23 January 2008

Five year Audit

Following on from my last post about setting up the conditions to get to work on your climbing, and enjoyment of it, here is a practical one minute step to deciding whether your training is correct. It's so brain dead obvious you might scoff. Be warned.

Write down a very brief description (or just think back) of where and how much you climbed, what type of activities this included and who with. Something like the following would be an example:

...Climbed indoors at the local climbing centre after work tuesdays and thursdays with Brian and Joe and at the weekend on Grit. At the wall I did 5+s and 6as and a little play on the boulder wall afterwards. Outside I did HVSs and the odd E1.

How many things are the same today?

The more things that are the same, the more likely it is your climbing level has not changed.

What to do? Something different of course!

This weekend try a new rock type. This weeknight try a whole session on the panel or angle you used to avoid and see how much you can master (& begin to love) it. Phone up a different climbing partner.

I know some climbers who deliberately train on the very same problems for years on end. This is not training. In the main they do this because of fear of losing the strengths they do have if they diversify their training a bit. I can tell you it won't have a negative effect - strip those problems and start again. Give your body something fresh to adapt to.

Sticking to the stuff you are comfortable with and know you can do is not training,

Don't get stuck.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Dave - A useful post, for me.

I write a Blog whenever I go training, and try to write something objective about the previous session. I used to find this a pain when I first started climbing (4 years ago now), but I'm starting to see the benefit of it now - I don't know why I started, but it seemed like a logical thing to do at the time.

I now feel that the Blog has given me a simple driver for me to do more sessions (volume), such that I'm now beginning to think more about the structure of the session and what I do in it (types of climb and so on). The Blog has also helped me identify my "comfort zone", so I can no try and step outside it (as you recommended in a previous post).