Stamina training is all about quantity over quality. Even though stamina won't make me climb harder or prevent me from pumping out, I know that I will be climbing for weeks and weeks in hot weather and it's important that my body can take that shear volume of climbing without risk getting completely exhausted to the point where I need weeks of rest before I can get back on the routes.
I view stamina climbing as a way of training cardio for your climbing muscles. The idea is to get your pulse going, and then race around the boulder wall och up-and-down the routes like a jojo, and then rest before getting back up. Eric Hirst recommends resting the same amount of time as you're climbing, so for a 10 minute interval I would rest for 10 mins, which is kind of a sweet deal because I need to belay my partner anyway while he/she does the same routine.
After one week of stamina training, trying to work out the proper amount of intervals, time per interval, tempo etc. I can say that the most difficult thing is finding the right grade and time on the wall. I want to avoid pump since that turns the exercise into an anaerobic endurance session, but I also want to get my blood pumping, so it's a fine line to walk. What I've done is to remember to take short rests on the wall when I feel the pump coming. In Stockholm at K2 it's easy to find long routes with good holds so it's pretty easy to avoid the pump, but in Växjö (where I do one session per week) I'm pretty limited in the selection of circuits and type of holds to grab, so often it's easier to just jump down and start over right away instead of trying to go for something really hard and getting pumped.
The climbing gym in Växjö is actually a racket ball gym, where they've "redecorated" one of the racket ball courts into a bouldering room, it's reaaaaaally tiny (the "inside-a-nutshell"-metaphor is spot-on). The holds were put up sometime... long ago, and haven't been replaced or even moved since then. I kind of like it though - it is what it is. There's a small group of local climbers who come here every other day, training on the same old holds they've practised on for years. Hat's off for their dedication and... patience! Don't know how they do it!
Just for fun, I put together a small clip of the gym, with me doing a typical stamina session of 3 minutes (compressed into one) for you guys to... well "enjoy" is probably not the right word but... watch atleast?
In other news, I've been invited to go for a 2½ week long climbing trip to Spain at the end of March, soooo psyched!!! I've missed climbing outdoors and it is always there that I get most inspired, most exited and it's when I'm the happiest while climbing. Climbing and training indoors is fun, it's convenient and social, but it is also just a means to an end. And that end is to climb as much as possible outdoors.
No comments:
Post a Comment