Training Through Winter With No Outdoor Climbing

[MarkAnderson]

"Sam from the UK" asked: 

The winters here consist of long wet periods (November-March) and little opportunity to get outside on projects. The summers are often showery with projects only being dry for 3-4 months (june- September ish). The trend over here is to train over the winter and start the season with a trip abroad around April and to finish off the season with a trip abroad in the autumn.

The last couple of winters my training has consisted of - 5weeks strength&power, 1 week rest, 5weeks 50% strength&power - 50% power endurance, 1 week rest, 6 weeks power endurance.

Reading your book has made me assess my previous training experience and I have realised that 1. I probably peak for 'bouldering strength' towards the end of the middle block and 2. I dont make the power endurance gains that I would like (I think this could be improved by using the training techniques described in your book).

My goal is to improve my sports climbing redpoint grade (currently fr.8a+). Onsighting I do for fun and bouldering I do to get stronger for routes (current boulder grade is v8/9).

My question is - with little use of a perfomance peak in the winter period, what would be the best use/structure for 5 months of indoor time to prepare for the on coming season?

[MarkAnderson]

Sam,



That's a great question. I think there are a couple different options. One is to just do two training cycles during the 5 month winter. If you did this, the first cycle would be truncated, only consisting of Base Fitness, Strength and Power. To stay motivated, come up with some indoor training goals, like a new personal best on the campus board, a one arm pull-up (or some other "feat of strength" like that), or to send some hard indoor boulder problem(s). That is the approach I use when I have nothing to train for (outside) for a long period of time.



Alternatively, many other sports utilize much longer Macrocycles and Phase lengths for periodization (like cycling for example). You could certainly extend the length of each training phase a proportional amount to stretch out your training cycle to 5 months. I'm not certain what the results would be, but it would be an interesting experiment. My concern would be that I tend to plateau pretty significantly after about 4 weeks of hangboard training, so I don't know how effective it would be to extend the Strength Phase. One way to mitigate that would be to do two Strength phases back to back with a short break in between. For example, you could do a 4 week strength phase, take a week off (or do a week of Base Fitness or Power), and then do another 3-4 weeks of strength training. I've done that in the past for injury rehab with great results.



I hope this helps, let us know how it goes, I;m sure many others would be interested in hearing how this works out.



Good luck,

Mark

[Chris W]

I've been contemplating something similar to this for a while. I seem to have lots of room to improve with my strength and power training, so I was planning on a full cycle for a fall season, strength and power only for winter (we boulder here in PA in the dead of winter), full cycle for spring, and a strength and power phase in the summer. Have you ever experimented with a schedule like this? Are 4 strength seasons per year too many (I'm afraid of plateauing)?

[MarkAnderson]

I currently do 4 cycles per year. I also skip the PE Phase pretty regularly if my goals don't warrant any PE training. But endurance is a strength for me, it comes pretty easily so I can afford to skip training it every few seasons or so.