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Post by veraun on Dec 11, 2017 16:13:29 GMT -7
Any tips on building a training plan for a USA Climbing youth getting ready for the sport onsight season?
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Post by jonfrisby on Dec 11, 2017 16:16:40 GMT -7
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Post by veraun on Dec 12, 2017 8:07:18 GMT -7
Maybe a more specific question...Chapter 13 of The Rock Climber’s Training Manual discusses onsight climbing and the importance of ARC sessions as a key training tool. That said, a typical linear periodization macro-cycle for an advanced climber only uses ARC training in the base phase. Should ARC training be incorporated into the strength, power, and power endurance phases? Or perhaps during the performance phase a non-linear periodization approach should be taken with ARC, strength, power, and power endurance sessions in each week as is suggested on page 195?
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Post by jonfrisby on Dec 12, 2017 8:53:50 GMT -7
are they training for lead or boulder or both?
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Post by MarkAnderson on Dec 12, 2017 9:36:40 GMT -7
You should continue to ARC a little bit through each training phase. I recommend it as the first part of every warmup. So frequency would be every climbing or training day. The duration of ARCing depends on the climber's priorities. For an onsight comp climber, and a young person with lots of energy, I'd recommend a 20-minute set to start each training session.
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Post by Jon on Dec 12, 2017 12:29:35 GMT -7
I would highly recommend cutting the ARC sessions down to about 8-10 minutes and going a bit harder than traditional ARC'ing. Horst and the guys at Lattice have some ideas on training long aerobic power/more difficult aerobic capacity that you may want to examine. Competition climbing is much quicker than outside onsight climbing. The routes are all timed, so climbers will only have 6 minutes to complete the route, so I would recommend targeting their training around that time frame. Being able to hang on to easier holds for 20 minutes won't really help that much. Comp routes also tend to get more difficult as they progress in height, so the ability to boulder hard after 30 feet of climbing is also very important. I know several very successful kids who would almost solely focus on strength and power with just a quick focus on aerobic power right before major comps.
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Post by aikibujin on Dec 12, 2017 15:57:43 GMT -7
Can't we not use the term "aerobic power" and use "aerobic utilization" instead? Much less confusing. If you reduce the time and increase the intensity of ARCing, then is it still ARCing? I agree that if you're primarily climbing less than 6 minutes with increasing difficulty at the end, you should train like that. But you have to warm up anyway, what's wrong with ARCing for 20 mins as a warm up? It shouldn't be taxing enough to prevent anyone from doing higher intensity aerobic utilization training later in the session.
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Post by Jon on Dec 20, 2017 8:33:20 GMT -7
Unfortunately there isn't an agreed upon standard for climbing terminology, so I attempted to use terms that most everyone understands, even if their descriptions are less than ideal. In regard to ARCing for 20 minutes to warm up, if you have unlimited time with your team kids, sure it probably won't hurt. However, most team kids I know have scheduled times that they can train, so I would push to get them climbing a bit harder sooner. Also, if your team kids are competing at the National level, they are likely already climbing low 5.13, even at the youngest ages. The older kids would be climbing mid 13 to mid 14. I think ARCing has limited benefit at that stage (beyond 5.12) in general and particularly when kids are training to climb a maximum of 6 minutes on route. I think there are more efficient things they can be doing instead of spending 20 minutes on an ARC session plus the 5-10 minutes needed to recover from that before progressing onto the next exercise.
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Post by Jon on Dec 20, 2017 8:46:37 GMT -7
As additional evidence to support this approach, you can look at the pro's. Elite boulderer's like Coxsey, Hojer, & Chon have all done well in international sport climbing competitions with minimal training focused on aerobic capacity.
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Post by daustin on Dec 20, 2017 11:08:12 GMT -7
As additional evidence to support this approach, you can look at the pro's. Elite boulderer's like Coxsey, Hojer, & Chon have all done well in international sport climbing competitions with minimal training focused on aerobic capacity. Not to split hairs, but have they really done that well, given their championship performances in bouldering? I didn’t think any of them had really done anything too noteworthy in lead comps, but I certainly could be wrong. If so, I might draw the opposite conclusion — even the most elite boulderers can’t win lead comps without some aerobic training. So if the kids you’re training aren’t the next Hojer or Coxsey, then they definitely need aerobic training. |
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Post by Jon on Dec 20, 2017 13:05:20 GMT -7
I should probably clarify my remarks. First, there is a very small/tiny group of elite competitors who can win both international sport and bouldering competitions; Megos, Ondra, Garnbret, and maybe one or two others. I was just trying to make the point that it is easier for the best boulderers to quickly gain enough aerobic capacity to make finals in major events (Coxsey took 6th in Kranj, Chon took 4th and 6th in the two Sport World Cups in China, and Hojer took 4th in Villars) then it is for sport climbing specific competitors to make finals in bouldering. As both Anderson brothers advocate, it is harder/more time consuming to build strength than endurance.
At any rate, I wasn't advocating for skipping all aerobic training for youth competition climbers. I was trying to advocate for other options than the standard 20 minute ARC sessions. ARCing has some value for outside onsighting, but in my opinion, there are far better options for training the very specific short-term aerobic endurance needed to climb competition sport routes that take no more than six minutes to complete.
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Post by MarkAnderson on Dec 20, 2017 19:29:17 GMT -7
Ultimately you should go with whatever produces the best results. If limiting TUT to 6 minutes or less is working well for you, keep doing that. Adolescents are highly adaptable so pretty much anything they do beyond playing video games will make them better at climbing. However, from a theoretical and experiential perspective, bounding the length of training bouts to the length of competition bouts is far from ideal. Olympic 1500m runners don't limit the length of their training runs to 3.5 minutes. Olympic power lifters don't limit their sets to 1 rep. 50m Freestyle swimmers don't limit the length of their swims to 50m. And so on. We're pretty sure we know that any activity that lasts more than a couple minutes will rely heavily on aerobic energy production. That's why track runners run many 10's of steady-state miles per week, in addition to sprints and intervals. Etc for other athletes.
That said, we were very deliberate and thoughtful in our choice of title and we couldn't care less what happens on plastic, so don't take my advice, lol.
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Post by Jon on Dec 21, 2017 8:42:21 GMT -7
Ultimately you should go with whatever produces the best results. If limiting TUT to 6 minutes or less is working well for you, keep doing that. Adolescents are highly adaptable so pretty much anything they do beyond playing video games will make them better at climbing. However, from a theoretical and experiential perspective, bounding the length of training bouts to the length of competition bouts is far from ideal. Olympic 1500m runners don't limit the length of their training runs to 3.5 minutes. Olympic power lifters don't limit their sets to 1 rep. 50m Freestyle swimmers don't limit the length of their swims to 50m. And so on. We're pretty sure we know that any activity that lasts more than a couple minutes will rely heavily on aerobic energy production. That's why track runners run many 10's of steady-state miles per week, in addition to sprints and intervals. Etc for other athletes. That said, we were very deliberate and thoughtful in our choice of title and we couldn't care less what happens on plastic, so don't take my advice, lol. Mark, I am definitely not arguing against your approach to training for rock climbing, just disagree with using ARC as a basis for training high level youth climbers to crush plastic. I also don't think runners and swimmers are the best comparables for climbing. Both require a significantly higher aerobic utilization of the heart, lungs and larger muscles in the body. Endurance in climbing is pretty limited to the local endurance of the forearm muscles. Swimming and running are also repetitive sports that are played on a consistent playing field. Climbing requires more movement patters and is played on an ever changing field. Climbing is primarily a strength based sport. If you can't pull the move, you have nothing to endure  So assuming you don't have unlimited training time, I think training kids via harder 6-8 minute intervals at a higher difficulty (harder than ARCing but less than arm shattering pump) is more efficient for training youth climbers to compete at sport competitions than 20 minute ARC sessions. In the end though, you are right, kids are highly adaptable and most stimulus will cause changes. It's just a matter of trying to find the optimal approach and tried to share my two cents on the matter. |
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Post by RobF on Dec 22, 2017 14:30:06 GMT -7
Really interesting thread. A good many years ago I was on a university course with someone called Simon Hartley (known as world class Simon on social media). He's written a book called two lengths of the pool.
The idea behind the book is to define the task in hand by the simplest possible means. i.e.: climbing from the ground to the belay in one go without weighting the rope.
You then list the top 5 things that will be required to achieve this task, then list the training that is necessary to fulfil each with a 1-10 rating for each in terms of how useful it will be. All along the aim is to only include training that will directly make progress towards the goal / say only those activities that rate 7/10 - 10/10 usefulness.
Simon did this process with an Olympic swimmer and they ended up discarding 60% of the old programme. Anything that did not align with swimming two lengths of the pool as fast as he could was eliminated.
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So assuming you don't have unlimited training time, I think training kids via harder 6-8 minute intervals at a higher difficulty (harder than ARCing but less than arm shattering pump) is more efficient for training youth climbers to compete at sport competitions than 20 minute ARC sessions.