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So, summer is here and although the term "summer" has to be used
with a sense of humour, most of you will have been out and managed
to get some ticking done by now. For those to whom pushing your
grade is an important part of enjoying the whole climbing experience,
midsummer is a critical time in the climbing year. Either you have
done something good and have that all important feeling of "progress",
or you have a deeper feeling of nothing having changed. Holds feel
just as small and runouts just as scary as last July.
Is it OK to want to improve?
Climbers often seem to have a problem with this psychological need
for improvement, both relative to their own standards and to others.
But climbing is really no different to other sports. Some people
go climbing just for the situations, the craic or even for the pints
afterwards. All of these are good reasons to go climbing. But having
a competitive element is not something to hide or feel ashamed about
either. You wouldn't find Michael Johnson or Steve Redgrave feeling
shy about achieving a new personal best. The fact is, the feelings
of improvement in performance some of us get from climbing are the
central motivation for many, even if they don't admit it to others
or even themselves.
What is improvement?
Improvement may take the form of physical aspects of climbing performance
such as crimp strength or body tension, or it may be some psychological
aspect such as developing a trust in the gear you have placed or
learning to keep down panic when committed on a route. This word
"learning" is central to improvement, glaringly obvious you might
think but many people are not aware that training is the same as
learning, both physically and mentally.
It is easy to understand the basic mechanisms of mental learning.
We practice or are repeatedly exposed to the stimuli in question
and the result is greater understanding or ability in this aspect.
The picture gets more complicated when we consider what happens
when the stimuli is removed. Since the point of this discussion
is about learning to climb well, we will use movement skills as
an example.
Simple skills such as learning to balance on a bike literally do
not take up much brain space and are thus retained over very long
periods, hence the phrase, "its like learnin tae ride a bike". However,
try doing the stunts you could do on your BMX you could do ten years
ago and you will understand the basic training principle of reversibility.
Climbing at your limit falls into this category of complex, difficult
movements. These fluctuations in particular aspects of performance
are similar for physical characteristics too and form the basic
training principles which underlie any improvement.
The importance of these principles cannot be overstated. Before
doing my degree in sports science, I thought I would learn all the
details and complex training schedules and methods which I thought
had to be the secret of success for the likes of Malcolm Smith or
Ben Moon. I was shocked at how seemingly obvious and simple the
principles were, yet how easy it is to inadvertently stray from
them and lose improvements, mainly by getting carried away with
details. I realised that the winners in climbing are the people
who are getting all of these principles right, all of the time.
A not so scary physiology lesson
The central word in physiology is Homeostasis. This means the natural
tendency of the body to work to maintain its internal environment.
What has this got to do with training? Well, any exercise places
a stress on the body and causes disturbance in the internal environment
in several ways. The body adapts to cope with this change in order
to minimise future disturbance. These changes include the changes
in the size and packing of our muscles that we are after to make
us cope with the demand (grade) we are trying to make our bodies
manage. Physiology is easy!
Information overload?
The name sports scientists give to this disturbance is overload.
The crucial point about overload is that it must remain greater
than the body is used to in order to see continued adaptation. In
practice this means if you are not doing more than last season,
nothing is happening. If you just do the same thing all over again
without increasing the level, why would you expect your body to
get better?
The other crucial point is that the adaptation happens in both
directions and if the body does not need the muscles to be packed
full of energy producing apparatus because you are not climbing,
it will lose them and fast. Again, it seems obvious doesn't it?
The reason I am writing all these things that appear obvious when
you read them is because so many people who would like to tick a
higher grade waste a lot of their time (years in some cases) when
a few subtle changes might change all that.
In practice, the principles all interact with each other to produce
the actual changes in performance which we measure with a grade.
Here are some examples of how subtle mistakes in each principle
might ruin a year's (or a lifetime's!) training gains.
More>>>
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