While I’ve been in Houston the past few years I’ve been developing a curriculum around teaching beginner and intermediate climbers (from three months of experience to around two years) what I consider to be the fundamental movement skills of climbing.

I initially developed this as an in-person workshop. After putting nearly 200 people through the course I felt like I had fine tuned it to a point that I wanted to share it with more people. Last summer, Kris and I sat down and figured out how to translate that in-person experience into a series of videos and discussions. After months of work, the result was The Shape of Power. I’m proud of what we’ve put together with this.

If you or someone you know has been climbing around two years or less and wants a better understanding of movement that they can take with them for the rest of their climbing career, I can’t recommend this course more.

Around the Internet

Without question, the best thing I read this last month was this 28 page document written by Nils Van Der Poel, the recent Olympic gold medalist in the 10k and 5k speed skating events as well as the world record holder in the 10k.

In this document, he lays out everything that brought him to that olympic success over the past few years. I loved reading the contrast between being fully focused on the short term of getting better at speed skating for the olympics mixed with the longer term approach of needing to be able to survive mentally and physically for multiple years of nonstop training.

There are too many nuggets of wisdom to share in this newsletter without making it ten pages long. Below I’ve shared several of my favorite sections as well as a few sentences of my own thoughts after each quote. I know that 28 pages of speed skating sounds like a big investment, but I promise it’s worth the read. Training nerds should start at page 1, but those of you who want to skip to the things that most obviously translate to climbing can start at page 15.

“I have never skated a 10k without questioning why I chose to become a speed skater. It always sucked with 10 laps to go, but working harder would only result in me blowing up too early. Every time I skated the 10k I was in doubt of my ability.”

-Hard redpointing is incredibly exhausting mentally. I think it’s important to remember that even the best athletes in the world feel an immense amount of stress during performances. Just because you feel stress tying in for your big project doesn’t mean you aren’t prepared or that you have an unhealthy relationship with climbing. Nerves are just a part of the game for people pushing their limits.

“The hardest thing about this program was getting through it with a smile upon my face. When I found ways to enjoy it I was unstoppable. Sometimes, to get through more hours, what was needed was an ice cream and sometimes it was multiple ice creams. The good news was that ice cream was pretty cheap. So even though other skaters had millions of euros going into their careers, I was able to skate faster than all of them, because I had found a way to enhance my performance with ice cream. To me the challenge was not about suffering, but finding a way to endure hardships with ease.”

• Performance enhancing ice cream.

I’m confident when I draw the conclusion that traveling days are not rest days. I think a lot of athletes do not respect this vital insight. As an elite athlete I could not afford spending days not training and not resting. When I was younger I could spend two traveling days for a training camp of 10 days. Today I do not consider that a wise investment.

• Spending 8+ hours in the car to drive to a climbing area isn’t a rest day. I’ve been just as stubborn as everyone else with this one, but it’s time to admit that planning on those long drives being “restful” isn’t setting us up for success.

My entire training program was predicated on a foundation of inner motivation. If it ran out I could no longer keep up the hard work. Therefore I did not only evaluate my training, food, sleeping, living… strategy on how successful it was, but also on how it made me feel and what it did to my motivation

• For him to become a world class athlete he needed consistency over the course of years. This meant he had to keep his motivation going even at the cost of doing less than perfect training. There wasn’t value in doing the “perfect” program if he was going to burn out mentally on it. Getting better at climbing is about playing the long game. Finding ways to get better that don’t burn you out is crucial. If you’re going to be in the sport for years you can’t rely on white-knuckling your way through every training period.

I wasn’t mentally strong as a kid, I hated to compete ever since I started speed skating, I truly hated it. It is still a little anxiety provoking for me, I think it always will be when I test myself in an activity that I really care about. But today it’s a walk in the park compared to when I was a kid. This development was mainly acquired through continuous voluntary confrontation with the challenge (read that sentence again and emphasis voluntary). It was first when I understood that, or felt like, I volunteered, that I was able to compete with a free mind.”

• I love this. Trying to perform at our top level is stressful. I think his advice to remind ourselves that we are in this situation because we wanted to be and chose to be is incredibly valuable.

“An easy way to add extra aerobic hours during competition season was to squeeze them in after races. I celebrated my 5k World Record for three hours with a champagne bottle on my bike.”

• I just thought this was hilarious.

• I really enjoyed this video of Louis Parkinson teaching Neil Gresham how to climb on on new-school boulder problems. I’m a fan of both Louis and Neil’s coaching, and seeing them together in a video where Neil, an accomplished outdoor climber, works through the same discomforts as modern day newer climbers was a lot of fun from start to finish.

• This last week Kris and I sat down and recorded a board meeting about gamifying climbing. I thought this TED talk on the Super Mario effect would go well with that. I especially appreciate the part about how we perceive failure as a baked-in part of video games. This is something that I see newer climbers do a great job of embracing, but as we get more experienced many climbers become risk averse and lose the value that comes with repeated trial and error.

Final Thoughts