This is obviously a massive subject; this article is a quick canter through the most important aspects for climbers.

Physical Training Our bodies are not well set up for rock climbing. We are really designed to move ourselves using our big and strong lower limbs. So, to climb well we have to play to our strengths (using technique to generate force with our feet where possible) and work our weaknesses. Our big weaknesses are the tiny muscles in our forearms which flex our fingers and the muscles which stabilise or move our shoulders and arms. There are many ways to train these muscles to prepare us for our desired climbs. Which activities you choose must depend on your individual circumstances. Thankfully, there are some quite simple set rules our bodies follow with respect to physical adaptations to training. This means we can home in on roughly the best types of things to do just by following the principles. If you do follow (all of) them, you really cant go wrong its inevitable that you will improve! Deciding priorities One of the great challenges in planning some physical training for climbing is how to set your priorities. It is very difficult to be objective about yourself and 99% of us dont use coach to accurately analyse our weaknesses for us. Its really important not to think of your performance limitations purely in terms of the physical symptoms you feel. When you fall off a route, climbers often blame lack of finger strength or endurance. It could be either of those, but there are many other causes besides. Maybe your technique was poor so you had to use more force than was necessary? Even if that was the case, you just feel that the holds were too small and you blame finger strength. Maybe you climbed too slowly because either you hadnt read the route from the ground or you were hesitant through lack of confidence? Yet you still might blame lack of endurance just because you inevitably feel pumped. Understand that the causes of your limitations and the symptoms you feel when you run up against them may not be the same thing! Often, asking your climbing partner how they think you did can reveal some more objective insights into your weaknesses. Another way is to watch a very good climber climb the same route. If they climbed it like you did, yet you failed, then maybe you can say it was lack of strength or fitness. In this way you can avoid wasting your time. If you dont pay attention to technique and tactics you could end up working hard on endurance for a decade but still failing to realise the improvements you could have had in 6 months if you had perfected good tactics. In summary, think hard about what the real limitations are, then work hard to sort them out. The working hard part will always be easier than the thinking part. Dont lose sight of the big picture; all the aspects discussed above interact to make you the climber you are. The most important aspect should always be having fun. Basic principles the most important part! Overload

Specificity Reversibility Individuality Overload Your body has the remarkable quality of adapting to its surroundings and demands. Muscle is one of the most adaptable tissues we have. The adaptation we are after is for the muscle to get stronger and fitter. For this to happen we have to tell it to adapt (it wont do it on its own because there is a massive energy cost to change your muscle physiology). The stimulus it responds to is being forced to do more work than it is accustomed to. A very simple concept. To become stronger and fitter, you have to do more than last month or last year. This more can take different forms, it can be more intense (more force/harder moves) or more volume (more or longer routes per unit time). If you did 10 routes at the wall, three nights per week last winter, are you doing more this winter? If not, you may not be producing an overload on your muscles and therefore not telling them to improve. Specificity This concept is summed up by the idea What you do, you become. If you spend much of your waking hours pumped, you will have good endurance. If you avoid taking on large runouts, you will never be good at them. From this principle, you can immediately start to build your own training schedule: Say you want to get better at single pitch traditional climbing. The pitches are about 80 moves long and take over 20 minutes to complete. You will spend an average of 30 seconds on each hold. You normally fail because you get too pumped after a while. So you need to replicate this as closely as you can in your training. If you only climb routes at the climbing wall which take less than 2 minutes to complete, you will get better at 2 minute climbs, but might actually get worse at 20 minute ones. This type of self-analysis of the climbs you are aiming for is what you need to foster. Boulderers are often particularly bad at paying attention to the specificity principle. If you are training to climb problems on real rock, is spending whole winters climbing on large blobby pinches on an indoor bouldering wall really the best use of all your energy and time? Reversibility Use it or lose it. This principle refers to the rather irritating tendency for our bodies to let go of abilities (mental or physiological) that we are not using habitually. It is the reason why the large majority of climbers spend a fair bit of time training each winter, yet somehow seem to still be climbing the same grades next winter!. If you train four months of the year (say winter evenings at the wall), well done, you have worked hard. What a shame to let it all slip away because of a summer of climbing outside a little more sporadically and the odd week here or there when you went on holiday or work got a bit much.

The reversibility principle has a silver lining though reversibility maintenance. It turns out that it takes much less effort to maintain the same physical level than it does to improve. In practice this means if you have to train three times a week for an hour on a fingerboard to get finger strength improvements, you will only need one session a week to maintain that level. You can use this feature of our physiology to make sure, with just a small commitment over those busy periods when life gets in the way or circumstances change, to prevent yourself slipping back to square one each year. Individuality Due to our genetic make up and the effects of our physiological history in life, we all respond to physiological stimuli (training) at slightly different rates. In some sports this means that you might never reach the top level even with the best training schedule possible. Climbing is less like this because it hasnt reached a really high level yet and it relies on a very wide range of physical and mental skills. In practice what climbers have to pay attention to get the best from their training is to find out through trial and error what works for them, and also to find ways round the aspects they are not so good at. Another important point here is to remember that we are whole people not just training robots you might be good at getting strong but hate training on your own. In this case, if you do lots of strength training it could put you off the whole sport. A common example of this principle in action is the injury prone boulderer. They are strong and respond well to training and hence become quite ambitious and also quite focused on the strength aspect of improving at climbing. But they keep getting injured fingers. This has caused many a climber to get frustrated and eventually give up climbing. The injury prone climber needs to accept what they cannot change but find a way round it. If they become more focused on technique and train less aggressively, they will climb better and give their injury prone body more time to get used to hard training. The end result being good technique, less tendency to get injured and, eventually strong fingers too. Not bad eh? Practical/mental problems The first aspect of physical training to think about once you have digested the principles is a mental aspect (remember, we are whole people, we need to be happy doing what we are doing to get better): How are you going to enjoy physical training which can be an intensely monotonous process at times? For the most ambitious climbers this problem becomes the central issue in how hard you will eventually climb; the harder you climb, the more you have to enjoy the preparation. You have to decide whether you like doing training on your own. If you do naturally, great! You already have a really important quality that will stand you in good stead. If not, its not a problem; you just have to think up some ways to make it fun. Do you enjoy it more when you have a competition to train for? Can you time your training so you meet up with friends? Do you work harder when others are watching you? Maybe even just thinking about training in a different way can remove the boredom factor. For instance I cant afford to climb in a climbing wall as often as Id need to get stronger, so I use a fingerboard in my house 5 days a week for 90 minutes. I pick a

good CD, stick it on and get hanging. I just think of it as listening to a CD and having a break from work. Before you know it, youre done. The nitty-gritty Its impossible to write down a formula for what to do to be a strong and fit climber, because a single one doesnt exist. The only guidelines are the principles I described above and some aspects that nearly all climbers need to work on. Finger strength In rock climbing your fingers can never be strong enough, so working on finger strength is never wasted time unless you do it at the expense of other types of training or if its causing you injury. Up to a pretty high level, bouldering is the best way of getting stronger fingers because it challenges different gripping positions and works technique at the same time. You need to apply the basic principles you want to get good at using small holds, so you need to find an angle and types of moves than allow you to do this. If you are a beginner this will be a slab. You can also use supplementary techniques to get strong fingers like campus boarding and fingerboarding. Even for the most ambitious climbers they should always remain just that; supplementary. They should be used in addition to real climbing, not instead of it. Otherwise they will ultimately make you a worse climber by several different subtle ways. It is easy to give yourself chronic injuries to the tendon supporting structures by doing lots of finger strength training. Your fingers are small structures and not designed for supporting your body weight treat them as such (i.e. with care). It takes years of slow, steady improvement for them to adapt to hanging off small holds. Specifically, try to climb in control and be ready to let go if something nasty happens which might pull a finger. The most common cause of finger injuries is when your feet suddenly slip off giving a sudden loading on the fingers. If you do very repetitive types of training such as laps on problems or campus boarding, take care to vary the exercises and dont be scared to take a few days off if something doesnt feel right. Remember that good recovery from training makes a huge difference to your susceptibility to training injuries (sleep, diet and lifestyle). Fingerboarding is a very powerful tool for getting strong fingers because you can set up a very simple and cheap wooden rung above a doorframe at home and do short sessions frequently. This means more training but you dont get as tired as when you do a full session at the climbing wall. Make sure you dont replace your climbing with this training or your technique will suffer. You can use fingerboarding to tie in with endurance training by doing a short (20-90 mins depending on your standard) session before your endurance session (or an outdoor climbing day). It doesnt work so well the other way round.

Fingerboard workout

There are many commercially available types of fingerboard to fit above a doorframe. You dont need to go to this expense. A 20mm thick length of sanded wood with a slightly rounded edge is all you need. Remember you can also use holds on the bouldering wall or the crag. Make sure you use chalk as sweaty fingers can slip under big loads and cause tendon injuries. You must also hang with your elbows slightly bent as if starting to do a pull-up. Hanging from straight arms repeatedly causes elbow injuries. Do several easy hangs and pull ups to get thoroughly warmed up. A bar is useful to start off with to increase blood flow and loosen the muscles, progressing to easy hangs and then pull-ups on the fingerboard itself. The warm-up should take between 10 and 30 minutes. Work through as many different grip positions as you can (this will depend very much on your current ability) including: 4 finger open-handed 3 finger open-handed 4 finger crimp 4 finger half crimp 2 finger pocket (middle fingers) 2 finger pocket (index + middle finger) Mono pocket (middle finger) You are aiming to perform each hang for 5-8 seconds at the limit of your ability. It should feel very hard to hang on. There are many ways to adjust the difficulty level to create the right intensity. You can use one or both hands. If you need to reduce your body weight you can stand in a suspended length of bungee, cord or a chair at the optimum distance in front of the board. You can work on different combinations of fingers, for example, 4 fingers with one hand and two with the other (swapping hands for each set). Wearing a weight belt or doing pull-ups while hanging on also increases the difficulty. At first only a few hangs will be enough to improve. You will over time develop an awareness of how much volume you can handle. You will need to increase this volume in steps very carefully, sometimes staying at the same level for months. I have been training hard for ten years and I do 5 sets of each grip, on average 4 times a week for around 8 months of the year. You can vary the focus of your workouts to suit your ambitions and weaknesses at the time. For instance if you are going on a trip to an area with lots of pockets, you can do more open-handed and 2 finger pocket work. Playing a CD or watching telly is a good way to prevent boredom while you do it. Because the sessions are short, you can build up to doing it quite often (several times a week). But its best to take breaks from it every so often as it is a very repetitive type of training. Finger strength is very slow to develop after the first few weeks so you need to stick at it for months and years to really reap the rewards. The plus side of this is that you will notice a slow steady increase in the difficulty of moves you can do and this type of training (if you are doing the other things right too) could be your passport to some impressive grades. Endurance

These days, most climbers use route climbing in indoor walls or sport climbing outside to improve their endurance. This is without a doubt the most efficient way to improve you ability to climb routes. There are some other methods too such as intervals on long boulder problems which have been described in detail in the magazines and climbing websites. In this section Ill simply go through some the aspects that hold many climbers back from getting the most out of their time spent training endurance. Many climbers big mistake in deciding what endurance training to do is not thinking about specificity. You must always try to replicate your eventual climbing goal in your training. If you are preparing to lead long E3s next season, think about what will cause you to fail. If the answer is lack of endurance near the end of long pitches (which take 30mins-3 hours to lead), then you need replicate this situation by focusing more on high volume, lower intensity climbing. This could mean doing a wider, flatter pyramid of routes per session at the climbing wall. For instance, doing 15 routes (~ 225 metres) up to F6c rather than 8 routes (~ 120 metres) and trying to climb three F7as before feeling wasted and dropping to F6a. Its quite common for climbers to use a certain cliff, or maybe even a particular route to build up their endurance on a seasonal basis (Hamish Teds at Dunkeld is a much abused route for this purpose). It can be good for the motivation to be on familiar ground and revisit a route you enjoy, and the routine of doing the same thing can be very effective for keeping people going. However, it is better to mix things up in the long run. The underlying purpose in training is to apply stress to the body as a stimulus. Remember Its got to be emotionally and physically hard work to force the body to react (especially if you have been at it for years). For some quite subtle reasons, training in exactly the same way, on exactly the same routes year after year, even if you are trying hard, can be ineffective for improving. So try somewhere new! To improve from year to year in climbing routes, you have to do more. You can increase the grade of the climb to create the overload. But because of the specificity principle this doesnt always have the desired effect. Always keep in mind what you are training for and keep track of the changes in the intensity (grade) and volume (number of sessions and routes). This is easier if you write it down. Otherwise you can slip easily into a yearly process of going through the motions without any real progression happening. Training endurance doesnt always mean getting pumped. If you want to get all round fitness for different types of routes, there are three main types of adaptation you need to stimulate. 1. Anaerobic endurance training. This is the name given to the intense pump associated with short routes (i.e. anything from about 10 moves to 2 minute climbing wall length routes). The most efficient way to improve is by doing several routes not far below your maximum level. The first couple should feel comfortable, the new few should feel hard and the last 2-3 should feel desperate and right at your limit. The adaptation which takes place is an improved release of energy in large muscle fibres You can get through a few more moves despite being very pumped.

2. Aerobic Endurance training. This is the longer distance type endurance you need to do long sustained routes from 2 minutes to 3 hours long). It allows you to delay getting pumped and to recover quickly from difficult moves and handle a lot more of them. You can get this type of endurance by doing several different balances of route difficulty and volume. All of these will involve doing many routes and 2-5 sessions per week to get an improvement. The adaptations include more efficient energy release from all muscle fibre types and improved blood flow to the muscles (see next item). 3. Capillarisation training. This type of training involves long sustained periods (20-60mins at a time) of relatively easy climbing. It causes the muscles to become chronically flushed with blood and stimulates the growth of a denser network of blood vessels in the muscle. This improves your endurance, especially the rate at which you recover from moves or routes. Another important benefit is recovery. It can help you recover from more intense endurance and strength training if you are training at an advanced level. Because you do a lot of moves in a low stress situation, you can use it to work on technique too! How much time you spend doing each or all of these types of training depends on what kind of climbing you want to get better at. Its also worth remembering the effect of strength on endurance. If you are stronger, each move is easier for you, so you will automatically have an endurance advantage (although this will not be the case if you have trained strength at the expense of endurance training). Other aspects There are many other physical qualities which might help you climb better such as core body tension, flexibility, general cardiovascular health and other physical training practices that can be grouped under the term lifestyle choices. I will cover some points about these in future articles. Separate notes - young climbers Climbers in their adolescent or pre-adolescent years have some additional aspects to think about when deciding how to get better at climbing. Training hard for sport during development has some risks (but also some huge benefits). Motivation If you love everything about climbing and want to do it as much as possible and get really good, thats great! Go for it. Being totally psyched is one of the best feelings climbing gives you. Keep in mind what it is that gets you fired up and excited and follow that. In other words, be driven by your own thoughts; if you ever find yourself going climbing or training because youve got to then ask yourself if you are really enjoying it. Dont let others steer you too much although if someone you know well thinks you are doing something wrong or should think about things (especially when it comes to bold climbing) its a good idea to listen. Remember that physical improvement comes slowly; you cannot shortcut this without storing up problems for later on. Physical training Heavy training at a young age needs to be done according to some carefully applied rules, otherwise you can get some serious injuries which will defeat

the whole point of doing the training in the first place. However, it is also the key to reaching your full potential as an athlete. If you are really serious about getting good at climbing, you will understand that you need to educate yourself and be patient and careful. Getting some advice from a professional coach is a good insurance policy against injuries caused by your own trial and error. If you dont want to go that far, some careful research from up-to-date sources will help guide you. For climbers the most significant risk comes from heavy strength training. It takes a long time for the body to adapt to high loads on small body parts like the fingers. Repetitive high loads from hard bouldering and things like fingerboards, campus boards or weights can cause deformities in growing bones and strains to lengthening tendons which have not built up resistance to high loads yet. For this reason its best to do only a little of these types of training before you are 15. If you gently introduce the body to these types of training over these early years, it will be ready to do more without getting injured. Once you reach 15/16 it is a good time to do more work on strength. Your hormone balance in the late teens creates a good opportunity to get strong. But again it must be stressed that the progression must be slow and it is very hard not to over-do it without getting some good supervision from an experienced professional. In climbing it is an advantage to have a low body fat percentage (well actually it is thought to be a big advantage but its not nearly as big as its been made out to be). But young climbers often go too far with staying thin to shortcut their development to high grades. This is a very bad idea in the long run. It will limit your ability to reach your strength potential and make you too tired to climb as much as you otherwise would. For girls it is even worse it will delay menarche and affect your bone health and possibly even psychological health. Technique To get good quickly, young climbers should focus on technique; learning to climb REALLY well. Why? Because you can safely do it as much as you like and because your young brains learn faster than any other time in your life. Go out and climb as many routes as you can, hook up with other good climbers and learn from them. Visit different areas, and enjoy them. Soak it all up. By the time you have learned to move well, your body will be ready to get strong too then things will really start to happen.