Controversial Nutrition & Climbing Tactics, Explained | Hype vs Reality

hello I'm Jason Hooper and I'm Dan Bell and today we're going to be discussing some underrated and overrated topics in climbing [Music] by the way this video is sponsored by Thrive Market use the link in our description to get a special discount the first topic is creatives creatine I'll take I'll start with this one this one like this I like it no it's on purpose okay if it's more underrated but a little then I'm going to be found a way around the binary answers so here's the reality for me I'm creatine seems to be quite helpful for like strength power performance stuff as well as even newer Research into cognitive benefits but taking creatine is not going to all of a sudden add like eight pounds of muscle mass in two weeks so that's why I say like overrated slightly because people think the effect size is going to be enormous when the research just doesn't support that yeah it's sort of like the effect size is measurable which makes it for a supplement enormous whoa It's been basically just established as like the gold standard of supplements for the last like 60 years but most of the studies over the last 20 years have been focusing on its therapeutic effects for other health conditions and it seems to be remarkably promising which is not surprising given that it's one of the main energetic moderators of like the entire human biology so um may have a lot of side benefits and it's somewhat interesting if nothing else uh can you touch on just because this is the thing that people tend to be most concerned about the potential weight gain aspect of it you don't put on that much weight you sort of can't um big Power lifters because it tends to scale with lean muscle mass right and so one climbers just tend to be relatively small at least relative to like large athletes in other sports so most climbers will not put on more than maybe a couple of pounds the other thing is an example that I kind of like and I think is quite relevant is like if you put on some weight with creatine that is pretty good evidence that you needed it right it's like my car in fact weighs more when it has a full tank of gas I'd say in a nutshell just don't worry about it yeah and if you are worried about it just look up just stop one of the things that people miss out on is like people will frequently cycle creatine by far the biggest and most significant results have been measured are in longer studies basically the longer you take it the bigger the effect size is because it simply lets you train a little bit harder every session forever so under the premise that you're probably going to take this stuff forever there's no reason there's no need to load and that can cause some well I don't know why it would but it does sometimes get reported as causing mild gastric distress if you take a bunch so five grams will definitely get you there probably over the course of a month and for most people maintenance is in the neighborhood of like two grams so yeah grab a teaspoon if it's flat or rounded whatever agree yeah all right the next one is sure to get some people riled up and that is Diet tracking diet tracking yeah disclaimer right like if you have concerns over like the mental aspect of diet tracking um talk to a healthcare professional beforehand although there are studies that say if you have no history of disordered eating or eating disorders then there doesn't seem to be an inherent risk associated with diet tracking but just make an individual decision yeah with that being said I mean I can't raise this higher there are studies that show that registered dietitians and normal people when asked to guesstimate their calorie tracking for the day regularly regular people are about 50 off in registered dietitians who should be the best at this are 20 off so we are bad at knowing how much we are actually eating so it's if you want to actually know like your Macros or just your calories it's kind of impossible if you don't have any tracking background stop acting like you know the way ahead like you know the rules there are no rules man we're lost for General Health purposes it is critical that you have an acceptably healthy diet and for athletic performance it's really important and for a body weight sport it's insanely important so like you know anything you do can be taken to disadvantageous extremes you know like climbing is pretty safe you can do it in the gym you can do it on a rope you can go free so you can go do like Alpine in the mountains and now it's very dangerous uh you can get crazy with your diet I would recommend not doing that but um the only way that you're going to be able to make dexterous and progressively good decisions with it is by having something to look back on and experiment with and if you don't I mean yeah you're just never gonna get a a good subtle sense of like what your body wants and needs if you don't track it to some extent it's just not going to happen and I would add like to Dan saying don't go extreme with it there's also the reality that label makers and at least the United States they don't have to be perfectly accurate I forget if it's 10 or 15 or 20 percent um for error but like your 200 calorie bar could be 220 it could be 180 so like don't obsess but the the tracking can be a very helpful guideline yeah yeah I'm a boredom eater so my intuition for Hunger is terrible if I'm bored I'm snacking yeah and to some extent ironically like exercise suppresses hunger for the most part I mean there's variation in individuals so in a lot of cases with climbing it's like when they diet to lose weight which is a very reasonable thing to do from time to time for climbing they don't have a sense of where they're at and so frequently you end up with two extreme diets which lead to bad psychological situations as well as reduced performance so knowing where your Baseline is allows you to make a reasonable guess as far as increasing macros or caloric intake for training as well as reducing it in a mild responsible way to happily and healthily get to like performance weights if you're trying to lose weight and you're not tracking and you're not actually in a calorie deficit deficit that's going to be frustrating if you're trying to get stronger and you're not eating enough calories that's going to be frustrating so there are other mental aspects that are solved by diet tracking I have definitely seen people's relationship with food and diet improve with diet tracking for sure like 100 you know a lot um just anecdotally uh if you want to start diet tracking I've seen a lot of success with starting to track without any explicit goal as far as weight change I think that makes it a lot more psychologically benign and it keeps you from sort of altering the experiment as well the goal is to just kind of see like what your normal habits are so then you can make changes in the future as opposed to kind of trying to measure something while you're actively messing with it do you want to make any recommendation as to what to diet trapping tracking oh I really like macro factor and love basically everything Stronger by science does um we are not affiliated with them at all sadly because they didn't answer because they didn't answer our email well don't you love me the next topic is BCAAs or Branch chain amino acids they're overrated in the sense that there are cheaper better Alternatives I think basically people have successfully made them taste good recently and they have an extremely high profit margin but they were essentially shot down like almost 10 years ago at this point it's like kind of a settled argument they contain and are frequently dominated by leucine which does directly stimulate the mtor pathway which does cause muscular protein synthesis but so do basically all high quality proteins um so if you find that leucine appears to be helpful for you I would consider just trying a high quality protein supplement as it will likely have better outcomes most of the products that are selling this stuff especially within climbing but kind of like to the market at Large all blew up after it was found that this is like basically which is ridiculous it's just some predatory nonsense we're all gonna die it's not today the next topic is collagen supplements serious face oh wait seriously so there's a thing called the protein quality score I mean honestly we have like a full like video about all the research on it and why like the research for collagen is just not great the philosophy is that the specific amino acid profile of collagen is going to be more relatable for your actual connective tissue as a climber so it's going to be more directly applicable to climbers to ingest there's just no evidence to suggest that that is the case or that that matters because your body is going to use the aminos where it needs to but here's the big thing if you're using collagen as a supplement especially like after like training if you do not get the required amount of leucine your body has no reason to activate muscle synthesis and collagen will never get there I think you need to take 80 grams or more of collagen to get the required leucine whereas that's like it's like 25 for whey protein yeah depending on the formulation because you need something like two grams of leucine to kick this stuff off maybe a little less yeah world's tiniest pushback on that is of all of the zany things that climbers do to try to get an edge collagen's fairly inexpensive it's almost certainly harmless it's low calories like you could certainly give it a try if you want maybe for some reason that's hard to imagine it's beneficial but if you did I would go with a generic brand because the ones that are marketed to climbers are overpriced taste bad and almost certainly don't work any better how neat is that that's pretty neat next one is prioritizing animal proteins over plant proteins oh my perspective on that just shifted with new research that is that was basically comparing the two and said that there wasn't a huge effect size difference with plant versus animal the reality for me if I just want to boil this down simply is are you getting leucine because if your goal is to build muscle then you need protein you need a certain amount of it and you need leucine animal proteins get you there maybe maybe slightly quicker or faster than plant but you can still certainly get there so I think just having to be like animal protein based is overrated yeah yeah I think that it's very possible to have like completely equivalent success with either approach um animal protein in some ways is more foolproof because all of it is a complete protein basically all of it is high quality protein um you know it's pretty mindless if you're doing like uh animal or dairy um if you're eating vegetable or plant protein you probably need somewhat more um it's not generally as bioavailable um if you're getting it from sort of like the raw food as opposed to uh intentionally kind of like refined uh plant protein powders you may need to be a little careful to get the an adequate sort of like spread of amino acids a lot of the like protein bars you'll see at gyms and things that are plant-based end up with like 12 to 20 grams of plant protein and my guess would be that it's probably not as well balanced so if you're just kind of jamming like a generic vegan protein bar you might want to be a little careful that you're getting an adequate dose but yeah with with a little bit of care you should be able to accomplish whatever you need through a plant-based diet all right the next topic is saving money on groceries easy way underrated lucky for us today's video is sponsored by Thrive Market Thrive Market is an online membership-based grocery store with guaranteed savings on every order do you hate wondering if you're getting the best prices on groceries do you sigh every time you realize you have to make another trip to 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video all right moving on to the next category which is recovery the first topic is deloads or deload weeks [Music] [Laughter] you want to kick it off no you go for it okay I don't think deloads are a bad idea and I think many climbers don't take any time off ever barring injury or yeah basically barring injury ever so in that context it's probably underrated and people should do more of it probably but I think it's another one of those things where as specs of sports science from other disciplines trickle into climbing people get a little too rigid about it um I think a lot of the pacing of it is because you gotta choose something and it's a little bit convenient for coaches to just say every fourth fifth sixth whatever week is a light week it's certainly easy to tell people to do it but it's often not needed on that kind of interval however people basically never have a perfectly balanced training routine therefore it is good to have periods where you allow access fatigue to dissipate I think you put up the wrong sign Dan you made a great argument for underrated I thought it underrated more oh you did yeah [Music] not enough people do it but I think the way that people talk about it is a little too hype training I only saw the red one the overrated component to me is that people don't really take it with that much of a scientific approach yeah they just say this might be good um the underrated for me is vastly related to injuries because I see injuries that's like what I see day in day out and oftentimes it's because people um just have this non-stop training regiment and they're pushing as hard as they can and there is like the the fitness fatigue model to keep in mind whereas if you are training at super high intensities you can accumulate fatigue which will decrease your performance and if your performance decreases then you're not actually making improvements whereas like a deload phase can reduce the fatigue and allow you to perform well again but my bias towards underrated is mostly an injury prevention because like Dan said it in a perfect world you'd balance it out but that's not what I see not down climbing to avoid not down climbing to avoid eccentric fatigue wait so I'm avoiding down climbing to avoid eccentricity so you're trying you're not down climbing to prevent fatigue basically yeah um I'm gonna put that past overrated to the point of like absurdity you could look at it as like a black and white and like the more contact you have on hold the more energy you're using sure so I want to hear your argument I guess it depends on what you mean by down climbing to start with like most people don't completely down climb the climbs that they're climbing even if you did I think that there would be a significant probably useful stress associated with that it definitely helps with sort of like uh learning and integrating movement patterns and being a competent down climber is a very useful skill both for performance and for survivability Outdoors but I think mostly when people down climb it's like reversing a few moves or going down some down climbing drugs so that you take less of a like raucous fall to the ground which I think immensely outweighs the the relative additionally as far as eccentrics go your hands aren't doing a like particularly meaningful eccentric down climbing versus up climbing your elbows and shoulders are but for most people that's going to be assisted reverse pull-ups which is going to be so light from an eccentric component that like it should be negligible [Music] that said like if your goal is to do like short hard Boulders and you're reversing everything you're not doing what you planned on so like within reason I think it's probably a good thing to do and if you're doing something like totally nonsensical that's probably not a great thing to do for the fatigue component of it like saying you have to jump off at the top on every single one I don't think the the benefits of that outweigh the the benefits you're losing like the practice down climbing The Eccentric control the body awareness that you mentioned so I definitely think it's overrated in that like it's not going to be as damning as you people are portraying it to be and it's also a safety thing to be able to down climb some before you jump there's a reason to down climb there's a reason sometimes to jump off like stop saying you have to do it one way or the other please yeah in entirety yeah basically like a statements and absolutes are fun but they're not normally right yeah and I think we know that you should always like And subscribe and share with your friends yeah you should always like And subscribe always the next topic is ice baths and cold showers yeah yeah overrated cold showers it should be like recognized are going to have significantly different effects from Ice baths I mean they're just not nearly cold enough to do a lot of the things that are purported from Ice baths yeah neither of them are likely to affect your your climbing very directly yeah but they may do some other interesting things yeah like I would I would honestly never really stop anyone that said they want to do a cold shower or as if someone said they wouldn't like it crazy but no but like if someone was actually doing hypertrophy training and they were doing ice baths I would recommend they stop yep all right moving on to the next category which is climbing the first topic is high angle crimping um higher yeah you mean full cramping we spoke quite a lot about high angle crimping essentially what that really allows you to do is utilize any like ink on any holes that you use and it allows you to generate Force away from the wall I think it's overrated only in the sense that somehow it's recently re-emerged as some magical thing so somehow we've had for a while people are like freakishly concerned about injury risk with crimps and now you have Aiden Roberts use a term that's not super common in the states and now it's how you climb E17 which is ridiculous but crimps are good it's important to have some sort of active grip and you need to be able to dig behind in cut holes so I like crimps I don't think there's anything magical about them oh Magic if you're a newer or more intermediate climber just use caution because the more flexion you get at your pip joint the more axial loading compression you're going to get and the more likely you are to develop some like pip joint synovitis yeah and if you're hyper mobile like I mean I guess if you're coming really high over you may not get hyperextension but you may also develop pain at that dip or distal joint that's actually a great point no surprise if this is a fad of some variety or at least something that's much more popular recently you run the risk of having significant background strengths by climbing however it is you normally climb and then now having the capacity to really injure yourself because you're applying that strength to a position that you're like pretty inexperienced with remember with great power [Music] right here's one that might be a little bit tricky this one is stopping your session early to avoid fatigue or the idea that less is always more um generally I feel like underrated most people kind of just rage until they can't anymore and I think that there is Merit to ending things intentionally when either you've accomplished the goals that you've set for yourself or performance dips depending but I guess also there's been a lot of noise recently about like never going to failure or like somehow fatiguing sessions being like major culprits for injury and that's probably somewhat everblown I see a lot of injuries from people doing these extremely long sessions like trying to get every ounce of it they can out of their fingers and our fingers just aren't honestly good at giving us feedback on when they're actually fatigued and hitting like a failure Point yeah um and so injuries can occur so I think it's it's definitely of value to have a stopping point and I think what Dan said is great like set like a a goal or set like mini goals and if you can accomplish at least one of them then great you don't have to just go to Absolute failure every time 100 do you know who I am no I I can't say that I do some amount is necessary to trigger an Adaptive response and beyond that you start getting diminishing returns and depending on your situation you need more or less of those for things to proceed nicely but the second thing is I think where people really make the mistake with excessively long sessions is not moderating their sessions with fatigue these are going to have a very different experience if you basically are like so psyched run into the gym flail on the hardest things you possibly can and the session finishes with just some absolute travesty of an attempt on like things that are still near limit versus if you were to finish out the session with a little bit more like easier technique based folders or some intentional ergonomic like endurance training both of which are much less likely to cause injuries while allowing you to work in these like sort of fatigue failure States effectively so you know don't do super intense stuff when you can't maintain acceptable form here's an interesting one warming up before climbing what what dude oh oh yeah yeah both yeah I think a lot of people don't warm up at all and very much should yes but then some people are convinced they need to like go for a jog or like have to do like 30 minutes of like jump rope or bicycling or something like that which is not I think particularly necessary what do you mean what do you what do you mean what do you mean perfectly said but I also think people fall into this like there has to be some like absolute specific warm-up routine but not only can that very individual to individual it could also vary day to day depending on your climbing goals or intentions so yeah definitely like sometimes not utilized at all so underrated but also sometimes people hyper focus on it so much I'm spending like an hour warming up is like just a terrible use of time yeah I guess as a tip every element of a warm-up should have a specific purpose um and generally what I look for is a couple of things in a moderate rep range to sort of help literally warm up the muscles I haven't found that that's as necessary in climbing as with some like Field Sports and things you don't need to like you know again like jog run whatever but doing some stuff that's like slightly slightly fatiguing combined to some things that are little bit harder or a little bit more uh like movement pattern based that do a acceptable job of simulating the type of harder things that you're going to do in a session so the more a day is kind of like volume or technique oriented probably the less explicit work you need to do is you can ease and do it sensibly if you're going into like kind of rage on some projects it's probably good to do a couple of easier things that are in a somewhat similar style to kind of get things firing and coordinated um may or may not help with injury prevention depending on the person in circumstance but will likely help you get better quality out of each of your attempts board climbing specifically Moon boarding I don't really know on this one like I think these days Moon boarding is overrated I think they're a great resource under a lot of circumstances but I think that they're too stylistically limited to maybe have quite the favor that they currently see probably a lot of people will benefit from at least stints on the moon board but as like their main training Focus if you have access to other forms of difficult climbing probably disadvantageous specifically there aren't really any bad feet there aren't really any bad hands and it lacks much of like a tension component once you're used to the style so it tends to be pretty snatchy on relatively good holds out of relatively weird positions there's a lot of Merit to that but I think people uh put it on too much of a pedestal so to follow up on that the next subject is board climbing in general yeah I think a well-set spray wall is potentially the best training tool that you can have full stop um they are hard to set perfectly and frequently take more uh sort of rounds of iteration than many gyms want to deal with but with a good one it's like you should be able to train more or less any style of move more or less any difficulty um they're a really really good way to build Fitness and learn technique if any of you viewers have any suggestions for topic areas for us to consider we'll have to Circle back with part two until then train climb send And subscribe oh yeah yeah that too and repeat don't forget to use the link in our description to get 30 off your first Thrive Market order

Channel: Hooper's Beta

Views: 80,969

Keywords: climbing, rock climbing, bouldering, sport climbing, rope climbing, climbon, climb stronger, climb better, rehab, physical therapy, doctor of physical therapy, orthopedics, strength, mobility, function, training, strength training, climb harder, sport, athletics, fun, education, sport training, training for climbing, climbing technique, climbing tips, climbing workout, climbing strength, climbing motivation, endurance training, creatine, diet tracking, moonboard, bcaa, collagen, deload, ice, cold

Id: 3yjaZi9dBN0

Length: 26min 50sec (1610 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 07 2023