Alex Megos's Secret To Climbing Harder

uh I'm actually breathing and and you had told me that you were reading a book on breathing and so I'm curious what that's about I mean what are the big takeaways there I mean I'm not done yet so I'm done about two-thirds but the takeaway is that breathing is sort of a lost superpower of humans but we do every day 25 000 times a day and we just take it as granted with things like uh breathing is breathing it doesn't matter as long as the air goes in and out um there's no difference but actually if you're breathing you can achieve incredible things you can perform better as an athletes you can heat yourself up when you're cold you can you recover better between burns on on the road I think breathing is the the secret superpower that you might have and most of them almost nobody knows how to use so um the right breathing technique I think can be a total game changer for athletes for normal people too implementing breathing techniques in your training in your daily life I think can be very helpful and so for listeners the book is called breath the new science of a lost art it's by James Nester and I heard an interview with him not too long ago and he was talking about how important it is when especially for athletes to breathe through your nose and we we really have this tendency to want to gulp down as much air as we can through our mouths but that actually nose breathing is far more efficient and I found that really fascinating yeah I think that's the takeaway of the first chapter shut up your mouth and breathe through your nose so hard for me to shut my mouth though as an actor and podcaster valve I'll try I'm just constantly talking sorry to take us on a slight little tangent here but when we talked the pressure of failure I'm curious to understand how that's limited you as a climber in the past and and how you've been working through that yeah um I think it has limited me in many ways that's why probably I did so many quick repeats of rather hard routes because lots of them were just not at my limit I tried them once I knew I could do them past I did them quickly but I mean the reason for that was also that I just wouldn't accept challenges where I was not sure whether I could be able to do them or not and that's something that evolved in the last few years especially the last you know three four years when I accepted that if you want to reach a limit and I think that goes for every climber obviously for high end times and professional cameras too if you want to reach your limit you need to accept and need to be willing to put lots of effort into something that might have the zero outcome in the end because you can't get through during the bowler and previously to that I would always see that pretty much just a waste of time I guess because I believe you invest a year into trying to do this one route and you don't do anything you might see this one year as a waste of time which obviously it isn't but you're young and you have lots of expectations you know you know or you feel like you have lots of expectations from other people from yourself that's the way you think and to overcome that I mean it took time and it's a process it's not that you know you just say okay tomorrow I'll come overcome my fear of failure I think it's um it's a process and I'm still working on it but I've taken the first few steps and I have challenged myself with roots that you know on some days I knew I was gonna do it and then three days later it felt shift and suddenly I will not go to any work I'll never do it and yeah um I I started to realize that climbing is probably 99 of the time failing only to succeed you know this one time when you get up the road and you know sometimes it's 100 failing and you'll never climb the route but that's also fine at least you tried yeah that's a pretty big evolution for you it seems like um certainly when I look back at older videos when you were popping off of you know a Crux move over and over again you were really really hard on yourself and and I don't think anybody else is being hard on you I just think that you wanted it so bad and you were so driven that when it wasn't working out um you could just see you could see like all of the emotion coming up so I don't think that's a bad thing I think that's you know we all knows famously like that as well because of what I need I think you need to find the right balance between being hard enough on yourself but not being so hard that you limit yourself I mean if you're so hard on yourself that every time you don't succeed you beat yourself up so much that it creates you know negative memories then at some point you won't end up showing challenging yourself anymore because you just afraid of fairly unafraid of feeling like loser so obviously if you only enter games that you know you'll win you're not gonna develop as an athlete or a human so I think there's always a fine line but I tend in general I would say athletes tend to be hard on themselves just because they want to improve and they want to become better at what they're doing so all right I'll just quick shout out here for today's sponsor which is fizzyvantage nutrition y'all I love this stuff so much I've been a paying customer for years now because they're science-backed products are performance enhancing they work they help me to train harder to recover faster to stay stronger whether I'm at the gym or on the hangboard OR at the Crag I'm telling you guys try the stuff you are going to feel the difference who else is feeling the difference you might ask well how about Alex magos that's right he's a fizzy Vantage athlete along with 50 others so you know this stuff is the best of the best check it out you're gonna love it hit that link below to get 20 off your order using Code struggle at fizzyvantage.com all right let's get back to this chat yeah most of us as climbers probably feel some level of that fear of failure or just that pressure to send it's kind of on a different level for yourself and other Elite climbers you know when you show up at the Crag I imagine all eyes are on you and that pressure just may be a little bit more acute a little bit more apparent plus it's your career you've got sponsors you know there may be expectations on social media who knows so so how do you work through that interestingly I think there are lots of different ways to work the blood pressure but what seems to work quite well for me is that I tell myself it really doesn't matter at all interestingly I I try I use always tend to put too much pressure myself so Trying to minimize the pressure I'm literally telling myself it really doesn't matter you know if you climb it today it doesn't matter you know the world's not gonna change you're not going to change you're still the same person the world's still gonna have to spin tomorrow you know the sun will go up and down nothing will change you know that helps me a lot so whenever I have big Roots ahead of me or hard roads that I'm trying I I try to tell myself it doesn't matter at all whether I get up or not you know yeah hell yeah to that man I think that's great I I agree I think the voice in our head is is always far more magnified we think everybody's looking at us we think everybody's judging us and they don't care they're just there to climb their own projects you know they're there oftentimes the climbing Community is just incredibly supportive so it's it's us who are our own toughest critic and interestingly also Chris has Chris Sharma has a very good attitude a lot he um he very often manages to see you know the path towards climbing something you know the process as the main goal and not the end goal so yeah that's uh always good to learn from it yeah we all just need to go you know spend a couple years in India and we'll all be uh putting up nine A's um well thanks for sharing a lot of that um the the mental aspect of it last question on on this subject here before we shift gears is um if you have a formal like meditation or mindfulness practice that that you do a daily practice or something that you do before climbing I mean one of my daily practices I feel like it does help it helps to calm me down um but try to be in the moment I try to focus on my breathing I think breathing is very important so whether you exercise or whether you're rest right does help the body to you know perform better to recover better so that's what I'm putting my focus on on I mean that's mine my mindfulness practice I um I mean obviously I would sound a lot cooler if I would say oh I'm getting up in the morning I'm meditating two hours then I think two hours of yoga well that's not the case I think you can incorporate mindfulness practices into a lot of daily habits that you're doing but it doesn't require sitting down to meditate for an hour I think just keeping that in mind is already a good tip and useful for lots of people absolutely yeah I'm a huge fan of that we can be present if we can be truly present in the moment whether we're chopping vegetables or exercising that can be a meditation if you're truly present and you're not letting the mind just ruminate and wander and spiral foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: The Struggle Climbing Show

Views: 27,977

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Id: KHk7WPcYruU

Length: 9min 27sec (567 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2023