My endurance training protocol for E11(Rhapsody)

and then my old Hornet and Tim Barton today heading for an endurance session at the Barton Rock this used to be my daily commute through the hole in the fence and the back of Morrison's car park and walking around to the Barton Rock and I did that five days a week for a couple of years when I was living in the Martin and it was i period in my climbing where I made enormous progress in the background there you can see the face where my Rhapsody is the first d11 traffic in the world and when I started training for that I was climbing around 80 80 plus and that route is 80 plus in the top rope so I had I knew that I had to significantly increase my level from where it was up to solid 80 plus 9A and to have any chance of actually doing the climb and in that period of my climbing I thought a lot about training I changed my training a lot and the product of that was very much to simplify my training right down to what I thought were big priorities in other videos in the past I've spoken about the strength side of my preparation to climb that route down to up my level in general and I'll link to those but in this video I'm going to talk about the endurance training that I did which was extremely simple and extremely effective and the same sorts of sessions and principles are still what guide my engineering training today [Music] so this little wall that I'm just setting below is where I did most of my endurance training for Rhapsody and it's just a steep wall and which is handy because it stays dry most of the time and it's covered in good holds and really with all endurance training you're trying to clock up a large amount of time at specific intensity so the goal picking intensity and then really Park yourself and that intensity for as long as you possibly can up to the point where it would start to compromise recovery or quality of the training session so obviously with a circuit like this it's so low intensity that um you can go essentially indefinitely you can clock up very large amounts of time going round and round and it's really not very stressful at all so I could easily my normal session here would be to do 40 minutes completely on the wall without stopping at all and then maybe have 20 minutes rest or so not keeping it exact because that's not very important and kind of do three rounds of that in a session I'm going to do that five days a week so clocking up quite a lot of time going around this wall but it wasn't really stressful I don't remember being tired when I was doing these sessions as I'm actually doing the moves what I'm thinking about it's primarily the Precision of a movement being relaxed safe [Applause] getting plenty of weight on the feet so as I said many times before on this channel consistency is the most important word in training and although people ask me all the time about lengths of circuits and should people do circuits for 10 minutes on two minutes off these details in general are secondary to a far more important thing which is consistency clocking up lots and lots of time on the wall it's just low intensity right now I am not pumped I do feel like I'm exercising like my forearms feel warm and finally staying there staying for Rhapsody on days like today which is quite good conditions you see that my hands are not really sweating The Climb feels easy so I would feel very much I will relax in easy session even though I was I would do hundreds and hundreds of moves but if I would come here on a sweaty humid hot day then I would actually get quite pumped so we naturally introduce a degree of variation in the intensity and that variation was just spot on it was really really good so getting that aspect of it right wasn't really something that I worried about the thing that I did worry about it was important to worry about was making the time to come here five days a week over anything else that was what was important when I started training here I had done some initial tries on Rhapsody and I had done the individual moves but I was nowhere close to reading it and at that time I was maybe I think I had done 80 plus and had done lots of foreign tattoos I started trying Rhapsody I've tried it in a spring and then when it got to the end of the spring and into the start of the summer and it got too hot to climb hard here then I sort of sat back and I I thought I really really would like to do this route how should I approach it and I decided to start uh a very consistent fingerboarding program which I've talked about in other videos and I'll link to those just look in the description below and I decided to come here and start to do endurance training and really the benefit of this wall in particular was the fact that it removed it from trying to perform the focus was very much on training not on performance that was really important I think I'll move around again how long have we been here like five minutes or so I just feel like I want to move again [Music] it's funny because I actually tried to make this video last Autumn when I was passing by and uh I was in the middle of seeing one of the great things about this walls that it almost never gets wet and it was actually like the wind was blasting right into the wall and it was that I think the only time I've ever seen this wall get hit by the rain and the camera blew over and all sorts so possibly in this video I may mix the footage between the session and that session so I'm going to start this episode off with a platitude about training but also I promise that I'm not going to end with the platitude so the platitude is that the best athlete is generally the one who trains the hardest and pushes the hardest the weird it gets a bit more interesting is to think well okay but how do you define training the hardest and how do you think you're shooting the hardest and uh kind of popular training discussions people often think of this in terms of physical effort so if you think of like endurance training harder than anyone else you might think of pushing through deep fatigue when you're doing circuit after circuit just like trying to hold on in terms of climbing that might be when you're really really pumped just pushing and pushing and pushing and there is some of that there is some of that in the high intensity stuff but endurance training is rather more complicated than this if you're familiar at all with the classic endurance sport world and the discussions of training in those Sports running cycling and swimming you'll I'm sure be aware of the increasing discussion over the last 10 years about something called polarized training rather than spending your time in a kind of mid intensity round about lactate threshold for example and many more athletes are increasingly polarizing their fitting to very low intensities such as Zone one and zone two depending on how you measure that can be heart rate likely other things and or very high intensities which are above lactate thresholds and are actually really really fast almost like sprinting this polarized strategy Works quite well with a very high proportion of the tuning time done at very low intensity that is um an inattentive where you can breathe through your nose you can maintain a conversation it almost feels too easy for most athletes especially amateur athletes um who are accustomed to feeling like exercise should feel hard so they will spend most of their time at those low intensities for long duration high volume or intensity trading but then mix that in with very small amounts potentially reducing the amount of high intensity trading but making that feeling more intense than it had been before so that's a movement that's kind of being rediscovered in the classic Endurance Sports but I'm not going to talk about that I'm going to talk about climbing training now rock climbing is fundamentally different from the classic Endurance Sports it's isometric intermittent isometric exercise rather than rhythmic concentric exercise like those plastic Endurance Sports so even the basic physiology of the movements are different and that has implications for how your blood flows through the muscle and how metabolites um are taken away and things like oxygen and energy supplied in addition to that the exercise is not really whole body exercise although we move our whole bodies when we climb the intensity for our lower body is very very different from the United States and our forearm most of the action is happening here in our forearms and so the total amount of energy that's used is lore it's inevitably going to be lower because there's a little muscle mass involved but the intensity in the forearm might actually be quite High even when the climbing level isn't so high so it gets kind of confusing the other layer of difficulty in characterizing or modeling climbing training for endurance is that the intensity varies dramatically from move to move or even within a move the intensity of the exercise and climbing is all over the place and it makes it very difficult to slaughter into neat categories for for doing training and as a result of that it has been unclear to me at least um and still is unclear how exactly to trade for many endurance claims and should you replicate um the intensity of the claims or your gold claims or should you take more of a polarized approach as in the Sports I don't really know the answer we certainly don't have research to tell us the answer most of the time we have stories of either this and it worked or it didn't work and even that has fraught with problems or like well we didn't test that with some other method to compare there's nothing to compare to so it makes it difficult to know however our own or other people's anecdotes are often always got and they're still interesting and worth talking about so that sort of talk about me so I'm sure you can prove it here in my breathing as I'm going around this Traverse now I'm mostly breathing through my nose but it is still stressful in a way in a psychological way so this rest that I'm on just now can you see that it looks just a little bit awkward when I go into the left and I come into this kind of drop knee I've got my face right in against the wall and it's a little bit of an uncomfortable position for my lower body but because I'm so much I've got so much weight over my feet I do get quite a good rest for not upper body so although the endurance circuit taken as a whole is a low intensity piece of endurance work it still has a difficulty to it and I'm really training myself to try and be relaxed to get relaxed and then stay relaxed in these resting positions because on real claims you don't just need to be not pumped you also need to be composed really at all times that's critical foreign so the other really nice thing about this wall is this jug it might seem like nothing but it's got quite a couple of unusual things that make it really really useful it's above a big drop so effectively when I move out here off the edge of this shelf below me and there's like what 25 foot drop down to the Rocks below so basically I'm soloing here and although I'm not pumped in a moment because I've not been doing that much yet when I come back to this rest I will feel not stressed but not exactly relaxed either and although again I'm doing endurance training but an important second we go again is to improve my psychological composure and also my climbing technique so as a track climber you can have all the endurance in the world but if you come to a joke like this you're a long way above gear you haven't found a wire or a can in this crack here and so you feel a little bit stressed and a little bit unprotected if you're over gripping and holding on really hard onto a jug like this in a dangerous position then you will still burn through all of your power and get very pumped and not be able to continue so at first I would over grip on this stroke I can actually feel that I'm doing it now but over time when I've cleaned back and forward to this rest and hung out here for I don't know let's say five minutes at a time but I've done that hundreds of times then gradually I learned how to hold on to this hold in a more and more relaxed fashion and so I'm also getting a Technical Training aspect just from not moving not not doing moves you know I'm just hanging on a hold and on the root Rhapsody that I was actually training for when I was coming here there is a rest on a big dog like this kind of a sharp edge jug and you've got to be completely fresh when you leave that jug in order to have any chance of getting through the Crux and it was really good for me to train myself really to associate hanging off a drug in a steep position like this with being relaxed rather than associate it with being stressed so when I would get to that joke on Rhapsody and feel ready to attack a Crux so I guess I've climbed around I don't know 120 150 meters of of climbing around 6ba standard a fair bit of that time has just been spent hanging on the rest relaxing just chilling out and so my arms feel like they've had a good bit of exercise but I only have a very light pump like right now if I had to do a hard red point if it was like an 8B or so and I feel like I could probably put my harness on right now and climb an A B because I I'm not really pumped if it was on HC Plus maybe I would need Sony to take a bit of a rest so hopefully that gives you an impression of the difficulty level here the relative difficulty level and so that right after doing it I could step onto quite a hard route but maybe not my absolute limit and certainly after doing three rounds of 40 minutes on the wall at this sort of standard I could easily come back and do the same the next day and the next day and the next day and that's exactly what I would do because again consistency and building up large amounts of time at uh at low intensities is the key to developing good during aerobic endurance so as I was saying when I started this process at the start of the summer of without in 2005 when I had done the moves on Rhapsody and I was really kind of committing to it as a very serious project that I wanted to do but I also knew that I was nowhere near ready to actually climb it by the time I'd done three months of this training protocol I go back on Rhapsody and within a month I talked cleanly and then I was getting on lead and trying to actually do it and if you've ever watched the film The 11 of me trying that that claim it's very much focused on The Late portion of the the process of trying it what isn't really shown in the film is the bulk of it which was just me trying individual moves it took me 10 sessions to actually do the individual moves so by the time I was trying to lead it and I was taking all those Falls that was like almost the very end of the process the progress that I'd made to get to that point that was the bulk of the progress and this three-month period of training here was really the kind of Tipping Point that got me over that here and the fingerboard at home and as I say I've talked to that in other videos and usually people lie in a Continuum between being very explosive athletes and being being very endurance phenotype athletes I would say that I probably sit more on the power end if you like and I am better suited to explosive cruxy climbs and bouldering and I do struggle a little bit to relax and conserve energy and hold on with the minimum amount of force so these sessions because they were so long duration they really just force it into you in the end the combination of raw finger strength that I was developing on the fingerboard together with aerobic endurance capacity which I was building with these sessions combined those together and you've got a really good formula and that's what led me to be doing as hard as Rhapsody which was actually mind-blowing to me um at the time that I was able to do that you know this is one aspect of claiming that I sometimes find hard on this channel I'm a professional climber I've been a professional climber for a long time and so people naturally assume that uh you know climbing comes very naturally to me climbing at a high standard comes naturally to me but it really doesn't in a way I wish I had more footage of my first 10 years as a climber so I was not that type of climber who's straight up to like v11 and 8C sport crimes in the first year climbing you know it took me a long time to figure out how to train and also to do enough training to actually see benefit from it anyway how do we chill maybe I should get back on the wall so obviously your training facilities are going to be different you may well be training in a big bouldering wall or a leading wall regardless of where you train I hope you can see that a key decision I made that facilitated my consistency and hence good outcome from this training was moving house to somewhere I had endless free training 10 minutes walk away at the time I could not afford to train inclining walls often enough or afford the bus fare to travel around to different Crags or walls but a good local crack with an overhang allowed me to get good at climbing anyway I mentioned earlier the platitude that the best athlete is the one who trains the hardest but alluded to the mistake that athletes may make which is having an unhelpful definition of training the hardest in the context of Base aerobic endurance training training the hardest May mean having the discipline to keep the intensity easy enough most of the time but also having the discipline to arrange your life such that you can cloak up the necessary errors at that easy intensity I hope this episode was useful to you and we'll see you in the next one foreign

Channel: Dave MacLeod

Views: 34,370

Keywords: training for climbing, endurance training climbing, training for trad climbing, lead climbing training, bouldering training, circuit training climbing, 4x4 training climbing, rhapsody e11, e11 trad climbs, worlds hardest trad climbs

Id: lIlj2exMlW8

Length: 18min 51sec (1131 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 01 2023