RRC Archives

Andrew does make a great point. If it's not fun anymore, it isn't worth doing. However, I think a little structure can go a long way. Maybe that's one of the reasons hangboards don't work very well; they're boring and you're not as likely to do it. But if it means taking laps on an old project or working problems with some friends in the gym, that's still fun!

Caspian, I've got some bad news for you about "sustained power". It ain't gonna happen. They're actually contradictory to each other. Your muscles are a combination of two different types of fibers (actually, three, but the last is pretty small). Slow twitch is capable of contracting repetitively over and over as long as it gets a chance to "reset" between contractions. Fast twitch is capable of generating large amounts of force for a short period of time and can gain bulk, but it doesn't have the ability to do this for very long. Everyone's muscles are a combination of these types that was determined by your parents. You can't change them but you can make them better at what they do.

Having said that, it is possible to get something like sustained power. Strength builds endurance. Endurance may build strength, but not always. If you train strength you will be able to maintain a higher level of power than you can now even though it will still only be a fraction of your maximal power. You can only sustain about, I dunno, 75% of your maximal power during a climb. But if you increase that maximum, you can crank harder for that time.

Long story made short, you'll never be able to crank as hard as you possibly can for as long as you want. It would be like sprinting a marathon. But you can get a lot of mileage out of strength training and learning how to relax on a route between moves as well as on the rests so that your muscles can get the blood they need. Strength and efficiency, man. [/rant]

Stewy911 wrote:The result of the huge gap in his fitness levels is that he can't really climb anything harder than 5.10 outdoors despite being a consistent V9 boulderer indoors.

Yes, but in the famous words of Yaniro if you cannot pull the single hardest move on a route, then there is nothing to endure. I looked at your spray list Stewy and noticed that most of your hardest leads were either slabby or steep face type climbing. So I am assuming the type of endurance you are talking about is on the more overhanging routes? In any case, building pure endurance is about continuous climbing. The goal would be to climb continuously for at least 20 minutes by traversing or doing circuits. To build anaerobic endurance the goal would be to climb something hard enough that you would reach muscular failure after about five minutes.

And do it in sets.

Something is being left out here - vascularization. Along with squeezind's great summary of why more power contributes to more endurance, there's also the issue of stimulating the growth of more/larger blood supply to the muscles. I wonder what the best way is to stimulate that?

All I know is that something happend in the first few years of me climbing - I just don't get the deep, deep pump that I did when I started. Sure, I get pumped and I fall off, but something changed in my forearm muscles.