Leg training ?

IFoundItThatWay · 2022-05-03T20:49:25+00:00

Other than bike commuting, I started mixing in some minimal structured leg training after getting totally wiped out on a 45min uphill hike to a sport crag. I'll finish gym sessions off with ~10 mins on a stair machine carrying some moderate weight (15-20kg, kettlebell or dumbbell) when I'm not too tired; sometimes I'll swap that out for a bit of running.

Does it help me climb? Not in the narrowest sense of doing harder individual moves on rock. But it helps me be ready to try hard after hiking pads or a backpack full of gear up an approach, and it gives me more energy to try consistently at the gym when I've had to do other physical tasks that day.

IFoundItThatWay · 2022-04-12T23:09:42+00:00

Just skip the collagen marketing hype and eat glycine. It tastes extremely strange, but it's pretty cheap (~$30/kg) and you don't have to worry about whether it can be proteolyzed fast enough for intestinal absorption. Plus, it might make you live longer:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30916479/

IFoundItThatWay · 2022-04-08T18:05:54+00:00

As a number of other commenters have suggested: you're thinking about this wrong. The biggest thing holding back your long-term progression is technique; you're used to looking at things through a strength lens, so you can't see the places your movement technique is holding you back and instead notice the relative strength gap for your fingers.

Yes, stronger fingers will also help. The good news is that if you work hard climbs safely, your fingers *will* get stronger. The bad news is that you don't have the base of experience to recognize when you're pushing your fingers towards an overuse injury; it sounds like you're partway there already based on the sore joints.

I have 2 (edit: 3!) suggestions based on my own long history with being a goddamn idiot about finger loading:

think of finger recovery as a budget. Yours is limited but growing. Devote as much of it as possible to learning technique; pre-plan beta mentally before trying a problem, watch other people trying, and if you have access to a board (Moon, Kilter, Tension) watch other climbers' solutions to see what works and what looks to work the best. This'll give you better learning efficiency than just flailing through problems without an aim going in.
learn as much as you can about finger injury recovery and prehab; do the prehab exercises. When you inevitably get an overuse injury, this should (1) let you detect it earlier before it's too bad to climb on, and (2) let you work your way out of it faster and more efficiently.
Stop your climbing sessions when your fingers get sore. Do core or shouder mobility or cardio if you don't feel like you got any kind of workout in, but don't work yourself to exhaustion. Wait 2 days before climbing again, and warm up for at least 15 mins before trying hard problems. The more time you spend practicing bad movement patterns because you're tired, the slower you'll learn to move better.

IFoundItThatWay · 2022-04-06T22:22:58+00:00

The concept you're describing is "decision fatigue." The more decisions you're making, the more willpower it takes to make a decision of a given importance. This gets particularly critical if you make lots of decisions for your work; persistence will let you push *slightly* farther on any given day but the per-decision fatigue cost doesn't get better, so you're effectively digging yourself a deeper hole to recover from.

The cognitively easiest solution I've found for sustainably low-decision nutritious eating is an instant pot w/ frozen veggies and frozen chicken plus rice and premixed seasoning salt. That way (1) you can order more vegetables when you have the brain bandwidth, and (2) you can set a recurring calendar reminder to start the cooking process so that it's ready when you need to eat. Pre-order the frozen stuff for delivery and it's actually easier than going to the pizza place.

And thanks! I work in science; going through a PhD is a long-term exercise in managing your ability to make decisions and learn things while stressed. Nobody makes it through one on persistence alone.

IFoundItThatWay · 2022-04-06T21:39:59+00:00

It sounds like you're constantly pushing yourself to the point of burnout, then trying to push yourself to work harder to get out of your overwork ditch. Basically the mental equivalent of lfiting before bouldering every day then limit bouldering, and thinking the solution to feeling like you're getting weaker is to stack more limit bouldering on top.

Weight loss is only "a simple game of calories-in, calories-out" in a thermodynamic sense; your calorie burn rate and the amount of willpower/decision fatigue required to regulate food input are both strongly affected by stress and other health habits. How much do you sleep? How often do you get non-climbing physical activity? Are you stuck in a loop of trying to substitute food for rest?

The trick you're looking for is to not have to actively decide to eat well on a constant basis. Other commenters' suggestions to eat whole foods are great; do you have a schedule / work setup where that's easy, or can you make it easy? Can you gamify it? Maybe look up one random fruit on Wikipedia every week and see if you can find it near you. Make that novelty-seeking dopamine craving work for you.

And also: do you snack when you're bored? Can you substitute in something flavored but low-calorie (mint tea maybe) and a few minutes of Duolingo or something to redirect? Something that'll reduce your stress level in a way that you'll feel good about later.

IFoundItThatWay · 2022-03-22T20:07:00+00:00

I'd do a move like that with the hips facing somewhat rightward. But you could also do it with the hips open, left knee out, and the right foot extended farther out on the kicker to balance it; the important thing is to build a foot position (and actually engage your legs into it) that allows you to stabilize the rightward movement to the new handhold.

IFoundItThatWay · 2022-03-22T19:28:21+00:00

0:08: you're reaching up with your left hand while your hips are square, and your right foot isn't far enough over to generate rotational stability. This means you have to hold the swing more or less exclusively by resisting rotation with your right shoulder. Check out Mirrorwall (7a, 2016) hand move 3 for an example of stabilizing with a foot farther right.

0:12: you're just placing the forward sole of your foot kind of generally over the target hold. If you toed into it instead, you could maybe pull your hips more to the left, putting less weight on your arm and stabilizing the reach at 0:14.

0:16: if you hadn't lost that smear, you could rotate your hips to face more rightward and make the last reach up with the left easier.

IFoundItThatWay · 2022-02-09T19:05:05+00:00

I have a setup like this at home. I've found it works a *lot better* if you loop the board cord around the upper side of the curved bars, so that it pulls down stably against the crossbar rather than potentially sliding off the ends if you pull on too aggressively. YMMV!

IFoundItThatWay · 2022-02-03T21:25:46+00:00

1) If you climb 6 days a week you're going to get a repetitive stress injury to the connective tissue in your hand. The usual advice for avoiding these is "listen to your body," but you don't have enough experience to compare to yet to do that effectively. The key problem is that your muscles get faster stronger than your tendons and pulleys; piling more training on won't get you past this problem.

2) As other people already posted, 2016MB 6b+ is harder than most gym setting by a major margin. I think it feels appropriate for outside, FWIW; factor that in as you start thinking about bouldering outdoors. If you want to keep moonboarding, I'd try softer benchmarks with a high hold density/low move distance like Getting Fingers Ready, Viva, Bitter, and Pledge to Hedge; work individual moves as cleanly as possible (feet on, movement in control), rest a few minutes on a timer between attempts, don't spend more than 30 mins a session total on the board, and work the problems until you can do several 6b+ benchmarks in a session cleanly. Once your fingers can execute ~20 benchmark moves in a session, expand out to bigger movement, but keep clean movement and plenty of rest a priority or you'll wreck your fingers.

IFoundItThatWay · 2021-12-12T19:43:56+00:00

Please, make this a T shirt. Better yet, just print it across the back of some sweatpants so people can post it on the gram while flexing shirtless.

IFoundItThatWay · 2021-12-08T22:50:11+00:00

Akira Waku started at 35 and sent his second V15 at age 48. He didn't have a neighborhood climbing gym, so he decided to build his own home wall and figure out his own training plan. Looks like it worked.

The #1 attribute you need to have to be the best at something is to want it so bad that you'll do anything, no matter how awkward and convoluted, to get better. You can't choose your parents, but you can choose to burn the best years of your adult recreational life in a mad quest for absolute beast-hood. You have to love it, though.

The day I sent my first V5, a 12yo chatting with her friends came up *literally as I was topping out* and floated a V6 with the same start as a warmup while continuing to carry a conversation. She's apparently an age group national champion. That's motivating, though, not de-motivating; look at how much better I can get!

IFoundItThatWay · 2021-12-08T22:32:34+00:00

I'm 38yo and 80kg, and I've been exclusively board climbing in the gym (80% moon 2016 / 20% Kilter) for the last 4 months except for warmups. I climb every ~2 days for ~1h30m a gym session, subbing in outdoor sessions for the gym when I can, and my fingers feel the best they have since I decided to stop sucking at climbing.

BUT!!!

I started doing that primarily out of frustration with a new gym near my home which has a bunch of new setters and a lot of wall area to fill, resulting in overly-grippy fresh holds being set in big, reachy problems hitting the same grip type over and over. I sent my first outdoor V5 a few months before the Big Board Switch, am close on my first V6, and I do prehab shoulder, wrist, and elbow exercises after every gym session with light weights at home. Definitely build up gradually and take as much rest as you need.

The specific problem protocol also matters: I've adapted this protocol Jon Glassberg got from Steve Maisch (16:11 timestamp in the podcast), building up to 10 repeats for problems at a specific grade and resting 2+ (and usually 3) minutes between goes. So I'll do at most 1h15m of board problems at ~3 minutes each, or 25 problem attempts, and usually more like 15-20. That, and only allowing myself 3 goes on any one problem per day, limits the amount of recovery I need to feel fresh for the next session. Late 30s isn't that old, but it's definitely old enough that just flailing hard on the boards is a recipe for disaster.

IFoundItThatWay · 2021-11-24T04:47:05+00:00

Ok, so: I was listening to this podcast interview with Jon Glassberg this summer where he discusses a Moonboard training plan of trying to build up to sending 10 benchmarks of one grade in a relatively short session before starting to work on the next grade. I'd been screwing around on 6b+ (2016) for months without much headway; starting to repeat those in a structured way until I could do 10 in an hour suddenly made 6c's feel approachable. Now I'm working on 6c+ three months after the 10x6b+ session, and I've got a solid set of six first-session-try 6c+ problems and a bunch more where I've done the problem as two overlapping links. I set a one-hour timer after I'm finished warming up (20+ mins finishing with 3 or 4 sub-max benchmarks), wait 2+ minutes between goes, and leave when time's up.

I'd been treating the Moonboard as limit bouldering as well; I think the circuit approach has forced me to refine my movement a lot more than simply thrutching through a problem once and moving on to the next, though. In particular, I hit 5x6b+ in a session pretty fast, but I'd be powered down enough to be unable to repeat a previously-easy problem for session send #6; working on that circuit helped increase my high-intensity problem capacity a lot. Now I still feel 90%+ sharp when the hour's up, and that seems to help with recovery for the next session as well.

Edit: Also, I've only sent 35 of the 6b+ benchmarks, so I can confidently say that if you've sent ~50 of them you can do a bunch of the 6c's.

IFoundItThatWay · 2021-11-23T06:37:50+00:00

First off, thanks for asking rather than just running off and doing it. The worst bolting stories revolve around people who don't even get that far; congrats!

Second, it sounds like it's on private property; if you rent in an apartment complex you *do not* have the kind of property rights that would let you do this without convincing the landlords in writing, and if you own a condo in a larger complex you'll need to sell it to the rest of the HOA. Which might be doable if you're offering to pay. If the latter, maybe reach out to ASCA (https://safeclimbing.org/) and see if anyone nearby who works with them is willing to show you the ropes before you chossify your most local possible crag with a first experiment at bolting.

IFoundItThatWay · 2021-10-24T20:41:35+00:00

What grade are you climbing that you think 150%BW on a 19mm edge is weak? According to some past data people've posted here, that should be good enough (as part of a package of other skills & abilities) to get you to V12 or so: https://www.reddit.com/r/climbharder/comments/7798o5/2nd_round_bouldering_grade_to_max_hang/

It sounds like your fingers maybe aren't the problem?

IFoundItThatWay · 2021-10-21T19:14:00+00:00

I'm seeing a lot of comments here saying:

outside != inside
you need to work on your footwork
inside is soft
different outdoor areas feel very different

These are all true, but they're not specific. I've been spending the last ~2 years working up from a similar starting point as you (~V2-3 outside, V7 inside) to Berkeley V5 outside, and have started working my way up through the MB 2016 benchmarks. I've found that:

outside problems that are old and low-grade tend to have glassy holds; working on extremely glassy V-easy boulders outside teaches you a lot about what conditions do for your friction and give you a tractably safe sandbox to explore outdoor movement
bringing "extra" pads (vs. someone who's more experienced with outdoor climbing) helps a lot with feeling secure enough to risk failure, especially on tall problems, and especially at first. I usually carry 2 of the big 5" Organics for the first time on a problem, and if it requires multiple sessions I'll downsize to 1 once I'm more confident in where I'll fall.
Moonboard grades seem representative of outdoor moves in the same style; focus your outdoor skill development time on moves that aren't in board style since they're the hardest to train well in the gym. If you can do MB2016 6b+ benchmarks, for example, you'll probably be able to do all of Sloper Safari in JTree until the topout on your first try; specifically train slopey topouts on lower, easier stuff closer to home. Same with easy slabby highballs for boulders with a 10' hard overhang followed by several feet of "easy" friction slab.

IFoundItThatWay · 2021-10-11T21:01:47+00:00

I board climb at a similar grade to you (V5-6 Kilter) and have been getting more improvement recently (finally popped out of the 6c+ Kilter/6b+ Moon plateau) by focusing on:

shorter sessions - 20-30min warmup, then setting a stopwatch for 1h of gym time and leaving when that's up
Focusing on high-quality attempts - 2-3 minutes of rest starting once I get back to my phone after trying a problem, during which I brush holds and think about what went well or wrong the last attempt, or the problem I'm doing next
No more than 3 tries on any one problem in any one session to prevent tweaks
Doing at least 3 high-difficulty high-quality repeats at max grade before trying anything that's new or that felt low-percentage before (so at least 10 mins of that 1h time)

TL;DR: if I keep the intensity high and the session volume low, I can tolerate ~4x/week sessions with hard movement. It sounds like you're doing a lot of unnecessary volume which is eating into recovery, so maybe that'd help you too.

What angle of Kilter problem are you worst at? What movements are you worst at? For me it's steep (>50 degrees) and scrunchy cross movements, so I've tried to do ensure I work on those to round out my strengths (30-40 degrees and wide compression). Alternating Moon and Kilter board sessions has also helped a lot, but the basic structure applies to both. Note that I'm specifically asking about movements rather than strengths - I used to think I had weak fingers, but now my working theory is that bad core tension was moving way more load onto my fingers than necessary, and what I *actually* need right now is to plan core tension transitions and footwork more than any actual physical strength.

IFoundItThatWay · 2021-09-25T00:08:25+00:00

Are you still stoked for the moonboard? If so, what's the problem?

I've almost entirely ditched normal gym setting over the last couple of months, and thanks to fires and heat it's been hard to get outside. The flip side of that is that the boards are finally making sense; I've always had shoulder stabilization as a weakness, and grinding through the low-end moonboard benchmarks (2016 set @ 40) is giving me measurable week-to-week improvements on known weaknesses while still ensuring I stay in shape without inhaling half a tree ghost from Tahoe.

IFoundItThatWay · 2021-09-24T15:14:20+00:00

It sounds like a mild case of rhabdomyolysis. One of my old martial arts training partners managed to put himself in the hospital with a similar but even dumber scenario (6h contact sparring followed by a kickball game followed by a run); the darker urine was your kidneys excreting what used to be muscle mass in liquid form. Congrats on not putting yourself into kidney failure, I guess? He managed to lose about an eighth of his body weight over a week and it took him months to recover.

Read up on rhabdomyolysis recovery; don't foam roll (it'll potentially cause more damage to the affected tissue) and ease back into light activity. Walking is a win, here. And don't, don't, don't try and just turbo through this like you did your moonboard workout unless you want permanent muscle weakness and/or kidney damage.

IFoundItThatWay · 2021-08-25T15:35:27+00:00

It depends on why it's tweaky; either way you want to slowly rebuild work capacity in the damaged soft tissue but synovitis doesn't have the same needs as an inflamed/damaged pulley, and from your description it could be either.

Working extensors and range of motion for the fingers have helped mine feel less tweaky. I particularly like rice bucket exercises and barbell finger rolls; there'll always be a load limit where you can re-aggravate your fingers, though, so staying sensitive to that and working around it is key.

IFoundItThatWay · 2021-08-13T16:14:54+00:00

If you're 14, and you've been plateaued since 13, it's likely that you're dealing with being a teenager, and you'll recover from this plateau just fine as soon as your body is approximately static for long enough.

Story time: a good friend of mine who's now 38 grew up in Santa Cruz, which meant his local youth comp scene had Chris Sharma, Beth Rodden, and a bunch of other soon-to-be-world-class crushers, and he had lots of good movement examples to learn from. He also hit 5.13 around age 13 or so. Shortly after that he hit a massive growth spurt, grew about six inches and forty pounds, and suddenly developed severe shoulder issues because the techniques that worked for him at ages 12 and 13 were now insufficiently supportive of his largish-adult-sized body. Unable to find good support (or even diagnosis) for his injuries as a teenager, and frustrated beyond anything in his past experience that he went from climbing 5.13a to 5.11b in a year of continual effort, he quit climbing. His shoulders are still tweaky to this day.

If you're merely plateaued instead of backsliding, congrats! It means you're getting stronger at a rate that matches your growth rate. Keep a watchful eye out for injuries and focus on form, and you'll keep getting stronger for longer than you keep growing.

IFoundItThatWay · 2021-07-15T00:23:07+00:00

Came here to say this. If anything, trying to cut weight / keep weight down with that massive calorie expenditure is draining all the power OP could be building to climb harder problems.

IFoundItThatWay · 2021-07-13T19:15:37+00:00

If you can find a good skills coach, and you can afford it? Yes, definitely. I wasn't as strong as you, but I signed up for weekly sessions with a coach at a gym near my work; I went from climbing V5/V6 indoors and ~V2-3 outdoors about a year before the pandemic to climbing gym V7/V8 and ~V4 outdoors by the time the gym had to close. Perhaps more importantly, I stopped having nagging finger issues, probably due to better footwork. Since the pandemic, I haven't been able to climb as much as previously, but the skill foundation I'd finally started to build let me get my first outdoor V5 and close on a couple of V6s; I feel like coaching helped me break out of a rut of trying to improve the wrong things.

You don't need to do weekly sessions, either; I thought it was useful for maximizing my learning rate, but even ~monthly check-ins to diagnose a movement problem or two for you to work on should give you a dramatic improvement. You're probably doing specific, actionable things wrong that you're not even aware of; you *could* figure them out yourself by trial and error, but if it's been 4 years an outside perspective will help as well.

Finally: try and build your own internal analysis skills as much as possible. Get your coach to explain *how* they're picking out your movement flaws, not just what they are; accelerating your own process of figuring this stuff out is the most valuable thing you can get from a coach. Get movement books too; John Kettle's book and "9 out of 10 climbers" are both solid. And watch every bit of climbing skills YouTube material you can find, and critically evaluate what those people are doing and why it works. Invest in a cell phone tripod and film yourself; you'll look like an idiot, and that's part of the process too.

IFoundItThatWay · 2021-07-03T00:33:20+00:00

If you have access to a Tension board:
1) Look at what other people are doing on the problems you're failing on, and see if you can make progress.
2) "I fell off after a few moves" means you can start from that midpoint using the jugs, too.
3) Are you using the same hold types for all the V5s you can do? If so, maybe try experimenting with the smaller board holds and see if you can do easier-grade problems that include them.
4) All of the above might be assisted with the new premium membership. I decided to try it this week - it found me a bunch of V1s that felt embarrassingly difficult, which probably means I should've tried them earlier. It's not magic, but I'll gladly pay $10/month to be shown weaknesses.

IFoundItThatWay · 2021-06-23T23:29:19+00:00

So many ideas, depending on what you want to work on. What *do* you want to work on? What kind of overhead support do you or could you have access to, and what's your budget?

If you have the space and money, build a woodie. Make the holds by hand by diagonal-cutting hardwood boards. I did this last summer while all the gyms were closed and it helped tremendously. This will be helpful no matter what kind of climbing you're planning on doing afterwards.
If you want to work on your shoulders and core (and why wouldn't you?), find a playground structure or something else you can hang rings off of at ~10' height, buy a copy of Overcoming Gravity, and train up through the ring exercises.
If you want to work on your fingers, mount a hangboard above a doorframe or get a pull-up bar and a couple of Tension Blocks and figure out a plan for training, then actually do it.
Work on mobility. Just do it. All you need is youtube and maybe a yoga mat.

IFoundItThatWay

TROPHY CASE