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cragnshag
Social climber
san joser
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1) what is good technique?
I think good technique is simply the most efficient way to climb a particular section of rock. The best technique will be different for every climber since each climber has different dimensions, strengths, injuries. With every move on a climb, a climber makes dozens of calculations in his/her mind and spirit. These calculations tell the climber where to place the left foot, right hand, slight pressure against a dihedral wall with the back just below the left scapula, inchworm move to gain a better hold, foot switch to relieve pumping out one calf, etc- the choices are infinite. I think the climber that channels all possible movements and knows how to correct and recorrect these movements on the go is using good technique to attain the climb.
2) in the event of an injury, what is an effective recovery regime?
Climb old easy lines that you dismissed in your youth as being too easy or a waste of time. Personally I love long easy routes- injured or not- they are stress free and take you to the tops of beautiful places. Climb around the injury: for some injuries this may be as simple as switching the type of rock one climbs. Finger pulley injury? Try slab climbing or mountaineering. I mentioned above, good technique takes into account strengths and weaknesses. In certain cases there is no climbing around the injury and patience is required. Make good use of your time away from the rock- go hiking, look for unclimbed lines in the backcountry and record the locations in your little black book, go on a cruise with the parents and reconnect, get that stamp/ coin/ comic book collection under control by entering the vitals into a spreadsheet, work on the family tree. Sooner than you realize, you'll be ready again for the rock.
3) what is effective training?
I'm not a big fan of training. I think for training to happen and be effective you have to be pretty motivated. I have only really trained for one climb in my life: Astroman. My training involved climbing the underside of the outdoor concrete stairs at my work during lunch hour for the 6 weeks before the climb. "Training" tends to remind me of countless hours spent doing laps or arduous 6AM water polo workouts in high school. These days my training comes in the form of occasional plastic pulling (not much at all since my son was born 1.7 years ago) and biking. I have no problem riding difficult mountain bike trails for hours on end since I perceive that as fun. Even road biking is fun if you find a hilly ride with few cars. Then I suppose the biking activities will help support my overall fitness- and in a way count as training for climbing since they must have some sort of benefit to the body. I have a pullup bar in the garage, but I'm too lazy to use it. It works well for hanging shirts to dry, though.
Long term injuries/ conditions: I've learned to cope with my psoriatic arthitis by avoiding hard finger cracks, climbing less steep terrain, and sticking to my medication schedule. I fully realize that my body is no longer capable of climbing past the 5.11 grade without significant permanent joint/tendon damage that will affect my ability to climb into my old age. And I'm OK with that- I have fun simply climbing, I'm just grateful that I can climb at all.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 10, 2011 - 02:31am PT
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Reynolds, Heather 1995. Physical characteristics including strength, flexibility, and body anthropometry of sport climbers at the elite and recreational levels. Thesis Dalhousie Univ, Halifax NS.
presumably this is published in her book: Climbing Your Best: Training to Maximize Your Performance Heather Renoylds Sagar, Stackpole Books 2000 (ISBN-10: 0811727351)
didn't get a good review at Amazon... anyone read it?
Russum, W. 1989. Physiological determinants of rock climbing ability. Thesis, San Jose Univ.
A study of 40 climbers, elite, intermediate and novice...
"Conclusions
Within the limits of this study the following conclusions were made:
(1) the descriptive characteristics of the overall group of climbers were similar and differed only on relative fat, fat weigh, shoulder strength, and grip strength.
(2) stepwise regression identified three variables as accounting for 45.3% of the variance between climbers: shoulder strength, body weight, and grip strength. Other variables measured accounted for an additional 14.0% of variance in climbing ability.
(3) the discriminant function 1 (grip strength, arm and leg anaerobic power, arm and leg anaerobic capacity, ventilation threshold, X rating and arm and leg fatigue index) accounted for 62.45% of the variance between groups.
Discriminant function 2 (fat weight, relative fat, body weight, leg strength, maximal oxygen uptake, shoulder strength, arm strength, and Y rating) accounted for the remaining 37.55% of the variance between groups."
Watts, Martin, Durtschi 1993. The anthopometric profiles of elite male and female competitive sport rock climbers. Journal of Sport Sciences 11:113-117
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8497013/
Over the past few years, competitive rock climbing--for a long time a popular sport in Europe--has increased in popularity in North America. An annual international World Cup competition circuit was started in 1988 which has shown growing success and a definite elite group of athletes has emerged. Descriptive anthropometric profiles of elite climbers have been unavailable. In order to fill this information void, 39 world-class climbers (21 males, 18 females) were assessed immediately prior to competition at an international World Cup sport climbing championship. All of the subjects tested were competition semi-finalists and, among these, seven males and six females advanced to the finals. The variables measured included age, years of climbing experience, height, body mass, height-weight ratio, sum of seven skinfolds, % body fat, fat-free mass, hand and arm volumes via plethysmography, average of right and left grip strengths, grip strength to body mass ratio (SMR), and climbing ability defined as the most difficult route climbed on lead. The results indicated that elite sport climbers are of small to moderate stature and exhibit very low % fat, moderate grip strength and high SMR when compared with other athletic groups. Values for the height-weight ratio and sum of seven skinfolds in the female finalists were very near those of the male finalists, which may indicate that reduction of body mass and % fat are primary adaptations in these female athletes. Climbing ability was predictable from SMR and % fat, though the R2 was low.
Wakasa. Do better climbers have stronger hands? R&I 80:43.
anybody have this and can scan it for this thread?
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Todd Eastman
climber
Bellingham, WA
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Aug 10, 2011 - 02:40am PT
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Ed, so far none of the journal articles deal with your three questions...
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 10, 2011 - 03:43am PT
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I think they have...
...I'm not looking for a simple answer, but it's also not an unasked question so having answers from you all is definitely thought provoking.
My posting of articles has been getting at the question of what you should train for... only part of the training process is climbing specific, though that is an important component of training.
If I take Elcapinyoazz as an example, e.g. the "physical ability is necessary to climb 'hard' and that is the ratio of grip-strength (finger flexor) to bodyweight. It is the single best predictor of climbing performance." This seems to be born out in many of the articles posted. One of those articles noted that grip strength as measured in a traditional manner did not correspond to the muscle activation seen in climbers gripping holds. This implies that a grip strengthening exercise may have to be more than squeezing a spring loaded device, a device similar to the devices that measured grip strength, incorrectly. This also seems to correspond to climbers' experience using various squeeze devices to try to get stronger grips.
The hand injury article cautions about pinch exercises as possibly leading to injuries, and also not training the right way to increase grip strength.
Finally, there are no studies that track the effectiveness in training as it translates to the rock. This is mentioned in some of the articles. For the most part, training is inferred from the discriminants which describe "elite," "intermediate," and "novice" climbers. What would be interesting is to train a "novice" into an "intermediate" with a regime designed to provide the attributes of the "intermediate."
jstan is only partially correct at my methodology. For instance, taking ECiya's example the denominator is body weight, my body weight has been pretty constant over decades, a bit heavier than I think is optimal for climbing. Am I going to reduce my body fat? it is probably a good thing to do in general, but the studies might suggest better attributes to train. The studies also give a sort of level of influence that such attributes could have on my climbing.
My bad back problem could very likely have been caused by bad technique in offwidth, and the intense training we were doing eventually caused problems. This could have been due to a number of different body problems, pelvic girdle stabilizers, hip flexibility, compensation for damaged knee, etc.
What is good offwidth technique? it not only gets you up offwidth, efficiently, but also without injury.
Can we describe such things?
One of the articles I didn't post speculated that climbers that did a lot of hand crack may be more likely to have carpal tunnel syndrome, I don't have it even though I do a lot of typing at home and at work, and I think I do a lot of hand crack... I don't know if my experience is similar or dissimilar to other climbers. Is it?
The idea is to try to explore the various aspects of technique and training and injury in climbing. It seemed that STForum would be a good place to develop these ideas given the large number of climbers and the range of experience.
jstan and rgold both make an important point, such training is likely to depend on the age of the trainee, and be for quite different goals, as also mentioned by cragnshag.
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jstan
climber
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Aug 10, 2011 - 04:14am PT
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Rgold and Cragnshag don't deserve to be compared to me. My knowledge of physical limitations is far more advanced than is theirs.
Also we have limited ourselves primarily to bio-mechanical factors. Recently I learned the arteries serving my heart are naturally quite small. There never was a basis for my having any athletic potential whatsoever. Somehow, I knew I needed to run. It was great fun. Loved every minute of it.
I have read that some of our cellular structures came about as a synthesis between bacterial and single celled organisms. So there is a reason mitochondrial structures mimic bacterial material.
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MH2
climber
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Aug 10, 2011 - 04:27am PT
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In a previous life I often looked at the studies on humans, when I was in the library for other purposes. Very little was memorable. We aren't really interested in averages and standard deviations, anyway; we are interested in the outliers. The studies usually just collect statistics. It is hard to do studies on humans and control all but one variable. Very few studies came to any conclusions that would make any difference to me.
A possibly interesting exception was a study done on healing after inflicted soft tissue injury in rats. One group was given anti-inflammatory medication and the other wasn't. Later they tested the strength of the healed tissue and the medicated group were mechanically weaker.
I thought to myself that maybe nature knew best, and the post-injury process should not be interefered with. That is probably too simple a conclusion.
We now know that part of the pain and swelling that follow injury happen because our immune system rushes to attack what it senses as a bacterial invader, because the injured tissue allows mitochondrial proteins to escape and these are similar enough, so I hear, to the bacterial ancestor proteins that mitochondria inherit. There has been long enough for evolution to sort out the difference, so it may still be an open question why the immune response to injury is so quick and vigorous. The speculation I heard was that the immune system can't afford to take chances because of what was, before antibiotics, the strong possibility that bacteria could kill you, hence the friendly-fire casualties.
The hope is held that if the immune reaction to injured tisse can be better understood and controlled then healing could be quicker and less painful.
One of the grad students in the lab I was in, Bill Abend, went on to study the neural control of arm movement. The impression I got was that even trying to describe the movement of an arm was hugely difficult, let alone an entire body.
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Branscomb
Trad climber
Lander, WY
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Aug 10, 2011 - 10:56am PT
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Interesting thread and so applicable to us 'ancients'.
Never having been a physically strong specimen, I've always had to rely on technique instead of sheer cranking, and I think that has helped me get to 59 years without any serious problems that 5000mgs/day of aspirin and Alleve and monkey gland extract can't handle. HaHa.
The flexibility aspect really needs more attention as I've gotten older. I do a 15 minute routine every day of simple stretching yoga and it really has helped avoid injuries.
Again, interesting thread and thanxs for starting it.
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Melissa
Gym climber
berkeley, ca
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Aug 10, 2011 - 01:06pm PT
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My bad back problem could very likely have been caused by bad technique in offwidth, and the intense training we were doing eventually caused problems. This could have been due to a number of different body problems, pelvic girdle stabilizers, hip flexibility, compensation for damaged knee, etc.
It might also be true that no other thing in your life put as much strain on a pre-existing weakness and that there was no technique for you personally to apply to climbing ow at the level of difficulty that you were pursuing that wouldn't have caused the injury. I know that "shit happens" isn't the most proactive reasoning, but there's good evidence that this is exactly what's up for some of us.
Avoiding certain moves (or avoiding training the bejeebers out of them) can become part of our good technique too, I reckon, if we define good technique as an efficient way of climbing while remaining injury free. Like another poster mentioned, the only way that I can run without aggravating chronic injury is to take walks or do the elliptical machine. Luckily for most of us, there are modifications of the things that we love (or that keep us in shape for things we love) that we can do without getting too worked over.
I read Heather Reynolds Sagar's book when I was recovering from my ACL and J from his rotator cuff. We were really wanting to learn something that would help with recovery and keeping ourselves injury free, and I was wanting a roadmap for training to climb harder. It was like reading a textbook...that was written by a student. She references data and studies often when making assertions and suggestion, but IMO, the data was often flimsy (N=small and not that relevant) and misapplied. Like most training books, it was also very much geared towards improving one's performance on overhanging face. Someone who was already a Rife/Jailhouse regular looking to up their game might have gotten more from the book.
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jstan
climber
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Aug 10, 2011 - 01:23pm PT
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Pardon me, if you will for stating something obvious. Appreciable numbers of people have been subjecting themselves to the weird stresses of climbing only for the last twenty years or so.
In the years ahead we will begin to have end of life data telling us what these stresses have done to us.
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Aug 10, 2011 - 01:41pm PT
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ed, you're not going to get anything like what you're hoping for from this literature. exercise phsyiology is still rudimentary. it was rudimentary when i was involved in it more than twenty years ago, and it hasn't progressed all that much. that isn't all that surprising, because it's actually remarkably difficult to get at a lot of key questions in legal and ethical ways.
two obvious examples: we still don't have an absolute consensus on the mechanisms of delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). should seem pretty simple, but we can't slice open the leg or arm of various athletes and get a nice look at what's going on in the process. so folks use proxies: blood analysis, muscle measurement (for swelling), etc. another example is steroids. we still have (and will probably never have) not even one, single, good study of the effectiveness of various steroids when used as they are actually used by elite athletes. there's a huge lit on steroids, but virtually useless. we can't do a real study because the way athletes use the things is illegal. so forty years after the steroid revolution, we still have no solid literature.
and so the training world lives in this twilight zone mediating the scattered and oftentimes mediocre scientific literature, on the one hand, and actual athletic and training room practice on the other, which mixes and matches empirical experience with folk-medicine and a lot of frankly superstitious weird sh#t. ( apologies to my colleagues in at and ex phys, but over beers and out of public view, many of them all say the same thing.) if ron wants to weigh in with a different view, he can, and he's a really good person to talk to. (aerili is also a pro and occasionally posts here.)
climbing is even worse, because it is so much less professionalized than tv and olympic sports. moreover, "climbing" isn't a particular useful key word. trying for record time on the dog route on everest? major back-country expedition in alaska? peru? free a big wall on el cap? climb lucille? sharma's new 5.15 project? bouldering with ondra? from a training perspective, these aren't even close to being the same sport.
the variety and complexity of climbing means that the lit here is going to be even more fractious, even when it focuses (as most of it does) on the most controlled examples: short, steep single-pitch routes at roadside or plastic crags.
we don't even have a consensus on whether supplementary training (sometimes called "general") conditioning should be part of a program or whether one's work should be entirely "sport specific." (not that we even will agree on what would constitute "sport specific," once we get down to the details.) we are still at a stage in which vastly different training approaches are producing similar outcomes.
the climbing training lit roughly breaks down into sport-specific versus general approaches.
self-coached climber represents the purest of the sport-specific programs, and has far and away the best movement analysis (i.e., the best discussions of biomechanical issues), with neumann's lizenz zum klettern and lizenz zum bouldern next, and goddard's performance rock climbing a bit after (and now rather dated.)
ilg's work is far and away the most invested in general conditioning (and now looking really dated), with heather's book and then horst's coming after that. i haven't read that san jose thesis, so can't comment on it.
the blogs are all over the map, as one would expect. moon, gresham and macleod's have all gotten really popular recently. the moon one is the most focused on actual exercises, so it's really helpful there. macleod's is the funnest to read, although it has a real, homemade (even amateurish) feel to it. (he recommends against aerobic conditioning, heh).
the best medical lit and research seems to be coming out of austria (and esp. innsbruck) these days. hochholzer's one move too many is the best summary of that lit available in english, although it's now getting old. hochholzer has published some more recent sportsmed studies in english as well, and you can find them (and thus the related lit via citation) with a lit search. i have a bunch of this stuff in pdfs but havent had time to aggregate it all into a single folder much less index it, but when things calm down (maybe next week?) i can send you the better ones if i can find them.
the lit on high-altitude adaptation is much better, btw, as one would expect from an area with obvious military and commercial applications. the real work started with the nazis on naga parbat. two of the docs involved in research for the nazis endedup in the us, one at ucsd and the other at texas, doing high-el studies sponsored partly by nasa. it's a weird old world.
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Melissa
Gym climber
berkeley, ca
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Aug 10, 2011 - 01:45pm PT
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^^^Thanks!
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rgold
Trad climber
Poughkeepsie, NY
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Aug 10, 2011 - 02:01pm PT
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The trouble is that no one has written The Aging Climber's Guide to Maybe Getting Up A Few More Routes Before the Inevitable Onset of Total Systemic Failure.
Nor has anyone written The Slippery Slope: Training Routines to Minimize Decline
The current crop of authors are inexplicably fixated on ways to get better, thereby ignoring a vast audience who wants to know how not to get worse. There's gold in them thar hills, and I ain't talkin' 'bout the fillings in potential buyers teeth neither.
Perhaps there is a market for more targeted audiences:
Stream of Consciousness: Multipitch Climbing for the Incontinent.
The Butterfly Effect: Blown-tendon Strategies for Beat-Up Boulderers.
Sugar Pie Honey Bun: The Hypoglycemic Climber's Guide to Staying Awake While Belaying.
And of course, Back to Basics: How To Climb Offwidth with Ruptured Disks.
And this is just the beginning...
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Elcapinyoazz
Social climber
Joshua Tree
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Aug 10, 2011 - 02:12pm PT
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IMO most training-induced problems/injuries show up because people start training programs and do too much, too soon. They have fully bought into the idea that pain=gain and to really push themselves. They focus entirely on the work and ignore the recovery.
The workout is just a stimulus. The recovery is where you actually get stronger. Many do not pay enough attention to recovery, many train beyond the point of sufficient stimulus and are basically just needlessly causing microtrauma and destroying/inflaming tissue during the second half of their workouts when they should have warmed-down, had their recovery drink and gone home, eaten a good meal and gotten to bed early so they can get >8hrs sleep.
Instead, the typical deal goes something like:
Bob Ondaknob thinks:
"I need to send Big Bottoms My Girl's Got'em at the Bubblebutt Crag, but I'm a little out of shape from eating Ho-Hos and Watching Jersey Shore for the last 6mo. So I'll start the "workout from hell"
Bob goes to gym, sheds shirt, dons beanie and gets to crankin. Three hours later, Bob's hands are opening on jugs and he can't get up his warmups from earlier, but he's still wildly hucking mos and wobbling up anything he can still climb. 3.5hrs into the session, Bob fluffs his magenta-dyed fauxhawk, nods to his bro-brahs, adjusts his nipple rings, and heads out to the pub with Shelly Senderelli.
After 4 pints of IPA, 1100 calories of greasy burger and fries, and making an unsucessful pass at Shelly, Bob climbs aboard his fixie and pedals the 2 blocks home, almost impaling himself on the bullhorn handlebars when his trackstand at the stopsign goes awrigh. Circa 2:35am, Bob hits the sack, only to get up at 7am, pour half a gallon of coffee down his gullet and head to work. He "rests" a day, then does this routine again.
3 weeks in, Bob is feeling a little stronger and is THIS close to sending the red-tape V7 at his local plastic palace - Spankin'-n-Crankin', then on his 37th try, with Shelly and the entire gym watching (because he is screaming loud enough to peel paint from the walls), his A2 pulley, shoulder, bicep, and tongue piercing all shred like tissue paper, leaving Bob in a moaning heap of Axe body spray and disheveled faux-hawk wondering what will happen with Snookie this season because he's going to be couch-bound for the next 4mo, then he will need to "get in shape" again.
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scuffy b
climber
dissected alluvial deposits, late Pleistocene
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Aug 10, 2011 - 02:27pm PT
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All I do is recover.
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rgold
Trad climber
Poughkeepsie, NY
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Aug 10, 2011 - 02:29pm PT
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That is some damn funny sh#t, El-cap.
I think I've met Bob at the gym myself.
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jstan
climber
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Aug 10, 2011 - 02:29pm PT
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Alright everyone. No more spit balls from the back of the room. Ed is trying to be serious.
Oh and by the way. Goldstone has to do facelift this year.
:-)
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Elcapinyoazz
Social climber
Joshua Tree
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Aug 10, 2011 - 02:32pm PT
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(he recommends against aerobic conditioning, heh).
Not sure what your contention with that segment of the book is, I'd be curious to know. Seemed like one of the better segments of the book to me...of course it applies specifically to high end rock and not to alpinism/dog routes at altitude/etc.
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Aug 10, 2011 - 02:51pm PT
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^^^^^it's one of the things i was referring to when i said it sometimes felt amateurish.
two reasons: first, one of the few areas of consensus in virtually all the lit on sports, training, and medicine, is that cv-aerobic exercise is the single most valuable use of your time for general health. it won't have any immediate application to performance in, say, the clean and jerk, but it seems to naive to suggest that it has no place in even a sports-specific regime. boulderers don't need to put in the time and energy that alpinists do, but i can't imagine anyone successfully onsighting long, difficult cracks (for example) w/o a pretty good base level of aerobic fitness.
second, what i think is really happening is that he himself actually does a lot of aerobic work, he just doesn't realize it. where he lives, and the type of climbing he tends to prefer, means that he spends a lot of time slogging up nasty, scrubby hillsides to get to crags. moreover, just given the lifestyle situation of his home, he (and most of his neighbors) probably walks far more on an average day than the average american does in a week. my guess is that if you ran him on a treadmill and measured his metrics, he'd come out at a pretty high level-- not like a marathoner, but pretty strong.
so a safe, commonsense idea-- craggers and bouldererrs don't need to do the sort of aerobic mileage that an alpinist does --gets expressed in awkward ways that the average urban, american gymrat reader is likely to apply in literal ways.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 10, 2011 - 03:56pm PT
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this is great stuff, all of it, really...
...I start with the literature because not necessarily because I believe it, but because it is at least well described and defined... and many of you have contributed detailed descriptions of what you think, and that is all an important part of this...
I don't know about writing a book, but my stretch goal is to get a lot of material down here in this book, studies, first person ideas... opinions, the whole thing... to collect a set of information to ponder and pick through and see if some good ideas come out of it.
As an aside, I liked Ilg because he has a great set of descriptions of basic exercises that are often hard to find elsewhere... though I also use ExRx a bunch more these days... but Ilg also has a parable like Elcap's above, but in the serious Ilg tone, to describe the foibles of impatient training...
scuffy_b's remark is wiser than it sounds, and is also part of what I was getting at in the initial mediations... always recovering...
Yoga has been mentioned in various places, even on this thread, but what is it about Yoga that makes it good for climbing? who can document (to some extent) the improvements? In the various studies, flexibility doesn't seem to be a discriminant selecting "elite" from "novice" climbers. But also, "core" strength also doesn't seem represented in any of the studies. This is odd since a major technique of climbers is to transfer weight onto the legs, and the only way to do that is through a rigid core... for OW it helps to have good core strength... but I don't know how much...
Another related question, how do you know you're climbing better or worse?
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Elcapinyoazz
Social climber
Joshua Tree
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Aug 10, 2011 - 04:03pm PT
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Another related question, how do you know you're climbing better or worse?
Most people rely on ratings or on benchmark routes they return to. I can go do mini-trax laps on my std circuit and some boulder problems I've done a zillion times and have a good idea.
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