How to Create a Climbing Training Plan

In this episode Dr. Tyler Nelson and Coach Collin McGee discuss the principles of creating a training plan for climbing for both on-the-wall activities and off.

They discuss what should be done, seen, and felt in:

• Strength phases
• Power phases 
• Power Endurance Phases
• Endurance Phases
• Capacity Phases
• Performance phases

Each of those sections has unique characteristics that need to be considered in order to achieve the results of the training.

Dr. Nelson and Coach Collin also answer user submitted questions at the end of the episode too so stick around to the end to hear specific questions get answered!

Make sure to follow along with the team at www.camp4humanperformance.com and follow each coach's social media accounts: @liftsmcgee, @c4hp, and @technicallystrong

Submit your own questions to the coaches to have them answered on the next podcast!

Transcript

 Welcome to the Camp four Performance Podcast. This is the official podcast of Camp four Human Performance. Our company started by Dr. Tyler Nelson to give you the most up-to-date, practical and usable information on rock climbing performance, training, and rehabilitation. On today's podcast, we're gonna talk about training plans, programming I periodization, phases, cycles, and all those other words that come about, and ultimately what they are.

And how do we organize our training from a week to week basis over to calendar year and principally, what should we be doing during things like strength phases, power, endurance phases, performance phases, and in season, off season, and everything in between. At the end of the podcast, we're also gonna be answering some submit.

Questions from our Instagram poll. So stay tuned to the end of podcast to hear some specific questions and what I and Dr. Tyler Nelson have to say about those. Thank you so much for all of your support and for tuning in today. So let's get into this episode right now.

All right, so I want to talk about programming today. And so from whatever school of thought that you hear these words, programming, periodization, training plans, essentially, I think a fundamental way to understand this is just how do we organize physical things, exercises, and behaviors accordingly to achieve a specific goal.

Um, there are categories of these things that are thrown out a lot like. Strength phase or cycle, a power phase, power endurance, endurance, performance, blah, blah blah. There's gonna be a ton of things out there. And so today, hopefully with Dr to Nelson here, we want to clarify these concepts, the concept as a whole, but then all the little subcategories a little bit.

And hopefully give you guys a more detailed look into what they are, why their categories, the way they are, um, what it looks like to train inside that cycle. What are we doing on the wall, what are we doing off the wall? And then initially maybe we'll talk about it in a vacuum textbook style, and then we'll add in the nuance in the practicality and real life side because what's always straight off the press in the research or in a textbook doesn't really work well a hundred percent of the time in person.

Um, and that's where like the art of coaching comes in and will be the foundation for our, um, our camp four performance certification that's gonna be coming out. But more on that later. So how, what are your initial thoughts on periodization programming? What have you? Yeah. What's worked for you? Where have you come from?

Let's get that started. I think maybe, I think about it more from, uh, the demands analysis, right? So thinking about an activity or something that the athlete is training for, that they feel like they need something additionally, um, that they need to compliment their practice with to help them reach that demand.

And I think maybe what we can do is, over the course of talking about this, we can tie in the donut lock off and talk about how could someone periodize timing for the donor lock off. Cause on the Instagram Live this morning, uh, Mr. Mads, uh, who is the mad scientist behind nature climbing, I suggested, well, they're, they're sponsors of the donor lock off this season and they giveaway sick prizes and he is potentially making me a donut shaped granite hold.

It's awesome. . So psyched. Yes. That's awesome. So we can maybe tie it into that, but it really, the puritization is like, is highly suss in terms of like, you know, that we have to have some linear periodized plan. Like the science does not support that periodization, you know, kind of fits its, uh, reputation for being awesome for athletes, but I think for individual athletes that maybe don't understand the physiology as well, it's just a simple way of categorizing types of training that hopefully compliment each other so they can reach these new goals that they're trying to attain with their.

No, I like that. And I always, I had that in my second bullet point here is like one's versus needs and that's how I always, I was brought up on it and to hopefully quote appropriately the two things. There was a, a good coach from my functional range conditioning systems, Dr. Shivers, that always said, ill-defined problems, come with ill-defined solutions.

And to speak to what Tyler just said, like you have to understand what your sport demands and then from an individual standpoint, what your baseline is. And that's why we assess and that's why we do all the finger testing and the strength testing and the power testing and all that stuff that, you know, to some people may seem excessive, but you can simply just let the assessment.

write the training plan for you. You know, if you come in and you say, I think I need this, I think I need that. Well my person and my friend is doing this, get assessed and see, well, your plenty strong. Well your passive attention is plenty good now, you know to go this route or your strength's covered, but your power sucks.

Like you are so slow according to all the information we've gathered. We can spend less time filling up this bucket and then we can spend more time filling up that bucket because the assessment told us. So I think that's a really easy way to begin that conversation. Understand the demand's analysis from your sport to then unde understand your individual comparison.

Like where are you? Where do you want to go? And that's a good way to begin to what do I need to do for a training plan conversation, and. Yeah, I think it needs it. I mean, best case scenario is customization for the individual, but that does not mean that something that would be more general wouldn't help a lot of people because it probably would as well.

And so, mm-hmm. , I think the confusing part there is, you know, I think the other analogy maybe, um, that I've heard is every training plan is good, but every training plan is bad. Just depends on like mm-hmm. , the, the context, you know, who you're applying that to. And so there's not good or bad exercises, of course.

There's just different exercises that for different physiologic adaptations for different athletes. And so I think educating coaches on maybe being more thoughtful about the individual instead of the actual stuff that the individual that climbers are supposed to do is really important. Right. Because that, that definitely, um, is problematic from like a sustainability standpoint.

Yep. That's probably to play  analogy tennis here. Um, you know, the principles over methods thing that we tend to talk about a lot, you know, that training program that you copy and paste off of wherever is a method. But if you understand the principles behind why maybe the original creator created it, and you know that strength is created from this minimum effective, uh, stimulus or anything, or this is how you get more powerful, this is how we heal tendons.

Like understand the principles and then knowing how to fit yourself is, is kind of where that's going. Um, but that is the nuance into coaching and programming. So let's say like we're in a vacuum assessment's good. Um, and we're trying to build a, a, a general climber for now. There are phases that pop up often, like strength, power, power, endurance, uh, endurance and performance.

I have written down where would one start, would there be a particular order? Someone should follow those and, and why? . Um, I think the typical order that makes the most sense, which Verkishanski said so many years ago that still applies today, is doing your strength training before your power training.

And from the physiology standpoint, that certainly has to do with the stiffness of the tendon that it's created with the strength training routine. So if an athlete's trying to, you know, make their fingers stronger, they're gonna get more stiffness in the finger tendons and the anular pulleys and the elbow chest pulling muscles, et cetera, then.

When they actually access more muscle fibers, the big muscle fibers that they recruit in their strength training, they're naturally fast. And so the idea that strength precedes power or is necessary for power is kind of an, it's not, it's not exactly true, but it's easier to access if someone gains strength in a more controlled way, cuz it's easier to quantify and you can add load, et cetera.

But that doesn't mean that's the only way someone can get powerful. Someone could do really fast movements and gain high levels of recruitment as well. It's just more, let's say more, um, more standard practice or more historically addressed from a strength standpoint and then a power phase afterwards.

But certainly I, that's how I think about it from always like the rehabilitative or the protective standpoint for connective tissue, where in a strength training phase, if I make someone. Tissues, increase their stress tolerance and increase their stiffness. The power phase is all about recruiting those big muscle fibers very quickly, eccentrically, and they will keep their stiffness there and then they will increase their power output.

Right? That makes Yeah, absolutely. Tons of sense. And now we see it from, we coach our coaches, uh, in a sense of if we had a person, you know, maybe you do with a beginning of the session where they have a lot of energy, we want something a little bit more athletic, quick, powerful run, throw, jump. And then you can kind of build into this strength phases as we go, like a daily, uh, session.

However, there are clear examples where you can't include power just yet. And if anyone coaches, youth athletes or even a general own population and, and you ask someone, maybe the box jump if they can't even get off the ground or when they land on something they look like baby giraffe. You can see why strength training is really important to precede anything that you're trying to coach.

As a power exercise because alongside the anatomy and the the tissue reasons, it just doesn't go well. And you're more likely to put someone at risk asking them to do things that require a lot of coordination, a lot of speed box jobs, bed ball work, campus boarding. If they don't have a lot of proceeding strength to be able to handle those things and even do them well, and even to do them as fast as they need to be to get power out of it.

Yeah. So from both perspectives, strength before power makes total sense in my book. Um, I think that's what's guidelines too for, yes, NCA's guidelines for Youth Strength training. I think they're, they have people in beginner and novice and advanced categories, and I think the advanced category. To one to two plus years of strength training.

And that should precede youth athletes doing intentional power training. And so that doesn't mean they can't do, like if they're climbing, that doesn't mean they can't climb hard or try hard. It just means that off the wall, intentional power training is probably not necessary. Right. For those And because they still need to get strong and they'll get powerful automatically by getting stronger.

Exactly. I think that's, uh, one of the things that can be overlooked is you could just do strength training in those correct situations and people are gonna get powerful, especially if they're also doing their sport or the speed's gonna change and it's gonna go up and down a little bit. You know, that can be their power training for now.

And then you can just focus in that controlled environment on just good strength training, good quality of movement, learning the skills of body awareness, and that's gonna translate to a lot of power early on. Um, so someone gets powerful. We're still in the general conversation. Um, and maybe they're in that category of, now I can think about, moving on, where might we move after a, uh, power?

Phase or cycle of training. So I would say this does not apply now to the donut lock off. So we're going off rails from the donut lock off because you do not need a lot of power to do the donut lock off. You need a lot of strength and sustainability for the donut lock off. So for the viewers that are, like you said, you were gonna talk about the donut , I know you're pissed about that.

I'm really sorry. But we're gonna call, we're gonna circle back , we're gonna circle all the way back with a few bumps along the way. I e the sprinkles. Mm-hmm.  back to the beginning where we make the com complete circle . But I mean a power phase, like in my mind I think about like the force velocity continuum, where the only difference between those different phases of training is the volume of the training.

And so if I'm going to, you know, power training naturally is gonna be lower intensity. And with newer research, even lower intensity into the 40, 50% range, um, it's not gonna have as much volume as your sport usually. . And so the only real difference there is just including more volume of your sport. So I think power endurance training can be more simple than climbers typically make it.

Where I think putting it at the wrong place before the power training or before the strength training, some sort of capacity phase will zap your power output. But I think after the power phase, it's mostly a capacity phase, but for most of my climbers, I'll write it as capacity slash performance phase.

Because if you take a, a well conditioned sport climber that's climbing five 14 and they just get a little bit stronger and a little bit more powerful in those two phases, they can just go right to their sport and start projecting. And that power and that power endurance will come back very quickly.

Their capacity will come back very fast, which is well documented as in in, in the exercise science community. But it's really hard to convince people of that cuz people love getting tired and shit. Mm-hmm. , oh my god. Yeah. I. I brought this up in the last podcast cuz that was the one we talked about endurance.

Um, but getting tired. I was watching a few of my friends. Oh yeah, I did. But anyway, to reiterate to the newer listeners, someone adopted a, uh, moon board three days in a row program of like a strength power endurance to a power endurance something. And just repeated it a bunch of times. And now we're doing pulley rehab.

You know, not that you know, A equals B, but getting tired is just not as useful as one might think strategically. You know, trying to push our limit to achieve new limits is much different than getting tired and, and tacking on a bunch of work on top of fatigue. Yeah. The more, the more experienced the athlete, the more the, the greater the training history of the athlete, the.

Fatigue they need to actually accumulate during their training sessions cuz that will carry over to negatively impact their coordination and thus their performance when they're actually trying to do the thing, which is send some RA route. Right. Um, and to maybe clarify for the listeners, when you say capacity, is that synonymous with endurance training?

Like I think so. Word. Word, okay. Yeah, I mean I think uh, the people like to use the energy systems and I think it just confuses the shit out of everyone because they don't work like that. We don't, we never use one energy system. Sm o two nearest literature would question a lot of the typical kind of textbook terminology or descriptions of 10 seconds.

Is this, 30 seconds? Is this, two minutes is this. And that's the stuff that I learned and talked about for a long time. But mm-hmm , we, you know, we have to keep changing that model, which is kind of annoying, um, for people that do this for their work. Cuz you have to keep learning stuff, but. I think it can be more simple if we think about just the actual demand of what you're training for, where if you're training to climb something that's really long and not powerful and it's just really long and pumpy, that's exactly what you want your power endurance training to look like.

You don't need to do a bunch of moon board four by fours to climb something really long and steep at the Red River Gorge. You know, it's just not the same thing. And so I think a lot of times people kind of miss the mark with their training because they assume that climbers all need the same things when they forget the whole reason why we're doing it in the first place.

Right? Yep. Big thing. So we've touched strength, power, power, endurance, and capacity. And then you mentioned like a capacity slash performance phase. Can we tease that out a little? So what would their performance phase in your, in your eyes look like? For most of my athletes, it depends. For bouldering versus climbing.

A bouldering athlete, it's all just like climbing. Hmm. Like don't do any training. Like, you know, if an athlete's put eight to 10 weeks in of like pretty structured things, lifting weights, doing power weightlifting, movements in the power phase, doing some hard limit bouldering, doing some finger recruitment training, like, and they're doing all the thing and they're getting a little bit of fatigue for bouldering athletes, I think it's probably the best to take a couple weeks off of doing nothing.

And then going to a performance phase where they're just going climbing and when no, there's no reason. As long as the intent is there and the recovery is there, there's no reason to keep training your fingers, your finger strength will stay the. It should stay the same. It's when you do too much volume back to back days, many days per week.

Go on a trip, try and push it for two months that you'll start losing strength. And that's really because you accumulate more fatigue. So as long as the athlete, even if it's like you send, you climb really hard on a day and then you rest two days and then you go do that again. That's a better approach than trying really hard the next day doing some finger training or doing a moon board session and then going to train like fucking chill and recover  and then go try really hard.

And especially for the trained athletes, like they will see massive improvements by doing nothing and then giving it all their effort when they actually go do the thing. Right. But at some point that's gonna stop and they gotta back off. Or it becomes risky maybe. Right. I had a light reminder that I posted about it, about, you know, taking a week off, but getting into mountain biking now and trying to.

Figure out. And, you know, science my way through that cuz I, I'm acquiring a new friend group and you start to hear, you know, the traditional words of oh you just ride, you just ride, you just ride. And it's just like people saying, oh you just climbing, you get better. And I'm like, no, no, no. I've got a moxie.

I'm gonna figure this out. And um, so I can see on my bike gauge, I can see my moxie, I can see my heart rate and it's hard, it's a power endurance to be probably analogous of high intensity. I'm in like zone four, zone five. And it is a delicate balance of getting good work in, but getting really good recovery.

And my bike went in the shop and I had to take like seven or so days off, came back on, did the same, uh, trail that I did normally as my repeat and my god was, Flying through it, I had more power, I had more strength to push up the hills. I was able to recover a lot quicker. Thus have the capacity to handle the skill required to not eat shit on the downhill.

And that's, you know, those little moments of, oh, you can take a week off and be totally fine and probably come back even better. Yeah, yeah. If you feel like you're plateauing and you're like, well I'm working so hard, I'm working so hard, I'm working so hard. Probably take off. Cuz again, you are trying to cultivate this environment to express your strengths.

You can't force plates on the squat. You have to cultivate the body that wants to actually do the squat and that requires rest recovery. Knowing how to balance out hard efforts with easy efforts and really, you know, submitting the ego or slash getting comfortable knowing you can do less and have more success.

Yeah, it's a big part of it for sure. If we weren't so like, Emotionally attached to training and didn't like training so much, we would all be much better off. But it's hard cuz it's fun to do and people need something to, you know, satiate their hate of their job, I guess , yes. They're just like off this, I want to go crush the boulders at the gym.

But really when it comes to the ability to coordinate and to talk to the muscles from the brain and have everything be very fine tuned, that requires a like well-rested machine. Right? Or, and I hate the term machine for the body cuz we're definitely not built like that. We can't just fix parts like that.

But you know, it really requires that recovery time. And I had the same experience going to Disneyland for Thanksgiving. I didn't skateboard for five days, which I've been doing it a lot cuz like every athlete, you get obsessed with something and there's something available in my backyard. And so, but when I came back I was like, wow, this is what it feels like to do it on rested legs.

Like immediate skill improvement, right? Mm-hmm. , which is really hard even for me to do because I love to train just as much as everyone else does. But when you think about the stuff that you do at the gym, you know, we do a lot of the same shit at the gym just all the time. It's really hard to like teach yourself or continually do harder new things at the gym because usually we're, you kind of get into the habit of doing the same things, but then you don't recover enough to actually express the effort for the new things.

Yep. So I would say I've been a big fan now of having my clients take rest phase, rest weeks off completely. Nothing for one to two weeks between phases for that reason, have seen some really good responses. Yep. And it makes total sense. So for everyone listening. We have added a phase. It's called a rest phase.

It's not a muscle and you can't down climb on it . And you're gonna do it and you're gonna, it's not running. It's not running. It's not, it's definitely not running. , . It's definitely not running. It's probably eating donuts though. Yeah. That's probably an okay. Rest activity. Uh, Wawa took away. Anyone's really Wawa any East Coasters will be.

Uh, but you've been on the East coast, so you know, Wawa, uh, my vanilla glaze, which are surprisingly good. So I will shout out Wawa for a, a whole full sponsor and they've replaced it with a candy cane glaze, so even more so I'm into holidays, spirit. So I've been, yeah, bringing those into the gym and everyone's like, what is this Planet Fitness?

I'm like, no, no, no. It's just, I like donuts. So sorry. Do people that plant a fitness eat donuts a lot? Apparent? Well, it's like the whole, there's a baby a day of month. They bring in a bunch of bagels and a bunch of pizza for people and, you know, the, the Jim Bros are like, Yeah. And the gym bros are like, oh, a gym with pizza isn't rah.

I was like, you should come to our gym. I just, my client just brought me in a whole box of pizza.  qualified. I remember, I remember the first BFR course, I taught at a, at a, it was like 2017 or something, added gym locally here, but it was like a weightlifting gym. A guy who was a client of mine who owned a gym and a bunch of his, like weightlifting clients came and then a bunch of climbers came.

So it was like half and half. There was like 20 people. 10 weightlifters. 10 climbers. And so I bought like bagels and donuts and the fucking climbers were just like, , like on their table. They had donuts and, and bagels. And then the weightlifters were like on this other side, and they all had like protein shit, , chicken and rice.

And I was like, these are my people for sure. That's right. . Exactly. Like, that doesn't fit my macros. I can't, I can't put it in. That doesn't, yeah, that doesn't fit my social, my philosophy of my, we had, uh, our very first, uh, The certified functional strength coach, the mike Boy one, we, we always host and shout out them for great coaching stuff.

The very first one we had with like 25 people, and it's like your general fitness education. Um, and I brought the donuts cuz I was like, I'm a, I'm a c4, HP man. Like I gotta bring this in. And you could see everyone walk into the gym going, am I love to have that Like this what? And I was like, guys, come on donuts.

They're huge. And I was like, you just come in half, you can share. Don't feel bad. Go on a chite. But then the second time around, everyone ate 'em. I was like, all right, now they know who we are. It's very rare that I, when we bring donuts to a conference that climbers aren't like, yes. I, you know, I mean, if we think about it too, like, you know, we're all so physically active and overly physically active that like, you know, it's, it's really hard to have that something so small be such a big deal in your life.

It really, I mean, it's really not that significant. And though, and think about that too from like the caloric load standpoint, right? It's really. There's so many other things that people can be doing that probably are hurting them way more than having a damn donut. Right? Like just doing too much volume.

Just have too much volume in your session. Yeah, that's gonna true. Or, you know, you're delayed onset muscle soreness and tissue breakdown, which happens days after gets compounded. And that will and hinder your performance way more than any donut would. Yeah. There's no way a four ounce piece of fluff is gonna hurt your planting.

Like, no, not at all. You're here. This doesn't make any sense, . So donuts for every soldiers, soldiers used to eat that shit for like their primary fuel in World War ii. Yeah. And we won. We won exactly. , we won. More importantly, you win, you win games with donuts, , you win usa Um, . So let's, uh, backtrack a little bit into strength and maybe we can tie in our donut lock off periodization here.

So get your pens and papers out. Uh, but if you're listening to this in the car, keep those hands on a wheel. So strength training. Let's talk a little bit about. Some things to see and to expect and maybe some guidelines, uh, for some on the wall and off the wall training. So for example, maybe an off the wall choice we choose is a deadlift and what that's gonna look like.

Maybe sets, reps, um, how long it lasts before we move into the next phase, and then maybe what we can do on the wall during our strength phase. Yeah, it depends certainly on the athlete's age and training age, you know, background history, like what they're familiar with, et cetera. Um, I'm a big fan of just like maybe ch choosing a couple things for athletes to do.

And I tend to err on the side of using the mechanically advantageous positions just because, and I had a conversation with someone that's a really well trained athlete trying to send a five 15 project. A client of mine had a huge response this summer, almost sent this project, um, with some of my ideas and methods, but still for him.

Even though he knows that, like what I'm suggesting probably is, is a good idea, it's still like that cognitive dissonance where he still wants to do these other things that he's used to doing. You know, where really a string training phase is all about recruitment, in my opinion, for an athlete, because I don't really care if someone can learn how to do a deadlift, because a deadlift is not rock climbing.

And so if they've never, like, I had another client this week that's wanted to do strength training, but they didn't have, they've gotten to like a five 12 climbing grade, but they have no experience strength training, but they've never done any like intentional finger loading, but their fingers were noticeably a limiter for them.

It's like, don't strength train. Introduce a finger boarding protocol and you're gonna see an improvement on the wall. Because if I put a bunch of energy into learning a new skill, which would be deadlifting, that takes away from my primary intention or potentially hinders my coordination on the climbing wall, because it has a level of fatigue that's gonna be hard to account for.

Right. So something that I really like to think about is all of the movements that we do, even strength training movements, they have a coordination component and that happens first. So for someone with no strength training background, doing like a eight exercise strength training session twice a week will actually make you climb like shit.

Not because you're climb like shit, it's just because the fatigue that you get from the non climbing exercise will hinder your performance on the wall, right? So I really take the strength training now more than ever, as like being more critical with how much or how much people really need that. For climbing.

Um, but the example would be like a deadlift. I would certainly start someone with something that has less of a skill component. So a deadlift from the mid die would be easier than from the ground. You know, a bench press isometric would be easier than learning to do a bench press movement, you know, but I like those two movements for sure.

And I like horizontal rowing, but gyms don't have seated row machines for some reason, cuz it's like UX pod and I not have machines now, which seated row machines are mega helpful because that's the better position for the muscle. So yeah, we got one. They're amazing. Yeah, for sure. So like, you know, three sets, five sets of, you know, three to six reps is like the typical strength training range, you know, but that depends on the athlete too and the intensity.

What do you guys do for your kids, for your youth? Um, probably we sit in like the eight rep realm and I always give them like a two in a tank and I say like, Hey, if you feel like one day you can only do six, stop there if you feel like, but you can feel like you can do 12, well maybe we can bump up the weight a little bit.

And a lot of the athletes that I see from their, you know, zero to one or two years worth of consistent training age, we do that eight rep magic middle number and they get really strong. Cool. For the very experienced ones that are going on to division one sports, I drop it down occasionally to like the three to five cuz they can handle it and then I'll come it back up.

But yeah, and speaking to that, I think one of the biggest realizations I had after like college, which was my inspiration for going into the fitness world and realizing how much we did and how kind of fatigued and hurt. Low energy. I was besides, you know, all the other college things we had to tech on that, um, was afterwards I adopted a very minimum effective dose, like once or twice a week, appropriately intense training cycle.

I'm just as strong as I've ever been and I feel much better, healthier, I have more time to do the sport. And because, so weirdly I'm getting better at the sport. And I think that's one of the other, you know, ego slash hard pills to swallow is you don't have to be in the gym for 12 exercises to A, just get strong or B, expect to also see significant increases, you know, in your sport.

So like Todd said, it depends, it depends on what you want out of this. You want to send a new grade in climbing, or do you want to be someone who is a like climb and a lifter because those are two different people and would require two different answers for the what is involved in your strength phase.

And I think that's totally fine for people obviously to do that And mm-hmm. , you know, I'm sure you would as well, but. Like if the goal, you know, a lot of people will come to a coach with the intent of climbing harder. They've been invested a lot of time practicing and they're like, I want to climb harder.

And then they get slapped with a bunch of strength training workouts that they don't know how to do. All of the initial gains that are pretty interesting and fun for them are coming from becoming coordinated. But now there's learning a new skill, which like, that doesn't make any sense. Which is again, why I'm a big fan of doing isometric movements cuz they're really easy to do and they're have less skill tied to them.

But they're just easy ways to access recruitment. Mm-hmm. . So the one thing that we for sure know transfers to a sport is recruitment levels. But even though deadlifting kind of looks like standing up on your feet, it's not the same thing as rock climbing. Mm-hmm. . So the skill is not the same. So I would not equate the skill of deadlifting to look more like rock climbing, cuz that doesn't mean shit.

Cuz it's not the same thing. Right. And so we get a, we get very confused. Climbers get very confused with the idea of being specific by, Ooh, that looks more like what I do when I'm climbing. That doesn't really matter. What matters is the amount of recruitment that I'm getting out of it, right? Nope, absolutely.

So for the strength phase, again defining, you know, start reflecting the mirror, who you are, things that fit some high intensity, you know, three to five, three to six reps. You know, if you're on the easier side of things or just getting into it. A youth athlete, again, that eight rep personally works really well.

That's like 60, 60%, probably 60 to 70%. Yeah, 50, 60%. Maybe for the first year or so, they get a little more consistent than 70 or 80. But by no means like that two in the tank thing. So if I say, Hey, I want you to do eight reps and you get the eighth, ninth rep, and it was hard, but good form 'em, boom. If they can't do, they can't even get to like five or six.

It's too heavy. And if they can do like 15, okay, then I add weight. But by no means do you have to take someone new to the world of strength training and force them to hit. Failure maxed out six rep things like they don't need that. And yeah, you might be getting strong, but at the cost of a ton of fatigue they can't recover from for three or four days.

And then they go to their sport and they're sore and they suck and then they don't do good at the sport and then they come back to you and they're extra sore from being sore at the sport and then coming to you sore and then now you can't have a good session. So I always like my athletes come in and the app we use is cool cuz it's a little subjective meter.

It'll gimme a a score and when I see it go green, I'm like, all right, we can kind of have fun here and, and work hard. But if it shows like red or yellow, like, all right, we're gonna back off. We're gonna take that three set thing we're gonna do. We're a little two sets, you know, maybe you're gonna pick an exercise that you have fun.

Maybe some we've adopted field hockey specific bicep curls in our gym, which make no sense, but it's fun for them and it's, it's less fatiguing if they wanna do one set. So it's all about like bouncing out, not killing your athletes, and for sure knowing that less gets them stronger. Um, all right, so strength training, uh, let's talk about maybe on the wall stuff.

What's. Would a on the wall type of climbing involve if I was programmed a strength phase? So again, it depends on the experience of the athlete. With the beginner athlete. I think just climbing is plenty good. Like I probably wouldn't have them do a whole lot of on the wall intentional strength training.

I would have them just get used to the skills and maybe explore steeper terrain. Um, but still keeping the session short, I would say for a new climber, having a shorter session that um, is more frequent would be considered strength training for a new climber. Where most climbers that go to the gym, they go and they hang out for three fucking hours for, I'm saying a lot of bad word, sorry,

This one will not be for kids. I'm , I'm in one of the, I dunno why I'm in one of those moods I just got chatting with. But anyways, so I would say for the, for those athletes, they spend three hours at the gym. They go four days a week. Like that's not a good way to get. Good at rock climbing or just start learning the skills of a new sport, right?

You're gonna get hurt doing that, but you're definitely not gonna let your muscles recover enough.  where you're constantly in a catabolic state where you're not really getting that anabolic response that's actually gonna build your strength. So that alone is probably plenty good for a beginner climbers.

Just spend time exploring terrain, spend time exploring steeper terrain, maybe alternating days, but have shorter sessions, but go to the gym more often cuz shorter sessions are easier to recover from instead of thrashing her out for an experience climber. I, for like a lot of my pro climbers or like people that are, are invested a lot of time in climbing, then I think about finger training.

And so I think about either finger training or body tension kinds of drills. And so, uh, people are, at this point are probably familiar with what I'm suggesting for finger training, but being more intentional with the whole block of strength training for them to load their fingers with intention or to load body tension, which would be kind of the same thing as the finger training drill, but grabbing onto bigger.

More slopey or pinch holds with bad feet. So they have to get tension. Uh, keep the tension the whole time up the wall. That's a really easy, and if they want to do like drop knees and heel hooks and toe hooks, like that's all on, I would say, um, in the plan or, or open for, uh, use in that particular drill.

But I have my clients do that for two to three weeks. And it's amazing how, how they respond. Yep. The intentional finger climbing stuff has been the big eyeopener for me. Going into climbs that involve actually like crimping hard or cuz you, you don't really realize. How much maybe you are just like hanging on versus what you could be gaining and actually learning how to grip the hold.

And it's a weird aha moment you get when you kind of do this strength training and then you hop back on a climb that you're kind of struggling with and all of a sudden you just feel like you Spider-Man, you just stick and like, oh, this is the difference between training my fingers, how to actually curl into the hold versus just kinda like hanging on there.

Um, and a question that came up from a clinic at one time was, it's not going, doing all this intentional finger training on the wall, it's not gonna make you an over gripper, over gripping kind of comes from fear or you're run out and you're kind of, you know, insecure. You'll still be able to take that new finger strength and create more efficiency by now.

Turning that drag position that may have been 60% of your fingers maxed and you know, now it's like 40 or 50. So you're creating efficiency through strength training as well. And just because you are telling yourself to actively use your fingers born on the wall, you're not gonna become this person who now can't climb sport routes.

I think the, there, I don't even know that the on the wall drill, I would consider that more, the more I use it and think about it, it's more like a hypertrophy drill. Mm-hmm. . Cause it definitely is a bit fatiguing every set. And you definitely get a little bit of metabolics, um, like buildup of, um, metabolites.

But I would say that's a hypertrophy, um, drill, but also a coordination. So I don't think that you're really. Grasping things and, and applying more force necessarily. I think you're just becoming more coordinated in the skill of grabbing off your hands, which is hugely important. Mm-hmm. , like way more important, like finger boarding will never do that for someone.

Finger boarding will increase someone's recruitment levels to some degree, but it does not have the same coordinative component as doing it on the climbing wall. Well, mm-hmm. , so huge like response there that I see with my clients, and then that needs to be supplemented. So if that needs to be supplemented off the wall with a fingerboard for some athletes, that's fine.

Or if they supplement to off the wall with recruitment, active tension drills, that's fine too. But it needs to be supplemented in a strength training phase. But the reason I've kind of reversed or kind of put most of my clients on those types of drills for a strength training block is because, They can't just perform year round because it has a different response on the connective tissues.

And so a lot of times if someone's in a strength training block, they're still limit bouldering or they're still Red point bouldering, but you can't really access higher or harder holds and smaller holds on a board if you don't actually stop and teach your body to generate more force and to actually grab onto those holds.

Because coming at them with the normal velocity, you're not spending that much time on them. You're just falling mostly. Right. You know? So it's like harder to get better at the sport by just doing the sport at the sport's intensity. That's your own individual limit where you have to stop that for a little bit.

And then I see people getting better at it when they come back. Right. No, it makes sense. I think Gabe brought that up last podcast where limit bouldering, you know, may have different definitions depending upon your perspective and limit bouldering may be like this higher velocity, more realistic to the climbing, but for some people, maybe they think that limit bouldering is at their limit of intensity.

So it might be a lock off that takes you three or five seconds to go there. And so what we're saying is don't confuse the intensity required to get stronger with, this is really hard for me. Personal high intensity, thus limit bouldering. Oh, that might fit into strength training. And so we want that to take a seat for a little bit and more focus on more intentional, slower paced things.

Yeah.

So donut lock off. Let me, lemme plug. Good. So if someone wants to think about the donut lock off, they're like, I can't do the donut lock off. Don't say that. First of all, I can't hold a one arm lock off, right? I'm giving you two options. You can use a 90 degree joint angle or 120 degree joint angle. And so if someone doesn't have enough strength to train an either joint angle this year, we need to do both arms right and left.

So the easiest place to start is by doing two arms, you know, in a neutral grip position, but holding it for as long as you possibly can. That would be like one of your activities that you could do, even though like a 20 to 32nd effort with two arms that would still gain a decent amount of recruitment but would increase the.

To the tend a little bit. And then those individuals need to start doing and practicing single arm holding positions, you know, at a small dosage like we're describing. And do that for, you know, you could do those three or four times per week and you should be able to gain some coordination because part of the thing with like something like a walk off it definitely a big coordination demand.

Mm-hmm. , big coordination, demand, big mechanics demand and also a little bit of strength demand. But it's probably more the coordination, the mechanics, better mechanics, easier to learn the coordination, right. So yeah, absolutely. Like that's a, that's a good easy place to start for someone like that. But I also suggest people do, cuz if you think about just the task, the Peck also needs to be trained so they need to do a bench press, so bench pressing as well.

Cuz my lock off sucks right now compared to my previous. So like I've been doing bench pressing again, going heavy, but just staying in. 90 degree position or doing incline bench press at 90 degrees to train the upper portion of the pack. Yeah. Yeah. Getting into, even when I like some elbow issues and doing the, the hangs, you realize how sore your pack gets when you do high intensity pull anything you're like, oh yeah.

The pack is actually incredibly important when you're doing these things. Um, and maybe to add to that for the listeners, would things like overcoming isometrics in these angles for their arm be useful for this donut lock off? Uh, it depends. Probably not as much because you want to like, rely on all the passive tension, so it's gonna be mostly an eccentric movement.

Gotcha. Yielding asymmetrics are more eccentric. I would probably load heavy with a yielding isometric and not really the overcoming isometric because it. The task is that thing, right? And so we wanna optimize all the passive tension and you wanna train that. Cause if you don't train that you won't get it as much.

Gotcha. So relates back to, again, the first thing we talked about on the podcast is like, understand the demand of the task, understand where you're coming from and that's gonna be your best way of building training plans and, and programs. So we talked about strength training. Let's move into how, so now things are moving a little quicker.

We did the in-season podcast, which mentioned velocity based training. We'll probably cover that a little bit here too. So under our power phase, which we will move into after a strength phase, what are some things that we should be using as guidelines on and off the wall? I usually, I've been more, more and more having athletes do unloaded movements or really light movements.

with the intention of just trying to target the large motor units at their contractile speed. So essentially like the deadlift, I would stop completely if someone's deadlifting in a power phase and have them do box jumps or have them do counter movement jumps or squat jumps. Squad jumps are probably the best for climber because at that point hopefully they've gotten enough recruitment, but now they actually need to be actionable about that recruitment cuz the recruitment does not transfer to rock climbing.

And so the other thing that is confusing for people is they make the assumption that increases in strength, i e increases in load to a bar or whatnot, will directly transfer to the sport. But the sport is not that slow for the most part. And so we need to make sure that they're contracting at their speed.

So that's a really easy way of thinking about it. Got it. Is there any situation where you can maybe like move too fast that one might need to add a little bit of load, maybe add some dumbbells in the hands of that squat jump or. That's probably a good, that's a good point. I would say, well it's interesting cuz the youth comp climbers now need to probably do more ballistic movements, which would be jumping where most outdoor climbers, they probably don't need to move their feet too much.

And so the jumping example would be like, probably in the warmup routine, not as much like a, like a, uh, like an intentional training set, although I have programmed that for athletes. But I think on the wall power things is probably gonna be the most appropriate power intervention for a climbing athlete because you want them to find some controlled or symmetric power move that they can repeat mm-hmm.

and they want to keep doing the same power move. And so that's going to, you know, hopefully activate the fingers, the el ar, elbow flexors, arm extenders, et cetera. Like at speed with. , you know, with that specific movement, which I think makes a lot of sense too. But there is some cases where I had the same client that I was talking about, his body weight pull up is like one meter a second, which is ball looks fast.

Oh yeah. Where, so for him, I suggested like if you go faster than that, you need to slow down, so you need to add 20 pounds or something. But that's not the case for most people. Yeah. I remember in Jersey, I've forgot the guy's name, he's like, Instagram's like someone of the bear in it. And his pull up was like a one, three or four.

We had to add like 60 pounds of kettlebells onto him. Whoa. Like, holy shit dude. You're way too fast. Freedom body. He was the most powerful climber. I think we've, I've been with you in testing. Um, yeah, he was a crazy strong man. Um, okay, so that kind of touches on a little bit off, off wall and on wall stuff.

So when it comes to power training, we want to be prioritizing speed and. Again, nuanced art of coaching scenarios. There is a time where you could move too fast and you'll have to be good at catching that and bring yourself back down. But moving quickly in the movements, you're kinda like synonymous. So again, like the deadlift translated to a box jump and then on the wall we're trying to move fast.

The skin kind of relates to the campus board too, where most of the times everyone just goes and does like the standard campus things. It's like it's a Pinterest page or like a menu from whenever it was created. Um, and everyone can tends to do like this one, five, some other number, but it doesn't really look that fast off.

Maybe the first move is, and then it's kinda like this lock off and a reach and a lock off and a reach. And just because you're on a tool that was designed for power, you know, is that example of, you know, now doing power too slowly so you can be on a campus board and not get any power out of it. The thing that people maybe don't appreciate that too is one thing with strength to power phases, there's very little argument to be made that changing the exercise is a good idea.

Where like the deadlift in the jump is probably the most different I would have as a change. But like pull-ups, if you're doing weighted pullups in your strength phase, you should still do, you know, lower intensity pullups in your power phase. If you're doing a bench press in your strength phase, you should still do a bench press in your power phase, et cetera.

And so there's not really any good reason to learn some new skill just because you're in a power phase. So a lot of times people, you know, put an idea that some tool or some exercises, a power exercise versus a strength exercise, they're just the same thing. They're just used differently. Mm-hmm. . So I like the idea of using the same exercise but just change the way you use it.

And the campus board absolutely is a skill. It's like a huge skill defined by. Lever arm length and all someone's strengths and et cetera, right. So, um, yeah, I would say the, the multiple distance tests mean absolutely nothing when it comes to some sort of performance indicator. Um, but people can get good at it and it's definitely fun to do.

I've done a bunch in my past too, but I would say for the most part it's distracting from people's time and energy when they would be better off doing something else. Hmm. Yeah, absolutely. And probably to reiterate again, cuz something we should talk about all the time. For some reason people still finished at a climbing session.

They're like, oh, time to hit the campus board. And every time I'm like, why are we trying to do a powerful thing at the end of a three hour planning session to move quickly, we need to have lots of energy and low fatigue. That's like Sprint, like Usain Bolt would never lift for three hours and I'd go expect his sprint training to go well.

Like we cannot put. High quality demanded things at the end of our session, so just make sure that we are remembering that too. Again, just because it is associated with power like TA said, doesn't mean you can just pick out and do it whenever you want. You're automatically gonna get power. You have to know how to use the tool correctly to get out of it what you want.

I think there's a good argument to be made too, that you could do a power exercise, warm up every single day you train regardless of the phase, even on a strength phase. And so the, the intention there is like we've mentioned, to just activate the biggest muscle fibers cuz they're naturally fast. So even if the weight is low and I'm moving very explicitly and quickly, I should get more recruitment in my warmup before I do my thing.

Even a strength training phase, which is pretty novel and that was a relatively new idea to me cuz for my life I've like used 60%. Bench press warm up 70% and warm up slowly that way. But the argument can be made is pretty convincing. One that you'd be better off moving, doing a really explosive movement before you do your heavy lifting movements.

Mm-hmm. . So the, so the person that was kind of giving you shit about their slow ramp warmup yesterday is . That's total bullic advice. Like that's a really bad idea to do a bunch of intentionally slow things at a low intensity that's doing nothing but getting a bunch of muscle stretch and building a bunch of accumulated fatigue, which will actually make your performance, that'll actually make your velocity output in your session be shit.

Because the thing that influences contractile velocity is metabolite accumulation. So if you get a bunch of calcium ion buildup and stretching, that will hinder your actual skill acquisition on the wall. So to that advice, science will always win. Sorry buddy. Um, I had something to go from from there. Oh yeah.

It kind of falls naturally into what we do here with our, once you get to like that experience point again in your training we always include some sort of, we categorize it as like a run throw jump or coordinate something with the athletes. So the two or three days are coming in and we're gonna do a small dose of sprinting every day or med ball every day because we can get that in.

Mm-hmm . So not only does it fit there and regardless of the training phase that they're in, cuz it's at such a small dose, it's not gonna do too much, but it gets them a little bit of their power. But also it adds into this nice cherry on the top warmup progression where now the subsequent training that we're gonna do, it's gonna be even better.

So that's gonna, one of those things I, you know, you kind of do as a coach and over the course of years you finally get the aha moment. Like, oh, this is why I've been doing this and why it's been working, you know, so well. Um, and adding to the world thing too, I like, I thought you brought it up once upon a time, but I just realized it once I did my.

Isolated finger strength experiment set where my second set, my first one I warmed up on the hang board. So I'm just kind of hanging there all, you know, yielding us metric, eccentric loading, did my first set of the concentric based stuff and did well. But then the second set, I added up 20 pounds. Like I hit 1 40, 1 40, 1 35, boom, boom, boom.

And I was like, oh yeah, you need to have some sort of concentric thing to kinda like cherry on top of your warmup if your subsequent training is gonna be concentric. Like so. Well the concentric movements are gonna be, and the explosive movements are gonna be the ones that actually use all the active tension, right?

So if it's like a big heavy, and a lot of people prescribe that as like a big heavy finger boarding protocol, high intensity before they climb. . I would say that's probably less applicable in some context for getting the most active recruitment. They would be better off doing like a feed on campus move where they're doing, pulling really fast that would wake up or like activate the large motor units better than doing a really slow controlled hang with added weight.

Right. So most of the time with like the warmup, it's like warmup on a fingerboard. I like that idea. And then do some power moves on the wall, then your session's ready to go. Yep. Exactly. And that's kinda, which is real easy. It saves you so much time. Rather than starting at V zero and getting the v12, especially with that new dope board will plug wetstone the, the tension board, the Wetstone board.

They look awesome. They're sick. Yeah. I need more space in my gym to plug more. I have three  . So the MK two s were a very, a great generation too. Shout out that. Um, all right. Strength, power. Um, Next. So performance phasing, again, kind of like climbing, but let's into the endurance a little bit. So on wall, off wall things to see and feel when you're doing endurance training.

I don't know that we finish. Do do like what do you guys do for sets and reps? For endurance or for for power? Maybe tell people that. What's your typical set reps frequency? If we ha and so in our gym we have the access to the vivi and the velocity based training. So we can see when people's numbers drop off.

And so the sets of reps, depending upon sport climbing, if I want to get a little bit more, so maybe that power endurance gray area, you can run it out and still have a nice cutoff where the fatigue is just very clearly present. So I might run that out for a higher amount of reps. So in the eight to 12, or if there's a specific project we're working for.

And if you're like a boulderer and you have like a one move wonder or you're not. Really focused on doing more than 10 moves with power. I think a shorter thing from like that three to six perspective, and if I wanna get real specific with projecting, um, but if I don't have that, I usually just fall in the plus or minus five rep category for power training because in just general experience, if you're trying really hard and you're trying to move fast, most people don't have it after the sixth, seventh, or eighth rep kind of thing.

So if I have access to the tool, I'm using that for specificity. And if I don't, I'm just using a rep scheme that I know people are gonna be more powerful on average than not. Rather than saying, Hey, I want 10 reps and I'm gonna expect speed, which isn't the case for me. Okay, cool. Yeah, and I usually tell people, as I'm sure you do, just like try and note, try and pay attention to the subjective power loss.

And I think most people know that. So as long as they have that. And they feel, you know, they're okay. They're given the suggestion or the green light to stop the set when they feel a power loss. That's, I think, really important long term, even though it seems like it's not a big deal. Thinking about how many years, you know, people train and how many reps they do, like shaving off 30% of those reps.

There's no doubt that that's helpful. Huge. And it's a big save on fatigue cuz those reps come at a higher cost than their previous reps. When it comes to resting between those things too, um, you can kind of run the self experiment if you have the tool or not. If you rest too little, your next set's just not gonna be good off the bat.

You're only gonna get to like one or two and then nothing. Where if we rest appropriately, usually I think like three or five minutes likely how we run things, then you can come back and have a quality second set and then you'll likely see your fatigue in like three or four, which I think is more expected to.

Two to three quality things, um, rather than doing the first one and kinda like CrossFitting it where you're gonna go really hard, rest 3.7 seconds and then jump back in. You can't expect to be powerful with that little recovery Right. Set to set. So that's not a big thing I think to pay attention to. Um, you should be able to do at least like two or three sets of something quality.

Yeah. That lets you know how much you're resting well, right. Okay. Um, power. Um, so endurance wise, cuz we kind of like touched on that too, we're now, we're not really working at a hundred percent of our stuff and we're probably trying to extend the reps a little bit. So what have you done? What if you've changed anything when it comes to your thoughts on endurance and how you train it?

Is it just on the wall? Are we doing 73 repeaters still failure. Um, I'm okay with people doing, um, doing repeaters to failure. I actually think that's a pretty damn easy way to stress the fingers and overload 'em and progress and like track it and all that stuff. Um, I probably wouldn't add weight to an athlete's, you know, body.

I would certainly do that at sub body weight, you know, cuz eventually they're gonna get fatigued. You can even modify that routine to be a little bit higher rate. So they snap into the board a little bit each time, which is gonna be more like, you know, normal climbing I would say for like, for the sake of people's elbows and like fingers and all the stress there.

I program a lot of off the wall conditioning than I do on the wall conditioning for sport climbers. Cuz I think the high volume power training, like you're describing the literature there would suggest that you can increase your aerobic capacity, your anaerobic capacity, and your R h I E off the wall with something that is, that uses all the body parts.

So you could do body weight like or sub body weight pullups on your fingers. And do power, you know, do high volume power training like that. I see a lot of benefit by athletes doing that. It's just a really easy intervention to do. Mm-hmm. , the, the cool thing about it is it takes away the skill component of the sport.

The skill component of the sport absolutely is important. But I don't want to make my athletes intentionally tired by practicing their sport, cuz that means that the skills that they actually use when they're on their sport are not that great. Right. So the problem with like a four by four is the four minute rest.

It's not really the four problems in a row, it's the four minute rest that's the problem. Cuz as they start to accumulate fatigue and develop metabolite, accumulation, their velocity drops, therefore their coordination drops. And so if we're doing back to back boulder problems, there's no, I have no gripe with.

but they need to be fully recovered from before I do it again to make sure that the quality is there. Mm-hmm. . But if I'm doing it off the wall, I can use pull-ups on a fingerboard. That's not very many, that's not very skill demanding. I can make someone a little bit more tired doing that, but it's the same exact thing all the time.

So I can quantify it easier. So I like that workout as well. Exactly, yeah. Cause front the wall, there's always gonna be, you know, if you're gonna come back next week and you climb something better, there's always gonna be a learning component. So as you know, strength and condition coaches, we're taught to make things objective so that we can audit if it's working or not.

And so that's why when we talk about the volume power training and using a hang board and all that kind of stuff, it's just really easy to see. There's low variables, there's low risk, and we can see if it works, there's repeatability and we can tell you whether or not that our coaching is working for you.

Um, and you can actually see yourself physically if you're being, if you're improving, and not just if you are making better decisions on the wall. Improving your skill and so forth. Um, and maybe to add an addendum to the four by four. Four by, well-rested. Yeah, maybe that's a good way to put it. Let's do four by well rested.

Yeah. Doing no problems. That's cool. If you, that's like four burns at the crag, you know, so for my athletes in that phase, that's not all I would have them do. I absolutely would be having them doing something like a four by four or route climbing or, you know, the actual on the wall, you know, things that have the same demands in terms of edge size, wall angle, grip types that their goals do.

But the off the wall training should be most of the conditioning stuff not on the wall. The on the wall training. I would rather it be something that, you know, looks and feels more like a max effort attempt for them and well rested and so they can actually keep that high level recruitment and power output.

Gotcha. Yeah, well, rested is like a big key word there and it's usually depends on who you are. But I always think back to the experiment I did with Gabe when he was doing his competitive or the grasshopper remote competition. And I had the moxie strapped onto him and he know blindly and I said, Hey, let me know when you think you're well rested.

And almost every single time he wasn't and we had to wait a little longer and then he got back on the wall and was able to give better efforts. Um, and then you can get kind of psyched up with your friends and climbing at the gym is probably hard to sit down for like four or five minutes and actually get well rested or go back on.

But just know how much better of a climber and how much better physically you're going to feel gained when you do things, when you're well rested. Um, so endurance, so that kind of covers the spectrum. The cycles and the phases, and we could yes, go into incredible more detail when it comes to the strength phases and the exercises and choice, and how do I progress a, a bicep and a pole and, and so forth.

And so we'll save those for later episodes and more specific stuff. And also we'll save that for , for Tyler, the membership that he's created. It's actually all attention directed to you. And questions, questions that you asked that are very specific like that, like today's live I hopped in was amazing.

And you'll get the information that you're looking for. There's no flashy quick Instagram catching to it, like you get all Tyler's attention, all of his education, and it's a fantastic resource. So if you want to ask those specific questions, hop on the website, can't afford performance, can't afford human performance.com, and, and hop in that membership.

And this morning we gotta see Carl's mustache. Oh. And yeah. Carl Huong, shout out. You get the all hill, the mighty mustache. My God. . I wasn't worth Carl's mustache. I wasn't worthy to be in that life. . Oh, me neither. That was, that was, that was the Yosemite Sam style. Oh, it was great. That was great. And you said, okay, I wanna give a little ending with the questions that were asked in the Instagram.

So when we post things about some podcasts, your questions are seen and are heard. And so we're gonna ask a few questions from the responses that I've had, and we'll kind of conclude the 10 minutes. Hey, I can, I can go over, let me do the, let's do the completion of our donut lock off thing. Oh, okay. Yes.

Finish that. So, so if someone had, let's say you start December just to make it easier. December 1st you start. Yep. And December 25th is when the submissions are due. So an athlete that maybe is trying to build a good performance for that, they wanna start with strength, but they don't have a lot of time.

So they may maybe do. Maybe four strength sessions per week. Right. But it doesn't need to be a lot of volume. It needs to be pretty low volume. But you could probably do a mix, uh, alternating of two arm lock offs for longer duration to, you know, getting some fatigue. And then the second session would be a single arm, like over or yielding isometric, just gaining that coordination and recruitment.

You would do that alter for a couple weeks, then you need to transition into doing, uh, longer duration effort. So that would be kind of like a capacity phase where they need to practice maybe using a sling with their other finger and just like building more tolerance, slowly releasing that sling. Right.

Same kind of dosage leading up to the event. But my best performances with that event have been like after a couple days of doing nothing. Mm-hmm. Like I can't do it day after day and see a good performance. You want a couple days off before you try and send. All right. We'll leave it that like that. And maybe, uh, if I remember some time off again, write up that little quick program and throw it in the show notes and, and post about it.

That'll be the donut lock off. Program in success. Don't walk off hyper speed program. Hyper speed. You'll all the gains you've ever wanted in two weeks. , hyper hyper speed program leverage. Doesn't matter. Training program. Yeah, you're just gonna, you're gonna do it for the low, low cost of $99.

So wrap this up with some listener questions or ig questions. Uh, and some of these might have been asked before, so we'll kind of keep this quick. Um, so what type of this is from plants climb. So you'll get shout outs too. Look at that. Uh, what type of climbing should we be doing during? Okay, so during a strength phase and he just references or references more time under tension on low holds and so on and so forth.

So a reiteration of our what to do. Climbing in a strength phase, I think. I think that's a really good time to do technical practice stuff too. Okay. So like if people are doing technical drills, drop knee, hill hooks, stepping, all that, I like people to do that. Before they do the strength training on the wall, because we still want to keep that repertoire and awareness, you know, and because the downside of doing this low control thing is like, you do that for four weeks, like, I forgot how to rock climb.

So some sort, some sort of warmup, some sort of technical practice, then that, but that's usually what I would do. Gotcha. Perfect. Okay. So those intentional climbings, and that kinda leads to those. Another question, uh, where peak performance systems are due, uh, to strength training before or after skill work.

So that kind of tied into that really nicely. Um, so technical side of things. Get those things in before you're going into strength. Things that require more intensity, more, you know, fatigue that could accumulate, that would affect, uh, your seal training. Had you done it after all of your strength work.

Right? Definitely wanna do it before, boom. That's a cool name, like an iex asks . That's awesome. Best name yet. Uh, de-load weeks versus complete Rest Weeks. And this is really good. We covered complete rest weeks. Rest weeks, so probably don't worry about, uh, de I think de-loading. Yes. It's like classic textbook kind of things.

I think enough people have like vacations, bad weather and whatnot that come into their lives where it kind of nationally deloads you. But there's probably more value in just resting. Plan your rest and you're gonna see a lot more, rather than worrying about the technicality of deloading donuts over booze donuts, over booze.

Every time donuts, over booze, booze will get you more than donuts in terms of your performance drop. And that's the other thing is people will drink it up, but then they'll talk shit on eating donuts and you're like, that's not how it works. That's, Nope, that's why you keep plateauing. That's bad logic.

Um, a guy named Te Technic, technically strong. Okay. Asks, um, in referring to where is, he's always late anyways. Where is he? Yeah. Yeah, he is, he's actually on a plane. We should have had him come in through the plane. That would've been cool. I don't even know if you can do that. Can you? Wifi maybe. Well you can have wifi, but they always say no video calls or whatever.

Oh, okay. Yeah, you didn't have to be on private jet. Which one day?  We'll be on the C4 jet. Yeah, . Um, so weighted hangs pull up. So density hangs. So where do weighted hangs pullups and density hangs. So I think we talked about the weighted stuff in the strength training, but maybe let's flip back to like density hangs, which was a, a thing you talked about in a the simplest figure training program once a while.

Um, has anything changed in your thoughts regarding Density Hangs? Were they useful? Oh no, they're great. They're great for, I usually think about those as rehab things, so those I for sure do for pulley, sore pullies and finger rehabilitation. You could do that in like a strength training phase. But I think an easier way to think about it is the on the wall slow controlled loading kind of does the same thing.

Gotcha. But it's more interesting. Yeah. Rather than just kind of hanging there for a long duration formation. Yeah. I, I like that better, but I think it still kind of has the same intent on the tendon. Gotcha. But for rehab, I really like it has a slow, continuous effort for the initial stages. Gotcha.

Technically he's strong. He's asking like he can't just text us. Yeah. . Hey, I like it. You puffed into the question. Maybe . Maybe . That's funny. Uh, Stephen Lewis, have you noticed any difference in max strength rep capacity between male and female athletes using the tin deck? So I know I personally haven't had enough time to train as many females, A lot of my demographics male.

So maybe onto you with all the data, any interesting things you've noticed? Um, I usually think that the, I usually find, and this is probably not surprising, that female strength, weight ratio, when we measure it with the overcoming style is usually a little bit higher than the males, but I think that's because the, they're just not as strong.

They don't have as much muscle pulling down. So I would say that's probably the reason. But I don't have long-term like use of training like that to show improvement on that cuz it's relatively something that, it's new that I've been doing. So not a lot of follow up, follow up numbers on that. Hopefully like when I chatted with Tom, you know, hopefully we'll do set some things up and I'll, you know, help help them design some studies to do.

Cuz for the finger physiology course, like some of the. Researchers used an overcoming style finger test, but then they still did a finger boarding. Yeah, no sir. So they didn't train the, the isometrics, they didn't train the overcoming isometric, but they tested them. But then when they came back, they're like, not really that much stronger.

You're like, well, no shit. You didn't train that movement. So. Right. Hopefully that will change and hope. Yeah. And hopefully that the education behind, um, really understanding what you're assessing and what you need to, you know, do the study on, because like you said, it, it looks the same, but it's not. So the study kind of missed the mark on, uh, where it could have seen the most value.

And our final question comes from, um, Baruch, which I, he taught me how to say his name correctly over the, the mobility course. Cause I was like, I'm sorry if I Americanize your name. I don't intend to. And he comes at with talking about the, uh, was relative to the isolated finger, like sets and reps.

Usually I do about three or four reps per set when my aim is Max took two days on and I couldn't go to gym. So he did six or seven reps per hand and he was still in the 80 to 85% range. But the goal was max, not necessarily strength endurance. So the question comes is in that case, you know, would you do three or four polls and it's better to rest or would you keep going until you see like a percent drop?

Is there any value between just cutting it off at the reps you know are gonna be high or can you get the same effect and maybe a little bit better if you do like the percent drop autoregulation with twice the volume percent, uh, not twice the volume? So I think, so I think the question to better frame is if I did, so if I did a finger pull and I watched the tin deck go up and out and I cut myself up.

I cut myself off when it dropped. And then option B is, I just did like three max efforts. Is there any value into getting stronger in that like three max efforts relative to maybe you'll get like seven or eight reps, but you cut yourself off where you're clearly fatigued? Assuming the volume is the same, I'd do like two sets of those things.

Um, I would do more volume. I would do, well, that wouldn't be the same volume. That would be, it's like six reps versus maybe 14 reps. Yeah, that would be more volume. With the second example, I would do the same volume, but I would do more sets and drop the reps. Okay. Because the more reps you do the, you're definitely gonna get a, you know, beyond five reps, you're not gonna get as much motor motor control and not as much like central motor command signal.

Gotcha. So you do leak into, Okay, cool. So I think to answer that, yeah, keep the reps a little low to keep your recruitment definitely high. And the more we push the reps, we can leak into some gray area that we, we might not want. If we're, if our goal is max recruitment intent, I'd do more sets. Yeah. Cool.

All righty. Um, so thank you for the questions to all of the, uh, followers on Instagram. We appreciate the supports and the input and the feedback. It's very helpful. Um, that will yeah, wrap up the ship. Any final thoughts on programming, ization, all that stuff? Um, I have a couple final thoughts.

Come to see us at T Swift in Jim. Woo. Shout out Taylor Swift. Hopefully our first celebrity guest. We'll do , do a shout out for T Swift in honor of her concert in June. So aside from that, no other, no other concerts. No, no comments. All righty, we'll end you guys. All on Taylor Swift and Taylor, if you hear this, I'm from Berks County.

I'm right here. You I know. Come, come, come, come meet us. So come, let's do one more plug for my client. Daniel. People should check out his video on YouTube. His handle is, lemme find it real fast. His handle is, I gotta give this kid some cause he crushed it. This ball, it was so sick his. Handle is rock underscore star, s h t a a r.

So go check out his, um, he did like a, his friend did a video called Damn Daniel . And it was like a, a double digit season. So he wanted to send as many double digit boulders as he could this fall. And he sent like, I think eight V 10 s or something. Wow. Like, just totally crushed it. So he's a So go give him some attention.

His video's cool. And he put in the work. So it's pretty's pretty inspiring. It's pretty cool to watch. Damn, Daniel. That's, that is impressive. I know. It's, so that's the title. It's awesome. Great success. Alrighty. That's our programming puration cycling conversation. Shout out if you have any questions, uh, and we'll try and plug 'em into the next podcast.

So thank you for listening.