Four months into a maintenance phase and it becomes awfully hard to get motivated to do a workout. The programme itself is a success. All the gains I made in the off-season and preseason have been maintained thus far. I’m climbing a bit better as my on-the-rock time has been great this summer, but I’m not climbing any harder than at the start of the season. This is exactly how everything was designed: get better when the weather sucked, climb hard early in the season, maintain that level of performance throughout the summer and into fall. Put up tonnes of new problems in the process.
This mental staleness may not have occurred if our weather had been more typical this summer. If we'd had the typical month-long rains and associated clouds of biting insects, I'd have squeezed in a mini off-season when the outdoor climbing conditions deteriorated. Breaking up the long season into two shorter in-season maintenance phases with a more intensive/extensive work in the middle would have been a bit more stimulating. Not that I am complaining of the stellar weather this year. Conditions were amazing, and I did my best to take advantage by climbing often.
But training was getting boring. Though the specific movements as well as the exercise stimulus to each muscle group changed every month, the overall maintenance programme is pretty much the same for it’s entire duration. Physically, I still enjoyed doing the workouts, but mentally I wasn’t there. I found myself slacking off. No longer looking forward to a training session, I skipped it, then decided maybe the whole week off would do me good. I got Shawn to take me through his rings/campus/hang workout, then he joined me for one of my sessions on Kermit. I went back to the in-season workouts for another hard week (since I wasn’t going to climb at all the following weekend I ramped up the volume-load hoping to get mentally and physically pumped), but still was left wanting.
That non-climbing weekend involved a fair bit of driving (and a search for solid sandstone -stay tuned for more about that!). Maybe the humming engine resulted in sympathetic resonance of my brain waves. More likely it was just that being seated for 5 straight hours made me want to move. In either case, I wanted to workout. Not what I’d been doing, not a typical in-season workout, in fact, not a typical workout at all. I really began to crave a type of metabolic workout that I’d done in the past and used quite often with my team sport athletes. Everybody loved to hate these, and the adaptations were positive. The protocol was first reported in the literature about a year ago. The hormonal response is marked, yet the overall duration of a training session is brief. Perhaps my body was in need of these hormonal spikes, as my current levels were not fluctuating significantly with the maintenance programme. The brevity makes skipping them nearly impossible. I thought it would be a good idea to do these for a bit to get back on track motivation-wise.
The pun wasn’t intended, but these are track-based workouts. Though one could make a weak case for them having some sport-climbing metabolic specificity, from a neuromuscular point of view they are not going to be beneficial. More likely, those adaptations will actually hinder climbing ability. I probably should not do these. What if I modified them by employing exercises (movements and resistance) that have more specificity to climbing?
Other metabolic resistance training circuit protocols I’ve used in the past have had phenomenal results, but are incredibly taxing. They have no place in-season, though, as they require deliberate rest and recovery strategies between training bouts to prevent overtraining. Climbing concurrently would be out of the question.
I’d like to train this way, but I want to boulder harder and better, and not miss out on a good outdoor day because I’m tired or sore. I want my cake. I want to eat it, too!
Is there any way I could make it work? I mulled it over on the drive home and came up with a few possible solutions. I reread the pioneering article, and went back in my training log to review what I’d done and what resulted. I looked up other references, and reviewed the charts of some of my teams. I got out the calculator to workout volume-loads, and estimate recovery needs. Eventually, I found the theoretical evidence and enough practical experience to support one solution in particular.
It’s still too early to tell, but so far (just a couple weeks in) I’m psyched to train and to climb. Physically, I’ve felt pretty good throughout the work/training weeks, and great by each weekend. A couple days ago, for example, I worked a new project and stuck two really hard moves that I could barely reach/touch last month. I also was able to repeatedly and easily stick the (crux?) big pinch on Two Zig Zags, a move just beyond my range previously. The next move (one I’ve done before) eluded me though as the pinch was still dripping wet from the previous days torrents. All this was after a few hours spent scrubbing and establishing 3 new problems in the Slab Area, and playing around on a couple potential hard lines up Big Slab.
I’ll post the training programme details, if appropriate, once I get a better gauge of the results. In the mean time, here are some more pics for the online guide.
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| Nutmeg V0 and Pepper Spray V3 are two nice new additions to the Mace boulder. |
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| Porcupine Caves, Cornerstones area |
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| Colt 45, home to ***Two Zig Zags V8 |
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| Dunce Cap V0, Megacrystals Area |
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