What I Do: I rest more days from climbing and training than I want to in order to promote top recovery and peak performance.
When I was younger and not as in tune with my body, I didn’t rest as much, and my performance and recovery both suffered. I often went to the gym sore and tired. I also lacked the self-discipline and self-awareness to stop climbing on days when my body protested, often kicking off a cycle of negative returns. I observe this frequently in other climbers of all ages (including even fit teenage climbers) – their performance starts to decline when they over-climb on any given day or series of days. Too often, unfortunately, we interpret these results (diminishing returns) as indicative of losing some sort of fitness or not training hard enough. And then we push harder, making everything worse.
I’m hopeful that I’m immune to this tendency now – after all, last winter’s overtraining episode was hideous and embarrassing, really, since I know better. That happened because I felt so great training hard that I decided to train even harder (increased intensity) and more (increased frequency), another common error. If you’re used to feeling beaten up and sore from climbing, and you start to actually recover adequately and feel good, you might feel like you’re not doing enough, and think you should push harder. I’ve done this too many times, instead of recognizing that I’m in a perfect state of balance between pushing hard and pulling back to allow for adequate recovery, a process described beautifully in “The Athlete’s Guide to Recovery,” by Sage Rountree. (Every climber should read this book. Even though it’s written for endurance athletes, much of the information applies to climbing as well.)
The Science Behind It: If you put in a powerful resistance-exercise workout, it can take muscles 7 to 14 days to fully recover from it, according to Dr. John M Berardi, Ph.D., in his article “Weight Lifting and Post Exercise Muscle Recovery.” Climbers erroneously think that they’re immune to this lengthened recovery time, but my experience over this summer, in contrast to my overtraining episode in the winter, illustrates this perfectly – by limiting my power/strength workouts to one day every week, I’ve managed to make significant strength gains every single week this summer (10 weeks so far). In the winter, when I tried to push harder, training the same muscle groups multiple days in a row or every other day, I instead ended up declining in performance and having to spend about four weeks just trying to get back to where I was.
Climbing hard sport routes (or boulder problems) is more often than not mainly a power and strength-based effort; if you’re sport climbing or bouldering at or near your limit, you are tapping into the ATP-CP (10 seconds or less) and anaerobic energy-production systems (10 seconds to 3 minutes) for the majority of your movements, or at the very least, for the movements that challenge you. The anaerobic system promotes the formation of lactic acid, the culprit in the dreaded pump. Aerobic energy production kicks in for activities lasting for 3 minutes or longer (endurance exercise), drawing upon your body’s most efficient energy-production system, which utilizes oxygen but is not as effective for quick, strong, powerful, and explosive movements. I’ve come to view sport climbing at or near your limit as similar, at least in terms of energy systems used, to running intervals in track – you sprint from rest to rest, and hanging out and shaking on rests is like walking between each interval. (And if you’re using mostly aerobic energy production when you’re sport climbing, you’re almost certainly not climbing at or near your limit).
Many climbers who’ve participated in endurance-based sports mistakenly think that they can train and climb as much as they did in their endurance sport, and that if they can’t, there’s something wrong with their recovery. But because hard sport climbing (and bouldering) isn’t mainly an aerobic/endurance sport, this simply isn’t the case. I find that how fast I recover is directly proportional to the difficulty/intensity and duration of my climbing or training day – how many powerful efforts I put in on routes (or moves) that challenge me. The higher the power and strength output/intensity/duration, the longer the recovery time. Of course, if you’re never climbing fully recovered, you probably don’t even know where your real potential lies (yet). If you don’t care to know or experience this peak performance capability, it’s worth it to at least be aware that you’re choosing this path. For more information on this, read “How Long Does a Muscle Take to Recover After Anaerobic Exercise.”
Let’s not get crazy here, though — I’m certainly not suggesting that climbers should only climb one day every two weeks, or one day a week. Far from it. I’m just saying that climbers can and should be aware that the harder the intensity of the climbing day/workout, and the longer the duration, the longer it will take you to recover fully from your efforts and be back up to 100 percent ability level. The amount of time required to recover will vary wildly from individual to individual, and all sorts of factors come into play along with intensity and duration (including age, stress levels, sleep, nutrition, fitness base, and style of climbing and familiarity with it, to name a few).
However, if you’re out at the crag and you hear a climber (or even yourself) complaining about “getting weaker on a project,” or “not being able to do a move I could do last week,” remind yourself that the body just doesn’t work this way – it doesn’t suddenly, inexplicably become weaker (unless there’s something systemically wrong, you’re injured but haven’t realized it, or you’re ill). Rather, the body appears to be weaker than it was in previous efforts most often due to a lack of adequate recovery, whether in terms of days off or in terms of poor sleep quality (or both). It can and will become progressively weaker, however, if you overtrain instead of resting in response to an off day on the rocks.
The next time you experience a poor-performance day at the crag, try to be aware and attentive to what’s going on with your body, for real. For example, I felt terrible climbing yesterday, and it was most assuredly from lack of sleeping and traveling over the weekend – so instead of getting ultra-upset, I just did a little beta recon and called it a day. There was a time when I would have angrily pushed on with my planned climbing day – and probably started myself on a downward performance spiral by doing so. Better to listen up and allow the body to rest. Getting greedy about pushing for too many climbing days or training days in a row will more often than not result in consistently suboptimal climbing performance. Make rest a key training ally, and you may find that routes crumble before you more easily than ever before.
Read more: Should I Rest or Climb? Using Self Tests to Assess When to Rest; Rock Climbers Can Promote Healing on Rest Days; and Rock Climbing Training – Rest Days and Good Sleep.
