You’ve probably heard it a thousand times when you’ve asked for climbing training advice as a beginner climber: the best way to improve at climbing is to climb. But at some point, you’ll hit a plateau, or life will get busy, and you’ll lose the motivation. In these instances, curating a specific training schedule can push your ability to the next level and ensure you continue to climb regularly, bringing you closer to achieving your climbing goals.
The key to creating any good training schedule is to make it manageable. But remember, it’s not about fitting your life around the schedule. It’s about fitting the schedule around your life. The goal is simplicity because you don’t want a training schedule more complicated or stressful than the training. Keeping this in mind, you can begin to fine-tune a personalized plan that gives you the power to decide when and how you train.
Make It Manageable
Step 1: Take inventory of your availability.
Sit down and inventory everything you have going on (e.g., work, vacations, clubs, kids events, etc.).To start, note down every available day and time when you could go to the gym. Even if you don’t end up using all the time you’ve denoted as available, mark it down. It will be helpful in step 3.
Step 2: Define your goal.
With your availability inventoried, define your goal. For instance, do you want to climb one boulder or rope grade harder, like moving from a V3 to a V4? Do you want to improve using a specific type of hold (i.e., crimp or pinch)? Do you want to improve your technique, such as mastering the heel hook? Whatever your goal is, write it down next to the availability you inventoried in step 1.
Step 3: Decide how much of your availability you will dedicate to achieving the goal.
Now is the time to marry steps 1 and 2. There is no right or wrong answer here. You have to decide how quickly you want to try and achieve your goal and how you want to balance climbing with the rest of your life. In most cases, dedicating all your free time to training doesn’t make sense. You should keep one day open for dinner with friends and another for watching TV with your partner. Remember, balance is key. However, the more time you allocate to climbing training, the quicker you’ll see improvements.
Once you’ve evaluated your goals, availability to train, and how much time you want to dedicate to training for it, you should come away with a finalized list of days and times you will commit to
climbing. This schedule is not just a list of days and times. It’s a roadmap to your climbing goals. Keep this in mind as you move forward.
(Optional) Step 4: Choose what time of day you perform best.
Step 4 is optional because only some have the luxury of picking the time of day that they train. Training in the morning might not be feasible if you have to be at work at 7 am. Likewise with evening training sessions if you work until 10 pm. Some climbers with flexible schedules can pick between morning, mid-day, and evening sessions. Consider breaking your training into morning and evening sessions if you fall into this bucket. If you can choose, you’ll schedule your most demanding training sessions when you know you perform best. This way, you’ll maximize your productivity and increase the impact on your progress.
Step 5: Plan your climbing sessions.
By this step, you should have a manageable training schedule with the times and days you intend to train. Now is the time to fill in the workout specifics.
There are four primary systems climbers can break training into: power, power endurance, endurance, and technique. You can Google specific details on each system and sample workouts, but a well-rounded training plan will incorporate at minimum one workout for each system per week. If you have a specific system you want to focus on improving, you can add a second session focusing on that system each week.
Step 6: Plan your strength sessions around your climbing sessions.
Strength training is an essential complementary component to your climbing. Prioritizing climbing is the main focus of the training schedule you are creating. You’ll want to program strength sessions after you pick the days you will climb. Combine strength sessions with a climbing session in the same trip to the gym, such as a power endurance climbing and core session or an endurance climbing and leg workout to maximize your time. An effective climbing or strength session can take less than 45 minutes.
If you’ve followed along step-by-step, you should have created an attainable climbing training schedule that fits into the rest of your life, pushes you toward your goals, and has a variety of climbing and strength workouts. You may need to tweak the schedule after the first week or two, but these steps lay a solid foundation. Feel free to ask any lingering or additional questions in the comments!