Im often talking with climbers about training and whether training program x or y is right for their goals.

Heres a few of my thoughts as to how training can benefit climbers.

Training for me starts and ends with assessment, I honestly believe that you cant call workouts training without them. Training means following a plan.

For a plan to be effective you need to know a few things:

1. Where you are right now, your strengths and lesser strengths - Your Starting Point

2. What you want to achieve - Your Destination

3. How to fill that gap in the middle

Look at it like driving from Perth to Albany at night time, when you have never driven there before.

You know where you are, You know where you want to be but you don’t know how to get there and you can only see as far as your headlights shine, illuminating the path as you go. You will get there a lot faster if you have a GPS…… or a plan.

10 Reasons To Train.

• The quickest way to get to your destination is to assess, put a plan in place to build your strengths and lesser strengths.

• Injury prevention, ensure you aren’t getting too repetitive with your movements or mistakes.

• Planned sessions give you focus, get a good volume and variety of climbing in rather than just getting drawn into the new climbs or your own style.

• Time efficiency, go in with a plan and execute, no wasted time during a session.

• You have more chance of sending your project if you are training specifically for it.

• Record keeping, know what has worked for you in the past so that you can change the stimulus when you start to plateau.

• Analysis, if or when you decide to work with a coach, you will clearly be able to present what you have been doing, this will show the coach where the gaps in your training have been.

• Over the course of training for a year or 2 you can check what you are missing, if your goal is to be a good or great climber you must get the variety of movement, technique and climbing styles in to absorb a wide variety of information to your internal movement database.

• Understanding what program creates what outcome for you personally, you may find you get better results with a bit of endurance and strength mixed in, or more from power training with some balance work or a mixture of all things during a single training phase.

• Motivation, sometimes you may not want to go in and do the “boring” or repetitive things, having a plan will reduce the chance of the voice in your head talking you out of climbing.

Something I have come to realise is that training or that style of focused mentality suits certain people, I have seen climbers who don’t train or rather just climb get very good, often times with holes in their climbing skills, whether its lack of power, strength, tension or some other aspect of their climbing but they are happy with that, they are happy to focus on their strengths and pursue those avenues to great lengths.

At the end of the day I train because I have things I want to climb that are outside of my current ability and I enjoy coming to the gym with a sense of purpose and direction allowing me to just focus on trying hard. Sometimes sessions aren’t fun and Im ok with that, it means I’m focusing on things i’m not good at or don’t enjoy.

Just remember to have fun, whatever that is for you.