Endurance Myths Busted with Coach Cam Hartley & Maddy Cope

Intro This is the Lattice Training Podcast where we bring you the best in climbing performance and training from the world's elite athletes, thought leaders and coaches. Speaker 2 Hello and welcome to the Lattice Training Podcast. Today I am sat here with Coach Cam. Welcome, Cam. Speaker 1 Hi, thank you for having me on. Speaker 2 And we are going to pick Cam's brains about endurance. We're going to debunk some of the common myths or misconceptions that we see from climbers a lot. And then at the end, we're going to share a step by step process that you guys listening will be able to apply in your own climbing again and again as a way of self experimentation, finding what works well for you in training and doing this rigorously with a plan laid out from start to finish. So come is, I've been a coach here at last is for a while. Cam’s background And I guess if I were to describe you, Cam, I would think that you are very open minded to all areas of training, whether that's kind of like the mental side, physical side, like understanding concepts. And you're also really curious in your own performance, which you know, a lot of us are. But then you follow that through with a really rigorous approach to learning about yourself. And I really see that in you, and I see you bring it to your coaching as well. Speaker 1 Yeah, With my my own climbing, I think looking back on it, I like the idea of experimentation and play. And a big part of my life is doing research. So being a PhD student that constantly takes up a big component of my life. But taking those principles that I develop in my PhD practise and applying it to climb in something I really enjoy. So rather than looking at training as a tool to get better at climbing ice sometimes use it as a tool to explore myself and how I can develop my own performance with different ideas and concepts based on my reading. What I try and do when I when I play with the the idea of experimentation is not look at the the end process as a success or failure, but as a next step. So if I didn't succeed with my idea of experimentation and I don't write it off, I just go oh what, what went wrong and how can I I improve it. I think when I look at my PhD practise one of my supervisors constantly reminds me that there are no bad results, especially when you look at non significant findings. It's how you interpret the results that gives you the the next step. So I always try and put that into my climbing practise by looking at the negative results as an opportunity to learn and tweak my process to make gains in the future. So that's what hopefully I can share with you guys today. Speaker 2 Yeah, definitely. And we're going to start. I'm going to just sort of ask you some questions to help set the scene kind of knowledge base wise. But then what I really like about sharing a process, and we really love Atlantis, is that people can use it time and time again and they can apply it to everything. So we're going to talk about it here in the context of endurance training, but there is no reason that someone couldn't apply this elsewhere in their training, which is really cool. So Cam, do you want to just set the scene for us? What is endurance? Why are we sitting here today talking about endurance? Speaker 1 Yes. So endurance is pretty much key for every, every climber, even boulders and they're probably sitting there going well, it's not key for me right now. But really when we look at endurance, it's the ability to maintain high levels of physical effort over extended periods of time. So that might be to regenerate energy or to perform efficiently when you're trying to use your metabolic endurance pathways. So we try and use Android's training to improve our energy output from a couple of different systems. What we'd know is like the aerobic and anaerobic systems, and it enables us to recover between climbs. That's where it comes in important for boulders and also perform at high levels without burning out so quickly. So more maybe get towards our root climbers or a boulder who's on an extended sequence. Speaker 2 Yeah. And I think, I think you kind of hit the nail on the head there in that climbers have a certain idea of what endurance is and what endurance is in the context of climbing. Whereas I think what you're describing there is you're looking at it at meeting the energy demands of whatever you're doing. And that is really important to all of us. And actually there's a whole spectrum of training, which is what we're going to get onto that allows you to kind of that can help guide you to prepare your body for whatever the energy demands are that that you're doing in climbing. Speaker 1 Yeah, I'd agree with that. Speaker 2 Cool. Do you want to just start maybe by explaining a little bit more about those two energy systems you just touched on? The two energy systems So just in case people haven't heard of them or don't know the distinction, do you want to just introduce those energy systems you just mentioned? Speaker 1 Yeah. So we have our aerobic system and our anaerobic system. The aerobic system is quite simply fueled by oxygen and the anaerobics without oxygen. And when we look a bit deeper, they have different stresses on the body. So the aerobic system, it relies on either fat oxidation or the breaking down of glucose, whereas anaerobic is solely glucose. Or if we take it to the next level, when it's high, really high level performance, it's just ATP that's stored within the cells. So that that's the basic breakdown of it. So if we're looking at the improving our ability to train with them, we have to treat them separately and or not separately, but understand what's going on at a physical or metabolic level to understand how to to adapt the body to be prepared for performance. What what you want to consider is what what you're trying to get out of your performance. So if you're, for example, a boulder who's has really good efforts at the start of the session, but doesn't, isn't able to recover towards the end is thinking about, well, what's happening here. And if I was in that situation working with a client, I'd actually be looking at the aerobic pathways. So looking at why aren't they recovering efficiently through the session and determining what training we need to do to improve recovery. And contrary to what a lot of people would work on going, oh, I just need to do lots of high intensity interval training, I'd go and maybe get them doing like ARC sessions, which isn't something that a normal boulder would think of. And I've done it in the past with athletes and they've seen really good improvements in their session fitness. And that's because we're looking at meeting the the metabolic demands of the adaptation rather than the performance demands of the adaptation. Speaker 2 Yeah. And I think what you've touched on there is something that people you, you hear it said a lot that the adaptation is specific, not the session. And I think people are often quite good at applying that to strength training. And I think when it comes to endurance, maybe people it's a bit less intuitive because the training you're doing looks can look very far removed from your performance. But what you just described there is the fact that you are targeting an adaptation, physiological adaptation that can still play into your end performance. And I think the other thing just to emphasise that I really liked that you said there is that the aerobic system, we've got two kind of sides to the coin. We've got the energy production, but we've also got the recovery of the energy systems we use, which gives us that ability to use them again. So continue to perform at a high level either throughout a session or on a climb. So yeah, hopefully that we're starting to, we're starting to convince people a little bit. We're trying to get some buy into this podcast. Cool. How to train for climbing So you, you did already mention it a little bit there. You mentioned high intensity interval training. Shall we move on to talking about some of the different ways that people can train? So you just mentioned there that you might use arc sessions with a boulder. Do you want to just kind of take a step back and describe what the two methods of training are, and maybe some examples and and what adaptations they bring about? Speaker 1 Yes. So I think a good way to start is by giving it a general summarization of the two overarching categories and then applying the the terminology we use as climbers to those those categories. So the first one is low intensity steady state and what you can liken that to in a climbing context is regeneration. And the other one we've got is high intensity interval training. I'll come on to that in a second. But you can liken that to aerobic capacity work like our one-on-one off sessions or server. You can go to anaerobic capacity and some aerobic power work. So anaerobic capacity that'd be like 6 is 6 or boulder triples. And then if you went and looked at aerobic power, it'd be 4 by fours or in some cases we have like a board aero power session where you're doing 55 boulder problems on a board, so. Speaker 2 Really high, really large, a really large spectrum there as well. And that is why I think that form of training, which, yeah, we'll come on to that next, is really interesting to talk about because I think that's one of the reasons why it can seem quite confusing to people. Speaker 1 Yeah. And when you're at, especially when you're trying to educate people and it's like there's a lot and it's how do we apply the terminology to it for people to understand? I know we've had discussions in the past with the endurance micro course that you're you're looking at or I think you've released that now. Speaker 2 Haven't you? Yeah, we've released that now, and terminology is always a hard thing, and basically I don't think we found a perfect way. But conversations like this and hopefully the content we put out there can help create a link in people's minds between a physiological outcome and adaptation, the training session and how it should feel. So that's what we'll maybe dive into a little bit more now if you want to start with the low intensity steady state and kind of maybe describe a bit more to people how that actually feels like, what are they doing? Low intensity steady state training Yeah. So low intensity steady state is trying to target the aerobic energy system. And when we think about the aerobic energy system, it's our our slow system. It's going to where it's going to be slower to activate, slower to produce energy and it's going to last a long period of time. So when we're thinking about this training, we want low intensity training that's over a sustained period of time and continuous. So what is going on with the mechanism is it's primarily using fats or carbohydrates and or carbohydrates to produce ATPI say and or because it's not binary, we don't have one or the other. And as, as when you get into literature, they work together. And then it does shut off the fat one when you go above a certain intensity threshold, which is really important. And we'll come on to it a little bit later. But yeah, so primarily you use fats and carbohydrates to produce the ATP and that's our energy currency and it's over a sustained period of time in case. So we want to use the primary fat oxidation. So that's the zone 2. That's why we want to keep it in in that level is for that fat oxidation. Speaker 2 So we're really wanting to keep it below a certain. Well, yeah, the word thresholds used below a certain intensity might be like how climbers think of it. Speaker 1 Yeah, and if you're finishing a regeneration session going, oh, I'm really pumped up boxed, you've gone too hard. Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, I really like that word that you just said is sustainable. The importance of feeling sustainable I always think that really carries through to my experience with the training sessions themselves is that they should feel sustainable. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's a big distinction between feeling boxed and like a dull ache. I think the dull ache's an important feeling to chase because with LOTC steady state training, we're looking at what would be referred to in cycling or running, a Zone 2 threshold training. And those sort of sports characterise it by the maximum expression of type 1 muscle fibres. And if you know anything about type 1 muscle fibres, they're they're slow, but they take a hell of a long time to fatigue. So you're looking for that dual 8 because you're looking for a very subtle fatigue over time. So that's first and foremost is you want low intensity to hit the type 1 muscle fibres. We've then got the duration. And so again, thinking about the type 1 muscle fibres, they're very resistant. They need time to fatigue. So we need a longer duration. Now I'm not fully decided on the duration. And because it's a bit different with the forearms when you compare it to a runner or cyclist who's got very big legs and they're going into also using a cardiovascular system. Whereas the forearms we don't really activate or we do activate the cardiovascular system, but not to the same extent. Speaker 2 Probably not noticeably. I guess we would probably say to climbers doing this type of training that they shouldn't feel really out of breath. But that's because the muscles, yes, they're working at a lower intensity, but they're also just not big enough to be really driving the cardiovascular system. Speaker 1 So yeah, so with that in mind, the duration I'm a bit undecided on and what I what the approach I tend to take with with athletes is I start with maybe like 5 minutes where maybe the mental, they meet mental threshold where they go, oh, this is boring and they get confused with the boring and fatigue and then maybe stop. And then over the course of a 12 week period, I try and ramp up the volume. So volume is another way we can progressively overload exercises rather than just intensity. And so I I progressively overload the the volume by 2 1/2 minutes maybe every 2-3 weeks and then build them up to what would probably be a suitable time frame or a duration for having the adaptation from low intensity steady state. Speaker 2 So So what would that be roughly what what are you looking to build people up to? You know, if someone was listening to this, they were like, I'm going to start doing that. What what do they? What do you think's a useful amount of time to aim for, and maybe if that's different between different people maybe you can elaborate on? Speaker 1 That for climbers I tend to to come for 20 minutes. I think for most boulders or brute climbers, 20 minutes seems like a reasonable time to be on the wall. What we've got to take into account is the abrasion of skin. So how long you're climbing on the wall for. If you've ever done a low intensity steady state session properly, trying to do it like a runner for 45 minutes to an hour, you're going to get a lot of blood blisters. I know I, I think I did it once. I was like, oh, I'm really psyched on this concept of regeneration. I understand the theory behind it now I'm going to play with it. So I did my first session and I did 60 minutes of climbing and then I went off and did something else and I finished with like 60 minutes of just circling around a board. And by the end of it, I had blood blisters on every finger and I couldn't climb for a week. So it's also taken into account the other factors outside of that, so. Speaker 2 Yeah, it's something I've definitely heard from climbers, maybe from climbers who have looked into running or cycling is if they are interested in, in this area of training, they're like, oh, shouldn't I do like, you know, five hours or you know, at times are a little bit more akin to what's used in those sports. But I guess the way we approach it as coaches is we know that any intervention, people are going to have to want to be consistent with it. And you might feel psyched enough to do it for Week 1, but you psyched enough to do it for Week 2, for Week 3, for Week 4, and to get that gradual progressive overload in there as well. Speaker 1 That's it, yeah. So I think starting a, a duration that's attainable and maybe feels like you're selling yourself short is probably better to start at and then increasing the, the volume with very bite sized chunks. So it doesn't feel like it's a big, big bit of progress. And I think with progressive overload, I like the concept of trying to keep the effort the same, but increasingly for the volume or intensity. So in this case, making the volume increases very small, where actually it feels like the same effort every session. But then when you look back, you go, oh, I started at 5 minutes, I'm now on 20 and it, it feels the same. I think that's a really nice way of looking at it and feeling like you've you've made really good progress. Speaker 2 Yeah. And as that's it, hopefully people really take away because climbers love to I think like I love to push myself. And I think we can often lean into kind of chasing or going after feeling of almost increasing challenge or difficulty. Whereas yeah, what you said, it's almost taking that satisfaction from it, feeling the same despite the fact that you're on the wall for longer. Speaker 1 Yeah. And I feel a big part of that's recording as well. It's really important to record what you've done if you're going to take that approach because it's very hard to reflect on it when you've not got the the evidence to support it. Speaker 2 Is there like, you know, just for people listening and they they might listen and think 05 minutes doesn't sound like a very, you know, large volume of the training to do in a week. How to do progressive overload Would you maybe do multiple sessions of that? Speaker 1 Really nice way of doing it, Frequency, I think. So when you look at progressive overload, you've got three main ways to do it. You've got intensity, which I think every climber is very good at because it's dead easy. You just add a bit more weight or increase the difficulty of the exercise you're doing. You've got volume, which is another pretty easy way to do it. You just increase the duration of your session and frequency. And I think frequency is quite often overlooked. And what I do if a lot of my clients plans is I look at the overload overall workload they're doing in a week and see how I can spread it out to equal the same workload, but not pushing too far into fatigue. So the classic example, I know we're talking about an endurance podcast, but I'll just use the finger strength example is a lot of my clients now give them three or four finger strength sessions over the week, but they're only doing two to three sets. So the idea is that they activate and get the stimulation to the the flexors, but then they don't get fatigue as much. So they get the adaptation, but can recover quickly and then go into the next session having adapted already and make a little bit of progress, recover and take that approach. And you can take the same approach with endurance training I think as well, where you do a little bit recover, adapt and respond. And I've got, I've got ideas in my head of stuff I want to play with in terms of, I think Emil Abramson's finger like that two times a day. Speaker 2 That was exactly what it was just making me think of it getting that kind of frequency stimulus and and that is I suppose was one what is just a really well known case where he really lent into that kind of frequency element I. Speaker 1 Find his his case really interesting. And I think if you ever go and watch our YouTube video with him. So we did a critical force test with him. And so critical force, we've covered this a lot of times is the ability to sustain a power output indefinitely. So it can be likened to lactate threshold too, or the anaerobic lactate threshold. And if you look at his critical force, it was really good. For a boulder, I think he was something like 45%, I can't quite remember off the top of my head. And for most boulders we may be seeing 2030% and it's not usually a strength for theirs. And I think it came back to that concept of he was working at a very low intensity and he was doing it quite consistently. So 2 * 2 * a day. I think he'd end up doing it for a year here or there, missing a session. I think whilst it wasn't the perfect aerobic session, there was an element of that recovery and stressing the type 1 muscle fibres and over the course of a year it extrapolated to improving his critical force quite significantly. So what I want to play with in the future and maybe using what Josh has done with the hand squeezer. Is developing like a maybe a 10 minute protocol where you're doing that hand squeezer or a Fingerboard protocol where super low intensity where you're not getting pumped twice a day and seeing if that could improve critical force. And that comes into that self experimentation in play. But I've never I've not had the time to do that for myself, and I've not quite thought of how I want it to fit into a client's routine to commit to it yet. Speaker 2 Yeah, that'll be, that'll be interesting. One thing I find useful with this sort of low intensity steady state is the idea of sandwiching. So I like sandwich it around my sessions, like you said, in like pretty short amount of time. But it yeah, the warm up, ankle down and it. But over time that kind of a little bit, like you said, with a meal, doing something for a year, if someone can stick with something for quite a long time, the benefits can really add up. So we sort of, we know what we're doing. We know the feel that we're looking for. But yeah, maybe if you can chat through the adaptations and how they're linked to someone's climbing performance. The four main adaptations to climbing performance Yeah. So I'm going to keep it quite simple because there's lots of adaptations you can have from different protocols, but sometimes it's nice to just remember free. And so the first one, which we don't talk a lot about is increased mitochondrial density. So a nice way to think about mitochondria are they're the little factories in our cells that help with energy production. So having more mitochondria per cell enhances ATP production, which means we get more energy and we can, we can, yeah, produce more energy. So if we can improve the energy output, we can climb for longer periods of time and we can recover more quickly. That's the one thing we can go, go with. Another we can look at in terms of adaptations is enhanced capillary density. This is the classic arc session where more blood vessels deliver oxygen and nutrients to the muscle fibres and that helps with energy conversion and recovery. So better oxygen delivery to the muscles improves efficiency during prolonged activity. And the final one is improved fat oxidation, so increasing the reliance on fat as a fuel source during exercise and sparing the muscle glycogen. So with boulder is we do and also root climbers, we do tap into that fat, fat reserve when we're doing like a, for example, a boulder might go out and climb for 8 hours. They'll be using that in their recovery between attempts. And then for a root climb, it might be on the wall and also that recovery between attempts. So being more efficient at breaking down the, the fat fat will help with improving energy supply. So that's kind of the the free that I would take away from this. Speaker 2 Yeah. And so I guess kind of coming back to especially with the aerobic system, the kind of ATP production, energy production and sort of clearing the by products you've got, they all sort of play into that a little bit. Because I suppose especially the mitochondria and the capillaries, they're either kind of involved in delivering nutrients or they can also kind of clear them away. And I think that's what cool. I always think of mitochondria as a bit of like, they're like ATP factories, but they're also sort of slightly like waste bins. Speaker 1 Yeah, because they they take in lactate as well, which is something that we don't talk enough about in training is that 8 mitochondria takes in a lactate and uses that as an energy source. So also having your type 1 muscle fibres really well developed to take in that lactate helps with as you say that by product clearance. So yeah, as I'm mentioning boulders a lot because I want to try and subconsciously or encourage them to think about more aerobic training in their climbing and how it could apply because it's not as obvious as a route climber who just goes, Oh yeah, my route's long, it makes sense for me to train endurance. There's lots of benefits to a boulder as well. Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. That they can definitely be missing out on. Cool. Well, I'm sold. And I guess as we touched on before, this is probably a much broader spectrum of intensities and feelings that could be associated with the different protocols that we use that kind of fall under this rather large umbrella. Speaker 1 Yeah. So I think a nice way to summarise HIT training is it targets the anaerobic energy system using short bursts of really high intensity efforts followed by periods of rest and the intensity of efforts can change. So if you have an aerobic capacity session, so like one-on-one off, it's going to be a lower intensity than a boulder triple session. But the duration of those is changing as well, which is important to recognise. This training method increases power endurance by taxing the body's glycolytic system, which quickly generates ATP without using oxygen, but can only be sustained for short periods of time. So we're trying to one, improve the efficiency of the breakdown of glucose in that that that system, but also it's supply through the rest. The rest is really important as well and you can play with the rest as well. Speaker 2 Yeah. I often think about work to rest ratio for these sorts of for this kind of type of training. You've got like a lot of things you can play with in it. Like you said, you've got the intensity of the work that you do, you've got the duration of the rest period. And then sort of, yeah, the ratio of those like how much you, how much fatigue are you accumulating? How hard are you working? How long are you allowing yourself to recover? Speaker 1 And for me, like the biggest way I distinguish between aerobic power and then both anaerobic capacity and aerobic capacity is the expression. So thinking about it in terms of specificity to the sport. So with aerobic power, we're manipulating the variables to be more light performance, whereas anaerobic and aerobic we're trying to capacity, we're trying to take it away from performance and focus more on the adaptation in at the metabolic level. Speaker 2 Yeah. So this is the sort of stress the system versus express the system, which I quite like. Do you want to just chat us through briefly how that would look on a sort of training timeline? How to train for power endurance Yeah. So I think a nice way to we could do it is bread and butter client who needs to improve their power endurance because they power out on the crook sequence of a bullet root. So the roots going to have elements of long duration, easier variable, easier climbing, but then it might have a crook sequence. So there's there's two components to that. There's the the low intensity climbing. So you need to make sure they've got a good recovery, low intensity and maybe they're not pushing too hard. So it's bringing up that that critical force marker to make sure. Speaker 2 Making it sustainable. Speaker 1 Sustainable, yeah. And then we've got the boulder component and with the boulder, we want to make sure they're able to execute the high intensity output and have enough energy before and after. So we want to be able to get them to recover after it. And so and it helps being able to switch on quickly as well. So that's where the anaerobic capacity also works is it helps you to be able to start switching on that high intensity effort more quickly after doing low intensity training. So first you look at targeting, they're taking it back and thinking about stress. So what are you trying to stress? So you've got the the high intensity boulder and the low intensity air climbing. So you might have a part part of your training in maybe weeks, one to four of a 12 week block that a split between anaerobic work and then anaerobic capacity work and maybe some like low intensity steady state work. And then next there's a cycle. You step it up again for the lower low intensity steady state and move it into aerobic capacity going into a high intensity interval training protocol. So this might be going from doing like 10 minutes on, 10 minutes off to then go one minute on, one minute off. And then with the anaerobic capacity, I, I tend to keep it the same protocol throughout. So I might just stick it like Boulder triples for two Mesa cycles because I think there's a bigger learning effect to be had with those sessions. I don't know if you've experienced with clients where that first Mesa cycle it takes a while to learn what excess, what boulder problems are appropriate for the session. So you actually only get any adaptation in the second mesocycle, so. Speaker 2 And you can keep just pushing it because you're probably going to push intensity rather than in duration on the wall. I think you can kind of stick with the same protocol. You know you would do a strength based Fingerboard protocol for multiple mesocycles for sure and I think for about a year, yeah. So I think that the the higher intensity forms of this high, these interval training protocols that we're talking about respond well to sticking with them for a longer period of time. Speaker 1 Yeah. And then I think the final phase is, so you've had your first mesocycle where you've been quite distant between the two types of methods of training. You've then got a little bit closer by increasing the intensity of the the aerobic sites are going from low intensity studies, they say regeneration to high interval intensity training, but aerobic capacity focus. So one-on-one off and to then now it's expression time. You've done all the stress, let's express it and get you ready for performance. So that's going into aerobic power and you could look at it going, OK, I want to do one more higher intensity focus. So maybe bolder it 4 by fours where you're doing really hard efforts with minimal rest. So having to express, express your high intensity efforts and recover, not be able to recover efficiently. And then you might look at doing maybe a more like performance. So you might choose a route that's you've got a period of easier climbing and then high intensity effort and then a period of easier climbing. You might try and do 2 laps of that, just trying to adapt to the demands that express your your your your stress, what you've stressed previously into a performance setting. Speaker 2 Yeah. It's looking to kind of start by choosing sessions that target just the adaptations you want. And then when you're stressing expressing the system, you're looking to mimic your goal more closely. Yeah. So there's sort of both of these fall under this high intensity interval training. Speaker 1 Yeah. And with high intensity interval training, as we've gone through that example, you can probably see we've played with a couple of variables to adapt. High Intensity Interval Training So the first one is intensity. So you can have a lower intensity and you can also have a higher intensity. It's important that the intensity is higher than what you typically do in a low intensity steady state because you want that anaerobic component, you want to be stressing that system. So with these ones, I think over the course of the the session, you should be feeling like you're, you're close to the red line towards the end of each each set. But then you should be recovered where you can put out the good, the same amount of effort in the next set. Maybe towards the end of the session if you're untrained, you'll be full enough and not having the success. But over the course of the eight week period, you should be seeing us increase success rate. We, we use that quite a lot of clients as well is the, the idea of failure and success rate. I encourage my clients to maybe look for a 50% success rate at the start of a plan and then. Speaker 2 Build in any, in any session fees or in more. Speaker 1 Be anaerobic and aerobic power and the aerobic capacity. I think there should be 100% success rate, but the anaerobic and capacity and aerobic power start with 50% and start to build to 75% towards the end of the plan. Because some failure is good because if you completed everything then you're not really pushing yourself hard enough. You need to have a bit of failure to learn where where the red line actually is. Speaker 2 Yeah. And this is where probably a little bit of exploration comes in. And I know we use what we just call discovery sessions. So anyone listening, if you want to try one of these high intensity interval sessions, whether it's one-on-one off, so sitting more towards the aerobic end, or whether it's bolder triples where we might expect some failure. It's just allowing that time to explore them, explore them on different levels of climbing in your gym and seeing what it feels like and seeing what level you can use before maybe you do start to fail a bit. And, you know, I think it's definitely a learning curve when you start doing these sessions. Speaker 1 Yeah. So, yeah, we we've gone through intensity and also a bit of progressive overload there. Volume, frequency, and rest intervals And whilst we've talked about intensity, progressive overload, we just, we also have volume and frequency. So with volume, as you said, we can change the duration of both the Rep itself and also the rest. I think the rest is quite an interesting one because in our sessions, you can play with having like a 2 minute rest for like the one-on-one off, so a more anaerobic capacity focused hit protocols and then build to like maybe only a minute rest, but then having an increased duration of two minutes. So you could go from doing a one minute on two-minute off protocol to a 2 minute on one minute off protocol. And in that period, you're getting more efficient at recovering at a higher intensity, but also being able to sustain that period for a long a longer period of time. Speaker 2 Yes. So the rest interval in itself is important and important component of the training. I suppose we think when we're at rest like, oh, we're just not doing anything, but our bodies are doing something. It's recovering from the work it's done. And actually that is one of the adaptations you'll see is that you'll recover quicker and you can create that progressive overload then by reducing that rest time. Speaker 1 Yeah, and I think the rest as well. Intensity is another thing you can play with. So when I start getting closer to the demands of the sport, one of my favourite things to do at clients is start bringing in climbing on the wall and learning how to recover on low intensity sequences. So the one-on-one off's another great example of this where you could do a, you start with a minute of climbing and then a minute of rest off the wall. You then start to introduce a minute of climbing with a minute of rest on the wall but not moving. So practise in rest positions. So it's increasing the intensity by getting you to be on the wall, stressing the flexors. But again, it's low intensity. You should be recovering in that period. And then once you've done a period of that, it's then going through period having two circuits and doing a really hard intensity effort and then an easier intensity effort where you're going around the board recovering. So that's another way of doing it. And I think not played with by a lot of climbers, but it's an interest interesting concept and works really well for when you're you're thinking about performance and expressing because climbing when you're performing, you don't get a minute of sitting down, you need a minute. So sometimes you are doing a variable intensity route where you've got a period of hard climbing and a period of easy climbing. So you do need to learn to recover on the wall as well. Speaker 2 Yeah, and it's a physiological side of it there, but also what you've just described to me, I'm like, there's a huge skill component there as well. And I guess that's one of the things, isn't it? Like I think people when they do high intensity sort of strength training on the wall, like bouldering, they see there's like a technical skill element there to the movement. But you can really bring skill elements into the endurance training in these sessions that we're talking about here. Speaker 1 We've covered variations, definitely. Yeah. So you can, you don't just rest by sitting on the ground. You can rest by climbing on the wall. So moving on to the adaptations you're getting from the session, again, I think going to keep it simple. The adaptations you’re getting from the session This three we can talk through, but there's many more so. Speaker 2 Yeah, and let's hear your top three. My. Speaker 1 Top three improved glycolysic efficiency. So we've talked about that with like the bolder triples, the four by fours where you have enhanced the ability to produce ATP through glycolysis, so the breakdown of glucose without oxygen. So it's improving our ability to perform high intensity efforts for short durations. We've then got also an increased lactate threshold. So this is closer to like improving our critical force. So thinking about if you're, if you're boxing out on the easy section in the route before you get to the boulder, then that might suggest your critical force is underdeveloped. So it's pushing that higher so you're able to sustain that effort. And so yeah, your ability to tolerate and buffer lactate. And the final one is increased anaerobic capacity. So that's a higher capacity to sustain anaerobic work due to better glycolytic enzyme activity. So improved duration for short bouts but slightly longer or intense climbing sequences. So more durate longer climbing sequences. Speaker 2 Awesome. OK. I feel like we've probably talked through quite a bit of like more technical information there and we're going to we're going to move on to debunking some myths, but you just want to give us a quick summary of how these two types of training complement each other. How endurance training complements bouldering and sport climbing So we've gone through the low intensity, low intensity, steady state, high intensity interval training. And yeah, can you just talk about how these complement each other, maybe in sport climbing and bouldering? Speaker 1 Yeah. So I think it's first good to understand that endurance isn't just about the ability to continue climbing as we've spoke about previously, we've got a couple of parts, you've got the energy production and you've also got the recovery between attempts. So whilst when whilst you look at your your performance and go, well, when I'm bouldering I'm just doing a hard effort, I'm sitting down and resting. So my training should mimic that. You should be thinking about, well, how can I improve the efficiency of my recovery period. So a Boulder main may think that ARC training isn't relevant to them. But when you look at the principle of Arc training, it's about improving your ability. Well, it's about stressing the type 1 muscle fibres to their their maximum threshold. And with type 1 muscle fibres we spoke about previously is they also clear lactate, which is a byproduct to an aerobic glycolysis. So if we're able to clear that and produce energy from it, then why don't we take advantage of that? It's like it's silly to just not train it if we can improve the efficiency there. So what I try and get out with, with my athletes especially and in my own training is that take a take a step back and look at what's going on at a deeper level. Not just like what's happening within this demands of your performance, but how can you improve the small part. So yeah, there's a combination that we need to look at and actually training both of them is important and could have different benefits and adaptations to to our. Speaker 2 Climbing, yeah, I like that. And I think what I often think is that if people just hone in on one and I guess maybe people tend to lean a little bit more towards the high intensity. And it's just a missed opportunity. Because as people will probably be able to imagine from these different protocols we've described, there's a real polarisation in intensities there and an element of just making good use of your time, which most people would want to do. Warm ups and cool downs Yeah, exactly. And I think with art training especially, it's so easy to introduce into a warm up and a cool down, especially when you look at how this is comes from Jane. We're very lucky that we have bi weekly catch ups with very leading experts in lots of areas. And I remember James Sprague, who's a leading cycling coach and very knowledgeable on energy systems way beyond what what I'm ever capable of. But remember him talking about the warmups they use for velodromes. And he was speaking about how you almost work up the energy system. So you start with the aerobic system, get that bigger cog fire in, and then you move on to the smaller ones going into like the high intensity interval training, but you use those protocols to warm up. And I was like, well, that makes sense. Why don't we just use that for boulders as well? Like if they're going to be using that aerobic system anyway, why don't we use the warm up to activate them for every session? And if it has a small adaptation over the course of a year, then it's going to have a better effect on their performance down the line. So. Something I get to try and get a lot of my athletes now to do is do arc sessions as part of their warm up. And it's, it doesn't take long, it's only 5-10 minutes. You do generally feel a bit more limber, a bit more recruit, a bit more activated and ready to go into the next part of the session. And it doesn't take away any energy. And likewise it's good for cooling down as well because it just allows you to have to do a lot of climbing. You're quite switched on. And I think when I look back in to my GCSE level P where my, my teacher told me, like cooldowns are important from a mental perspective as well. Like it helps you to switch off. So you use the cooldown, switch the brain off and just return to baseline. And I think that's not what a lot of climbers don't do that. So you could use the arc session to just switch off a bit, reflect on your session and bring back down to like baseline and then go home. So I think that's another thing to consider is cooldowns are important for just switching off mentally and physically. Speaker 2 Yeah, I think that's a nice way to summarise because I think we've probably dived quite a bit into like, you know, details of the protocol, but it's really is a holistic approach. And you know, that's definitely part of, I mean, I know all the coaches here at Lattice, but we we really enjoy that side of working with humans. OK, so we're going to move on to debunking some myths. Myths about endurance training So people might have been listening and obviously you might be following what we're thinking. Oh yeah, that does make sense. But often people can really default back to myths and misconceptions that they've built over years that built around their belief system around training. So maybe we'll make this like a little bit quick fire on each of these. So I'm going to, I've got 6 myths that I've written down here and maybe you can just kind of give your quick response that you would you would give to to a climber who's thinking any of these. So the first one really common that basically if you're going to do endurance training, you must be getting hideously pumped, otherwise you're not training and it's not worthwhile. Speaker 1 Well, I think that comes back to stressing the metabolic systems and going, well, what am I trying to get out of my, my session? And if you're trying to improve your recovery, then my argument would be, well, why aren't you targeting that part of your, your Physiology? And to best do that, you want to target type 1 muscle fibres and by definition zone 2 training the maximal expression of type 1 muscle fibres is to work below the aerobic threshold or at the aerobic threshold. And that's very low intensity, so you shouldn't be feeling pumped. Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK. The second one, boulders do not need endurance training. Boulders do not need endurance training And I know you've you've mentioned this a few times and I think that's probably partly because you've done a lot of bouldering yourself and explored endurance training. But yeah, if I was a boulder and I was saying I only boulder, I'm barely even on the wall very long, surely I don't need endurance training. Speaker 1 How long does your session last? Speaker 2 Two hours. Speaker 1 And if so, this is the way I look at it. If you only have two hours on your boulder, but you have the potential to claim for four hours in a day, you're losing out on two hours in that session. So if you have two extra hours to work a boulder in a session, would it be quicker to do it? I'll just leave it there. Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. Way more time for movement practise often as a kind of a goal or people. Something that people share with me a lot is, oh, I'd like you have to climb this level, whatever more quickly. That might because they're time pressed or it might because that's they find that really satisfying to execute things quickly. And ultimately, if your sessions are higher quality and you can sustain your performance longer, you'll probably do it in less sessions. Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Speaker 2 OK, so third one, oh, we need to be constantly performing. So I guess it's this is like, oh, why would I do those sessions that don't really look like what I want to do and surely I'm better off just spending my time trying to keep climbing my sport Red Point project. Speaker 1 Yeah. So again, let's look at the basic principles. Effectively, if we were to summarise training into two words, it'd be stress express. The Basic Principles of Training So with the adaptation, are we looking to stress it or are we looking to express? And if you're constantly expressing, then you're not going to be stressing. And stress leads to further adaptations and improvements at baseline level. So if we're not developing that part, then we're never going to be able to express. We'll always be at a ceiling. So the base is important to raise so we can have a higher ceiling when we express it. Speaker 2 Yeah, people talk about raising the floor, don't they, rather than always. And one thing I will just mention is that just focusing on performance can work for a lot of people for a period of time. And that is because of course you are. You might do within that day that you go sport climbing to try a project, probably do a warm up, you might do a cool down. But is it the most effective way and are there other options? Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, definitely. Speaker 2 And OK, number four, well, it's basically more is always better, more endurance training is always better, More training is always better. I think plenty of people believe this. Speaker 1 I guess when when I look at the the pillars of of training, you've got your strength, you've got your endurance, you've got your performance. Ultimately, I think strength represents the top of the ceiling, and if your ceiling is quite low, you're never going to be able to breakthrough it, so your endurance is always going to be capped. So to improve endurance, sometimes just improving strength actually drags it up because it allows you to produce more force per the original energy output. So it's just a normal way of improving endurance and probably where you don't realise it just allows that ceiling to be raised after the endurance training. Speaker 2 Yeah. And I guess one of those other pillars is kind of recovery and I guess being able to hit all these different intensities we've just talked about. And so if you just keep doing more and that is meaning you're not allow abling yourself to meet the quality or the demands of your training sessions, then you are not going to be getting the most out of them. OK #5 You can't build endurance and strength at the same time. #5 You Can’t Build Endurance and Strength at the Same Time Or something that I suppose is sort of a worry people often voice is that endurance training will make them weaker. Speaker 1 Look at triathletes, yeah, quite simply a running and cycling in general who do the 8020 split who train endurance 80% of the time and strength 20% of the time. And I think it was a massive breakthrough in from when I was reading the books about like endurance training in those those disciplines. It was a massive breakthrough for them where they went. They like left the other competitors down the field when they were training with this concept. But the, the idea is that if you can keep them distinct, they shouldn't interfere. But in you can also look at it at a micro level of how your your your your strategy of placing the sessions across a week and making sure that if you are concerned that endurance is going to interfere with your strength, either doing on separate days or sometimes it's nicer to the endurance in the morning when the body needs to wake up and the strength in the evening when the body's fully activated. But leaving a good 6 to 8 hour buffer between the two shouldn't have any effect on the body. Speaker 2 Yeah, it's probably speaking to those people who maybe are feeling that their strength is being impacted by their endurance training. Look at your overall training load, look at how you're structuring, and there's probably actually just improvements that you can make there. And I'll just also give a shout out to Josh Hadley's self experimentation, his critical force, his however many squeezes a day. He looked at strength alongside that, and actually that was fine. But what did change was the rate of force development, and that did go down. I mean obviously this is n = 1, but that I guess is interesting distinction. Speaker 1 Though the rate of force development goes down because it it's power and power does the recruit really quick. So is it the endurance protocol? Is it just because he didn't train it? Do any didn't put an emphasis on power training in that block. Speaker 2 And then you were. Speaker 1 Short four week block. What is power? Speaker 2 Training, yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's just about being smart, really, training strength and endurance alongside each other. OK. Endurance training should always be low intensity The final one, which I suppose is almost the the opposite of the 1st, is that endurance training should always be low intensity. Speaker 1 So as we covered at the start, you've got your two metabolic pathways that we need to target anaerobic glycolysis. You need the high intensity to switch off the where the the muscle fibres can't produce. So the type 1 muscle fibres can't produce enough energy to supply the sport. So you don't need to bring in the type 2 and type 2 function without oxygen, which then we we need to target. So that's why. Speaker 2 Excellent, right. Well, I feel like that was a good kind of whistle stop tour through the the most common myths that we see. So now we're going to kind of round up this conversation with a bit that I'm really excited to share. Cam’s step-by-step guide to self-experimentation And I'm excited because I feel like it really brings all of the kind of ideas that we've talked about together. And this is your, don't know what you'd call it, your step by step guide to self experimentation. Speaker 1 I guess it's just my training for the past five years. Speaker 2 So this is the bit where people listening now think about this as we're talking through this process, think maybe about how it would be for you. So I guess I'm going to hand over to you, Cam, and just let you explain this process and explain what each of the steps are and what you think about for each of these steps. Speaker 1 Yeah, so with myself, experimentation process and reflect on it, to summarise it in a way that's easier to understand, there's five steps. So the first step is observation. You then have tests, that's the second step, third steps, intervention, 4th steps, retest. And then the final step is evaluate and revise. So the first step observation. With this, there's going to be a hypothesis. And in this context, we're not looking at in a research context, it's just going, I have this idea and I think it'll bring about this result. And so this might be my recovery is poor. That's what I've observed in my training. I'm getting pumped and powered out too quickly. I think this training intervention that I've seen on the Internet will work. So I'm going to implement this in my climbing for X amount of period for X amount of time. So after you've done that, you've got an idea. Critical Force Testing We now need a baseline. So this is test. We need to understand where you're currently at to make sure the intervention is working. So if it's to target, improve recovery or stop you getting powered out and pumped, you might be wanting to look towards critical force testing. And so there's a video we have on our YouTube which we'll link in this, the show notes about critical force. And if you've watched any of our videos with Stefano, Emil, Will Bosey, you'll see the protocols being completed on there. And and that that those ones are our all out test. And then we also do a remote assessment, which has our other critical force test, which is known as a constant load critical force test. And they're 2 slightly different approaches, but they both equal have both produced a critical force in West prime value. And I won't go into too much detail on the specifics of each one. But in short, if you're wanting to do it at home and you don't have a fancy tin deck or a digital rung, I'd recommend using the constant load approach. And we, we do have a blog, which will also be in the show notes on how to do that. And as I said before, we have the remote assessment, which even though it's, we charge you for it, it is, it is pretty good at just quickly doing that and giving you a value to work with. And then the other one, the all out, if you have a tin deck that there is a built in feature on tin deck that allows you to do that. Or you can just watch our videos on YouTube that show you how to do that protocol. And so yeah, you want want to do that test and get a critical force value and also AW prime you then introduce your intervention. So this might be if I'm trying to improve my recovery, I'm going to play with doing the low intensity steady state protocol in my warmups. So I'm going to do start over a 12 week period. I'm going to start with a 5 minute warm up for four weeks and then a 7 1/2 minute warm up for the next 4 weeks, and then a 10 minute warm up for the final four weeks of my training session. For every training session. Then I might introduce it as my call down as well. And that's all you do. Another protocol might be I'm going to start playing with hip protocols and I'm going to take the concept behind anaerobic capacity and try and reduce my risk of powering out. So think about what you want to do. Or you might try and play with a combination of the two, but keep it the same and be consistent. You'll then do your period of time. Don't worry about what's happening in that period of time. Training ebbs and flows. You might see reductions in poor performance, but the exciting part comes with the retest. So after the 12 weeks or whatever period of time you choose, you then do the retest where you mimic the same scenario that you did the testing in at the start of the protocol. It's really important that you keep it the same because any variation, so using a different edge or the conditions are different may impact the results. Especially with like a critical force test, which is relying on sustained power output and getting you to go to exhaustion. Stuff like friction, busy day at work beforehand, mental fatigue. But that one's a big one that's been shown to. Speaker 2 Impact, yeah, we've always got to remember that any test is a one off snapshot in like that moment of time. And I suppose people, if they're really feel that the test did not represent that performance because of any of those things, you could redo that. You could and. Speaker 1 Then allow yourself to do it again. But yeah, just consider the the conditions you completed the first Test in and then try and replicate them for the second. You won't get it perfect because we're not professional athletes or most people listening this aren't professional athletes and we live a day-to-day life that does fluctuate. And then the final bit is the evaluator revise. So with this bit, I think it's really important to adopt A growth mindset where you don't look at it going, I'm the expert, I know best, but go or what can I learn from these results? So when I go into my evaluate and revise process, I'm going, what were my expectations going into this protocol? So what was I looking to achieve? And did I have any that might like more deeper level expectations that I wasn't ready to confront yet? So did I have bigger expectations of it or did I expect it to revolutionise my life, something like that, which sometimes you do think. And just bringing it back in line with going, I think any progress towards where I was going is a positive sign. Then you're looking at how did I progress towards my expectations? So if you have really big expectations and you only make a small bit of progress, then I would discourage writing that off down to changes in conditions or just being non significant because you only got one time snapshot at that point. So you can't say it's non significant because you're at the end of one and you've only done it for a short period of time. So I'd recommend doing doing the protocol again if you wanted to and seeing how it progresses. Because if you only make, so say you make a 3% gain in your critical force and you went oh that, that's just negligible that anyone can make 3% gain without trading. And then you repeat it again, you make 3%, then you made 6% over a 24 week period. So you are progressing towards your expectation, just not at the rate you wanted to. So keep an open mind on that front. Speaker 2 Yeah, climbers overestimate what they can do in a month and underestimate what they can do in a year. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. And so then that comes back into what do the results tell me about the intervention? So no change or regression isn't a negative result or I just don't make progress, then you aren't going to make progress. Whereas if you go, oh, how can I tweak this to take me to the next level or make the protocol work for me, then that's when you make the progress. Because another thing to consider is that a lot of time when we're choosing exercises, we're trying to fit them to like normal distribution. So we're finding the protocols that work best for most people, and our experience as coaches is generated from working with hundreds of athletes and go being able to pick up on what protocols work with which athletes in certain situations. That doesn't mean it works for everyone because people sit outside that normal distribution. And in those situations, you get the fun opportunity of experimenting with a new idea and going, how can I tweak this protocol to suit the needs of myself or an athlete I'm working with to bring about the results I desire. So that's when you get back through the the theory and see if you've missed something or I have like with all my protocols now I have lots of different checklists to go through and how I can tweak the, the protocols to suit. And he's the athletes to get best get out the results they need. So that that's kind of the process I'm going through with the the self experimentation. So observe, test, intervention, retest, evaluate and revise and just keep repeating that process. And I do it with everything. Speaker 2 Yeah, I, I think it's really nice and one thing that you know, you're, you're doing a PhD lots of people listening to this won't be doing a PhD. And I think it can sound on the face of it quite academic. But I think when you actually go through the process for your own climbing, you I, I guess I get a feeling that it's not as academic as it, as it kind of looks on people, which which I really like. And it's a really nice kind of it. It actually feels like quite a holistic approach. And I guess one thing that I think plays into that, which if I'm going through this process, I like, and I, I know you do this again, is in the test retest, also think about your experience in your climbing. So yes, I think we think it's obviously it's really useful to have a more kind of reproducible benchmark, something that is quite simple like a critical force test. And you know, you are kind of taking away certain like technical elements, but alongside that have like a description or a feeling in your climbing or, or it could be a bit more objective, maybe like some grades. It's nice to get a bit of a spread, I think of information when it comes to testing and retesting because what you might find is that, yeah, there's not much change in percentage in, I don't know, some, your critical force or something, but actually your change in experience could be really meaningful. You know, I, we don't really have something that tells us this percentage gain in on a Fingerboard or in any basic test kind of correlates necessarily to this exact meaningful change in your climbing performance. Speaker 1 I feel, yeah, that's, that's a really interesting point because so again, I'm, I'm linking back to my PhD existed, but I've done a lot of my reading. And if you've not listened to the previous podcast, it was in it looks at mental fatigue and performance. And part of mental fatigue is you struggle to regulate emotions. So I've done a lot of reading around emotions and they take a very similar approach to what you've said there in that they've tried to be really scientific and go into every physical, physiological change you can have and create like a fingerprint for each emotion. But then when they've tried to extrapolate that and look at lots of people, it doesn't matter. And what they argue is that emotions are constructs of our environment. So we're always taught what our emotions are. So. If you're raised different to someone else, you have a slightly different construct of emotion. I think the the most common would be if you look at anxiety, sometimes you can go, oh, you could liken those feelings to excitement where you, you're a bit jittery. You're like, oh, sometimes you can re you can re describe that feeling as excitement in training. I think it's very similar as well, where we're only actually taking maybe one or two physiological variables and looking at them. And that's not a snapshot of our entire performance. And we have this really powerful, efficient system in our head that's probably the best computer in the world, which is our brain. And we don't put enough faith in it sometimes to go actually my experiences, what my brain is telling me is actually better than what these numbers say on the just leading into that subjective feelings really important and trusting. It's something that I've I've embraced over the years now and a lot of my clients do because it's, it's quite sad sometimes when you see clients achieve their goal, but actually the more upset that they've not improved their finger strength. I don't know if you've experienced that with clients before. Speaker 2 Yeah, maybe not quite as you described it, but just obviously like an an over focus or an over analysis on it. And yeah, you're right, I think and that's why, well, hope you know, something we like to do is describe these tests, how we're going to look at these like if snapshot in time, but trying to keep everything in its place, I suppose because the of course you could choose not to do any of those kind of more basic testing, but they can be really useful. So I guess the place that it would is nice to be is to be able to do those. But like you said, maintain that real sort of curious approach where it's like, oh, that's interesting that hasn't this basic key capacity that I measured hasn't changed, but actually my experience has changed. And it also just comes back to maybe when people are doing this process, making a link or jotting down what they value in their climbing. And so you what we are taking this quite sort of, I suppose, rigorous approach in a way that it's rigorous, which allows you to learn more about yourself, but making sure you look at it in a holistic way. Yeah, Yeah. And. Speaker 1 For example, the critical force example you used there, it's worth remembering the context that the test is performed in. So if you've done a critical force test on the finger flexors and you're testing the finger flexors and then you go and do a protocol which is full body, you're not measuring the full body's capability, you're just measuring a specific area. So you might feel fitter overall in the general session, but it's because the whole body is adapted, not just the the forearm flexors. So it's worth also critically evaluating your own protocols and then looking back on it. Speaker 2 Yeah, I always like to think like, I like to gather information about myself or, you know, if I'm working with climbers, it's nice to gather information about them. And then the way I like to think of it is holding it all lightly. So, you know, not grabbing on to any one bit of information as like much more important or instructive necessarily than another, but holding it all lightly. And then using a process like this that actually allows me to step back a little bit and gives me a framework to look at all that information in. And I actually think having a framework like this can help people use information in a much more curious way, which is cool. OK. Do you just want to run us through to kind of round us up this process with, I don't know, with an example from your training, given that this is something that you've used a lot? Example of a recovery protocol Yeah. So I think the most recent example in an endurance context is coming back to the idea of recovery. So I'm a boulderer, that's where I get my kicks from. I enjoy bouldering, I enjoy it. And I had a trip which had been September 2023 to North Wales and felt really, really strong, but I just couldn't recover. Like I maybe get an hour into a session and then all of a sudden I just crash. And I reflected on what my training was and I'd done loads of hard bouldering, climbing at my limit, but I hadn't actually done much lower end work. And I, when I, when I tested myself, my W prime was exceptional. So my ability to produce ATP and have a big pool of energy was, was great, but my critical force was really low. So this is an area that I was like, oh, right, well, if that's really low and I'm not recovering, well, maybe that's the reason why I'm not developing. So I went, I may as well just commit fully to the protocol and just see what happens. It doesn't matter if I lose 3 months of trading. It's, it's just a process. It's part of my life. So I went into this protocol with the idea of just playing with ARP trading and experiments with the idea that will improve my recovery. And so I didn't do much testing. And when I reflect back on the process, it's like I should have done a critical force test, but at the time I was busy and it didn't really fit into the schedule that I had then. So I just went in knowing that my my feeling was I didn't I wasn't recovering well. Speaker 2 Yeah, your test was more your experience like what we talked about you leant on more how it felt for you in a session, knowing how you felt after an hour. Speaker 1 Yeah, and if I wanted an objective value, I would have done a critical force test. But so I did an arc, an arcing protocol where I had I can only climb three times a week. And I I went full ham. I went and did for like 30 boulder problems, but I'd do a combination of doing like 30 to 40 minutes of Arc training, just going around the board and over the course of the first maybe six weeks, I built that up from 10 minutes to 40 minutes, just being very slow and incremental in the increases. And then with the 30 boulders I built out from 10 to to 30. So undeciding myself and building up over the course of the six weeks. And then I did the post call for 12 weeks just to see what would happen. And then I started to notice my motivation was dropping with it. And I thought that was maybe a good time to transition out of that focus and just start climbing on the board again. And what was interesting was when I went on the board, my actual performance on the board hadn't changed. I was still doing the ball, the problems that I could previously do. I was moving a lot more efficiently on the board. So I think having that time spent just doing lap and lap of moving on the wall. Speaker 2 You got a real fluidity and you're moving. Speaker 1 Climbing, I didn't feel as recruited and but that's because I've done lots of low intensity work and that comes back quickly for me anyway. So I wasn't concerned. And once I'd got the recruitment back I found I was able to climb for harder, for longer. So I'd go from maybe doing 20 minutes to an hour of hard climbing to be able to do 2-3 hours quite comfortably and still cracking out the the high intensity efforts and having to stop because of a time constraint rather than a physical energy constraint. And that that's, that's what I observed. And when I was evaluating it, there's parts that I'd improve. So I'd probably next time be more objective and so do like a critical force test and looking back at the protocol, probably do a short period of time because what led me to stop was like a drop in motivation. But again I was listening to my body and going, recognising that my motivation wasn't there. So it may be worth time changing protocol and trying something new. Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean I'm, I've got a burning question which anyone listening would want me to ask you. Strength training So whilst you were doing that, I assume you still did, did you do any strength trend, did you do like a board session a week? Speaker 1 No, I didn't do any board climbing. Speaker 2 You did no board climbing. Nice. Speaker 1 I did so did three sessions a week and they were all all started with art climbing. So that started about 10 minutes and built up to to 40 minutes and then go and do boulder problems at below V4. So quite comfortable for for me and I wasn't putting out much effort and I'd do about 10 to 30 of them and then go back and finish with another 10 to 40 minutes building up to 40 minutes of art training. Speaker 2 That's really interesting. I mean, I'll just put my like when I've experimented more with this sort of focus on art, I'll just say that I am I keep one board session in a week. You obviously maintain recruitment. I'd say I'm at the other end of that. Like I do lose strength really quickly and but I have what's interesting is that have found one session a week has actually maintained for me a good level and. Speaker 1 I did pickups throughout the protocols. Speaker 2 Ah, OK, so your fingers are still getting. Speaker 1 Pickup protocols a week, yeah, yeah, I always do those early morning. So I was always recruiting in the morning and then I won't walk on a Fingerboard as part of my my sessions anyway. But then leaning into my my strength is my Max strength. I can recruit that really quickly and have a good conditioning base, so if I stop doing that, my baseline's really high where I probably don't notice it too much, as if I was not as recruited or developed in that area. Speaker 2 Oh well this isn't cool. We're going into winter training as we record this so I am already. This conversation has got me thinking about my own little self experimentation and what I'm going to do Oh well. I usually always do my finger strength because it's such an area of weakness and I've tried different things. It's actually interesting because I really like the self experimentation element I've did, I have done an approach which got my fingers a lot stronger. But interestingly I've just never gone back to it. I've always just tried something else. But that's because I quite like to try different things. And obviously life, life ebbs and flows and changes so you have different amounts of time and stuff like that. So yeah, I'll probably have to get my thinking out on but what I what I want to try and. Speaker 1 Finger strength version of this next time. Speaker 2 Yeah, maybe that'll be the next one. Sure, it'll be popular if anyone's like me and really struggles to make good gains. All right, well, I think that's a wrap from us. So I guess we'll hand over to you guys listening and hopefully you can go through this process for yourself. Hopefully you've found this conversation useful in providing some of that kind of foundational knowledge and then also a step by step process to actually help you apply it. And if you do give it a go, let us know how it goes. Oh yeah. And if you want to learn more about endurance in a different format, and then we do have an endurance quick course out now. And I guess the aim is that it doesn't take loads of time and it provides kind of a bit more video content and a flow through that. So just if you're a bit of a different learner. And it also provides things like plan template and links to these, all these sessions with some more example sessions, including the ones that we've talked about today. So that that kind of will really help provide you with their I suppose your the intervention options if you want to go through this. Speaker 1 Just to add to that course, because we were working together on developing some coach onboarding recently and you get, I luckily got the opportunity to have a quick look over it. And I have to say it is an exceptional course. Like it was really, I was really impressed with the knowledge in it and how it was communicated. I've not been involved in the process. So that's that's why I thought I'd just add that. I just thought it was like from an external perspective, even though I am part of Lattice, but from an Excel perspective not being involved. I thought it was really well communicated and gave a really good foundation of knowledge from the bits I watched and I'm now integrated into the practises that we use for education at at Lattice. Speaker 2 Awesome. Well, thank you very much. And well, you, you are involved in the next one coming up, finger strength. We'll be picking your brain to that. All right. Well, I guess that's everything from us. Speaker 1 Yeah, thank you very much for having me. Speaker 2 Yeah. Thanks for joining me. It's been great.