One of the best ways to improve your climbing is to find a mentor, a coach, who can help you set up your training schedules. Until you’ve got your own, you can take this Climbing Tip from the Edgeworks Team Coach, Jon Manz. “One important aspect of improving is to manage your training cycles,” explains Jon, “don’t focus on strength every time you train. Vary your work out.” Essentially, we have to establish training days to build important and specific climbing skills and muscles.

You should build a training pattern where you incorporate strength, power-endurance, endurance, and rest days into your weekly schedule. Try this out:

• On day 1, focus on strength; hit up the bouldering wall and weights. You’re looking to increase your strength.
• Day 2 is a power-endurance day. You’re going to head over to roped routes and climb at a consistently hard level (but not your hardest), while increasing your volume of climbing.
• On Day 3, it’s all about endurance. Here’s where you focus on the traverse. Stay on the wall as long as you can.
• Follow this cycle with a good rest day and repeat.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 1st, 2011 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Training.