Muscle loss - don't be distracted by it

In the comments to my previous post on reasons for lack of improvement, Ian asked:

“I understand how to lose weight, but is there any specific way to ensure that as you lose weight you reduce fat% and not just body mass?”

With a weight loss program there isn’t any way to guarantee you lose only body fat, but you would almost never want this anyway in climbing. Most climbers could do with losing a fair bit of lower body muscle as well.

You minimise the loss of muscle associated with general weight loss by training those muscle groups you need while losing weight on an athlete’s diet.

The only situation you really need worry about loss of muscle is if you diet the unhealthy way i.e. by reducing the proportion of carbohydrate you eat and/or dieting aggressively but then letting it go and putting on fat again.

Common reasons for zero improvement despite seemingly getting everything right

So, you eat well, sleep well, climb three+ times a week and mix up the training venue/activity/angle/rock type etc, but you STILL don’t improve. What’s going on?!

Here are the top two reasons why this happens in climbing:

1. You aren’t trying hard enough. Yep, that’s right, you just don’t give it 100%. Most people simply don’t realise how hard they can try. Don’t believe me? It’s been proven time after time in muscular strength research. Get your average non-athlete and put them on a strength testing apparatus of your choice and tell them to generate their perceived maximum force. Add screams of encouragement – force goes up. Add some fear – force goes up. Think about it – there are lots of extreme circumstances in life that people adapt to handle, that would be unthinkable to the untrained person. Soldiers in wars can function around sights and sounds of death, whereas an untrained person would fall apart put in their shoes. A grim but real enough analogy.

Athletes are trained to know how to generate massive amounts of neural activation and send that like a lightning bolt to the muscles to squeeze out every last drop of activation. It’s no surprise the muscles are stimulated to adapt. Much time is spent in climbing coaching just trying to communicate the fact that often the strength for the moves is already there, it’s just being able to muster the level of effort to tap into it.

Think of something in life that gives you a little shudder of fear because it’s so hard for you or you know it requires so much effort. Apply that level of effort to every route you do, and you cannot fail to improve.

2. You are too heavy. Climbing hard demands a body composition that is skewed as far as possible (palatable) in the direction of light and strong. Carrying excess weight acts like a dampener on improvements made in other performance effectors.

Consider two hypothetical male climbers, one with body fat 9%, the other 25%. Otherwise they are identical. It takes both the same amount of training to achieve a 5% increase in maximum finger force output. For the 9% fat man, this is enough to destroy all of his current projects and throw him comfortably into the next grade at least. For 30% man, it might be hardly noticeable. The lesson? Be 9% man.

How much training can you handle?

Something that people ask constantly is how much training should I do? How often can I climb? Of course the main worry in the back of folk’s minds is injury. It’s a constant trade off between training hard enough to make an overload and giving your body too much to recover from between sessions and descending to the point of chronic tissue damage.

The answer is of course ‘it depends’. It depends on how much your body is ready for the training. The more years of training you have behind you, the more you can deal with. Ultimately, the only person who can decide whether you are training too much of little I you. Fortunately, your body is constantly giving you messages informing you of whether this is happening or not. Lets look at a few of them:

‘I am not getting stronger/fitter’ – This message means you are not training the attributes you wish to target hard enough.

‘I really have to force myself to do each session and I’m feeling tired, sore and unable to maintain a similar level of performance to previous sessions. – This message means you are doing more than your body can recover from. But before blaming too much training, first ask yourself if it’s the quality of your recovery that is actually to blame – too little sleep, too much additional life stress, poor diet, too much alcohol etc…

To start answering the question of ‘how much should I train?’, a good place to start is ‘try a bit more that you are used to’. Your body will tell you whether your choice is broadly correct or not. If its not enough training, you will stay at the same level. Too much and thing will hurt.

Another complicating factor that will confuse the messages coming your body (besides how well you take care of your body in recovery) is training choices you make. So if you train harder and harder than before and still nothing happens, you probably need to add some variety in the training.

Pulling on the same holds, on the same wall or crag week in, week out, for years is not training, it’s just going through the motions.

The bottom line is – listen to your body, if you really pay attention to it, it will give you almost all of the clues you need to choose the right workrate.

Breathing in climbing

Something that people occasionally ask about in climbing is breathing during difficult climbing – how important is it and how can it help your climbing?

Obviously we need to breath almost constantly and during exercise of any kind its even more important to fulfil it’s most basic function of delivering enough oxygen and removing carbon dioxide so metabolism can keep happening at the desired rate. But breathing is also extremely important psychologically.

Breathing can be used to set or assist the pace and rhythm of movement and even to help control aggression on moves. Climbing movements at your limit require constant changes in speed of movement and delivery of muscular effort. Regulation of breathing can be a sort of link between body and mind for managing this task. The best way I can describe it is to say that the mind expresses the desired type of movement through breathing, which tends to be followed immediately by a similar body movement, tension or force delivery.

Often, A sharp or deep intake of breath happens before a movement is executed, followed by a longer exhalation during or after the movement has been completed. Many climbers find that they hold their breath far too long during climbing until the breathing centres force them to breath and this breaks up the body’s climbing rhythm and they ask how they can break this habit?

The answer is by running some technique drills. Technique drills are nothing scary, so don’t be put off by the jargon - it just means repeated exercises focusing on something in particular that you want to practice. A really good time for any breathing or movement technique drills is when you warm up.

Because the climbing is not hard, you have ‘space’ in your mind to concentrate on something within the movements (like your breathing rhythm) as opposed to having to give your full concentration to just staying on the wall. Practice climbing a route or problem you can do comfortably again and again. Separate the two main stages of climbing movement – preparing to move (where you set your feet and body) and moving (where you execute a hand movement). While preparing to move, focus on making smooth relaxed breaths as you set your lower body in preparation for the next reach. One complete breath cycle for each foot movement is common on lots of moves but not on every one. Take a breath in as you stare and focus on the next hold and exhale as you grab the hold.

Consistent practice during easy climbing will help you find a breathing rhythm that works well for your climbing style and it will become automatic so it happens without you even thinking about it on the hard stuff. It’s most often relative beginners (less than two years regular climbing) that notice breathing as a problem. It’s hard for them because there may be no such thing as easy climbing! Just being on the wall is enough to feel so tense you have to force yourself to breath. If this is you, don’t worry – you will find a rhythm and with patience it will come once you get a change to be more composed on the rock.

Start reading the rock (and never stop)

Coaching is really great fun. I don’t have experience coaching other sports but I’m guessing climbing must be pretty interesting as sports go. In climbing there are so many skills and abilities that create the performance. Meeting climbers who are at a high level you see that many of these skills are a prerequisite and don’t even need mentioning. With these climbers the challenge is to get them to stand back, and see the bad habits they have developed and to make a convincing enough case for them to see clearly the benefits on offer if they change those habits.

Coaching climbers at a less advanced level is very different. It’s strange sometimes to see different climbers all trying to climb the same problems but using totally different styles and approaches. When in groups it makes it easier to talk folks through the benefits of each approach and the effects of neglecting other parts of the chain. Always the most dramatic image for students is when someone who is obviously very much weaker than the rest (often a female climber in a group of strong young guys) makes climbing steep ground look effortless through applying momentum and lower body muscle groups. I love it when this happens because it’s something I cannot (easily) convincingly demonstrate myself. People assume that if I make a move look easy it’s because I applied more force through the handholds. So I spend a lot of time pointing out my tensed calf muscles as I move on a steep board and generate the force for the movement from my toes and my movement of my hips.

Getting down to the nitty gritty of movement is really great fun. And making breakthroughs in it is even more fun. One big thing that the climbers I coach say to me is that they worry that they will forget my explanations for how they managed a move easily that was previously impossible, so the improvement will be transient.

And that brings me to my most repeated piece of advice in coaching – look at the rock and the holds, and listen to your body as you make the moves on them. Soak up the information it gives you, even though it feels like a brain crash to start with.

At first you will have to process the bits of information consciously, chunk by chunk. Like learning a foreign language, at first you have to piece sentences together by individually recalling words and their basic meaning. Everything is clunky and takes a great deal of conscious effort. There is no sidestepping this stage – you have to go through it.

But gradually, more and more aspects of what the hold layout means in terms of movement decisions will come automatically, and you can deal more and more with understanding it at a higher level and refining the timing and execution of each part.

But the minute you get lazy and stop looking at the holds before, during and between attempts on a climb, your technique learning will slow down or even reverse. It is the conscious (at first) efforts to understand what the holds are asking you to do that makes the connections in the brain you are after.

Look > try to understand > try to climb > try to understand > look some more > and so on

This is the way for steady technique gains.

If you go for:

Try to climb > try to climb > try to climb > brain asleep > try to climb > try to climb

Not much improvement is on the horizon.

The seemingly hard way of trying to understand climbing movement from the word go, rather than hoping you might understand it someday is actually the short cut.

Alcohol and training

Brendan asks…

“I've just read your reply to an OCC question about how drinking coffee affects endurance training. Something I've wondered about is how another drink - booze! - affects performance.
I assume drinking is not beneficial to climbing full-stop, but is it particularly bad to drink soon after a session/on the same day? I often climb on a Friday then go out for a few beers that evening, I'd like to know if that wrecks the physical benefits of the training. Is it worth planning training around evenings when you know you'll be drinking?”

Ah ha, alcohol is definitely a different story! It’s pretty bad for your body in lots of ways, but the main way it will affect your training is by reducing the quality of the recovery and increasing the recovery time. The best way to offset the worst of the effects is to make sure you have a proper athletes meal (high carbohydrate) and plenty of water straight after the climbing. And make sure you avoid the super greasy takeaway after the night out. The combination of a skinful of beer and something as nutritionally evil as a takeaway kebab is what gives so many British climbers a little tyre to weigh them down on the rock.

I can’t believe I’m really writing about this on this site, but for a lot of British climbers, its really holding their ability on the rock down a grade or two.

The funny thing is, just increasing the amount of time between any drinking you do neatly solves the problem, without having to sacrifice the feeling that you can’t relax and have fun when you do go out. The nightly in-the-house beer in front of the telly is the hidden evil here. It raises your tolerance to alcohol a hell of a lot. Meaning that when you do go out, you ‘have’ to drink more, if you know what I mean.

On the other hand, if you only ever drink every other week/month when you do go out, half as much or less alcohol will have the same effect, with the obvious benefits of less weight gain and less detrimental effects on recovery from training. I find that these days every time I drink a pint of beer (once every couple of months?) it feels like the first time I drank alcohol, i.e. one pint and I’m a right mess. I like it that way.

Five year Audit

Following on from my last post about setting up the conditions to get to work on your climbing, and enjoyment of it, here is a practical one minute step to deciding whether your training is correct. It's so brain dead obvious you might scoff. Be warned.

Write down a very brief description (or just think back) of where and how much you climbed, what type of activities this included and who with. Something like the following would be an example:

...Climbed indoors at the local climbing centre after work tuesdays and thursdays with Brian and Joe and at the weekend on Grit. At the wall I did 5+s and 6as and a little play on the boulder wall afterwards. Outside I did HVSs and the odd E1.

How many things are the same today?

The more things that are the same, the more likely it is your climbing level has not changed.

What to do? Something different of course!

This weekend try a new rock type. This weeknight try a whole session on the panel or angle you used to avoid and see how much you can master (& begin to love) it. Phone up a different climbing partner.

I know some climbers who deliberately train on the very same problems for years on end. This is not training. In the main they do this because of fear of losing the strengths they do have if they diversify their training a bit. I can tell you it won't have a negative effect - strip those problems and start again. Give your body something fresh to adapt to.

Sticking to the stuff you are comfortable with and know you can do is not training,

Don't get stuck.

Planning your training - rule 0

Freedom > success (not the other way round)

Planning your training starts with organising your time to allow time and space to improve at the skill of climbing. Don’t work now to get freedom later. It won’t happen. Find work that gives you the freedom now, and that at least gives you the chance to start now and not later (later is too late).

Understand that this is not a mythical easy option. It’s a real option and it’s the hardest option. Safe = mediocre. Finding the answer to this problem will be the hardest training ask you’ll ever do. It’s great that you have to deal with it first!

Getting through the issue of finding the right work that fits what you want to do (as opposed fitting what you want to do to your work schedule) will most likely involve some radical action and some quite scary decisions or risks. Could you tell your boss that you want to work from home because you could produce more results in half the time? (and that you going climbing more is a good thing for your productivity, not a bad thing)?

It’s easier just to stay safe and not do it.

Then you won’t have to try and wonder how you can find the job that allows you this freedom, how you can redefine your current one, or whether you want the rewards enough to muster the effort.

In no time, twenty years will have gone past. Don’t turn round and find yourself still asking the same question.

Lactic Acid woes

Nik asks…

is there any way of decreasing the production of lactic acid?

I’ve heard that drinking a lot of water while doing a long climbing session flushes the lactic acid out,
shaking your arms,
breathing deeply while on a route,
not drinking caffeine as this dilates the blood vessels,

Any thoughts or advice?

The answer to this, frustratingly, is that it’s not really the question that needs asking! Muscle fatigue is a complicated subject in general but for the type of contractions we make (I’m talking about forearms here – intermittent isometric contractions) it’s even more complex. If I launch into an explanation it could bring on headaches all round but let me summarise by saying that lactic acid is just one among a long list of chemicals that cause our forearms to fail. Potassium ions, hydrogen ions and many others build up beyond their normal equilibrium and interfere with running muscle metabolism as fast as we’d like.

The goal is not so simply to decrease production of lactic acid, rather to delay it or prevent it to as high intensities as possible, and then tolerate it’s presence for as long as possible at higher intensities. Lactic acid build up in climbers bloodstreams is miniscule compared to most other endurance sports that engage much more muscle at a high intensity. In fact the small amounts of lactic acid we do produce in our forearms are probably easily taken up my the other muscle groups and recycled. So we should focus on the forearm.

Not enough is known about what goes on chemically deep inside the forearms at the moments before we fail on routes. That’s mostly because it’s so difficult/unethical to research (would you like a big apple core of muscle ripped out of your forearm by a man in a white coat just as you pump out?). But it appears that local and pretty transient chemical changes account for a larger part of our forearm fatigue.

The main (non technical) method to avoid forearm pump is of course endurance training! There are no short cuts or tactics that substitute hard hours on the circuits. But breathing well and shaking arms are indeed useful for helping diffuse the local build up of chemicals, delaying the point at which they will inhibit metabolism and also assisting blood flow. Thorough warm-up is also critical, not just at the start of a session but also if you stop and let yourself get cold between climbs.

It’s important though to keep perspective though. Good climbing technique will be far more effective for delaying pump, and spotting rests will do more to get you through a pump than anything else. No hands rests are everywhere, even where you least expect them. Make yourself an expert on kneebars, heel-toe locks, toe hooks, bat hangs, and various scums and body bars. Look out for them everywhere as you climb, and take note of how they are used when you see other using them. They will give you a killer advantage, not to mention make your belayer choke with jealously as you relax and chill in the middle of the crux.

What I’m saying here is that if you are at the stage to be worrying about having a cup of coffee before a climbing session your technique should be virtually perfect!

Top 5 ways to avoid pully injuries

I've seen that my posts on A2 pulley injuries on my sites are really popular and get loads of feedback and extra questions. During next year I'll be writing more on this subject and really welcome your case studies either by commenting on the posts directly or emailing me.

Phil emailed today to ask about good way to prevent finger injuries. I've written some advice in an extended article on my main site here. But for a quick hit to keep in mind while you are climbing here are the top five ways to avoid finger injuries in a few words:

1. Good footwork - sloppy footwork means cutting loose when your feet slip unexpectedly. Sudden unanticipated peak forces tear pulleys. Keep that footwork clean. If you are too knackered to climb properly after many hours at the wall, go home and eat pasta and come back the next day.

2. Focus - lack of concentration or distraction often causes foot slippage. Take a second to focus properly before each attempt on a problem. You will climb better and anticipate better.

3. Warm up - And remember to re-warmup if you stop and chat for an hour in the cold.

4. Get strong openhanded - You should be just as strong holding a simple edge (like a campus rung) openhanded as crimped. If you are more dependent on crimps, you are putting yourself at risk.

5. Eat and sleep lots - Poor rest and fuelling sets you up for the risk factors above. Take care of your body, you only have one. Don't climb with a hangover...you'll wobble and shake your way to an injury.

...actually I'll rephrase that - Don't get a hangover so you can climb safely.