Motivation is a funny thing, sometimes the psych is high to try hard and do things but just as often it is not.
During a training session yesterday I was climbing with another climber, working through some skills and trying some hard boulders. The start of the session our energies were on complete opposite ends of the spectrum, I was super psyched and ready to go and the other climb was having a rough day, very low energy and not much enthusiasm for trying hard. Over the course of the sessions the poles switched and by about 3/4 of the way through I was low energy and he was high, the excitement of a world of possibilities had waned for me and grown for him.
Energy is contagious, both high energy and low energy, for the the exposure to a low energy individual for the course of a session left me feeling at a lower energy state by the end of the session, the same as my high energy start had left him feeling psyched.
No motivation or psych to train?
Here is a conversation I once had with someone about training. It all started with being asked this question by another climber who was struggling to train,
Ash, how do you stay so psyched to train all the time? I have been trying to hang board and strength train and it always feels like a slog, I am never psyched to do it and it just feels like a grind.
We spent some time chatting about what he was doing for training, I gave my thoughts on what he could do to improve his system and get better results but I noticed there was still no excitement in his language, he still didn’t believe in training. It is impossible to stay motivated for something that you don’t believe in. Everyone talks about “training for climbing” that its the thing to do, if you want to get good you must train for climbing but training isn’t for everyone, well atleast in my opinion in not for everyone in every situation, at some point some form of training or working on your weaknesses has to become a part of your life if you want to continuously improve towards your chosen goals.
Ultimately he didn’t believe in what training for climbing often is marketed as, do more pull ups with more weight and hang on 3mm edges for a day or 2. I asked him what his thoughts were on training and he confirmed my suspicions, he couldn’t connect the dots between training and climbing all the climbs he wanted to climb. It was at this point I suggested that maybe he shouldn’t train, just climb follow the path that he enjoys and believes in. Over the past few years I have seen this climber go from climbing maybe V8 to having at least 1 V12 under his belt and as far as I can tell this has been without what most people would class as training. Now I feel I should mention here that a lot of people don’t have the subjective awareness and ability to focus on what’s failing them while they are actually climbing and this person does do what could be classified as training, they have outdoor boulder circuits they go to, they limit boulder or try hard things and they do climb regularly but they probably don’t even know how much they can do a pull up with.
So we found this persons motivation, climb hard lots outdoors.
Something that is key here is that they tried to follow the traditional method of training for climbing and it was not working for them at that point in time but my honest belief is that if you want to progress faster and reduce the risk of injury then training is the only way to do that, by training I mean having some weights focused days to balance out climbing and monitoring the F.I.T.T principle of everything you do.
Frequency, how often you perform x.
Intensity, How hard you are trying.
Time, How long you are trying at that intensity.
Type, How regularly or irregular do you diversify your training.
Most people will jump into a new training program and up atleast 3 of these things at once, the old go hard or go home and I will achieve more if I do more right? But this almost always leads to injury and or loss of motivation, why? because its too much too fast and it’s tiring. You are not conditioned to that level off stimulus change, its like trying to swim across an ocean on your first day of learning to swim.
Training is the long game and it is also the short term boost or change in stimulus to break plateaus but it’s not for everyone at every stage of their life. Personally I enjoy being able to turn up with a session plan and execute, it allows me to focus on what I need to be working on without getting distracted by all the less beneficial shiney things out there that catch my eye.
How to build trust in your training and then have the motivation flow through you?
Trust is built on experience, if you have never written a program for yourself it is going to take atleast a few programs for you begin to understand what stimulus you need and your first program is going to suck, its going to be a mistake in terms fo progress but your second program will be better and so will the next. This is where a coach comes in handy, they already have written numerous programs and know the tell tail signs of shortfalls in training and can use their experience to program for you, meaning better results which equals more trust, you just need a coach that is either where you want to be or has other athletes that are where you want to be, atleast then the door to trusting the program has been opened to begin with and you will feel slightly more motivated than if you found a program in the bin.
So you have a program but are having one of those CBF days, its 40 degrees out there and work is busy? Im both sorry and not sorry to tell you this but motivation aint going to do shit for you here, that ship has sailed. A good old smack upside the head with the Discipline stick is what you need, or maybe a coach to bring the energy that you just can’t seem to find, if you don’t think you can do it, just get that shit done.
Discipline is easy when you have a plan, you just have to turn up and execute.
To build your motivation, Connect the dots between what you need to do to improve and where you want to be, this may be just to try slab more often, yes good climbers can climb slab too! I do think though that if you chosen sport is part of your down time and you are going through some shit then maybe a day to play is what you need more and you may come out the other side better off for not training but be wary of getting caught in that trap all the time, there’s always ways you can train without training.
