes. I had watched it three times before it really hit me that we were only seeing the successes. How many hard lines had he almost flashed? There could probably be another ten minutes of near flashes that would be just as impressive as the original video.

Last month, a video of Sean Bailey came out that showed us one of these moments. In this video, we see him fall off of the last hard move of what would be the worlds second 5.15 flash. Even though this 32 minute video shows an array of world class accomplishments like v16 and 15c ascents, this clip of him not flashing Ace of Spades remains the part of this video that has stuck with me the most. I would love to see more of this in climbing.

Final Thoughts