How much is too much?

[avaserfi]

I'm just finished my power phase (campusing) and am in my power endurance phase (4x4). While I was hang boarding I found any additional climbing was to my detriment. I was gassed. With campusing I did a warmup boulder ladder and gave 3 attempts on some projects, occasionally sending. After campusing I would hit up a few more problems (maybe 1-2 above my flash level) that I knew fairly well as a cool down.

I just did my first PE workout today. I did a decent WBL, the PE training and took a decent break. I had some time to kill and did some medium/hard bouldering and a couple moderate routes. I do stop climbing if technique starts to fail, but will push myself a bit.

Should I lay off the post campus and PE climbing and do more moderate cool downs such as easy boulder problems moving into light arcing? I'm concerned my overzealous nature is harming my potential gains.

[Chris W]

My goal with training is to stimulate, not annihilate. You don't improve (physically) when you are training, you improve at night while you sleep as your body repairs itself and overcompensates to adjust to your training stresses. I'm interested to hear what folks with more [climbing specific] training experience have to say.

[Jack Ziegler]

I would focus more on intensity than on volume (unless you want to train to be able to climb for longer on outdoor trips).  I have found if I have a really hard workout, and then try to do more hard climbing, it takes longer to recover, and the next work out is affected. 

Here are some suggestions that you could experiment with. I've been climbing 8 years, but am also new to training so others may have better suggestions...

If you feel you need more, you could consider shortening the rest between workouts, say instead of 72 hours rest, do 48 hours of rest. Or instead of 48 do 36. 

You could also consider additional climbing that stresses different parts of you body.  If your gym has vertical or slabby routes that don't require much pulling strength, you could work those and not affect the stimulus on your pulling muscles so much.  Stemming problems are also good too.  Focus on climbs or boulder problems that you fall off because of technique, not strength or Power or PE.  If you have a partner you could also cool down by doing 'down leading'.  Lead something not too hard, but then down climb it unclipping the bolts as you go.  I find this is good mental training for outdoor climbing too.

[MarkAnderson]

Your fitness will always be a trade-off between power and endurance. If you want to favor more power, you need to do lower volume, higher intensity training. If you want to favor endurance, do the opposite. It's really a question of your goals and the types of routes you plan to climb. I'm always favoring power because that is my big weakness, and the limiting factor in my progression (YMMV). So even during the PE phase, I do a lot of power work (Hard Bouldering/Limit Bouldering) and I purposely limit my PE work. For me, a "PE" day will inlcude 60 minutes of bouldering and no more than 30 minutes of PE (really, almost never more than 20 minutes).

And I still try to get as much rest as I can stand. If I get into a mode of climbing two days on (or even every other day for a week or more), climbing pumpy routes with little to no high intensity bouldering (say on a trip to the Red), my power plummets. My challenge late in any cylce is to maintain my power.

Unless you need skill practice, I would skip the extra moderate climbing. I've seen value in tacking a short PE session onto the end of a Campus workout during the transition from the Power Phase to the PE Phase, but even then I keep the intensity as high as possible.