Base Fitness for bouldering trip recovery

[Jesse W.]

OK, so first off, the strength and power cycles that I did (first dedicated climbing training that I've done) worked great. I was able to send a project that I wasn't even able to get off the ground with 6 months ago. 

The downside, was that after that problem I was pretty much too drained to give more than a couple of decent tries on one more problem before I was completely gassed for the day.

On problem #1 (a slightly overhanging V2 arete with some longish moves and and awkward slopey top-out) I rested around 5 minutes between attempts, and kept hydrated. After I sent the first project (which took around 10 attempts to figure out the top), I rested around 30 minutes, ate some granola bars, beef jerky and some gatorade and had plenty of water. 

On problem #2 (a 10ft. horizontal roof on jugs and then a long move to an awkward slopey top-out, also a V2) I made 3 attempts at the full problem (with 5 minute breaks between attempts) and then tried to work the top 4 or 5 times with about the same rest. I was super fatigued at this point, so I ate some more food, drank some more water, and laid down for 20 minutes to rest and see if I could recuperate. I then tried the problem 2 more times and was too gassed to give it any good effort.

I then hiked down to some lower boulders (about 45 minutes) and spotted my son on his project for 20 minutes or so. I then decided to try another V2 that I hadn't seen before and got 1 good try, then tried it 2 more times and couldn't even hold the crux holds at all.

So, my question, I understand that ARC training improves your ability to recover between climbs, but in your experience, are there any adaptations that can or should be made to be more specific to this kind of recovery? I very rarely route climb, and the handful of times that I do it's on mostly vertical and technical terrain that doesn't really require much pump management, so I'm not really interested in ARC'ing for that. I also have a decent amount of experience with performance nutrition, so I'm relatively certain that I had all of that in order as far as amounts of carbs and protein required to optimize recovery.

Thanks for any help you can provide, as working my ass of for almost 3 months and dieting down a decent number of pounds just to climb one problem is a little annoying!

[jessebruni]

What's your overall level of fitness currently? How many days a week do you climb? How long did you spend on the first problem? 5 minutes between attempts on a boulder problem is usually a pretty good amount of time to rest before going for redpoint attempts. If it's taking me more than 5 minutes to recover I know I'm usually not going to reach maximum levels again that day. If you ended up actually spending 3 hours on the first problem then it makes sense that you were too gassed to do your other projects. If you did it first try and were still too gassed then maybe you have some problems.

[Jesse W.]

I would say overall level of general fitness is moderate as I've focused solely on climbing for the past few months. Overall level of climbing fitness would probably be relatively high (for me) but not through the roof. I spent about an hour on the first problem (10 attempts with 5+ minutes of rest in between) I generally climb 3 days per week, though over the past few weeks that's meant 1 day of actual climbing and 2 days of a hangboard warm-up followed by campusing.

Basically, I know that my climbing endurance is pretty low (along with basically all aspects of my climbing performance, hence the V2 projects ) but I was wondering if there is a way to optimize endurance training specifically for this kind of bouldering trip rather than route climbing (where 30 minute ARC sessions seems to fit pretty exactly) Partially this is to be as efficient as possible, and partially this is to see if there is something less boring than long ARC sessions to work on this kind of endurance, because it's the WORST

[jessebruni]

I think 4x4's or linked bouldering circuits would serve you well. You do a lot of hard climbing that's at 80%-90% of your limit, rest for a few minutes, and then do it again. Basically it forces you to be able to recover quickly and perform close to your maximum for a long time, which is good for bouldering.

[MarkAnderson]

Jesse W,

Climbers often refer to the type of fitness you seek as "stamina", that is, the ability to perform at a reasonably high level for many hours throughout the day. Redpoint climbers think of it as the ability to get 4 good burns a day instead of 2 or 3, etc.

The risk with stamina training is that it's a zero-sum-game to some extent, much like power vs. endurance training. Your body has a given "work capacity", which is analogous to the total volume of effort you can expend. If you want to increase the duration of that effort, you must reduce the intensity. For these reasons, I'm not a fan of stamina training for myself. I'm virtually always limited by power, so I refuse to risk sacrificing some power for an extra redpoint burn that my family doesn't have the patience for anyway Also, anecdotally I believe that being a little bit stronger will allow me to send my project(s) in fewer burns anyway, so while stamina training might get me more burns per day, I'm not convinced it will get me more sends per day.

However, it is possible to increase your work capacity, thus allowing you to increase your stamina without reducing the intensity of your efforts. In my experience improvements to work capacity are slow coming, so I wouldn't expect any huge improvements overnight. It's more likely if you improve your stamina it will come at the expense of your power. Bouldering would be a good way to experiment with this though (vice redpoint climbing, where there is such a huge jump in volume from 2 to 3 burns or even 3 to 4 burns).

Anyway, I would not recommend ARC training for improving bouldering stamina in the near term. ARCing may be beneficial in laying some ground work for improving your work capacity over the long run, but I would expect it to negatively impact your power near-term.

I would consider a two-pronged approach, first to try to eke out a bit more stamina while maintaining your power, and second to improve your work capacity over the course of the next few years. To do the first, I would increase your bouldering volume. During the Base Fitness Phase, try to perform many problems in a session, at a moderate intensity. Track the number of problems and try to progressively increase the number. Once you're into the Power and Performance phases, the trick will be to maintain your power while increasing your volume. I would do this by building up to a power peak in the usual fashion, with limited volume, but once I get there I would progressively extend the length of my Limit Bouldering sessions. You're not likely to see huge improvements here.

If you can do that over the course of several seasons I think your work capacity will gradually improve as well.

[Jesse W.]

Awesome, thanks for the replies. I'll try that out and keep track so I can update at some point in the future as to how well it worked.