Tag Archives: weight training

Only 12 Pounds To Go!

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So, I found out yesterday that I’m way, WAY closer to reaching my top long-term training goal than I thought I was earlier in the week – and I also discovered just how much being sick makes a person appear much weaker than they actually are when they try to perform physical activities at their limit. What crazy mental shifts I’ve undergone in the past week; it’s been a bit of a wild ride to be in the driver’s seat here (which is kind of how I picture all of us, really – we’re these disembodied spirit beings inserted into these flesh machines that we try to mold and push into what we want them to be, but “we,” meaning the conscious drivers, have only a sort of pseudo-control over what happens to the meat-sacks we pilot).

Let me take you back, briefly, to the start of my concerted training efforts. They begin in January of 2008, when I hurt my ankle so badly in a bouldering competition that I couldn’t walk for six weeks before departing for a three-month trip to climb in Kalymnos. It seemed like totally imperfect timing, but in actuality (like so many injuries and other unpleasant life events), it turned out to be an extremely productive and life-changing episode for me. Since I couldn’t climb or run or even walk, this left me with pretty much no choice but to train…and since I had no weights at that point but I did have a hangboard,  I simply did pull-ups. I could do a set of eight pull-ups when I started. After only six weeks of this, I was sold on the idea (finally!) of training outside of climbing to make gains in climbing…and so my saga with becoming a training-obsessed climber truly began.

Right then, that’s when I established my longest-term training goal, the training goal that has motivated and pushed me all along. It’s not a climbing goal; I have a huge list of those, too – but one of the great things about training I’ve found is that it’s really fun to set training goals to guide and direct me to stay the course as well. They feed my fire to train, just as training feeds my gains in climbing.

This No. 1 training goal, now four years old, is to do a one-arm pull-up.

Last Wednesday, I was psyched that I could perform a one-arm with 32 pounds off. Kevin has built this cool pulley system that allows me to take weight off down to the pound, figuring out just how much help I need to perform a one arm. My left arm was weaker – I needed 55 pounds off that day to do a one-arm. And I did this workout without bouldering or training in advance; I’d been sick, and I just wanted to work my weaknesses and make sure I hadn’t slipped in strength.

Yesterday – wow! I was recovered from sickness fully, I guess. I bouldered with the guys for two hours, observing aloud to Gabe that one thing I’ve realized more than ever this winter, I think due to how much time we’ve spent sport climbing outside, is that I really do suck at bouldering (relative to my sport climbing ability, of course – I’m not comparing myself to other folks). Yes, I’ve gotten better as I’ve gotten stronger, but somehow, this has just increased my awareness of how far I have to go (of course, regularly bouldering with two guys who are way taller than I am and stronger/more powerful than I am only makes my perception of my own weakness that much more pronounced).

Anyhow, back to the training thing – after we were done bouldering, I suggested that we come inside and figure out how close we were to one-arms (Gabe and me; Kevin can do sets of one-arms with a weight vest on). And that’s when I found out – I only needed a measly 12 pounds of assistance to do a one-arm with my right arm. HOLY SH#$! I was totally shocked and of course, delighted. What an amazing development for me, and how perfectly timed for departure for my Spain trip. (Lefty still lags behind at 30 pounds of assistance; part of this is injury-related, but lefty has always lagged…next goal will be to do one with lefty once I’ve done one with righty, of course).

When stuff like this happens to me in both climbing and in training, when I finally at long last succeed or get so close to a long-term goal that I know it’s going to happen, I feel overwhelmed and completely in awe, every time, that someone like me can put in the time and work and effort and actually see the concrete results. It’s absolutely amazing to me, that I can push this flesh suit with so much physical work and emerge with significant gains. I always feel strangely detached from it; I don’t know how to explain it, but again, it’s like I’m driving this thing and I don’t really have control entirely; I’m just trying my best to navigate through the muddy waters with imperfect radar; all the best training intentions and ideas are still as much of an art as they are a science, because our damnably unpredictable bodies almost never act on cue exactly as we expect or want them to, no matter how perfectly we train them.

And that’s another thing – my training has been less-than-perfect; I’ve stumbled and fallen flat on my face numerous times throughout these past four years, as anyone who’s read this for a while knows. I’ve overtrained, I’ve undertrained, I’ve hurt myself and I’ve trained in silly ways (especially early on in this process). Even know, I feel strange about leaving for Spain, as I realized yesterday that I feel excellent in training right now, like I’m recovered from last year’s difficult training and climbing, and I’m ready to put in another strong training cycle – oops, just in time for leaving for a two-month climbing trip in Europe. I just did two hard strength workouts in the same week, which I could never do before, and I felt better in the second workout in all of my lifts (save squats, and when I realized that I wasn’t recovered enough to do them, I dropped the exercise for the day – this is progression and maturation for me as well, because I used to stubbornly adhere to the plan even when sh#$ was sore, and that’s how I got overtrained; lesson learned).

But, now isn’t the time to train; it’s time for Spain, and I can’t be upset about that, and I’m not. I’m just actually super happy that we didn’t get to climb in the Octagon this week; I needed this mental boost in confidence, this concrete evidence of my physical progression. I couldn’t ask for a better send-off, really.

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 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.

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.