We’ve just
returned to the Millenium FalcVan after five weeks of holiday inside our
holiday, which we spent back home on Vancouver Island. We left our van in the
care of wonderful friends Colleen and Gilles and flew to Victoria in
mid-December. It was both a good and a hard Christmas, but the bottom line is we
feel so lucky to have spent time with our families this season.
Alongside the
family visits we also made time for four weeks of training. After wrapping up
our two months of sport climbing in the Red (which was preceded by three months
of almost solely sport climbing) we were feeling the need to build up our
strength and power. The plan was to spend four weeks doing strength training on
the hangboard interspersed with power-specific exercises in the climbing gym.
All in all it worked pretty well, with only a bit of falling off our training
schedule near the end.
For those interested, here’s pretty much
what we did…
Strength
Training
We designed our
workout based on suggestions in the “Rock Climber’s Training Manual” by the
Anderson brothers. Basically, we chose seven different grips/holds on a
hangboard (we used the metolius 3D simulator), and then did three sets of
7 second hangs separated by 3 second breaks on each grip/hold. Within each of
the sets for a given grip/hold, the number of repetitions decreases and the
intensity (added weight) above the baseline increases. Between each of the 20
sets that make up the whole workout, we took a three minute rest. Here’s an
example of the notes from one of workouts:
The hangboard
work-outs took about two hours to complete including our warm up, and we did
them twice a week, making it a totally reasonable time commitment. We always
made sure there were at least two days between hangboard workouts and that we
took a rest day from finger-intensive activities the day before a workout. All
the details on how to set up one of these workouts can be found in the Anderson
book.
Power
We did our power
training at The Boulders Climbing Gym. Twice a week we’d go in for a
three hour session - one hour of warm up followed by about two hours of
power-specific exercises. A typical day for us would look like this:
Warm-up
-10 minutes of very low intensity
traversing
-25 minutes of climbing specific problems,
slowly working up through the grades until you reach about your onsight level
-25 minutes of working two problems just
above your onsight level. Problems that you can probably get in one session
Training
Usually we would
do “two-ups”. To do the exercise we
either had to find a problem with two sequentially very hard moves, or make up
two hard moves. Over 15 minutes, we repeated attempts of the two moves, using
power spots as necessary. We rested about 3 minutes between each attempt such
that we tried the moves 5-6 times over the 15 minutes. The moves HAD to be harder
than what we could pull and we tried to make them big/explosive/dynamic and
twisty/strange so it wasn’t straightforward. We used a variety of hold types
and did this exercise exclusively on overhanging terrain. We would repeat the
exercise for a total of four different “two-ups” and the whole thing would take
just over an hour. The
rest of our session would be spent projecting, making up problems, or
campusing. There are lots of good resources for these sorts of things on the internets :)
We also managed to get our hands on real
rock with one afternoon, and headed out to Victoria’s Powerline Boulders with
Dan. It was SO cold though…. A couple hours was all we could manage in the cold
conditions!
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| Cleaning frost off the top outs |
We are pretty happy with how the training
went and are very excited to test its success on the problems of Bishop,
California over the next 4-6 weeks.
Some other memories of the holidays this
year…
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| COLD days |
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| Christmas decorations |
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| family walks |
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| Feeding the birds at Beacon Hill park |
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| Super awesome sweater! |
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| SOGS reunion <3 |
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| kitteh |
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| forests |
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| family gatherings |
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| berdz |
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| The "kids" table at Grama's |
