Progressing to smaller campus rungs during the power phase

[pickard]

Greeting Andersons - As a relatively new campus board user I tried my first campus session following the beginner workout, and was able to complete the entire workout with relative ease. Based on this I attempted the intermediate workout yesterday evening and got pretty solidly shut down. The campus board I have only has the metolius medium and small rungs, and I am able to complete ladders and max ladders on the medium rungs very comfortably with good fluid form.

My problem is that when I get onto the smallest rungs I get completely shut down, and am struggling to complete even a basic ladder. As much of the intermediate workout seems to spend time on the small rungs, I am not sure how best to utilize the campus sessions during my power phase. Even more frustrating is that during the strength phase I specifically targeted small open handed crimps to try and be ready for the smaller campus rung size, and saw great gains during my four weeks of HB. 

Do you have any suggestions for how to progress from the medium to the small rungs? Or would I be better suited to tailor my campus workouts for this season on the medium rungs?

Thanks again for all your advice and help. 

[MarkAnderson]

Have you tried Matching Ladders on the small rungs?

Can you get a power spot, or use a kick plate for your feet to make the small rungs a bit easier? If so, try that for a while until you get used to the smaller rungs. I would guess this is at least partly mental, so if you can get some help at first, you might be able to convince yourself that you can use the small rungs.

If those are not options for you, I would continue to warmup on the medium rungs, and then try the small rungs for a bit during each campus session. If you continue to struggle, you can still do the majority of your workout on the medium rungs. Keep trying to use the small rungs for atleast two sets each workout. Eventually you will get there but it may take a couple of seasons of hangboard training.

[iepsje]

What is the size difference between the rungs? And what happens when you shut down? Do you slip off? Is it mental? Can't you pull up?
Can you deadhang on the small rungs? If so, I wiould say try to do a pull-up on the small rungs or try to lock off on the small rungs. If you can perform those, then try to lock of and let go with one hand and try to reach the next rung, then stop and try the same on the other side. And try to work with small steps towards a (matching) ladder.
And like Mark said, do this besides the training on the medium rungs, but maybe focus on performing it real neat and tidy.

Good luck!

[pickard]

Since my first post I have done some deeper inquiry into this, and I sorted out the problem. I feel pretty sheepish writing this, but hopefully other newer campus board users might not make this same mistake as me--- or will simply grab every size rung before getting into their campus sessions.

It turns out that my gym uses two different "versions" of the the small metolius rungs. One set is the normal, straight out of the box metolius version, and the other is the same small rungs only sanded down significantly to make much less positive. Our gym does have some climbers who have put down some outdoor V14s, so I suppose for them the small campus rungs must seem like jugs and they asked for more of a challenge. Turns out I had been using these "modified" small rungs and not the normal size. The sanded down rungs feel extremely similar to the small crimp on the bottom row of the beastmaker 2000 for a reference.

After realizing my error, I put a session in using the "non-sanded down normal small rungs" and realized that I can indeed do ladders and was able to start working max ladders.

A pretty foolish error that costed me two campus sessions, but glad to be on the right track. Thanks for the help Mark and iepsje.

[Charlie S]

As a side note for any future campus boarders or individuals new to it:
My first season of campusing was weak, really week.  This past season (my second season on the campus board) I improved significantly.  Instead of doing mostly large rungs, I was able to do many on the medium and basic ladders on the small.  Here's a volume chart for reference:



My first season was 5 workouts.  I extended that out this season (workouts 6-12, with 10-11 being limit bouldering).  While the graphs don't show you my precise workouts, you can see that I was able to up the duration and intensity on the second season!  (Each "set" is comprised of two laps or runs.)

[MarkAnderson]

Nice Charlie! I'm curious how you are measuring "volume" for your campus workouts. It's always a tricky metric because usually it's pretty easy to tack on garbage sets at the end of the workout to increase your total work accomplished. For measuring the intensity of a single set, I think something like this would be pretty good:

Intensity = (total rungs cleared*)/(# of moves), *where 'total rungs cleared' would be 5 if you did a 1-3-6 Max Ladder.

This values one big move over several smaller moves.

[Charlie S]

I like your idea of rungs cleared.  I'd been using an arbitrary intensity scale:

Workout	Intensity
Ladders	1
Skip 1 Rung	2
Double Clutch	3
Skip 2 Rungs	4
Skip Double Clutch	5

My formula for volume is currently:
Volume=Intensity*duration

So now what it looks like in my massive Excel spreadsheet....

(click on it to see)

On the left side, I put in the raw data: rung size and the actual workout.  On the right side, I have the rung "intensity" (L=1, M=2, S=3), the workout intensity (from the above chart), the duration (number of moves including start and finish), and finally the volume is calculated as:
Volume=rung intensity*workout intensity*duration

Example:
On my last workout, Set #8, I did B4-R6-L9 and B4-L6-R9.  This is a skip 1 rung and skip 2 rungs workout.  For this case, I averaged the workout intensity as 3.  The rungs were medium, so that's 2.  The duration was 6 moves (over the entire set).  The volume for that set was 3*2*6=36.

Trying your formula, and modified to include rung size:
Volume=Rung Intensity*Rungs Cleared/# Moves=2*(2+3)/2=5.  This negates the need for an arbitrary workout intensity...I shall try this!  How would you implement the formula to account for double clutches as clearing 1 rung with 1 move (the same for a basic ladder)?

[RyanJohnson]

I recently got carried away with devising a way to graph the results of a campusing workout and this discussion is right along the lines of what I've been doing! It's simple enough to create a table containing various exercises and rung size.

Date	Rung size	[1,3,5]	[1,4,6]	[1,4,7]
07/01/2014	LG	x2	x1	0
07/04/2014	LG	0	x2	x1
07/07/2014	LG	0	x1	x2

By ordering the exercises in ascending difficulty, at a glance it's easy enough to intuit progress by noting the shift in raw counts rightward.

But as much as I like tables, I prefer graphs for visualizing trends. My formula involves a few more variables that help differentiate the computed value associated with each exercise. What I've started using is:

CampusVolume = RungSize * Offset_initial + Reach + Match_final + (LadderVolume))

LadderVolume is broken down a bit further in effort to isolate the repeated movement involved.

LadderVolume = Offset + (Match + Reach) * N

The values for Offset, Reaches and Matches come from an arbitrary scale associated with rungs traveled. RungSize is small, medium, large corresponding with values 3, 2, 1.

Rungs Traveled	Offset	Reach	Match
0	0	2	1
1	.5	3	2
2	1	5	3
3	1.5	8	4
4	2	13	5

What I'm trying to do is associate a value with the difficulty of the various movements involved in campus. I think generally, and for me especially, it's harder to start matched and go to a higher rung than it is to have a hand on a higher rung and draw the training hand up. Same for starting hands offset as opposed to matched.

Anyways, after calculating a value for each of the campusing exercises that I do then multiplied by how many reps of each exercises and summed for a value that I can plot against the date, I was left with a nice graph allowing me to visually see how days spent campusing compare to one another.

I came to the same conclusion that I could just add junk workouts to pad the graph. To fix that, I decided to graph a kind of difficulty density. Instead of summing all exercises performed, I only include the top N exercises. Where N is the number of exercises I should ideally limit myself to, say 15-20 for campusing, compared with the amount of exercises I actually do because I got carried away/wanted to pad the numbers.

So far I haven't done an entire campusing cycle with this new calculation yet. I've only been doing maintenance campusing exercises in an effort to extend the performance season a bit more to finish the ol' proj. I'm very curious as to how it'll all turn out during the next cycle.

Cheers!

[alanl]

Hi, I'm new on the forum and new to systematic campus training (and much impressed with the book, thanks Anderson Bros). I'm currently in my first power phase and wondering how to progress on max ladders: go longer first, or smaller rungs first? I'm close to 1-3-5 on big rungs: when I'm solid on those, is the sensible progression 1-4-6 on big rungs, or 1-3-5 on medium rungs? Or both?

My inclination would be to go longer first, because I think I'm weaker on dymamism and upper body burl than I am on finger strength.

Apologies if this is covered in the book, but if it is I missed it.