Whew. Long aside there, sorry. That’s another blog topic, and one for a day when I feel a little more together in terms of saying what I mean to say with any sort of concision – always a challenge for me, and I’m definitely more foggy in how I write/speak when I feel frazzled and fuzzy around the edges like I do this morning, after yesterday’s fragmented day of attempting to rock climb followed by changing gears to put in my hardest training session of this training segment so far.

We should have known better and sort of did, seeing the low-lying, gray clouds hovering just outside of town. Those skulking, giant obesities were just biding their time and sucking up all of the moisture in the air to inflate their bellies to the bursting point. As soon as we arrived at the crag, they began to belch forth their contents, spewing out vast quantities of spring snow and rain in a steady stream, pelting and saturating the surrounding landscape. Grim. It’s been so warm and dry this spring that we’ve been lulled into a false sense of security, thinking that it’s just going to be nice, but not so – this isn’t unusual, these late-spring storms. It was way too cold, miserable and damp to make much of this day. Doused and downtrodden, we waited for a break in the weather and scampered back to the safety of the car and the house.

I knew that I needed to work out, though, regardless of whatever happened next. I’m always frustrated and distressed when this happens – though I told myself (again) that I need to take the big-picture perspective on these types of situations and let go of the short-term expectation that so often leads to disappointment. I worked to turn my mind around from the “dammit, I really wanted to climb outside today and I was rested and ready to crush!” mentality to the “okay, no big deal, it’s just one day, and even if I’m not recovered for the next nice day, in the long run, an awesome workout on fresh muscles will probably serve me better in terms of overall climbing improvement.”

As soon as I began my workout, I started to feel better, of course – I just needed to put in some hard work in the body to soothe the mind. They work together to feel good, and when my body hasn’t been active for a few days in a climbing-oriented fashion, I start to feel restless and unfocused. And I didn’t get to climb at all yesterday, except for one really cold warm-up pitch. But the training was enough; two hours of focused and concentrated resistance work on climbing-relevant areas left me feeling satisfied and satiated – I’m definitely in the right place to do a max-strength build right now, mentally and physically both. Timed when I want it, too – as I segue into the canyon climbing season, when I can balance these intense workouts with outdoor climbing and make them work together to push my ability.

Perhaps I’ll delve into that a bit more tomorrow: how I structure my personal training segments to work with my outdoor climbing/performance plans from season to season and year to year. Stay tuned…

First of all, everyone’s body responds differently to training factors, meaning that one person may take overnight to recover from a workout, while another might take three days. To complicate matters even more, the same person might recover more quickly from doing the exact same workout from one week to the next, or alternately, may find that he or she needs more time off than he or she did after the previous (same) workout. How a body will respond to a workout or series of workouts is hard to forecast at best, especially on the small-scale (day-to-day) level.

Secondly, the extremely variable nature of rock climbing – it is far from a rhythmic and predictable sport – makes it hard to stringently quantify the energy drain and bodily impact of each effort, much less each day of climbing. This makes it hard to calculate what a person can possibly or potentially do to train constructively on any given day in addition to (or sometimes instead of) climbing. Add to this life stressors and scheduling conflicts/restrictions, and it can seem like a veritable jungle of confusion to even try to come up with a structured training program that makes sense and yields cumulative gains.

Oh, and did I mention that most sport climbers and boulderers aren’t training to compete, but rather, are training while still trying to maintain a peak level of athletic performance level for many months of the year? This is crazy, in terms of training cycles, really – it’s really kind of unheard of, to expect/want/think it’s possible to be continually increasing performance while simultaneously training, never cycling the training, not structuring the training beyond random climbing and bouldering in the gym, and never really taking a break or lightening the training/climbing load (in many cases).

Plus, most climbers I know tend to take one or two days’ worth of training and climbing measures as absolutes in terms of evidence of whether their training is “working” or not – never mind that you can pick up a general athletic training book and find graphs of how athletic adaptations work when a training program is considered solid and sound. These graphs show an undulating curve with a gradual upward trajectory, NOT a solid line of straight-up performance/training gains. You’ll have good days, and you’ll have bad days, even if your training program is ideal. It’s all about the general trend of a person’s cumulative climbing and training efforts, not about one or two days of piss-poor performance that mean, “I’m getting weaker; this training isn’t working; I probably need to train more/harder.” That’s only a logical conclusion (the training isn’t working part of it, anyhow) if over the course of months, a person’s trend is a constant downturn.

Still, in such cases, I would argue that more often and not, if that person has been diligently training, that this usually indicates one or both of two things: 1) chronic overtraining (since I’ve observed so many times that many climbers seem to embrace a culturally influenced mindset of “more is better,” and often train in excess with lower-quality workouts, never resting enough to allow their bodies to proper adapt and to fully assimilate potential training gains) and/or 2) improper training – aside from overtraining, improper training is commonly seen as either the climber training to his/her strengths and ignoring his/her weaknesses, the climber utilizing inefficient/ineffective means and methodologies to try to address his/her weaknesses, or the climber considering hours spent randomly bouldering/route climbing in the gym to be an effective way to train and see notable improvements in ability level.

Luckily for us, it’s our minds that cling to rigid structures and schedules more than our actual bodies, a lesson that I’ve struggled to internalize in my own training just as I watch the people I coach struggle with this issue similarly. Just because our training program says we should do “x” on a given day doesn’t mean that we should do “x” without first determining whether the body is in the proper state of being to engage with this training element on this particular day. The more I’ve trained and set up my own training program and ideas about what I “should be doing,” the more I’ve come to realize that whenever I force the issue (e.g., train when I’m not adequately energized or recovered from a previous workout, or train after climbing when I’ve already given my all in climbing for the day), I pay the price, either with needing more days off subsequently to recover from the ill-placed workout, or with overtraining/overuse injury issues, which completely go counter to the whole point of training.

I try to communicate this mindset to everyone I work with directly through coaching – that if you’re too tired/sore/worked, you must be okay with walking away from training elements on any given day. This is the best training decision a person can make, and it should be considered just that — a training decision. Each individual, however, has to learn from experience where this line is for their own individual body, and this line and comprehension develops over time. It’s best when you’re starting out on a new training program to err on the side of caution and always stop while you’re ahead (still have energy and don’t feel destroyed), and then wait a day or two to see how your body responds before you delve into another workout or hard day of climbing. As you get more into a training rhythm and program, if you listen to your body and pay close attention to how you feel, you’ll develop a greater and greater understanding of when it’s time to train again, what parts of your body are ready for training, and when it’s best to just walk away from the gym and try again another day.

My energy had dragged through much of last week, as I mentioned – I’d never felt really recovered, though I hadn’t felt horrible, either; just not as peppy and psyched as I usually am (or at least want to be as much as possible and can be sometimes). I ended up taking it as my lighter week for this month’s training, adjusting my schedule accordingly to accommodate my body’s apparent need for this, despite the fact that I wanted to put in another anatomical adaptation weight session to prepare for my upcoming maximal-strength build.

In any case, after Thursday’s killer go making the clip on my project, I ended up taking two rest days. On day one, I stretched, and on the other, I did nothing. I felt guilty for doing nothing, honestly; I still (STILL!) feel bad for taking two rest days in a row if I don’t do cardio on at least one of them. It’s silly, and I know it’s silly. So I listened up and honored my body despite the voices that told me I was being lazy; my body wanted me to rest.

I needn’t have worried or felt bad, though, because the result was a leap forward for me yesterday. I sent another low-lying fruit of steepness, finally doing this short, half-route with the weird sideways/downward dynamic move under a belly. The cool thing was that I finally had enough time (read: improved arm and body strength) in the set-up position to sort out my feet and push off properly. I couldn’t even barely do these moves one at a time less than a year ago; yesterday, they felt not bad at all (as they need to feel, since I’ll do them over and over again in the future, too, when I dig into the full-length route that starts with this baby pitch). This send freed me up to work on a much bigger endeavor, and I put in some cool beta refining on this, tweaking some sequences to make them work better for me.

But it was the at-home training that REALLY got me fired up yesterday; for the first time since my crazy left-hand nerve impingement paralysis episode, I felt amazing in strength training instead of kind of fragile and scared to push things. It’s funny, that, as I’m not sure how much of that has been “only in my mind,” or how much was actually a valid message from my body, but I’ve still felt rather frightened and delicate when training, afraid to push hard. This wasn’t the case yesterday though – it had been more than a week since my last weights session, and I discovered that my body is ready and psyched to move into my max-strength build, starting now. I felt more stable and balanced in all of my lifts; I could easily lift more weight than I could in the previous session in all of my lifts, too – and I felt solid enough to start testing the waters for more-intense lifting levels, moving into lower reps and higher weights. It was awesome! I wish I felt that good every single day. (I always wish I could train hard every day.)

Full of energy through my workout, I still had the discipline to stop at the end of my workout (I tend to feel ebullient and like I could just keep going with more training when I feel so great, but I’ve learned this isn’t really the smartest choice). I instantly drank a protein recovery drink, followed by a delicious big meal shortly thereafter, and a stretching session, too.

Today, so far, I feel awesome as well – I can tell I worked out hard, but I don’t feel annihilated. I feel good enough to get a much lighter workout in targeting a different energy system later on today, most likely – though as always, I’ll test my body out slowly as I warm up and use my observations from that to determine exactly how today’s workout will go and what it will be comprised of. I try to keep an open mind with no rigidity whatsoever about second-day on workouts/climbing days, allowing my body’s messages to guide my choices without coming in with any preconceived ideas about what I should do for the day, especially after a really hard first-day-on workout. I’ve found this to be the most effective way for me to avoid overtraining and encourage maximal performance gains from training and climbing days, both.

Back to Thursday. I haven’t really been feeling tiptop this week; my body needs rest days and I hear it; I’m in the midst of two days off right now. But the weather was warm and I was stoked to try and had a belayer, so why not? This climb actually illustrates yesterday’s blog entry perfectly, since the coolest aspect of it for me this season is the discovery that I can do the hardest sequence of the route – which is a balance-y, technical nightmare on mean and gnarly holds – in a more efficient and fluid manner due to my increase in overall body strength. Crazy, I know – but I can take a terrible hold and high step and really pull down on this hold and lock it off in a way that I couldn’t last season. I wasn’t strong enough to get into this position or to lock it off, which meant more abuse for my fingers due to my lack of reliance on the rest of my body.

So after my warm-up burn on this climb, I went for my one real burn of the day. I usually only do two go’s on this thing, because it rips my fingers up. Surprisingly, I high-pointed it. That was cool, since I hadn’t been on it in a couple weeks, and I’d only been on it a couple days this season so far. I fell going for the crux clipping hold, taking the giant plunge. I hung there, gathered my strength and courage, telling myself, “You just need to go up and make the clip,” which is what I’ve told myself every time I’ve hung before this clip – only this time, it worked! Hooray! I climbed up strongly into the clipping stance, pulled up the rope, and even bobbled the clip a little bit, and still made it, and made a couple moves after, even though I was overcome with excitement and was shaking. I tumbled off, whooping with glee: “Woo-hoo! I made the clip!”

The biggest barrier to me believing I could ever send this climb just crumbled; I’m overjoyed. I felt stronger on it than ever on a day when I definitely wasn’t at 100 percent. I high-pointed and made the clip; I climbed the crux a bunch of times, too, to make sure I know how it feels and to train my body to do the moves perfectly. I know for a fact that my increased overall body strength has lent me more stability and comfort and confidence as I move up the terrible holds on this route – my technique is better because I’m stronger, and my increase in strength allows me to utilize different techniques to perform the hardest moves on this climb. I’m so excited to get back and try it again…but alas, we’re in for some cooler days now, so I’ll have to wait until the next hot day plus psyched partner to try to make it happen. I’m totally fine with this, though; all things in time.

And yet, this is not to say that I don’t think perfecting climbing technique isn’t a worthwhile endeavor…

Watching a recent UFC event, Diaz vs. Miller, my ears perked up when commentator Joe Rogan made an astute observation about headliner and fight winner Nate Diaz. Rogan noted that Diaz’ superb technical skills made him need less absolute power and strength to have the same effect as other fighters – in other words, his technical precision and skills (I think Rogan was talking about striking in this particular instance) increase his overall efficiency, thereby decreasing the absolute level of power and strength necessary to have a devastating impact on his opponents. So Diaz, though definitely strong and powerful in his own right, can overcome stronger, more powerful opponents, in part due to his superior technique.

This to me served as an awesome nonclimbing illustration of the importance of developing excellent technique for sport climbers and boulderers – but not to the exclusion of working for more power and strength. It’s all about balancing the two components and using them to support one another, not pitting them against one another with a “vs.,” as in “Technique vs. strength; which one is more important in climbing hard?” The answer is that both are important, and that to develop your peak proficiency as a climber, you should pay close attention to both of these key components.

In fact, as Periodization-5th Edition: Theory and Methodology of Training, by Tudor O. Bompa and G. Gregory Haff explains, ““The limiting factor of improvement for prospective athletes is generally considered to be technical proficiency. However, recent evidence suggests that muscular strength may be the most important factor because it is strongly related to technical abilities.”

In other words, my snooty and patronizing attitude about my high-‘n’-mighty technical climbing skills was off-base and misplaced. Before I started training (beyond the random bouldering in the gym, etc. that I thought qualified as “training” before), I didn’t have the strength and power to continue improving my technical skills or to incorporate new, more strength- and power-dependent technical skills into my climbing repertoire. This has happened regularly as I’ve developed more strength and power in the rest of my body beyond my fingers during the past few years. I definitely have more technical skills in my arsenal due to my increased total-body strength. But, like Diaz, I may still not have to be as strong and powerful to accomplish movements or send certain climbs as a less technically developed but stronger and more powerful climber.

I’m not saying that I’m God’s gift to technical climbing, here, either – I’m just noting that if you train either of these crucial components of climbing exclusively or you put too much weight on either of them, you may be hosing yourself from experiencing your peak performance potential. Technical development and strength/power development should always go hand-in-hand, supporting one another in an athlete’s overall improvement toward becoming the most efficient and effective player of the game or sport in question, whether it’s MMA, rock climbing or something else entirely. Neglect either one and you give up the opportunity to advance as quickly as you can, potentially setting yourself up for long periods of plateau or stagnation, like what I experienced for at least a decade.

To sum it up: Perfect technique will never make up for a lack of strength and power. A high level of strength/power often makes it possible to execute climbing moves successfully with less-perfect technique. BUT (and it’s a big, big BUT!) perfect technique makes it possible for a climber to do moves using less strength/power, since solid technique translates into a consistently more efficient usage of the climber’s current strength/power level.