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No 186, June 15, 1999
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Rock Craft | Bouldering | Destinations | Training
Recommended Reading | Gear | Higher Education | Ratings

You don't have to hurt to get strong

Two reasons to train for bouldering are:

  1. To send a hard problem you cannot currently manage.
  2. To increase your fitness for bouldering to get in longer, more productive days.

This training may involve nothing more than "going bouldering," but a little thought and self-discipline during sessions can reap big dividends both in muscular strength and coordination.

If you fixate on one hard problem that you can't quite manage, you will not be doing a lot of climbing, you'll be doing a lot of falling. A faster way to improvement, and ultimately to quicker success on all your projects, is to alter your bouldering sessions to involve more success and less failure. You will get stronger and better faster by making complete ascents of problems than by trying over and over to pull off a single move you can't quite manage.

Simply put: climb easier problems. Choose their difficulty so that you can climb several of them smoothly twice or even three times in each bouldering session (with a rest of two to 10 minutes between each ascent).

This regimen, known as interval training, ensures you climb more moves efficently and, besides making you strong, has these advantages:

  1. It reinforces and increases your use of good technique. Tired, sloppy technique will reinforce bad habits.
  2. It increases your capacity to climb numerous problems one after another.
  3. It improves your satisfaction and motivation by increasing your percentage of successful ascents.
  4. It enables you to sense the condition of your muscles better, allowing you to punch through hard moves close to your strength threshold without fear of falling.

Sometimes you'll want to work that "project" problem, but only try it when
you feel strong. If, after four or five tries, you find you're not strong enough to hold the necessary positions and maintain good technique, move on to
easier problems, being careful not to limit yourself to problems of a particular style or length.

A gym is a great place to train because you can create or select a circuit of varied problems at the right level of difficulty, introducing or off-limiting holds as required. Aim to complete between 10 and 20 ascents each session, climbing the easier problems three times, those almost at your maximum strength limit once, and those slightly below your maximum, twice. Important: unless you make some clanger of a mistake, you should never need to try a problem more than a third time.

Always spend the first half hour to full hour warming up, and 10 to 20 minutes warming down. Finally, for those new to this program, two or three full days off are in order to avoid climbing on very sore muscles. After a few months, your body will adapt, and you may be fine with just a single full day of rest.
So there it is: Training for bouldering may well involve little more than simply going bouldering, but going bouldering with a different attitude. Your aim is to climb more problems near your limit, and fail on as few as possible, walking away from those that you can't manage within a few tries, and repeating those you can.

— Wills Young

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Rock Craft | Bouldering | Destinations | Training
Recommended Reading | Gear | Higher Education | Ratings

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