Tag Archives: strength training

A Final Workout & Off We Go

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It’s 5 a.m., and I’ve been awake since 3:30. I pulled myself deliberately from a weird dream that was going nowhere, preferring to be awake instead. I didn’t realize how early it was, of course. As seems to always be the case when I’m about to travel, I’ve been sleeping less and less through the past few nights, culminating in this past night of only 5 hours of sleep. I actually don’t mind this all that much; with a huge time change ahead of me, I figure the more I can sleep on the plane, the better, and the more tired I am, the easier this will be to accomplish. So I just told myself that I woke up at 11:30 this morning in Spain – and I never sleep in that late!

Yesterday wasn’t the frenzy of packing that usually takes up the day prior to traveling for me. We’d spent much of Sunday packing and cleaning the house, making the pace much easier and more casual yesterday. This was nice; I had coaching clients to respond to in the morning, had to drop of keys and visit with the neighbor who watches over my house while I’m away, and had to get in a pre-travel, second-day on training session in anticipation of sitting on my butt on a plane for two days.

Training went awesome, again. Given that I’d done a hard double session the day before, with morning bouldering and afternoon weight training at a maximal-strength level, I didn’t expect much out of it in terms of performance. My energy levels were pretty decent, though, considering the previous day’s efforts. I struggled with warming up, as I often do, wanting to get right to the good stuff…I’d walked the dog for 45 minutes (cardio part is always fine with me), but the warming up specifically for climbing part of it was the same challenge it always is, just trying to pace myself and make sure my body was ready to do a set of 4x4s.

We did the same problems we’ve done the last few times for this workout, the last time being last Thursday, when we did a 4×2, and we both felt sick and worked. Awesomely, Kevin felt recovered enough to do really well with the workout yesterday; this bodes well for traveling (he’s been hacking and sniffling since the OR Show; such a bummer). I surprised myself by feeling strong enough that on the first go-round, the problems all felt casual, especially when compared to the last time. Moves that seemed big or powerful seemed easy. I did notice a pumped feeling in my right forearm pretty fast, and this is unusual for me – I don’t get pumped in my forearms much. It still didn’t make me fall off, and it gradually diminished as we got more deeply into the workout.

However, what happened through the course of four laps on four problems proved how worked my body was, strength/power-wise, from the previous day. Every time I climbed each problem, the holds got farther and farther apart. On the last effort on each problem, the holds looked so far away that I pretty much knew I couldn’t do certain moves, though I fought with my pessimistic mind to do those few more moves that it told me I couldn’t do (and this is so very key to succeeding on hard routes – the ability to override the internal messages of “can’t”). On the fourth lap on problem three, I managed to do about five more moves than my brain thought my body could do before total failure set in. I hopped back on to finish the problem…but I was thoroughly destroyed for my fourth go on problem four. I literally couldn’t do a single move on my own, so Kevin gave me weight off for three-quarters of the problem, until even that felt useless and I came off. Awesome. Total destruction – the first time it’s happened in this workout for me. Yes!

I cooled down with some easier problems and some light work on my fingers, plus a full stretching session. I was super happy with the day’s workout, as I know there’s no way my body could’ve dealt with two training days in a row like this not too long ago. The failure felt good; I didn’t feel hurt or overtrained, and I don’t feel terribly sore or overworked this morning (though admittedly, I am ready for some full nights of sleep, for sure). I just feel ready to climb onto a plane, to sit back, relax and enjoy my flight – hopefully sans screaming babies, loudmouthed babblers and/or coughing nightmares (aside from my hubby) sitting anywhere near me.

Two Days ’til Departure

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It’s a cloudy-ish morning on the last morning of the last day that I could possibly climb in the Octagon this winter, and I’m thinking today will turn into another indoor workout day. Our blissful January sunny days escaped us in the past couple of weeks, reminding us that yes – it is still winter in Wyoming, and we simply can’t expect to climb outside with any regularity. We have to get when the getting’s good, and give up when there’s nothing left to get. At least this spell of not-so-inviting weather synched well with our trip to Salt Lake City and Kevin’s ensuing illness (he’s almost recovered, but not quite there yet). It would’ve been much worse if he’d been sick and the weather had been great, I suppose.

This means letting go of sending all I’d hoped to send before we left, but I’m much more okay with this than I’ve ever been before. I know I can just come back stronger and fitter, and that the routes will always be there. I don’t even feel like they’re failures, which I perhaps would have considered them in the past, because I’m rational enough to see how much I gained from working on these routes (in all aspects of being – mental, physical, emotional and spiritual) – and I also feel like I’ve only just engaged with them; they’re not climbs that I’ve been seriously beating my head against for months on ends. I’ve had a handful of days to try them, and a handful wasn’t quite enough. Fine by me; I’m super excited to return from Spain in April when the weather’s more stable to finish them off.

This is a great thing, actually – to feel like I’m about to head off on one of those “adventures of a lifetime,” but at the same time, feeling totally excited when I think about what’s to come after my journey abroad. I love never feeling bummed to come home; it’s an awesome way to be and live, and I hope that I always feel this way, no matter where my home base happens to be on the planet. I’m super psyched for Spain, and the reality that it’s really happening is starting to sink in, finally…I spent all day yesterday crafting upcoming coaching plans for clients, knowing that jet lag would make this pretty much impossible to do well in my first days there. And piles of belongings that need to come with us are making their appearances around the house as we collect our lives into bags once again, whittling them down into the most important stuff. (I thank the stars for wonderful inventions like the Kindle, which has made it so that I can bring a whole library of reading materials with me, saving myself the heaviness and space that books used to take up in my luggage).

It seems like these days, I’m happy with whatever happens and see the good in most everything, most of the time. I admittedly felt bummed about not climbing outside this past week – but only until I started my weight-training workout. Then I realized how much that bolstered my confidence and belief in myself and my training choices – it ended up being a better use of my time in terms of setting me on the right mental path for Spain. The day after that, Kevin was well enough for a little gym session, and we did some light bouldering and then a light power endurance session (4 by 2 instead of 4 by 4), and it felt wonderful. I was really powered down for more maximal moves, but my power endurance and endurance felt good; it’s always interesting to me how you can target a different energy system even when you’re tired and have a worthwhile workout, often emerging feeling better than you did before you worked out, so long as you stay away from overdoing it or delving too far into taxing the energy system that’s already fatigued from the previous day’s workout.

So today, maybe no climbing outside, but that’s fine; I’d like to have a fun bouldering sesh with the guys, maybe do some weights afterward (depending on the bouldering session’s intensity and how I feel), and then do a brief power endurance workout tomorrow, if possible. Though tomorrow will be busy with coaching and packing, it’d be nice to set off on the journey tired so that I can make the 8-hour time difference switch more easily, hopefully sleeping on the plane as much as possible.

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.

Calm & Centered

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What a contrast – yesterday when I wrote, my energy was scattered, frenetic and unfocused, making it hard for me to concentrate on anything. Today, I feel calm and centered once again, ready to engage fully with each task I have ahead of me throughout this day. This highlights just how important pushing my physical being regularly is for me to maintain an even and focused keel on all fronts. When I don’t exercise enough, I start to feel insane. Funny thing, though – when I exercise too much, I also start to feel unbalanced and off-kilter in my mind. It’s all about the middle ground, maintaining the right level of exercise volume and intensity for my being’s current state of being…a delicately balanced tightrope act. I’ve made too many blunders and missteps off the high wire to count, in both directions. However, I’ve definitely landed far more times in the too-much category than on the not-enough side of things.

Yesterday, though, I was starting to fall into the not-enough-exercise mindset, making me irrational and illogical. I’d thought we were possibly going to climb outside, giving me the ultimate climbing fix – the Octagon! Sport climbing! All day outside! Laughter! Sunshine! Movement! Great cardio, too! – but alas, the clouds, wind and Kevin’s ongoing struggle to kick the flu conspired against us. While I was only sick for a couple days, this bug has bitten Kev with a vengeance, unfortunately. Though he wanted to try to put in at least a little bouldering gym session yesterday, his shivering, hacking body denied him even that escape, sending him straight back into the house and back to bed. What a bummer. I’m just hoping he can kick the sickness out entirely by the time we leave for Spain, since traveling ill would just plain suck.

Sitting alone in the bouldering gym, heated to perfect climbing temps, I felt totally uninspired and unmotivated, even after not climbing for four days. It’s so strange, this feeling – I’m realizing that I simply don’t really love or even much like climbing in the gym anymore. From someone who once spent more time in the gym than outside and maybe somewhere secretly deep down inside preferred climbing in the gym much of the time over climbing outside, this is an interesting development. I feel no love for fake climbing; something really important is missing from the experience for me – or maybe more than one thing.

Climbing outside means breathing fresh air deep into my lungs, inhaling the light scents of junipers or pine trees or wildflowers carried on the breeze. Climbing outside challenges my sensation of touch to the maximum as my hands feel for the slightest of indentations for better purchase on one-of-a-kind handholds, while my feet dance an at-this-point instinctive ballet to position my body efficiently for every (hopefully) fluid movement I make. Climbing outside treats my eyes to incredible natural settings, rendering the entire human world and all related concerns infinitesimal, inconsequential and insubstantial. Climbing outside wraps me in a feeling of oneness with the universe, self-completion, pure joy…and the experience is almost always shared with other like-minded souls, making it a deeply communal activity, too, which also feeds a crucial part of my humanity, the social animal.

Take away the social component of bouldering indoors and I guess you take away one of the key aspects of it that can make it truly fun for me, I realized yesterday, faced with all the gym’s holds glaring down at me but no one to climb with on them to make them seem fun. Plus, I struggle to make up the right kind of problems for myself in the gym – I usually make up stuff for myself that I think is hard at first but ends up being too easy/my style; my partners are better at gauging where I really am and what I’m capable of (and vice versa, to a certain extent). And I never feel like at this point that the best or most efficient way for me to develop more strength involves gym bouldering, honestly. I still struggle with straight-up upper-body strength, above all else – so throwing away a first-day on doing a half-assed strength session on my own in the bouldering gym seemed like not a good call, especially given my lack of enthusiasm (yup, the f’ing Octagon has ruined my winter bouldering gym tolerance for sure — totally spoiled now, want outdoor climbing and want it now).

Change of plans – after doing a few warm-up laps/campusing, I came back to the house to put in a full weight-training session, for the first time in three weeks. It dawned on me that this could be good in a number of ways. It would allow me to test my theory about Ocatgon climbing – does it really help develop strength, or am I kidding myself because I just want to climb outside? And it would allow me to test how close I am to doing a one-arm pull-up. And it had been so long since I’d weight trained without climbing first that I realized it might be fun to just weight train fresh, not already carrying some fatigue.  Finally, a weight-training session would help me assess how far along my nerve impingement is in the healing process, since the last time I weight trained, it was pretty pronounced.

To make a long story short: 1) Yes, the Octagon has helped me get stronger or at the very least, not lose any pure strength. I lifted as strong or stronger in all of my lifts than I did last time I lifted. Cool. 2) If I weighed 85 pounds, I would already be able to do a one-arm pull-up. Alas, since I’m 5’6” and weighing 85 pounds would mean I’d have a BMI of 14 (i.e. severely underweight/emaciated), this is never to be. (I’m being sarcastic; I’d never want to weigh 85 pounds, don’t worry). But I’m way closer to a one-arm than I was before, even three weeks ago – I’m taking off much less weight, and since the pulley system adds friction, it’s actually probably more like if I weighed 95 pounds (we’ll see when we make up our more efficient pulley system here soon). Not that I’ll ever weigh 95 pounds, either, mind you. Not a chance. Must get stronger! 3) Weight training fresh was awesome. I felt amazing. It was a total blast. 4) My left arm is WAY better than it was three weeks ago; way less fragile and more stable. I’ve rehabbed it properly by the choices I’ve  made; it’s improved tremendously, and it seems on track this morning for total recovery soon.

I put in a solid, lengthy workout, and I did it proper – proper warm-up (next Training Talk Topic, hopefully tomorrow’s post), great session “belly,” and proper cool-down, too. I trained my fingers/forearms after all the other lifts, as always training my strength after my weakness, which I believe is the right way to do it (this felt awesome, too). I also managed to exercise some restraint on myself in everything I did; instead of going for total destruction/annihilation, I opted for moderation, stopping before completely trashing areas of my body, which is a tendency of mine – especially with things I’m good at, like finger training. Instead, I gave myself a number of sets for each exercise and an intensity level prior to starting, and I stuck with it. When I was done with everything and I felt ebulliently high and like I wanted to do more, I managed to walk away, too – and that’s always been an issue with me and big workouts. Usually, I start feeling better and better and better the longer I work out, and  then, of course, I just want to keep on working out – and that’s when injuries can happen, especially the insidious kind that creep up behind you on the following day to tell you that you should’ve stopped sooner, if only your body could’ve given you that message in the moment instead of delaying the response until later.

Last night, though, I walked away feeling great, ate a nice dinner, and then did some stretching, self-massage and heating of the impinged area later on. Today, as I said at the start of this entry, I feel calm and centered again, confidence restored as I realize that I needed that weight workout to stabilize my mind as much as I needed it for my body; seeing that I’m stronger makes me feel more confident about the choices I’ve made this month (climbing outside in the Octagon instead of climbing/training inside) and more confident about my left side’s healing process, too. Today, I’m considering either a power endurance workout or a light restitution workout later on, but I’m holding off on that choice until afternoon – because sometimes it takes a while for the full repercussions of a workout to sink into my body, and I don’t want to overdo it right now, on the cusp of leaving for Spain.