I injured my hand last summer trying Poker Face Alice in Lander. In the grand scheme of things, it was a mild lumbrical strain, but it was my first time ever sustaining a show stopping injury. Work got really busy in the fall, I went to Japan with my girlfriend, and before I know it, it's the end of December and I've only gone climbing, rock or plastic, four times in three months. I don't really do new years resolution, it just so happened that work finally started to let up at the beginning of the year and I started to dream about Yosemite again. I hit up my buddy AJ, who is also a coach with climbstrong.com, and put together a training block.

Setting Intent

When planning the block, I spent some time figuring out where I was, where I want to go, and what the goal of the block is. Here's the content from my google doc

Where am I at? Over the last 4-6 months, my training/climbing volume has dropped significantly to where in the months of November and December of '22, I got three sessions of climbing in. However, as we expect to take 4 weeks off of climbing to deload (Bechtel), a month off is not disastrous. I may feel like I'm far behind when I begin climbing again, but I reckon it's not as bad as it feels. My skin is also non existent which is something I’m taking into consideration.

Guiding Principles: The goal of this block is to build a base of general strength and priming my fingers for increased loads. With a non linear program, I find that with a packed schedule, I actually get a strength day in every 10 days, which doesn't feel conducive to building a base. The following block can continue into a more specific strength training day, or shift to two power days and drop a strength day. The idea here is Block Focus - Maintenance A - Block Focus - Maintenance B. I’m designing the core workouts to be able to be done at all the gyms I have access to. With it being winter, weekend warrioring probably won’t be happening all that often.

Goal: The purpose of this block is to rebuild training capacity and ability to do a lot of work. This will allow me to train more in future blocks, and also prepare for big walls in yosemite

Strength Capacity Block

When is the block over? 4 full cycles, so 12 workouts.
Session pattern: Strength - Power - Strength - Endurance
Note: All workouts start with the same 20 minute warmup.

Strength Workout

My thinking is that this should be a non climbing day. The goal is work capacity. Rather than adding weight to the exercise, we’ll be adding additional supersets to increase capacity. Since this is the bulk of the cycle, these will be pretty easy to do at any gym.

We'll start with three circuits, then increase to 4x after session four, and 5x at session six.

Power Workout

My thinking is that a power day is a 60-90 limit session. This is a dedicated GP81 day, where I make the effort to get out there, so I can have some fun trying hard. I should track how many quality efforts I get.

60 minutes of climbing harder project climbings, which will probably be in the flash+2 range. Ideally I’m building strength on linking sections and having to move between holds powerfully. A moonboard might be too much on the fingers as I ramp back into this, but the kilter or decoy board would be ideal as they have more ergonomic holds. Cut the session when the quality of attempts starts to drop. For limit sessions, I’ve always found a 30 minute on the wall warmup has always primed me the best.

Endurance Day

The goal of this day is to build some fully body level fitness and endurance, and work specifically on intensive endurance. The goal of this day is to never feel pumped or fatigued. The workout should be “easy” but consistent. This is the priority if I can make it to the gym. We'll use Bechtel's extensive endurance workout to build general endurance.

Extensive Endurance intervals - Repeat circuit 4 times

• 5 minutes on the rowing machine, maintaining a zone 2 heart rate.
• 5 minutes of continuous climbing
• 5 minutes rest

Block 1 Retrospective

I completed the first block in 6 weeks, consisitently getting into the gym. I like using this happy face, meh face, sad face format for quickly gathering thoughts on how the block went.

🙂

• I really liked the focus session idea, where we rotate between focus - a - focus - b. It felt really nice having something more consistent with workouts, like, no matter what happened, I was getting into the gym for the same workout twice a week. Really helped me build a sense of rhythm.
• No more doms! Feeling well recovered between workouts, 1 day one 1 day off has been a great schedule.
• The warmup is great. I think this is the first time I’ve consistently done the warmup for all exercises, and it actually gives a good idea of how I’m feeling.
• The progressive overload of adding rounds is really cool!

😐

• In limit and endurance sessions, I’m finding that I’ve really lost a lot of pull through/lock off strength. On the decoy board, it’s especially noticeable where moves that should be straight forward lockoffs are suddenly dynamic moves.

🙁

• I felt like I’ve been having a hard time dialing in the power and endurance sets. It’s probably because of only getting a couple of sessions in for each, and after a long hiatus I’m recalibrating.
  • Flip side is, board climbing is helping me relearn how to keep my hips open and press with my feet.
• But yeah, hard to quantify any sense of productivity from limit and endurance sessions, but I suppose those are more for small gains or maintenance
• Limit sessions don’t feel the most productive right now to be completely honest. There’s not much climbing actually happening, and more trying to link two moves.
  • Time on the wall linking more moves would be better combined with a full body power workout. Like, I think trying to shift to more time-on-the-wall climbing would be really useful and do more full body power workouts.
  • Last session actually felt good, finally. I guess it took a minute to dial in

What's next

After getting in 16 sessions in the last month, I want to build general strength and power while also continuing on the thread of capacity. I just started my general strength block, so I'll post about it after it's over.