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Training Talk 2: The Warm-Up (Part 2)

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In yesterday’s entry, I talked about why you need to warm up in order to achieve your peak potential and stave off injuries prior to climbing and training sessions. But how do you warm up properly? It used to be that athletes were encouraged to perform passive stretches as a key component of warming up, but these days, this is considered to be counterproductive, causing muscles to actually experience a decrease in power, strength and overall performance in any type of athletic endeavor. So nix the passive stretching, unless you don’t want to climb or train at your highest potential.

Instead, try using the following warm-up protocol:

  1. Start out with a minimum of 5 minutes of low-impact cardio activity. I actually think at least 10 to 15 minutes is a better amount of time spent doing this, but I understand that sometimes, people are pressed for time. What do I do myself? Prior to working out in my home gym, I usually exercise bike for 15 minutes, starting slowly and gradually increasing the intensity until I’ve broken a sweat and my whole body feels hot, right into my fingertips. If I’m going climbing outside, the hike into the crags suffices as an excellent cardio warm-up period. I actually don’t really mind this part of the warm-up, honestly – it’s the climbing-related part that I find a bit more dull at times.
  2. After this general warm-up period, I move onto more sport-specific warming up. This can include climbing at a submaximal level, like warm-up pitches or problems, which are the most commonly used forms of warm-ups by climbers, I would surmise. It can also include exercises and/or dynamic stretches that mimic the motions of climbing, like pull-ups, light finger rolls (standing on the ground and grabbing a couple holds open-handed, then rolling your fingers up into a crimp and then back down into an open-hand position) and high steps. I often integrate dynamic stretches into my climbing warm-up problems or routes by deliberately exaggerating movements in slow-motion that may come into play later on in the day in a much more difficult manifestation. For example, I’ll hang down straight-armed off of two good holds, then drop my feet off entirely and arch my lower back to move my feet away from the wall, then let go with each hand in turn, and then slowly swing my feet back onto the wall, do a pull-up in slow motion, and then continue moving up the route or problem.
  3. After warming up, I’ll usually rest for at least 10 minutes (and up to 45 minutes) before I start to really try anything hard. Sometimes, I use my first attempt on something hard as the last part of my warm-up period, too – it’s like I have to prime my muscles and my body for those specific movements on that specific rock climb, when I’m trying a sport route that’s really challenging for me. Often, I’ll deliberately skip the hardest parts of the hard project on this first attempt of the day, pulling through them and climbing the easier (but usually still hard for me) terrain as my final warm-up.

A question that often comes up in relation to the sport-specific warm-up period is “How many warm-up pitches/problems should I climb, and at what difficulty level?” This is where individuality in athletes really comes into play. The best answer I can give is that you’ll simply have to experiment to determine how much/how hard is the best quantity/type of warm-up climbing for you to experience peak performance, and that the more you work with your warm-up period to optimize it and refine for yourself, the more of an intuitive sense you’ll develop as to when your body is primed and ready to go. I’ve noticed this in myself – I definitely can start to feel it when I’m firing on all cylinders and everything’s smooth like butter. Another thing I’ve noticed is that as I’ve developed more fitness and in particular, more strength and power, the amount of time I need to spend warming up to optimize my power/strength potential has diminished, meaning that I’m primed for powerful routes/problems earlier than I used to be. I’ve also noticed that it usually takes me less time to warm-up for strength and power climbing it does for me to warm up for more endurance-oriented affairs.

If you simply must have a guideline to go with to start developing your own warm-up routine, I’d say for climbing, you need a bare minimum of 5 minutes of cardio (until you break a sweat), and then you need at least two pitches of rock climbing and/or 15 to 20 minutes of easy-to-moderate bouldering to get ‘er done right. If you have more time to warm up, even better. The most important aspect of this, like I said, is to figure out what works best for you as a warm up – but I guarantee that if you operate under the premise that no warm-up is best for you, you’re not only wrong but also, you’re sabotaging your performance/workout potential and flirting with injury.

One thing I’ve found to be really helpful to me is to develop a specific warm-up protocol for every climbing area or training facility that I use regularly as quickly as I can. Once you have a warm-up routine that you’re familiar with, it can become one of your most useful tools in determining where your body’s at on a particular day in terms of potential performance and recovery status. If you’re warming up on familiar terrain and you feel like a big pile of doggy doo-doo, it’s a good sign that you probably shouldn’t be climbing at all, and definitely shouldn’t have any performance expectations for the day. If you’re warming up for weight training and lifts that usually feel easy are inordinately hard, it’s a strong message that lifting isn’t in the cards for you today, unless you want to walk away with an overuse injury. If you breeze through your warm-up routine like it’s nothing and you don’t even feel warmed up, it might be time to up the ante on your warm-up routine, indicating a higher level of fitness and/or strength. This happens sometimes from year to year for me – I have a great warm-up routine at a climbing area one year, and when I come back the next season, I discover that my warm-up routine is like going for a walk with my grandma, meaning it doesn’t do much of anything for me anymore.

The point of this is that warm-ups have the potential to serve us tremendously as athletes on a daily level as well as on a week-to-week, month-to-month, and year-to-year level. Warming up is an integral part of every smart climber’s performance and training regimen, and warming up should never, ever be overlooked or neglected. Perfect your warm-up period, and you’ll increase your chances of climbing and training injury-free and at peak levels every single day you’re active.

Training Talk 2: The Warm-Up (Part 1)

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I hate warming up.

Okay, maybe I don’t always hate it, but I warm up for nearly every climbing session with at the very least a vague sense of impatience. I want to get straight to the good stuff, pushing my body to do moves and sequences that truly challenge me physically, and I want my body to be ready to do that instantly…but that’s just not how bodies work. Shirk on the warm-up, and at best, you won’t perform optimally in that day’s training session or climbing effort. At worst, you’ll walk away with an injury that could have been easily avoided simply by preceding your maximal efforts with a solid warm-up session.

Compared to actual performance or peak training time, warming up tends to be somewhat boring, I think. I find it particularly dull when I’m faced with warming up at a crag where I’ve climbed hundreds of times, and I’ve done all the warm-up routes hundreds of times. I honestly just don’t usually feel psyched to climb the same old routes over and over again, no matter how good they are. This is a good reason to establish an alternative warm-up protocol if this happens to be the case for you, too – but I’m getting ahead of myself here, and I’ll get that option later on. I have to complete my bellyaching about the boringness of warming up first.

I also find warming up not the most fun simply when I’m bouldering in the gym or working out with weights – because again, it’s sort of a waiting game with my body, trying to get it right and gauge when it’s ready to really start going. I want to like warming up, don’t get me wrong – and I’m diligent about doing it, and trying to do it right, of course. I try to keep a positive mindset about it, but to be totally honest, some part of me always feels annoyed that I can’t just start climbing or training and climb or train at 100 percent right off the couch (this is the same part of me that thinks it’s a cruel phenomenon that one hard day of climbing or training can sometimes require two or three days of little-to-no climbing or training in order to recover fully).

So, why do we need to warm up to perform at our peaks physically (and please, spare me the “so-and-so doesn’t ever warm-up and he climbs xx grade just fine;” just like all lame-assed excuses for doing stupid things (i.e. drinking heavily, never training weaknesses outside of climbing, not resting enough) related to rock climbing, the truth of the matter is that so-and-so is probably a genetically gifted freak to a certain extent who can get away with climbing relatively well compared to the rest of the world DESPITE the fact that he makes poor choices about how to treat his body; if he made better choices, he’d probably climb even better…but I digress; back to the topic at hand). The warm-up should be a crucial tactical weapon included in every climber’s training and performance arsenal, because it enables you to take advantage of your body’s full capabilities both physically and mentally.

Warming up has the following potential physiological impacts:

  • Increases the body’s core temperature and muscle temperature;
  • Increases blood flow and therefore nutrient and oxygen transport to muscles;
  • Increases the body’s ability to transport waste products away from muscles;
  • Increases muscular plasticity, making muscles more stretchable and pliable and able to utilize their full range of motion and power/strength/speed potential;
  • Decreases the risk of injury, as more elastic muscles are less likely to get injured;
  • Enhances neuromuscular pathways, making for quicker responses and reaction times (ever feel “fuzzy” or like your climbing brain isn’t quite in synch when you first start climbing, and then feel sharper and sharper as you warm up? This is why…); and
  • Reduces rates of injury.

A good way to think about it is that warming up is sort of like melting a stick of butter – everything in your body becomes more fluid, smooth and efficient as you warm up. But, just like melting a stick of butter, it takes time to render the whole entity liquid, and if you do too much too quickly, you might end up burned instead of flowing and ready to move at peak levels.

Tomorrow, I’ll continue this discussion, sharing how to warm-up properly for climbing or a climbing training workout.