Climbing Myths Debunked: It’s Not All About Upper Body Strength

One of the most common questions we hear from people curious about climbing is, “Do I need upper body strength to climb?” The answer may surprise you: No, you don’t. This misconception comes from the way climbing often looks to the untrained eye. This might be from movies or famous climbers but it might seem […]
How to Measure Your Climbing Training Progress

Achieving a goal is a tremendously motivating experience! Many goals, such as sending a hard project, require more than one kind of improvement in order to achieve. Tracking your sends is an obvious and relatively straightforward way to measure your progress; but, how do you do it when you have no new sends to report? In […]
5 Rules for Picking the Perfect Climbing Problems to Train On

Choosing training problems is actually one of the simpler things to do in climbing. If you follow a few general rules, you will be an expert in no time. Rule #1: Train What You Know The most basic rule of training is one many climbers, including high-end climbers, neglect far too often. When trying to […]
Climbing Success: Balancing Projects and Embracing Failure

Short-Term Projects When projecting, consider both “short-term” and “long-term” projects. Problems you feel you can complete quickly (“short-term” projects) tend to teach different things than problems that take more time to send. But both are important if you want to progress as efficiently and effectively as possible. The word “quickly” is obviously a bit of […]
Choosing the Best Climbs for Projecting

Picking Your Project One of the best features of projecting is that you don’t need any special training to start. It’s as simple as picking a project and trying it. In this article, we will discuss some tips for choosing a climb for a project and getting the most out of your time on it, […]
Want to Get Better at Climbing? Try Projecting!

How Do You Get Better at Climbing—Faster I’ve been a coach for over thirty years, and one of the most frequent questions I get from climbers of all abilities is: “How do I get stronger?” After training hundreds of climbers of all abilities—from first-timers to Olympic athletes—I’ve discovered that this isn’t the real […]
3 Simple Tips to Set Climbing Goals That Match Your Grades

How to Set Good Goals Based on Grades Perhaps the single most difficult thing for many of us to do is to set reasonable goals. We all have a tendency to set goals that are either way too hard or too easy. Both strategies, however, tend to be motivation killers: too hard a goal and […]
A Brief Introduction to Climbing Sets

The total number of possible sets in climbing is as large as your imagination. That being said, the bulk of them are variations off of a few common themes, or patterns, that are tried and true. We use several key patterns frequently, and tend to build sets off of these by varying details like difficulty, […]
Climbing Smart: How to Prevent Repetitive Stress Injuries

What are Repetitive Stress Injuries Along with overtraining, repetitive stress injuries (RSI) are the most common cause of performance declines during training. In fact, repetitive stress injuries are frequently an indication of overtraining. Repetitive stress injuries are the result of overusing particular muscles, joints and connective tissue. They are caused, in general, by performing the […]
Preventing Overtraining in Climbing: Tips for Staying Healthy

What is Over-Training? Perhaps the single most common risk to athletes during the season is overtraining. In this article, we’ll examine its causes and effects in detail and discuss how best to avoid it. Overtraining occurs when a climber works out a particular system or goal without giving it enough time to recover between […]