EP 199: Will Anglin & Matt Jones — A Masterclass in How to Progress Your Climbing

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The list goes on and on. You can learn more about how Supercharged Collagen can support your training and climbing at FizzyVantage.com and use code Nugget15 at checkout to save 15% off your next order. Hello friends and welcome to the Nugget Climbing Podcast. This is your host, Stephen Dimit, and we have got such a valuable episode today. This is one of the most valuable episodes I've ever recorded. It's a gold mine for any of you that want to get better at climbing. There are so many nuggets in today's episode. My guests today are Will England and Matt Jones. Will's back on the podcast. He was just on. If you missed his episode, that one was great. Will is the founder of tension climbing and a really high level boulderer himself. Most importantly, I love the way this guy thinks. He's kind of a climbing philosopher. He loves thinking about training, how to progress, what people are missing, what they should be doing. The trends he sees in really high level climbers, he loves thinking about this stuff and he loves geeking out about this stuff with his buddy Matt Jones. Matt is a coach and trainer. Matt has a really deep background in sports. I'm not going to go into it too much here because the first thing we do in this episode is introduce Matt and he shares his bio. These guys come from opposite backgrounds. They compliment each other really well. I love how they both think. This episode really is a master class. I can't think these guys enough. They put so much thought into this before they even reached out to me. They had an outline. They had a plan. They knew what they wanted to say and I simply provided a platform for them to share some really great information. Once again, no matter where you're at in your climbing journey, if you're a beginner, intermediate, advanced, maybe you've been climbing for a long time, no matter where you're at, I really think you'll get some value out of this episode. This is also my last episode of the year. I'm taking a couple of weeks off over the holidays. I'm really looking forward to a break. I'm excited about next year. I've got a great lineup of guests. Do not fear the nugget will be back in January and I think it'll be better than ever. I'm really excited about some of the stuff we've got planned in the new year. All right. Let's dive in. Please enjoy this master class in how to progress your climbing with Will Anglin and Matt Jones. [Music] Okay. I think we should start with an introduction of Matt. We've done a whole podcast so people know who you are. Matt, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and your connection to Will and how this all fits together? Yeah, sure. I lifelong athlete, I've always been a big science nerd and athlete of all things. I've played pretty much every sport under the sun at some point or another. Got to college, studied kinesiology, so that's my degree is in from the University of Maryland. That's where I found rock climbing too. Too many years of soccer and track kind of had me burnt out and parts feeling older than maybe they ought to at 18, 19 years old. One day I was studying, looked out my window and just over studying and saw this big, rickety, wooden thing behind the gym at University of Maryland and people rock climbing on it. I was like, that looks better than what I'm doing right now. I'm going to go try that, ditch studying, went and climbed, met a bunch of really nice people and had a ball and then really haven't looked back 15 years later. That was kind of how I found rock climbing and then two years later I started setting and coaching part-time at the gym formerly known as Earth Tracks, or that's how I like to think of it. Not that anything gets movement, but it's just with a different vibe then. There was this other dude, Will Anglin, coaching it, one of the three Earth Trek gym locations there. We hit it off. He was a lot better at rock climbing and still is than me. We were just coming at the sport from really different angles and I thought that that was really interesting. I had a lot to learn from him. It also just so happened that Will's now wife and I were close friends and had a lot of friends in common in college as well. It was like an easy hang, a lot of times pretty convenient. I think we were just coming at the sport from really different angles and then I coached at the Earth Tracks gym for almost 10 years, think eight and a half, nine years before my wife and I moved out to Seattle where I started coaching for the vertical world climbing team with Tyson Cheney and a bunch of other really amazing coaches and athletes out there. Did that for four years for change maybe. My wife and I moved to Charleston, South Carolina where we're at now, where I run my own climbing, Jones Fitness and performance.com, that's where you can find me, where it's just an online training support system for athletes. Most of my clients are climbers but I do coach athletes and other sports as well. Okay. Yeah. Right on. Perfect. Yeah, I will have probably talked about this in the intro a little bit but I want to touch on why we're doing this, what we're trying to accomplish here. Will, you and I had a conversation in our previous episode mostly about, well, we talked about tons of things, but as far as training goes, we gave a lot of caveats. We talked about some of the trends you've noticed and stuff, but just reminded people, it's really hard to be prescriptive on a podcast because it's really about discovering your own path and climbing and leaning into actual rock climbing skills. We both left that conversation feeling like, we wish we could give people something a little bit more tangible because lots of people were going to be, or listen to that and had questions and they want to know, of course, the burning questions for people is always like, what do I actually do? If I'm a really good rock climber and I'm weak, maybe they identify with you will, what do I do? Or if I've spent all my time in the gym and I know that I'm pretty strong but don't have those climbing skills, what do I do? That's what we're trying to help with in this conversation. You guys are the masterminds behind this conversation or this episode. I'm just the guide here. Let's start with, who is this for, who is this episode for, who we're trying to help? Yeah, that's a great question and I think a lot of what we're trying to do here is help like identify areas of focus rather than give very specific things to do. Trying to help people understand what some helpful goals might be and as far as who this is for, in Matt and I's history of coaching and working with athletes, we've often found that people fall kind of towards one end of the spectrum or another where it's like you said, a climber who feels like they're really strong but maybe doesn't feel like their performance matches up to the strength level that they have or something a little bit more on the opposite side where a climber feels like they're, you know, having relatively good performance but their strength just seems to really be lagging behind. And so we've tried to build out a bit of a guide for folks who fall in one of those two categories and looking at progression between what does a beginner climber look like and what doesn't intermediate climber look like and then what it's an advanced climber look like and how do we move from one of those things to the next? Yeah, so how do each of those two types of climbers, what should they do or what should they focus on at each of those skill levels? So whether they're kind of newer in their climbing or they've been doing it for a few years or they've been doing it for a lot of years. What should we talk about next? Should we talk about kind of broadly speaking, we'll get more into this specifics as we go through each category. But what broadly speaking, are you talking about or how are you defining beginner intermediate and advanced? Do you want to touch on that a little bit before we dive further in? Yeah, Matt, you want to tackle that? Sure. I think, you know, this is a tricky one because you can, what Will and I talked about this not long ago that no matter where you're at in your progression as a rock climber, you are a beginner in intermediate and advanced and maybe elite in a bunch of different things all at the same time. So let me just answer your question maybe with like a disclaimer first that like we're creating a lot of binary and dichotomy things here like you are this thing or you're at one end of the spectrum or the other, we're really, it's not ever that. We're just using those as means to discuss this kind of stuff. I see, I think Will and I both seen a lot of this climber is overly identify with I am this kind of a climber. I like crimps or I'm good at overhang or I'm strong, not good or whatever it might be. And they kind of pigeonhole themselves and it really, it deters them from branching outside their comfort zone and progressing in ways that they could otherwise if they didn't put that label on themselves so I'm going to say a lot of things that we're just using as means to communicate but please don't feel like you are this thing and then you're that thing forever because that's not helpful for anybody. But to actually answer your question, how are we defining these things? So real basically a beginner climber we're putting is somewhere capping out in that like V4, 511 plus range, we'll go into a lot more detail about like what characteristics go into that climber. I think that's a lot more important than the V grades that we're talking about here. Intermediate climber, probably somewhere in that like V5 to V9 range and then up to EZ13s on rope, advanced climber kind of anything north of those numbers. There's also kind of a range of time of your climbing career that falls within each one of those two but again, you can kind of be bouncing between those things, whether it be beginner, intermediate, advanced outside of your climbing career duration based on your capabilities of where you're at at a given moment. Yeah, totally. So if you spend all your time climbing on the moon board, you might be advanced at that style and you might be an intermediate or even beginner when it comes to technical granite face climbing or slab or cracks or something like that. Like maybe you want to eventually go do the free rider and you might identify with some of those other categories as far as things you should focus on for building that skill set. Totally. Yeah. Okay. Alright, so I think we should just dive in here in a second. I just want to remind people we're going through six archetypes. So beginner, good, not strong, will be one type of person and then strong, not good, very oversimplified. But this is just guidelines to help you out. We're going to do that for beginner and then those two things for intermediate and then those two things for advanced. And then within each of those, we'll hit on three key things. All of these guys talk about that in a second. But just want to let you guys know that I always do time stamps for these episodes. They're called nuggets. You can find that in your podcast app by scrolling down or in the show notes. And I will really clearly break out all of these six different types. So if you want to go back and revisit one of these sections that you identify with, especially strongly, you can go find that in the time stamps and go right back to that section. Alright, let's dive into beginner unless there's anything else we need to cover before we jump in. Yeah, I think there's, I want to cover a few kind of general ideas that we're going to be touching on multiple times. So just a few things that we're going to, we're going to come back to multiple times as we hit these different like ability levels or types of climber, just so we have a common understanding about some of these core themes. So one of the, one of the most important ones I think is understanding the relation of skill and strength. And we're going to talk about it as a spectrum in a lot of ways as we move through these, you know, different climbers and ability levels. But it's really more of like a feedback loop. If this is going to magnify your ability to perform skills and increasing your skill level is going to allow you to get more out of your strength. And so there's this constant feedback loop happening between your skill and your strength. And there's, they're not really two super separate things and that interplay is really important. So you can, this loop can work in a kind of a positive way or a negative way. So the, the first way I put it is kind of a positive way where, yeah, skill is going to magnify your strength and strength is going to magnify your skill. But at the same time, strength can mask a lack of skill and skill can mask a lack of strength. And this is, this interesting relationship between strength and skill is something that we're going to kind of constantly be touching on as we're discussing the rest of these points. Very good. To add on to that, sorry, can you hear this animal going crazy in the background here? Is this okay? No, zooms. Zoom's blocking it out for us. Yeah. Perfect. Thanks, zoom. So, yeah, another thing we'll come back to a bunch here is this concept of the four stages of competence. If you are a teacher or a coach or you've been exposed to like the learning process in any endeavor, you've maybe heard these things. So the four stages real quick are unconscious incompetence, which is aka ignorance. You don't know what you don't know. You're so fresh that everything is new and it's like that time you walk into the climbing gym and the first time you see somebody do anything, it completely blows your mind because you didn't know that was possible until 30 seconds ago. Second stage is conscious incompetence. Where you see somebody blow your mind, you are now aware that that is an option that can happen in the world of climbing. That's really important, right? Like, when you see something happen or you're exposed to something for the first time, it kind of opens up a whole new world of possibilities for you. Third stage, conscious competence, which is learning. That's what we call like drill work and skill work in climbing, right? Like, you're aware that all this stuff exists and now you're doing something on purpose to try to acquire that stuff. Fourth stage is unconscious competence or mastery. And this is what we kind of casually refer to as flow state, where you're in the moment, you kind of have all these basic skills, super dialed, so you don't need to be able to have seen them in this specific scenario. But you know them so well that you can kind of apply them. You can improvise a lot more and things just happen. It's one of those things you kind of know it when you see it, when somebody does it. And when you feel it, you hear this a lot. Hey, so-and-so, V27 Boulder, you just flashed this super hard Boulder. How did it feel? Yeah, I don't know, man. I don't really know what happened. And I did this thing and next thing I knew I was on top of the Boulder. There's a lot of unconscious stuff happening there, and that's what that mastery feels like. Autopilot. Another thing we're going to -- oh, yes, exactly. Next thing, this is a hill I die on. Things we use in climbing gyms are tools. Tools can be used in a whole bunch of different ways, and both Will and I have been guilty of this ourselves. I think maybe every rock climber has been guilty of this at some point or another of misusing a tool. So I'll throw myself under the bus here and use myself as an example where, early in my climbing career, I saw some YouTube video of Paul Robinson doing a hangboard workout. I believe he was in a boot if memory serves correct, so I think he was injured. It was maybe less of a hangboard workout and more doing lots of pull-ups on bad edges on a hangboard. I think by the end of the like 12-minute video he had done a hundred and change, pull-ups on 10 pull-ups here, 10 pull-ups here, 10 pull-ups in a bunch of different ways. And being like 18 months into my climbing career, Cyke was overflowing and I was like sick. If Paul Robinson's doing that, I should do that too and started doing it and he was doing it every day because he could not do anything else. He was in a boot. That workout did not represent the same thing to both of us, right? Like, to Paul, what that was of like cool, let's just keep up some like base fitness pulling and finger strength. To me, I was doing a max effort day, five days a week now, which maybe, like I was fun, I didn't get hurt, got lucky, right? Was it the best thing I could have done for my climbing at that point in time? Probably not. So we'll kind of use, as we go forward, like some of the best ways you can use the tools that are available to you based on where you're at in your progression of climbing. Makes sense? Will, anything to add? I guess just one last point before you jump in to the kind of the first block. Just this concept that if you're very untrained and if you've not done anything really, then pretty much anything you do is going to work. But the further you go along, the less and less that's going to be true. And so that's another kind of important point to what Matt's saying with the use of these different tools and potential misuse. The way that you would utilize something early in a climbing career might not be exactly the same way that you would utilize it later on. I think that's going to be kind of an important concept as well. I think every climber under appreciates that until they really learn it firsthand, you know? Because you do something and it works. You're like, oh, that was the secret sauce or you see someone else do something and it works for them. You're like, that's the secret sauce over there. But yeah, it took me a long time to learn that it took going through different seasons where I tried things that had worked in the past and they didn't work again, where I was like, oh, I'm a different climber now. I need different things. I have different goals. That makes sense. But I had to kind of learn it the hard way. Hopefully other people don't have to. Maybe they're smarter than me. Okay. Do you remember even the, I was just saying, I feel like to me, everybody remembers their first plateau that they hit as a rock climber. Like the first time doing anything stops working. Do you remember yours, Steven? Oh, that's a really good question. I mean, it probably kind of maxing out what I could do in Leavenworth, you know, having come from a background of like climbing a lot in a gym as my primary training. But in a very old, old school gym that was, that had no overhangs, basically, it was all like very vertical, very slippery, tiny little holds and stuff. So I was getting good at like, dancing, kind of, balancing stuff that ended up serving me pretty well at Smith. And then I was climbing like, featuring thuggy, squeezy things in Leavenworth and just kind of missing everything in between. So anytime there was a steeper climb with a bad hold, I just had no chance. I couldn't, I couldn't just pull on stuff. I had no background in like board climbing or, you know, there was, there was no, I'd never climbed on a 45 period like ever. So I kind of worked my way up through the squeezy things I could do and then just hit like a really hard wall because, you know, I did my first V10 or something five years into climbing, but I was actually like a V7 climber as far as like being well rounded. So I had to take a bunch of steps back and, and like really backfill a lot of what was missing in the middle, which for me was, was mostly like finger strength, but specifically like decent edge lots of weight on your hands. I was used to being able to take a lot of weight off with either heel hooks and, and squeezing on the compression stuff or by like being, you know, balancing and, and kind of dance like on the more vertical stuff. That's a great example. I think you actually said something that I think is really beneficial to pull out here as we dive into this of backfilling your skill set. I think our goal here, Will and I is to help people identify things before your way past them so that you don't have to go backwards. So like, okay, cool, you're kind of feeling your progression stall for whatever reason we'll dive into those, but here's what you can do to not only identify what it is that you're missing, but address how to overcome those slowings of progression. So then you don't have to be bashing your head against the wall for X amount of months or years and then go back and backfill stuff. So I think that's maybe part of our goal here is to help you identify that stuff at the time. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's, let's jump in. Let's jump in. Okay. So category number one, beginner, do we need to talk about anything else before we dive into strong, but not good? I think just kind of generally laying out what we mean by beginner climber in a little bit more detail kind of taking it a little bit more nuanced than like Matt said, just kind of the V grade. Generally speaking, this is, you know, this is just a new climber, anyone who has never really done it before. And the, the first thing that I think is really important for beginner climbers coming out of that, like unconscious incompetence is gaining that initial awareness. And a lot of that comes from just watching people, because it's tough to generate if you have no experience. And so something that I like to remind new climbers is watch other people and try and describe what it is that you're seeing them do. I find that to be a pretty helpful exercise. And then if, you know, you're in a position to try and replicate it to take that a step further, that's a really great way to kind of begin to learn how to climb. But for the beginner climber, there's also a certain level of general physical preparedness. That's also super important. Matt and I have taken to calling this meat suited competence. It's just kind of being comfortable in your body. I mean, climbing is a pretty strange thing to ask your body to do. And there aren't a ton of other things other than climbing, like coming from other sports that might really prepare you for what it is you're about to put yourself through. And so that's those are things that I think are pretty common in the beginner climber. And then we're kind of splitting it between this strong, not good and good, not strong. Something that's been really helpful for me in over the years, just having Matt as somebody who I can work with and also discuss things and try and come to answers for some of this is we're kind of at opposite ends of the spectrum, or at least that's been our experience in climbing. And so, you know, talking with Matt, he can really shed more light on the strong, not good. And I'm more kind of the good, not strong. And so I'll leave it to Matt to take us through this first section of the good, not strong for the beginner climber. Yeah, I think it's still a straight up bar. Yeah, strong, not good beginner, strong, not good. Here we go. So I think, like we all said, this was just representative of how we both kind of our initial relationship with the sport, where I came from a sports background of kind of doing everything under the sun and kind of right before getting into climbing a big emphasis on like calisthenics and gymnastics strength kind of stuff. So upon finding climbing, my ability to campus and project were not that far apart from one another, from a V-grade perspective. So it didn't really compute to me how maybe like the more string-been-shaped climbers in the gym were just cruising stuff that I couldn't even touch. So again, speaking from experience, things that, if this feeling it all resonates to you, here are some things you might also feel. You get stuck not being able to identify what it is that other people are doing, right? Like we've all seen that or felt that thing when a teen kid slithers up your prodge and they are nothing but skin and bones. There's not a muscle to be spoken of and it's probably maybe even a steep climb. So this like, your brain just doesn't compute how somebody could be doing this without the tools that you have available to you. Will and I have taken the calling this person the hammer. You are a hammer, so everything looks like a nail to you. And even though a boulder might be representative of a screw, maybe there's some like, really technique-y like things that it's requiring of you, you still are going to try to smash the screw in. It might go in if you're lucky. But that's not how the screw is designed to be. If you get it hard enough, right? Like, but you got to really wallet that screw for it to go in. And if you're lucky, the screw goes in and doesn't break. And if you're lucky, the hammer also doesn't get messed up along the way, which regardless of what breaks and what doesn't, this is not the way to put a screw in the wall. We can all agree with that. So I think the just here is that you need to be able to recognize and acknowledge that not everything is a nail and that you need to be able to find ways to diversify the tools that you have. Hammer is still a valuable tool and will continue to be forever. So keep it cultivated. You don't need to not work on your hammer anymore. But you need to be able to start recognizing when it's time to start using another tool. And if you don't have it, how to build it. So I think that's like the big take home for this strong, not good person. And that kind of plays into the meat suit competence rule issue that Will was talking about that you might be really good at being a hammer. And then somebody can say like, hey, this boulder doesn't require you to be really strong. You have to do this other thing while that may make sense to you. You may not know how to make your body do that thing yet. And it's probably not because you're not strong enough. There's a lot more finesse and subtlety that needs to go into your practice here. And that's a really tough thing to learn for somebody who's maybe found a lot of success through just smashing harder over the years. And I think that's what makes it tough is because you're when you're really strong and you're getting started in climbing, you're able to use that strength to be successful. And so it's tough to hear somebody who's like, hey, like maybe try to do this problem this way or solve this move this way and you're like, well, why would I do that? I can just jump and grab that thing or I could just campus the move. And I think that's one of the first major hurdles for a new climber is you kind of get stuck solving problems in one way because you're being successful. And if you don't, the earlier you can open your mind to other solutions, the less you're going to have to do that kind of backfilling where you push that strength really far. But eventually, you're going to run into a wall where that's not going to solve your problems anymore. And it can be tough to go backwards and have to build that technical competence when realistically you could do it all at the same time, starting off. Yeah, I think I'll use a fun case study that Will and I had back in the day, our buddy Cole Hinga, who was a junior Olympics caliber gymnast, just really incredible. He was the hammeriest hammer I've ever seen in my whole life. So he came to us, his older sister climbed pretty regularly at the gym. Cole was kind of burnt out on gymnastics world and just kind of said to us, like, hey, can I try out for climbing team? And we both said, like, no, try out necessary. Please just come join us next week. Go to be really awesome to have you. So Cole was already like 17 years old, 170, something pounds and 0% body fat. So he could campus V9, but not climb V5, V6 on a, like, let alone slab, he couldn't do it on a flat wall. So the challenge Will and I kind of set for ourselves without telling Cole was, can we make Cole tired enough through a practice that we take away his strength from him as a problem solving tool that he's forced to do something else because he's so pooped. Unfortunately, Cole was in much better shape than we thought he was. So mixed, mixed results there. He, like, by the end of a two hour practice, he could still kind of crank out five one arms whenever he wanted to. So it worked a little bit, but I think the point was a good one that, like, we were trying to take away the way that he has problem solved everything as an athlete for 17 years. And in doing so, forced him to try to come up with ways to get stuff done that he was not accustomed to doing. And I think if you're like a coach out there listening and you probably can identify a few of these hammers on your team as well, that encouraging them to like, we've all coached that kid who's like, hey, you know, you should do it this way. And they're like, but I can just jump and catch the thing and they do it. And it works. So you don't want to say, like, well, that's wrong because they're finding success. And that's what we want, right? It works. Yeah. If you do it, it's, it's kind of right. Yeah, right. It's not wrong, but it could be right in another way, maybe you're right or, or you're passing, you're passing over something that you're passing over another tool that will be helpful for you eventually. Very well put. Yeah. And I'm guessing the opportunity to learn that, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. So that you can use these like toolbox analogies for them of like, cool, you can do it this way. Can you do it? Other ways. And maybe even try our our coal strategy and hopefully you have better results than we had with coal. But the idea works, I think they're like, have you watched Thor? He uses a hammer for everything. I don't understand. It works. It works. Great for him. Yeah. Well, and what's interesting is this, this same idea plays out in the good, not strong beginner climber as well. And so like Matt said, like with the kind of toolbox metaphor, the goal for the beginner climber overall is to diversify the toolbox, diversify the experiences that you have diversified the different ways that you can solve problems in climbing and not get pigeon hold into one way of doing things. So with this like strong, not good guy, you know, what they've been successful at and what kind of is always front of mind is just crushing stuff. But another spectrum, you've got the string bean to me, where it becomes all about what I see people doing as some like, you're just trying to be slick, you know, you're trying to be like, you'll find any, you get really good at using any other tool but strength. You're like, if if I can crimp this foothold or like get my thumb in this little thing or do some crazy contortion thing to get around the thing that like I'm looking at and I know I just what they want is for me to hold this crimp and like pull through to the next one. Literally doing everything else, but that you basically break the beta on every single rock climb. Like you just have to find a different way of doing it and you always resort to cleverness and sneaky tricks and stuff. Always trying to find a way to sneak through which is a really great tool and a good thing to learn. Absolutely. Like you want that, but if you overutilize that to solve too many problems then same thing in both directions, you're just you're leaving something really important on the table that you are eventually going to have to go back and reckon with if you don't take care of it proactively. Yeah. Can I chime in here? Yeah. That's how to thought, because this does get like quite nuanced and it's interesting. On that point, like you're also, I was not a string bean, but you're describing my issue in Leavenworth, but this stuff just for people to think about it a little bit more deeply, it can kind of hide, like it can kind of be sneaky, you know, like I was a strong looking dude with muscles, but I would use my muscular strength to avoid finger strength at all cost. I didn't have the finger strength and so I would like do crazy squeeze moves and do crazy heel hooks and like, you know, by new shoes, if I thought they would heel hook a little better on this little crystal, so I could just crank this whole down and lock off and skip the shitty cramp or whatever, but I just want to touch on that. Like it's not always just avoiding strength, it can be avoiding very specific weaknesses. That was my case, yeah. What it comes down to is just over whatever the thing is that you are initially kind of naturally good at over utilizing that as a problem solving tool and that ends up hiding all this other stuff that you could be learning. And so I think, you know, Matt brought up one tool that we've used historically to help address that kind of thing and that's fatigue. So if someone is like extra strong, say for you like squeezing, trying to fatigue that part of you so that when you're presented with a challenge in like a training scenario or a practice scenario, you're incentivized or de-incentivized to utilize that tool and are incentivized to maybe try something else. And there's all sorts of ways you can kind of manipulate the way that you go about climbing and add different constraints to help you not build in an over-reliance on certain things. I've used all sorts of different rules over time to emphasize other aspects of a person's climbing. You can do things like, okay, I know you can climb this, but can you climb it without your feet cutting on every move? Or can you climb this boulder and not use your thumbs on anything? Like do you don't pinch any of these holds and you're going to have to find a way to adjust your body position more in order to gain an advantageous position for these holds rather than just crushing it in your fist. So can I bring up an interesting constraint here? I think we've all seen the drill of like robot arms being used in climbing gyms or somewhere, like do this climb, but don't bend your elbows at all. That is a good concept to teach people like especially their first day in climbing or maybe if someone has hammer like tendencies to try to take away their elbow bendy stuff away from them. But really that's not the best way to teach movement pattern. So like bending your elbows isn't really what we're trying to teach people not to do. We're trying to teach them not to generate force from their elbow flexors most of the time. So like for instance, if you're on slab and you need to stand up and you need to just do one of these guys, your elbow is going to bend no matter how much or little force is coming from your shoulder elbow area, right? Even if 99% of that force is coming from your toe. So I don't really love that coaching cue as a constraint. But to Will's point, I think finding creative ways to limit whether it's your own or other people that you're working with, problem solving abilities is the best way to move forward. And Will, I got to give you a shout out here. Will wrote a great blog years ago, I think on the tension blog called Rules. People about this idea that by cheating boulders particularly, I think Will maybe you wrote it in the context of like board climbing, is that right? I think it was, I was trying to create a clear delineation between practice and performance where that kind of note holds barred like because like if you're in a comp or you're going to rock climbing, you're like actually trying to do something, do whatever the heck is going to make you successful, like use whatever tools going to work. But if we're trying to learn, we're trying to get better at climbing when we're trying to practice, it can often be very helpful to add those constraints as a way to direct the intention of a session in a particular way. And that was an article kind of specifically about some different ways that I've utilized over time. Yeah, so I think if you'd like want to dive more into this or if someone listening wants to dive more into this idea of how to put constraints on your climbing and kind of help jog your thought process, find that rules blog and the tension page that's a good one. I've used a stolen specific drills right out of that or just used that thought process and gotten creative on my own, my own climbing and as a coach, that's super helpful resource for that. Very cool. Yeah, I'll link to that for people. Okay, I want to kind of go ahead, do you have more? Oh, I was going to say so one of the, we spoke really specifically, I think about the climbing like for the beginner climber, but not so much about potential other interventions like off the climbing wall that might be useful for this kind of a, for either of these people. Do you want to speak to any of that? Yeah, definitely. I think, oh, maybe I'll do the string being, you do the hammer, the other way, we'll switch it up a little bit just for fun and then you can tell me if I'm wrong in your experience. Yeah, so because I think this will help lead us into intermediate in a way. First share, so I think upon starting to coach climbing kind of early in my climbing career, I felt a little exposed that I was not as good a rock climber. Not only some of my coaching peers will included, but even some of the kids that I was coaching. So I found that like, I was trying to find ways that I could be most effective and a lot of that was the many, many like highly successful string beans, the good, not strong folks on team didn't know how to prepare their body to be able to handle more anything. And I think that's really what the good, not strong beginner climber needs to be able to do. They have a lot of tools in their toolbox, but they don't have a hammer. Their body just can't provide more juice or sustain more force or, yeah, like more damage inflicted on it would be very detrimental to this person. So being able to find ways to cultivate those adaptations off the wall was something that I really gravitated towards and trying to help a lot of these athletes early on in my coaching career where coming from a multi sport background, I could say like, yeah, I know how to make you stronger. I know how to make you more injury resilient and all these other things. And that's what I've found to be really successful for this good, not strong person is you're a pretty good rock climber at this point, meaning you have a lot of skills and stuff, but there's like really only one or two things that are holding you back from progressing quite rapidly in my opinion. They're not rocket science, but they do take dedicated hard work, right? Like, I think any coach or trainer who you ask for gym specific workouts would tell you that it's not rocket science, doing a three sets of 10 or four by four in the gym or whatever it might be for your bench press, your squat, your kettlebell swings, pick an exercise. It's not complicated stuff. You just have to do it. And this athlete is generally very adverse to spending time doing it because climbing is awesome. They love rock climbing and as well they should and they're finding success in probably most avenues of climbing except for the ones that require this one specific tool. Do you feel like that's accurate? Totally. Yeah, and something I feel like I missed out on early in my climbing career because I didn't I didn't want to spend my time doing pull ups or doing push ups or you know any any of that. So if I wanted to I wanted to just older more in sport climb and and like you said, you're if you're finding success there, it's hard to get that person to feel like maybe maybe stop thirty to forty five minutes early and like let's spend some elbows. It's a hard sell. It's a hard sell. It's for for this person. It's not as fun where I think maybe the opposite is true for the strong, not good beginner climber where speaking from experience like if I couldn't do something, I've found success thus far by going and lifting more weights or doing other stuff that's not rock climbing related. We're really what I need to do is anything but that like I need to be spending as much time as possible doing rock climbing stuff just to diversify the tools I have available to me, problem solve on the fly and just get more reps of that kind of stuff. But this person has found success in the gym and therefore is more likely to continue to go spending a lot more time in there so I mean we've seen these people who climb V3 and can do weighted pull ups with their body weight and stuff and you're like they're bashing their head against a lot of me like why am I not climbing V11 yet? I'm so strong well yeah but you stink at rock climbing so like it doesn't really help you very much here. Yeah, identifying the low hanging fruit like that's essentially what we're going to be talking about all the way through here and early on it's oftentimes if like if maybe this isn't always true, push back if this is BS but at least for myself, I often find if I'm like if there's something I'm that's really easy to get myself to do, I will kind of question how much time I really got to spend doing that and if I'm if I start thinking about something I'm like oh you know should really start you know working on my pulling strength when I'm like yeah but I don't know I do like oh that's a if I'm apprehensive about it it's usually something that I need to spend more time like thinking about or engaging with and if it's something that's really easy to make myself do it's usually something that I'm already good at and maybe you don't need to spend a ton of time focusing on yeah make sense pretty accurate. Can I summarize things because the okay so we just talked about the beginner climber we started off with strong not good it kind of bled into good not strong and we kind of talked about both of them together. I want to summarize the goals of each of those types of climbers and touch on the intervention like what they should actually do and then see see if I'm getting everything and we can move on to intermediate yeah cool so yeah the beginner climber who's strong but not good the goal is to diversify your toolbox you're a hammer but there's a lot of other tools don't forget that and then just keep developing that meets who competence you know I don't know that can come in so many different forms you can definitely learn that through climbing but I don't know doing yoga doing some dance like stuff like that might really help that type of climber so the intervention there is learning more about problem solving identifying which tools being asked of you for climbs you guys had some physical preparation tissue prep stuff on here do you want to touch on that as far as the the strong not good climber. Yeah yeah I think this is this is something where I often get kind of thrown under the umbrella it's like mobility and I don't know that's a reasonable way to talk about it but that saved me basically that this person needs to work on any physical quality that you wouldn't categorize as strength that's a good way of saying it yeah so you know there's a lot of other stuff like again speaking from experience this person's ability to climb for a long time stinks they can climb at their max for a very finite period of time but they're climbing specific capacity stinks so doing some base training aerobic training endurance training however you want to define that super beneficial to this person because that allows them to just climb more which is what they need so really just to sum it up I think anything that's not continuing to build your strength capacity is where you should be spending your off-wall time okay and then summarizing the good but not strong beginner climber you guys called this this this person the string bean I liked the word crowbar you threw that in there too this is someone who's really good at using leverage using all their tricks so the goal here also meets who competence just get you know better at using your body and for this climber it's probably gonna be getting used to just trying hard and pulling hard those sorts of things and then you wrote acquiring strength skills I really like that yeah working working on some of those more physical things and let's see here yeah you talked about some tissue prep thing and you also talked about kind of breaking out practice and training session in addition to just performance that makes sense to me like that good but not strong climber especially the beginner climbers are usually good because they're just kind of in performance mode all the time they're always trying to squeak out like the last percentage to get up you know their first v7 when they really have like v4 level strength so that sounds like that climber needs to learn how to think about climbing is practice and also is about training to kind of round themselves out but feel free to to add anything else there yeah I mean I think that's I think that's great and the strength skills portion I mean this is definitely something that a beginner climber can work on off the wall in the gym I mean it's one of those things like climbing involves a lot of pulling if doing pull ups is not a comfortable thing for you working on a pull up progression off the wall is great and more than just pulling like general physical preparedness depending on you know where you're starting out but you can also climb in a way that will facilitate those kinds of improvements as well this is something I nature lay has been putting out some really cool content related to this but just talking about the way that the terrain that you're climbing on is going to tax you in different ways and so you know if you're climbing on mostly vert to slab slightly over hung you're going to be able to get away more usually without having to do a lot of the hard pulling but you get into some steep terrain and all of a sudden like you do have to keep your arms bent and you have to start pulling and so this is another one of those things generally speaking with the beginner climber like we talked about gaining experience across a lot of different climbing styles and a lot of terrain and using those different styles and using that different terrain as a training stimulus because it's new it's all very new and so you can have physically hard kind of pulling day focusing on climbing steep older problems or steep routes and you could have a more kind of technically oriented day where we're climbing on lower angle stuff and like Matt said getting in trying to just improve your overall capacity for climbing load you could do you know drills where you're getting some cumulative fatigue forcing your body to recover over a certain period of time or if you're primarily a boulder and you have access to rope climbing climbing routes is a really great intervention or longer for boulder problems depending on what you have that access to but really trying to include some variation across the board yeah I just I agree and just want to add one thing that when somebody goes to try to do this and create your own drills and put your own constraints on yourself checking your ego is a really big thing here where like if you're a V4 rock climber and you feel like you're on the cusp of kind of bustling through that beginner level into the intermediate world that doesn't mean that like climbing V2s in a particular way that will just described as below you or something right that like that's probably what you need to be doing like I listened to you had Steve back to on and he talked about how campus training is maybe too hard for as a power stimulus for a lot of people and really like putting your feet on and just doing big explosive moves and just focusing on the power output is the better way to go but that's kind of a tough pill to swallow for some people to be like well I've seen so and so campus on the thing and they're super powerful like that's great and hopefully you'll get there at some point but like what is the the term I use but folks I work with is train to the adaptation you're looking to get not to a V grade you think you should be able to execute that thing on right and I think that's really key for this person like the amount of really strong rock climbers that I wish would have gotten that concept earlier on is vast they would have made that improvement so much faster so no one is going to judge you for doing these drills on like maybe not your hardest grade ever and if they are their jerk so screw him anyways but I think that's like a good thing to keep in mind as you're trying to build this stuff for yourself very good yeah yeah to to will to your point about nature lay and what he's been sharing I think you and I basically talked about that in our last episode I shared that you know when I climbed at Smith Rock and was dancing my way up sport climbs I felt like I had to spend time in the weight gym and doing heavy hang boarding to kind of even maintain body strength and like deeper strength whereas you know now I travel and I've spent the last few winners in Waco and after a season in Waco I'm like stronger than before all around you know in every in every way and I rarely do any supplemental anything I just go climbing in Waco so yeah I mean what you're doing the type of climbing you're doing how you're doing it can really go a long way as far as rounding out some of those strengths yeah and you're and when you're building that by climbing you're also building the skill alongside of it and the so the application of that strength is built in which you know super important regardless of uh regardless of the level that you're at and we will be right back this episode is brought to you by 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discover your potential with better help visit better help calm slash nugget today to get 10% off your first month that's better help h-e-l-p calm slash nugget and now back to the show can we transition into intermediate let's do it yeah cool so this is a really interesting transition and Matt and I spent a lot of time chatting about this one this is one of those things where I this is a uh for whatever this is a pet peeve I know this this point in the climber screen it usually happens like around v4 to v6 or so but it's the first time that folks will start to use the word plateau and I think that initially they kind of don't totally understand what that means like that plateauing is is a pretty specific concept and what really starts happening as people exit this beginner stage is the improvement just starts to slow down and the reality is the improvement is going to continue to slow down the further you go along when you start off your beginner climber everything's new anything you do works oftentimes people have this experience of like every couple of weeks next v grade like a month or two next v grade and get pretty used to this consistent progression through grades and this is a period of time where I think it's it's it's extra important to try to learn how to contextualize progress separate from the grades because I were just talking about you know a quote unquote so someone who might call them so like I'm a v4 climber and put themselves in that box might actually like need to be doing laps on v0 to v2 in the steep cave as the stimulus that they need to like improve their power or their pulling strength or something like that and when you when you start to attach your progression to the grade like Matt said it becomes difficult to climb on something that you feel like is maybe beneath you but when your conception of progress is a little bit more nuanced and is more relative to a specific skill or a specific strength or what have you comes easier to understand what kind of climbing or what kind of intervention might actually help you progress that individual skill and it's not doesn't always have to be next v grade and so our note for the intermediate climber is this like oh no now what like holy shit I've been climbing v5 for two or three months what's wrong with me like what do I do like is this is this as hard as I'm ever gonna climb and no you're fine everything's cool like you're just starting to get into it like this is climbing really learning how to you know is that yeah we've been joking about that like the minute you have that oh no now what the answer is congrats you just figured out what rock climbing is in our opinion right like cool welcome to the club we're all here bashing our head against the wall trying to move forward an inch and inch at a time I think it's like the welcome to reality moment for most rock climbers where you're not getting better every time you go into the gym anymore which I think is pretty cool but I've been rough with some athletes in the past who have hit this point and been like hey like if this relationship to sport is not okay with you that's fine but rock climbing may not be your jam right like just so you know so you don't have to like wait a whole bunch and hope that things are gonna change because it's probably not gonna hopefully and you know this happens from athlete to athlete maybe at v7 you hit like a huge jump in your training and now you accelerated to like 8 9 10 really quick that happens from time to time and but for the most part this is how it's gonna be until you decide to stop rock climbing so yeah take it or leave it yeah and improvement almost becomes like logarithmic or something I was talking about this with Jesse Firestone the other day and I don't totally understand how it all works because when I look at grades in like the space that they take up in the rear view mirror you know like v6 and 7 and 8 all feel like similar size blocks but when you're trying to go from 10 to 11 it feels like it goes from this wide to like three times as wide to like 10 times as wide you know it just feels like there's an exponential amount of growth and development and learning and strengthening and skill developing and all those things that needs to happen to get to the next level but the cool thing is like at first that feels really discouraging it's like oh my god if I'm stuck at v6 how am I ever gonna get to v10 but the cool thing is there's so much more room for growth it's just not going to deliver the same linear progression through the grades but you're gonna feel like twice as good of a rock climber by the time you reach v8 and you're gonna feel like five times as good of a rock climber by the time you get to v9 or 10 or whatever it is and and that's really satisfying because it opens up the door for like such a breadth of cool experiences because all of a sudden you can climb all the v6s in different styles if that's what you want to do or climb them a lot better and just feel more confident and flowy at those grades it's worth it like it's a great journey it's awesome even if it feels a little frustrating when you when you start to feel those grades slow down so that's like a really great more optimistic side of a coin than what I just said that's awesome like yeah I wish everybody said exactly what you just said of like oh well I can climb pinchy v6s but only v3 crimpy things and been like oh well there's so much more for me to learn before I get to v8 on my pinchy things in that between v3 and v6 and every other way of that i rock climb yeah dude thank you for saying that that's awesome everyone should do what you just say the way yeah well yeah i don't know i mean it's it's it's just kind of my story right now like i haven't you know i i don't know if i sport climbing in particular i haven't progressed a grade in a long time i i did my first 13d somewhere between 2013 and 2017 depending on what where the grades landed on specific routes i did you know but i haven't climbed 514 but i i have become like a completely different climber in the last six years you know since that 2017 route and um i just enjoy my climbing so much more now i feel like i can go to any crag and climb at at least a similar level you know i'm not going to go from smith rock having climbed my first 13d to the red and not be able to climb 13a you know like that's that doesn't feel very good um if you want to travel and taste and like try other you know styles and things but now i feel like cool i just yeah i just feel like my whole base my whole like skill set the toolbox is so much more full and um it's just more satisfying and fun so it shows me too that like oh i think i think there's a lot further i can build a lot higher on this base now like it it was kind of this rickety scaffolding you know um even though i had like a pretty big pyramid it was all within a narrow style so anytime i branched out of that i was missing a lot but now i feel like it's just it's just so much more robust in that yeah that's been really satisfying and and there's a ton of growth in the last six years without having climbed the new grades so anyway that's where i'm coming from but but yeah i can also be discouraging at times too for sure when you you know there's those moments where you're like god damn it i really thought i would have done that by now i think there's an actually like an interesting thing to pull out here that maybe kind of segways us back into the intermediate discussion here is that you know you're done a bunch of hard 13s but yet to have your first 14 in my experience as a coach you're probably strong enough to do your first 14 without having to go back and go through like a bunch of physical training it's more about like finding the one climb that you're really psyched on that maybe fits your profile just the right way and you've got enough time and good vibes at the crack for you to just get up that thing and i think one of our like big qualities we're trying to pull out of the intermediate category here is really finding what trying hard means in the world of rock climbing will and i did a little you know national training camp for the kids maybe this was like 10 12 years ago at this point and will ask the kids but will spend a lot of time setting a bunch of routes like a full rope mock comp for the kids overnight he was there way too late in my opinion but it was awesome and the kids like they were great they were sick routes yeah they were great the kids tried but they didn't really like leave it all out there and to use a Michael Jordan meme will took that personally and so his talk with the kids was like okay raise your hand if you felt like you tried hard and maybe like two thirds three quarters of a hands go up and he was just like no none of you tried hard and we pulled up a picture of it was like it was early days adam andro time of andro like screaming until his eyeballs shoot out of his head kind of like his signature move right and will said this is trying hard did anybody try this hard today no hands go up and he's like cool we're not going to do anything else except you need to get back on the wall and try that hard people got farther on their route we didn't do anything magically from like a coaching or training perspective hell it was the same afternoon we didn't have time to do that stuff but seeing that like light bulb moment for a lot of them was like oh there's a ton more left than the tank here and I do have there's like other opportunities for me to apply the things I already know by just kind of like stepping on the gas a little harder or they thought they were redlining before will do you remember this I do I do remember yeah I was I was not super pleased that's how I remember it I was like yeah I was like a re here to give it or what like it's like if y'all don't want to try hard then we can just stop now yeah that was that was a good one and really learning learning how to try hard is like super key and it's not always like I like to try and make a differentiation or at least kind of talk about it in a slightly more nuanced way where like I want people to try well you know because hard has like a certain connotation and and in a lot of instances trying hard is what you need to do like squeeze the shit out of that hold jump as hard as you can pull as hard as you can whatever it is but I think trying well or trying better is maybe a little bit more kind of all encompassing of what we're trying to get across to this this intermediate climber especially the good not strong or sorry strong not good where that person is probably pretty good at trying hard but for them trying well is something that they probably ought to work on and vice versa for that good not strong person they're probably pretty good at trying well they're probably good at like applying just the right amount of force and just the right way at just the right time to kind of get the outcome that they want but when they're put into a position where it really is like to to borrow my friend Rowan's term eyes closed everything flexed they don't know how to do that and so learning on both ends of the spectrum there like if I'm really good at just cranking how do I better direct my ability to like apply that level of force and try hard for a positive outcome and if I'm really good at kind of being tricky and finding all of these subtle little things how can I learn to bring like a level of intensity to that that I am not currently doing yeah love that that's that's great okay where are we where did we land here are we that was kind of an introduction to intermediate with some tangents thrown in there but it was all yeah do we want to dive into all the tangents all the time we take one step back from that I think it rolls us right into the beginning of the intermediate here of like okay what will just articulated is 110% true but how do you know where you lie on what it is what it is that you need to address are you really good at trying hard maybe it's kind of like hard to know where you're at at this point at any point in your climbing journey but particularly here do I need to try harder and do I know what 100% is or is 82 really what I think 100% is or do I need to be focusing on trying better or whatever it might be so I think like a big theme that we're asking of intermediate climbers here is to be able to start being a little bit more analytical of what's happening why are things happening the way that they're happening this is where it's super useful to have like either a good crew to climb with a coach video yourself whatever it might be but to start figuring out like really what's happening and why that thing is happening um I think uh one of my favorite like basic drills for this was at freeze when you fall so if you fall off you get spit off your boulder freeze wherever you felt don't turn around and look at the wall don't move at all why did you land where you just landed and this is like an always an interesting puzzle to give people to me and for myself included right like if I stick it like a gymnast like okay it's maybe a little bit easier to piece apart why I just fell but if I get rocket it off the wall and spin in flip 180 and smash my face into the pad there's a lot more to unpack there but those things should the I mean emotionally unpack also right there's a little bit of emotional bruising there for sure but there's probably more stuff for me to learn from because of that wacky fall that I just took so I think uh well save me I'm rambling about yeah yeah so with the beginner climber it's really tough like they don't they'll often fall and be like why'd you fall like I have no idea like they won't even know what hand they were going to a hold with you know what I mean and that makes sense everything's very fresh it getting into the center immediate zone this is really where like in order to improve you're gonna have to start being you're gonna have to understand why those things are happening and and pay more attention to those things like if you fall why did you fall like what came off first did your hand come off first or did your foot come off first like if you can't tell the difference between those two things like you you need to be able to like this is that is a learning opportunity or like why did your foot slip if you if it was your foot why was it your foot was it because you didn't place it quite right was it because you took pressure off of it too soon yeah and then and and even when you're successful so it's like okay my foot picked why maybe it's because I didn't put enough weight on it okay cool so more weight on the foot this time they do it again okay we're successful the foot didn't pick did you have more weight on the foot yes or no if they're like no then okay well then what else made you successful or if yes the foot did stay on and I put more weight on it how did you to put more weight on it what about what you did for the try that you were successful was different from the try where you were unsuccessful starting to get analytical like that and breaking things down and and when you're asked a question about either the successor the failure you are able to answer that question and over time answer it better and better this is where Matt and I really started talking with each other about this concept of bandwidth and this is something that increases like throughout a person's climbing career their ability to take in all of this external and internal information and turn it into something that is actually usable and not just passing through they really taking seriously the kind of conscious part of this progression the going from conscious incompetence to conscious competence understanding what you're doing if it's working or not working why it's working or not working and how you can change what you're doing to have a better outcome is this relevant for the hammer and the string bean this is this is for both for sure this just generally has like an intermediate climber this is this is that just a super critical piece and this is something where like like if you can't invest in this and start to move through this process it becomes very difficult to get anywhere past this point climbing only gets harder and only gets harder it only gets more complicated and so starting to build out a system for yourself for whether it's you caught self-assessment self-awareness just understanding what you're doing if you don't understand what the pieces to the puzzle are you're gonna have a really hard time putting them together okay puzzles only get walkier from here should we dive into intermediate strong not good let's okay for sure what are some of the issues that that climber faces so okay well there are lots like we'll just mention the bandwidth analogy something we'll come back to a lot I think when this person is asked why did you fall their answer most of the time is either either here does like a blank face and you hear like dial up tone noises in the background or their answer is I'm not strong enough which as we've established in the beginner category is likely not the case for this person so we're like I couldn't hold on like I couldn't hold on to that hold or something right so you're like forms of the size of my neck so like maybe that's not the case like hey or maybe it is right there's always some bad holds for everybody but most of the time for this person it's starting to I like this chunking concept they need to break things down into smaller pieces the way I describe this to my youth athletes is if you picture a phone number and you take out the hyphens and you mush all those numbers together remembering that phone number is really tough for your brain to be able to digest so we stick hyphens in so that you get chunks of numbers to remember at a time there's been a lot of studies on this kind of thing if you want to google chunking it's a thing that you can look up your brain really likes chunks of like three to eight items whether their numbers shapes or otherwise and then you can have three to eight chunks of chunks and you can build from there so you know whether that's a few moves at a time or a few parts of a move at a time right so to use will it will example if you don't know if your foot or hand is coming off or if you didn't put enough weight on your foot a lot of people struggle with moving laterally before they go up to wait a foot if their foot is outside their box we'll use that as an example right so okay cool like did you feel your hip hamstring something move you towards your foot before you start to go up right that could be one chunk that we focus on before we try to work on attacking the next hold so all that's to say this specifics don't really matter breaking stuff down in the smaller chunks that will let you focus on more than I didn't hold the hold is key here yeah getting getting beyond the the left right left and like okay left hand to that hold but where and how and then what like micro beta yeah it gets uh I also like to think about it is kind of like a resolution thing um the more advanced you get in the harder things get the the closer you have to look in the closer you look something that seemed like one thing like oh I just need to grab this pinch is actually a couple of things like I need to grab this pinch my like index finger needs to be here my thumb needs to be here I need to be standing on the foot hold this way so that like I'm pushing into a product like it can get all the sudden things start to balloon and there's actually a ton of things going on and so I think that's that's part of what Matt's talking about with the chunking and like getting into smaller chunks subdividing the information that you're dealing with uh smaller and smaller and this happens over time like uh the I feel like this intermediate zone is where climbers spend a lot of time honestly like the the further you go along the longer you're going to spend it any of these zones beginner can move you can move through that relatively quickly intermediate is a meaty time there's a lot going on a lot to learn and the the strong not good person really trying to help them understand that they can be successful in more ways and I found that that breaking the chunks down helps people understand that there are more dials that they can turn um it's not like the the answer to it isn't oh the sequence is left left right instead of left right left it's much more subtle than that it has to do with how you're taking a hold how you're taking a foothold the trajectory that your body's taking like Matt said people often have trouble like going over before they get up or even understanding that that's a thing that you would do it is like yeah but the holes up there why would I go that right like that that thought in congruence is not there yet I think in this in terms of like what do you do right I think that's the next case of like cool like we're asking you to look for more subtlety here and pay closer attention but like easier said than done right uh will do you want to lead us into like okay cool you ask me to like figure out if I stepped on the left side of the hold the right side of the hold and I said uh but like how do I build that into my practice yeah this I like the just kind of guess and check model I could never memorize my time table so I'm familiar with the guess and check but if if someone comes down and they're like I don't know what happened I'm like I will do it again and like tell me something you're going to do on purpose like if you don't remember where your foot was like pick a spot try again and they pick a spot and they do it it doesn't work like okay now we know that that doesn't work like we have like a discrete piece of information stepping on that foothold that way is not helpful to us so let's try another way try stepping on it like with a different part of your shoe or a different part of the foothold or something and going through that process and starting to turn those dials and letting the climber like generate as much of that as possible it's not that helpful like if you're a coach listening to this if you just keep telling the athlete what to do they're not going to learn how to do it on their own if you're not there and that's not helpful allow them to have that cognitive dissonance of be like like do you think I should do so like put my foot like this and in your head you're like there's no way that's going to work I mean like I don't know give it a shot see what happens like learning what doesn't work at this point is just as important as learning what does work really trying to encourage the climber to explore and just try turning dials and and when they don't work having a conversation about why and when they do work having a conversation about why like Matt said having having a great crew of people to climb with really helps improve the quality of what we're talking about and the rate of improvement if you're just soul a lot of time it's really tough to self-assess this kind of thing without some form of dialogue oh wait and I think we've talked a lot and this is a term that gets thrown a lot in the like climbing verse of training is drills but drills can take any form you want and to Will's earlier point about rules and constraints like you can just make them up to serve your purpose in the moment so I think in the goal of trying to figure out what works and what doesn't trying to create drills that force over exaggeration of one style or another is a really important thing so I'll use an example I believe I stole this from Chris Hampton is the sloth monkey drill where you do a boulder twice in a row the first time is the sloth you climb it as slowly and statically as humanly possible it's not the right way to climb the boulder by any stretch but that's not the point you're trying to figure out what moves maybe feel good that way and what moves feel really horrible that way and upon like maybe making it halfway through a move you might find that like oh man I'm getting really pooped having to lock this off and going three seconds from hold to hold so I'm going to need to change my body position to find something more economical and maybe you just discovered how to drop me for the first time by accident by nature of being tired right that's pretty cool thing to just kind of stumble into and the next time you do that boulder you're going to do it like a monkey super loose super dynamic using momentum everywhere you possibly can again there's going to be moves that are like absolutely not meant to be done that way and you'll find out pretty quickly but there's going to be moves that you do that way like holy shit that was way easier than trying to like slowly crank through this move the right answer to do that climb is probably a mix of two things or somewhere in between but you don't really know where the line is until you cross it what will and I use this term all the time I think it's from the Dave Chappelle Charlie Murphy story about Prince or maybe Rick James I think is the Rick James one that you don't want to be a habitual line stepper you can cross a line once and it's probably pretty good for you you just don't want to cross it all the time so in my opinion drills are about finding where the line is and you want to cross it to so that you can backtrack to be like cool that's the sweet spot I like that that's cool yeah this is also how I introduce hip inverse square positions in climbing and another great drill for like the intermediate climber is picking a climb doing every move square like hip squared of the wall knees out do it again turn your hips in on every single move and as you're doing it you'll realize that some of these moves feel better this way some of them feel better this other way you get down you have a discussion about okay cool move one awesome we want to do that square that felt really good move two definitely going to want to turn the hip that was way easier and you start to kind of construct an ideal way of climbing the climb and then okay now execute and be able to shift from climbing in a square position to a hip in position and back in an efficient manner and then all of a sudden cool and we've just now learned how to problem solve in in some way and so I think for the intermediate climber engaging in that is really important for the strong not good that is really helpful to help them sort of break out of their normal problem solving mode by just forcing them to try and solve something a specific way and for the good not strong you can kind of you can take the same drill and tweak it the other direction and have it be more of like a strength stimulus we have we have like a pretty big list of stuff here so I don't know if we want to try knock all of them out like listing drills I think the the core thing to understand is like what we're trying to do here is really engage with the problem solving elements of climbing and start to build a process as a climber for how to in some form of a stepwise fashion go about solving these different problems we encounter in climbing and try to understand the tools that may or may not be at our disposal given whatever the circumstances are and that I think really encompasses generally what we're trying to do on the wall but for an intermediate climber off the wall I think we're we're starting to explore more as well this is still a scenario I think it and Matt let me let me know what you think where the situation where I kind of like anything you do works is still kind of in play for the intermediate climber there's they don't need that much structure for the physical training like off off the wall stuff I find it's more like learning new exercises so when we get to a point where we do really need to get in and start structuring like a physical training plan it's not like the first time that this person has ever done like an overhead press or like a weighted shoulder car or something something like that yeah definitely I think a lot of really good youth coaches in any sport but I'll shout out the homemade Tyson Cheney real quick that he talks a lot about like vertical climbing teams known for producing really great athletes of many different age categories but you know when I first showed up in Seattle I had more questions than I had answers I didn't know what to do with all I just wanted to like sit Tyson down for like four whole days and just grill him and luckily he was pretty cool with me doing that but one of them was like how are you creating all of these like really strong CBA climbers like how are they doing this he's like that's that's them right they're just good athletes like the program's goal is to create athletes who are gonna peak when humans are supposed to peak in your 20s 30s whatever it might be depending on your endeavor who you are as a person you're trying to just give them the base stuff now that they know how to use and they can always go back to when it's time for them to use that later on in the process and I think that that's kind of what we're hitting on here with like learning how to use a lot of physical training tools like you want to know how to do that before you it's really time to use it use it if you've never bench pressed before you should learn how to do it before you go try to three rep max right that that seems pretty logical but there's so many climbers I've worked with and I'll throw our good friend Kerry Scott under the bus here that like Kerry came to me at like 17 or 18 I had never bench pressed before but she I watched her run quads on 12b the week before right so like that's pretty late in her climbing game to have never bench pressed before so learning those skills before you really need them I think is a really big theme that an intermediate climber should be aware of do you know how to use a hang board do you know how to use the campus board can you bench press can you deadlift can you swing a kettlebell can you name the thing you just want to be fluent in as many training climbing tools as possible so when it's time to hammer them your fluid okay yeah that makes sense what did I miss there well I think well I might push back a little bit I'm not I don't know I agree with all of that but I think we should clarify it further because throwing that at people probably makes them feel overwhelmed with the amount of things that they could be spending their time on where you know if we're talking about the strong but not good intermediate climber a lot of their priority should probably still be specifically within climbing movement skills climbing strengths that sort of stuff yeah do you want to do you want to speak to that either of you like how to think about the balance of those two ideas I'll take a spin yeah well first out again I think like every coach kind of in like our generation has had their mind blown by Steve Mechdel at least once so I'm going to steal from him again Steve like sat me down one day and was just like hey this is like roughly I was asking all these technical questions and he was like that stuff doesn't matter Drew's just a circle and said three quarters of the time is rock climbing the other 25 percent of the time is not rock climbing training stuff so I think that that still holds true here and that maybe can alleviate a large part of the stress here so what I'm talking about is just trying to spend that 25 percent of the time that you're not rock climbing doing different things you don't need to be pigeon-holed into like these are the three exercises that I need to do all the time to get better at climbing and if you did bench press and weighted pull-ups in a front squat for a month and then the next time you come back around to your strength block maybe pick different exercises or learn how to do something different during your power block or your endurance block so that like throughout the course of a year and to Will's point like in the intermediate time frame is a meaty one that can be a many years process for most people that gives you a lot of time to differentiate what you're doing in that 25 percent part of your time meal that yeah because I think you're right like I don't want what I'm saying to come off as like I hear what you're saying about rock climbing but like maybe you should bench press instead of rock right that's not that's not where I'm coming at yeah but I yeah we don't we don't want that that makes sense like you it's not intermediate is not the time to be going all in on aid and Robert's shoulder rotation exercise like there's a lot of other things to be working on and developing that are a little bit more fundamental than that that's something you can be doing but it's not time to hammer those very specific strengthening exercises absolutely yeah you're you're not trying to specialize in anything like doing weighted external rotations for your shoulder awesome like that's great but it's not so it's not like I'm in a program weighted external rotations every time I'm doing shoulder work for the next two years yeah like branch out like if you're doing some overhead pressing like maybe for one block like massive do with the barbell next time maybe with a dumbbell next time maybe like work on some sort of like ring inversion thing or whatever but like you're still doing the core stuff like we want to pull we want to push we want to do something with our chunk like we don't want to forget about our hips and our legs um you know addressing the body and all the ways that you should but not getting like overly constrained in your exercise selection um like do some isometrics do some eccentric do some dynamic work do I like even adding in some isolation but like doing dumbbell curls or for something like more complex like doing a pull up but like Matt said just getting fluent over a period of time what I'm not saying is like just start throwing all this stuff at the wall all at once move move through there are progressions and and this is another thing that that we had talked about prior to recording this is um there's a lot of good resources out there already as far as like exactly how to do a lot of this stuff like if you want to experiment with some isometric stuff tons of great information out there about isometrics you want to try some like gymnastics more like calisthenic rating progressions tons of great information out there um and so I think this is maybe a good point in time for that climber to start experimenting with some of that and and moving through all this so by the time you're in a position like Matt said where it is time to like really start hammering this stuff you actually have this like library of competence with all these different kinds of of exercises exercise selections types of movements that when you get into the advanced air arena and you have a very specific problem that you're trying to solve just like you've built up a toolbox on the wall movement wise I now have a toolbox of like exercise selection and different interventions that I can look at the problem I'm dealing with and make good decisions about what tool I'm going to use to solve that that's great yeah good good distinction call out there to make there Stephen can I throw in a tactical observation for intermediate climbers before we I thought of this I thought of this will when you were talking about your hip exercise I really like that of having someone climb an entire boulder open hip versus hip in and seeing how those different types of movements feel on each move and comparing um I think I see this a lot with strong but not good intermediate climbers but I think I see it with it can be either just this is a very common intermediate thing is you know people by necessity start to pay more attention to the nuance of hard moves because they can't do them unless they pay attention to the nuance they they start paying attention to not just which hold do I grab with which hand but how exactly do I take this hand hold how exactly do I place the foot all that sort of stuff but I think what gets missed by a lot of intermediate climbers is they forget to apply that across every difficulty level of move they don't do that for the easier moves on the boulder or on the route they don't rehearse the top out and make it as easy as it could be I see a lot of box checking like oh the you know I'm trying this v8 and there's the crux down here and the topouts only v3 so I did it once it felt not that hard and I never tried it again you know and then they finally get through the crux and then they fall off the top out and it's like well yeah you didn't do it well you didn't have a good method that's kind of a you know an extreme example to make my point but I see that a lot and I think it gets it can be a lot more subtle than that and you know if you're trying like a 15 move boulder or a long route with you know a few final bolts of climbing that are easier than the crux but not that much easier that's where it really becomes necessary to apply all that sort of detail thinking to all of the movements on the climb like you know go back and listen to my episode with Paul Robinson he's one of the best boulders in the world and he's saying that he always works things top down and he will refine a move over and over and over to make sure he's doing it the easiest way possible even if it's v0 you know even if it's dead easy for him he will have done that move many times and yeah I see it happen a lot we're like a reasonably strong climber who's reasonably skilled will just kind of burrow their way through a top out or through you know like the final part of a route to get to the chains or something on their working burn and then think like check that box never have to try it again like I'll be fine you know but are you gonna be are you gonna be fun like people shouldn't putt you know people shouldn't punch people shouldn't fall off the easy part of climbs that's so preventable I mean flukes happen but like if it's a normal thing for you and if it happens semi-regularly that's like definitely something to pay more attention to yeah I mean that's classic and and a really good point to bring up I think it gets at a couple of the different things for sure there's a tendency to like you said you there's a move that you feel like is hard and the rest like all I can just do that or the or really classic like I hear it all the time someone maybe they do even rehearse the top out but it's like kind of ugly and you can tell that it's really not maybe the best way to do it but they're like I'm just gonna get up there and I'm gonna be psyched and that's gonna get me through it yeah like hopefully all the dice my friend exactly I'm like yeah why why gamble there's no need to gamble that yeah yeah and I that can come from a number of different places but I think the one of the key points there is like it could also just be like an overall economy kind of a thing certainly as a climb gets longer and when you talk to really good climbers they're they're constantly thinking about that sport climbers like there's a rest and it's not oh I rest at the rest it's okay given the next sequence like I need gas in my right hand so maybe I'll actually kind of cannibalize the energy in my left arm at this rest to get a little bit of extra back in my right so that I can make it through this next sequence hit the next rest then I can get it back in my left hand or like get in this crazy knee bar that's not very good but and it's taking a ton of core but I don't need core for the next section I can get a little back in my arm so there's actually like a more detailed energy usage and economy conversation happening internally or oftentimes externally between climbers as they're like working on something and the same applies for bouldering the other part of this just take it off seriously like there's yeah if it you can you're still learning yeah respect it you're still learning like you can learn you're gonna learn something by doing that top out better and at the end of the day spending more time dialing in the climb and then executing it like well that being kind of the goal I think you're you're just gonna get more out of that experience if you're really focused on just taking the like the box and the guidebook and be like I did this climb I think that's that is also that's a mindset that I think can lead people to doing what you describe which is just like let me do the bare minimum that I can do to like scrape myself up this and then it's climbing like you do get to check the box you know like you did do it it doesn't have to be pretty but you know is that actually going to help you moving forward is that gonna help you do the next boulder you try is that gonna help you do something more difficult it's a it's just kind of like a short a short sided view right and I mean that what you just touched on is a skill too and an important skill like that becomes really important for like trying to climb sport routes in two tries or three tries you know we're trying to onsite like in that instance there is a skill of okay I don't need to find the best possible way to do the easy part of this route I just need to find something that works I know I can do it and I know it's easy enough that it's not gonna affect me when I get to the crux or you know vice versa that's a skill too and that's a deep like self-awareness of knowing exactly how easy things need to be for you blah blah blah like that that's a deep well of learning but I'm my point was more for projecting I see that a lot with projecting people just neglect like easier parts of climbs and it's and then it bites them you know or they get away with it but like it's it's just so unnecessary you can rehearse the top out a couple times is the final part of your warm-up you know and you can do it in a way where it's not taking away from your skin or taking away from your red point tries or whatever you know finish the session by doing the top out a couple times or something yeah especially on a rope like people just get lazy I think when they're sport climbing and don't want to go to the change yeah too many moves or I don't know um yeah anyway it's preventable stuff just yeah don't pun I mean talking about backfilling too like the more you engage like as we've been talking through this the more you engage with these levels as you move along and and focus on the kind of breadth of learning rather than like really going getting kind of over specialized early on we'll give you more tools to interact productively with what you're talking about like when you get to that point in your projecting like ideally by that point you have some level of experiencing competence with a lot of different kinds of climbing and top outs being something that really it takes experience doing it before you really understand kind of the mechanics of it and if you've never done that before that's an intimidating thing when you go out in your project and you're working on something and you're like man I really in your those people know like in their head like I it would probably help if I did it again but often I hear this a lot we're like I don't want to have to do it again I just want to do it one more time and have that be the time that I send when really like you need to you need to learn that thing and the better you learn it the more you'll be in a position in the future where you can be like oh the top out I got that like I don't need to run it five times before I get send a tent I think just to like pull apart a few things you guys have said here is that we can kind of compartmentalize a bunch of the things you guys are talking about into practice training and performance right we're like if if you know you're that guy who you're a serial punter you get up to the top of boulders and then you stink at mantling let me back up intermediate climbers get psyched there's a whole new world of climbing has just opened up for them they're learning new skills they're probably getting a little bit better maybe they're climbing outside some more who knows what it might be they have their crew all that good stuff so they get into this they're always performing cycle you're always trying to like climb as hard as you can particularly when you're outside and maybe that's something you don't get to do very often it's not super motivating to be like hey you should go mantle like you're just gonna mantle today you're gonna climb up that v1 or v2 and do 27 top outs today that's it right like but that might be what you need that's really different than trying to climb your hardest on a day so I think the intermediate climbers I see have success are really good at separating out the times when it's time to perform it doesn't matter how you do something and it's just like be scrappy get up the wall versus I'm trying to get better at this specific thing today whether that's in the gym or on the wall is irrelevant but they they don't coexist very well and I think that gets muddled a little bit and in separating them allows you to not get so frustrated with yourself because your expectations for a given day are really different does that make any sense yeah it's great okay where are we we need to re ground ourselves in in this outline we've got here so we've been talking this whole time about intermediate climbers do we make our way through strong not good and do we need to talk specifically about the good not strong climber for this category I think we covered our strong not good we went through the drills there I think maybe we didn't touch too much on the good not strong yeah we'll do you want to take that away sure yeah the I want to start kind of with the goal here because I think we've touched on on the issues themselves but this is we said earlier like this is the sort of welcome to climbing moment it doesn't nothing gets easier from here it only gets harder and it's gonna get harder and harder to hide especially for the I find like the the good not strong person you're you're going to have to get stronger or or your progression is going to really slow down I learned this the hard way for sure over the years and a lot of this has to do with Matt uses terms like getting the reps in and I think this is a great a great position for the intermediate climber to be in like if you're if you're not great at climbing on like quote-unquote strong boulders in steep terrain start focusing on that don't don't let that slide to what Matt just said about the you know separating practice from performance it can get pretty demotivating if you're like okay all I'm gonna do is go into the gym get my reps in on steep terrain and not really get to do any of the fun stuff that I'm like successful at or good at the way that I sort of handle this for for myself is I like eat my vegetables first and if like do do the climbing that I like I know that I need to do like because I objectively understand that it's going to help me but it's it's usually not as fun for me and then I sort of dangle the care that the end of the session where it's like and then you get to go like mess around on this like a rep or slab and do fun stuff but getting the vegetables in first is is something that I've sort of found to be helpful and honestly that works for the you know are strong not good climber as well but I say it's a little almost set up better for this good not strong person we're like you're doing the physically taxing thing first whereas like maybe if slabs your game your arms can feel like jelly but you're still going to be able to go climb a bunch of the slab boulders that you want to climb so it's really set up perfect for this person to go ahead and eat your vegetables first and do the stuff that's not as motivating to you but real taxing like it really doesn't take much for this person either right like that could be 20 30 minutes of just like I'm just going to climb on steep chuggy stuff and be really powerful about it and then I can go spend the rest of my session having fun doing my slaby stuff and you know you you're still going to get the gains that you need and the stuff you stink at that's a really good point it's kind of flip flopped to like for the strong not good it's almost like do rip around on the ball and get tired and so that you can't actually just crank through a more technical set of boulders way around kind of flipping that depending on where you'd lie on the spectrum there and we will be right back this episode is brought to you by Rhino skin solutions my go to when it comes to taking care of my skin my go to products 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taking better care of your precious skin today this episode is brought to you by wonderful pistachios you guys know that I mostly eat whole foods when it comes to my nutrition right I've talked about that a lot but I always need good crack snacks to bring to the boulders or to the cliff I like to bring a whole meal as well but you know you don't want to have a bag full of Tupperware and things like that pistachios are known for their protein power fiber and better for you unsaturated fats for a combination that may help keep you feeling fuller longer than other snacks and they are so convenient and so tasty they're no shell flavors include the classic roasted and salted that one is my favorite it's super basic but I love it salt and pepper honey roasted chili roasted and smoky barbecue they are all so good you literally can't go wrong wonderful pistachios come in a variety of sizes perfect for enjoying by yourself or with family and friends or taking them with you on your climbing adventures so whether you're hitting the climbing gym after work or hitting out on a weekend adventure fuel up with a healthy and tasty snack check out wonderful pistachios dot com to learn more about how these little green wonders can power up your day again that's wonderful pistachios dot com to learn more and now back to the show checking my notes yeah um I mean this this is uh this person again still just 25 percent but you're gonna want to be strange training even if you don't want to be strange training that's the case maybe and and to your great point earlier on Steven like the the kind of climbing you're doing can also take a lot of those boxes too so uh if you really just can't bring yourself to get into the gym and do the pull-ups and whatever else uh you can diversify your climbing to a point where you can get a lot of the same input just from climbing um but it can be harder to do especially depending on what you have access to throughout sitting at your gym whether they even have wall angles like that and still on yeah totally well in our talks about that you you know this was an experience you had as a climber talk to a lot about like how you started to program your vegetables at this point in your climbing journey what vegetables are best for you how many vegetables is enough vegetables so in to unfetchable this analogy is uh like what stuff is important to you off the wall and how are you starting to use them I guess in your so are you talking about accomplishing advanced status in the not so distant future okay I may be answering a different question but I'm going to give it a whirl uh so it can be really easy to get in over your head at this point movement wise and get hurt honestly um and something that I as a more good not strong person something I've found really helpful um because I have injured I've sublexed my shoulder twice in four years had to have two surgeries um total messed and the the issue was I was I was trying to climb in a way that my body couldn't handle and so like it's all well and good to be like okay yes you can climb in a way that will give you these adaptations but you can run into situations where you're truly just not physically prepared to jump to a gas stone over your head in a roof and the way to get from not being able to do that to being able to do that isn't trying to jump to the gas stone in the roof over your head ten times a session every week like just trying to have that outcome by exposing yourself to it over and over again this is often a thing where I'll take those situations and use them to kind of inform what's happening off the wall like if I'm working on a climb uh or I'm just noticing that like I don't have the I don't feel like I have the shoulder to like take these gas stones really wide or to like actually get these lockoffs deep enough to do the kinds of moves that I'm trying to do but like all right so like what's happening physically here like I need to build strength and resiliency in my shoulders so that when I go to practice these movements on the wall I'm bringing like the the requisite tissue to that scenario and then can teach it to do these climbing movements that I want to them like want to be able to do uh is that kind of what you're talking about Matt like yeah that's 100% thank you for being able to decipher the gibber jabber that came out of my question yeah uh so yeah and and this is this can the goal setting part of this I think is really important along with like the self-assessment of where am I at especially for the the good and not strong like if I want to climb a boulder that has a certain kind of mood or want to develop a competency in a certain style I may be in a position to understand technically how that's happening and in some ways actually be able to replicate it but I might not have the tissue to actually you know we talked about this kind of skill facilitating strength facilitating skill and in a point where like I I have the skill but I don't have the strength required to execute on that skill in the way that I want to do it and that can be addressed by kind of building movement progressions on the wall like say my target move is this really wide gasstone that I want to move dynamically into this is where uh boards system boards really shine or spray walls for that matter I can set a similar move that's just kind of scaled back and then maybe you set a couple of moves where over time I'm like as I get strong and feel stable in this position I can make it a little bit harder and then learn that and then make it a little bit harder all the while kind of moving towards this target movement that I want and I can also that can go hand in hand with what I'm doing off the wall right like if what I need is more shoulder like I can select exercises that are going to help me build that and so I'm kind of hitting it from both ends and I'm able to build towards whatever that goal is um and I think that's that's a really important carryover like something that I feel like you it's really nice to learn as an intermediate climber because it gets really pronounced as an advanced climber like being able to understand like that I want to do a thing whatever that is whatever goal it is that I have understanding how that needs to be done like why I may or may not be able to do it and then how to take that information and come up with interventions that will help me get from where I'm at to where I want to go yeah just like she's like well sure of course like that's the whole thing yeah but no that that's good like that's training the reverse the reverse engineering and then being able to look at your own climbing in your own body and your physicality and say like what preparation do I need to do you know at the baseline to be able to take the next step towards that goal to take the next step to actually be able to stick that move to actually be able to link through that move to be able to send the boulder whatever it is that makes a lot of sense yeah reverse engineering is a good term to use for it I think and that comes back to like the bigger themes that we're trying to get at from an intermediate climber is like asking them to be more intentional with everything that they're doing right like and ask why why are you doing something and how can you be intentional to achieve the answer to that why and just like a quick a common pitfall I see a lot of people slide into where you know I'll name names for a second point fingers Chris Sharma did so many wonderful things for the sport but I think that this is something that maybe his success was not helpful to the climbing masses on the whole where he was famous for oh I can't do that route so I'm gonna throw myself at it with a martyr like commitment until he does the thing to like cool like if that works for him that's going to work for me right again maybe hopefully that would be really cool if it did but I get a certain point there's going to be stuff that doesn't happen you have to do the reverse engineering process that you guys just described it happens from like a technical standpoint to good point uh this is this is a something that Quinn is working on right now so technically he has an understanding of like okay in this position I want to I need to be able to articulate my body like this like turn my hip in or or uh get my heel up to this like high foot hold or something so he understands it technically that that's what he needs to do but he doesn't have the flexibility or the mobility depending on how you want to talk about that his body can't actually do the thing that he knows that he needs to do and so he'll just overpower it and he has a lot of he's built a lot of self-awareness and understands where he's like I did do it but that wasn't it and I know what I need to do but I don't I'm like physically incapable of doing it so reverse engineering from that like how does that person like say I need more hip mobility like that person needs to train flexibility and range strength like they need to actually be able to manipulate their body to accomplish that technique and that's going to amplify the strength that they already have uh so climbing is one of those things that this is a tangent that I won't go on but like being able to be in the position is critical if you're a little outside of it it gets exponentially harder and takes exponentially more physical input and so like the flexibility in climbing I know the kind of training sphere waffles on how important training flexibility is um but it's important um you you need to be able to occupy these positions and then be able to express strength in them in order to actually climb well and so if you're on that I'm really strong but not very flexible side truly investing in improving your flexibility and your mobility is going to go really far and if you're on the side where I am really flexible and I am really mobile but when I get into these positions I cannot produce the force necessary focusing on that strength is going to really pay off and awesome reverse engineering is a great way to figure out that how to actually address those things yeah it's interesting I'm noticing you know again in this conversation we're not giving any prescriptions we're not telling people whether they should spend more time you know bench pressing versus doing shoulder press or spend more time on attention board versus uh you know the beast spray wall or whatever else we're not telling people what to do there was a time in my climbing where I would have been frustrated by that because I really wanted guidance but what I hadn't learned to do yet was this process and this process kind of changes everything it helps the person guide themselves towards what they should be spending their time doing it's that process of identifying like who am I as a climber where am I going with my climbing what do I want to get better at what am I trying to get better at what is it that I why am I training in the first place like what is it that I want to be able to do that I can't yet do and then kind of iterating you know with with this knowledge with the self-awareness of this reverse engineering process and what that gives you it's like okay because this type of move is hard for me and it demands this with my shoulder or my fingers or whatever or my flexibility this is the limiting factor for me and let's go to all these resources that are available and try to figure out you know a way to actually work towards that and that might change over time like you might have to go back to basic stretching protocols before you work towards like on the wall drills to to work on heel hooking or whatever maybe you can do both at the same time but um but yeah so I love that you guys are taking this kind of 3,000 foot view and focusing on areas of focus for people so that they can find that path for themselves on their own or with the help of a you know a crew or or a coach or or whatever yeah I think that's a great summary yeah thank you for saying that I think you know we maybe should have led with this but like our hope here is we're trying not to be like copying out by not giving people prescriptions but Steven you said it in a past episode where you've learned in your own climbing journey to focus less on the specifics and more on the principles and I can't remember where you said you learned that but I think what we're trying to give people here is like an illustration of the process that you need to go through in order to like recognize something acquire something and then gain mastery over that thing and that thing could be anything right crimping pitching heel hooks mobility flexibility bench press you name it right but that process stays the same and you might be a beginner and intermediate advanced or whatever in a bunch of different things all at the same time so our goal I think is to give people the tools to identify where you're at on that continuum of whatever that skill might be and how to go through the process so that once you get the process it gets more fluid and quicker every time so that when you do you've gone through it a few times and now you've identified something else that you would like to become really good at it happens way quicker than the first couple times and you can avoid all the growing pains that will and I have gone through as well as countless other rock climbers me yeah yeah if you understand if you understand the goal and you understand the process it actually becomes very like quite easy to pick the exercise or the intervention and I think too often people will come at it from the exercise and intervention side and and then it doesn't work and then they wonder why it doesn't work and it's like well you just you're going about the whole thing backwards so if you start with the goal and then understand the process the rest of the it will more easily fall into place and you'll be able to kind of you know you're scrolling Instagram and you see the new shiny thing that people are doing and you're like you have the immediate rash was like oh that looks fun but you're like wait a second does it align with my goals like does it fit into this process of that like I'm currently working on to like address this thing am I climbing and if not it's like right like that's cool maybe save that for later but like moving on yeah yeah maybe not even that looks fun I mean you know training does look fun but for me I wonder if people can relate to this because I'm such a like I don't know because I have the engineer background and stuff and I was obsessed with the question of like what's the best way to get better for so long I would see stuff like that pop up and think am I blowing it by not doing that like oh fuck here's another thing that I have to add to my list here's another thing that I have to at least like investigate to see if it's if it's better than what I'm currently doing and it's like that's just completely unhelpful and and now I am closer to what you're describing where I can see you know or or do an interview with someone who has a different way of training than me or different way of training than than something I've been exposed to in the past and it's compelling on its own right it's interesting and I can take that and look at it through the lens of you know does it fit me and my goals and where I'm at does it fit my lifestyle like those are really important filters to look through and if those if one of those answers is no then it's like cool I'll set it over here in this box of like someday maybe you know like this is like a great thing that I'm not forgetting about I'm you know you can use a notes app or whatever works for you but don't lose it if you think that it's compelling maybe you'll return to it but it's a not right now sort of thing and yeah yeah there's just I mean we really can only do so much at any given time and that's totally fine that's actually a good thing and just because you're focusing on a different style of training now it doesn't mean that you know you might you might kind of max that out or learn what you you might get what you need it from the type of training that you're doing now and and open yourself up to something different in the future so yeah that'll leave you it's a lot of stress I used to feel a lot of overwhelm from just like collecting information and not really knowing how to do it all because of course you can't yeah I think you hit a couple really interesting things if you don't mind me adding on the like well number one like will and I talk about the optimal doesn't exist like maybe theoretically the perfect training plan and nutrition plan is out there but no human could ever possibly hope to actually execute that right like professional athletes like the LeBron James of the world have a whole team of people around them trying to control every little nook and cranny of their life and they still don't pull it off so like that doesn't even exist in rock climbing so what hope do we have right so yeah that's not going to happen but that's a throw a wrench completely the other direction here that like we're talking about all like you know the best ways to spend your time but if we're going on to the assumption that optimal doesn't exist like I'm a big proponent of having fun while you're doing this also so if you do see that thing on the Instagrams that you're sliding through and you're like oh that looks sick yes go through that process of like is this the thing that I need and if your answer is no but it still looks really sick to you give it a whirl right like I didn't kill me then I did that Paul Robinson hangboard workout for a little while I realized after doing it for two weeks I couldn't move my arms so it probably wasn't like the right thing for me at the time but I had fun doing it it was an interesting challenge to take on I learned some stuff I got to throw it into a podcast 12 years later now or something like that but you know like if something looks fun to you assuming that it's not dangerous I don't want to have the trainers of the world yet really mad at me for saying this but like just try some stuff that's okay but also know that it may not be the best way for you now that's that's a great point I think that's super important and and those things can coexist absolutely like right now I'm in a phase where I'm really into OTGs you know the mapful it's like lifting weight off the ground for reps with a with like some sort of hangboard implement right like the tension blocker or whatever else I don't think it's better than max hangs I don't think it's the new secret sauce to getting your fingers stronger I just think it feels cool I just like it you know I and I need I want to keep working on my finger strength and that is an element one of the elements of of my climbing that I want to work on to go from where I'm at to where I want to go this is a way to do it there's lots of ways to do it and I'm doing it I've kind of pivoted to it yeah again not because it's the best thing out there but just because I saw it and I saw Matt doing it and I tried it and I was like I feel like a badass when I do this I like counting reps instead of counting seconds I don't know why just my brain likes that for some reason I can kind of program it similar to my weight training and that's working for me so yeah a lot of the stuff it's like there's lots of different things that can lead you you know towards your goal pick the one that you like don't ever think it too much absolutely all right I mean that's that's awesome I think that's fully just kind of segues us into advance because I think this the this like optimization problem is really where I think the it is one of the biggest stumbling blocks for the advanced climber because at this point you've been climbing for a good handful of years you've done some training right like we talked about intermediate ideally you've built up some sort of a toolbox of different off the wall interventions on the wall interventions so you're you're getting pretty trained like you've you've been exposed to a lot of this different stimulus and you've probably felt like your your ability is improving but the improvement starts to slow down naturally and this is a trap that I've fallen into a lot and like even now like I I know but it'll still things will still hit me away and I'll be like oh maybe but that like just like game changer boom like I just like leveled up in six weeks kind of the thing it's kind of off the table like that stuff doesn't really happen anymore for a trained athlete and so you still really want it to exist and you still get very excited when you think you come across it but it's totally see a new thing and you're like oh shit maybe this is it like this is going to do it for me and you try and it doesn't work just that kind of thing doesn't happen anymore and so really what's happening or what ideally what's happening instead of trying like zoning into much on this optimum what we really want to do is start refining refining all the things that we've been kind of exploring and learning as an intermediate climber and dialing that kind of stuff in and being able to really focus it in a very specific way which is kind of a skip ahead towards like the intervention but the the issue that or one of the issues that I feel like the advanced climber comes up against is the goals need to get more and more specific so your understanding of what's going on has to get more and more nuanced in order to like understand what those specific goals are and then again reverse engineer and understand what kind of interventions are actually going to apply to that goal. I think to go back to our bandwidth theme that we brought up a few times is that like you've learned to be analytical and to parse out what what went wrong how to address it all that kind of stuff and what an advanced climber needs to be doing is have all that happen more accurately and faster and I think this for sure happens in your like outdoor climber and regular gym climber as well but you can really see it under the microscope in the comp environment where every time an athlete does not get to the top they have to go through that process really really really quickly through like a bunch of different variables and all we see as like observers is they fell they chalk they rested and then they sent the boulder we're really what's happening in their head is they're asking all the questions that we just talked about in the intermediate scenario about like why did that happen what do I need to do differently what if this what if that times a thousand all happening while they're chalking up their hands for 30 seconds and then they get up and make adjustments if it didn't work then they go through that process again and again and again and again but they're like a supercomputer at this point right like they can just run so many scenarios so quickly that all we see is chalking and resting but that's not what's happening internally so you know I think to reuse Will's word of refinement here that you've got the stuff you need once you've gotten to this area in your climbing journey it's about being able to like utilize those things better and knowing what to do when faster in our opinion yeah yeah it's great it's a tricky one though definitely not easy to do right like I in my head this is going from like dial up to fiber object right yeah that that costs something you know right there's like hopefully you built the infrastructure at some point that like you're not first trying to dig a hole from the street to your house at this point but like things things are gonna get quicker here and then once you have the fiber optic system going you can do a whole bunch of cool shit with it and I think that's really where like advanced climbing starts to manifest itself Will do you want to take us through the first strong not good advanced climber yeah I think I I want to because we have a nice little thing here where yes the strong not good good not strong is kind of an inversion of the same idea for the strong not good working hard got you here but now you need to be smart and on the flip side for the good not strong like being smart got you here and now it's time to work hard so that that flip there I think is it is another interesting thing depending on kind of where you end up on the spectrum as you arrive at that advanced level I like that to drill to drill a little deeper for the the strong not good I I mentioned Quinn earlier throwing him under the bus a little bit he won't mind uh Quinn's one of your tension buddies yeah Quinn's back for a he he works at tension um and he's brutally strong like it's it's crazy like he could just be climbing v 40 like if he sets the boulder like it could be any grade I feel like do it quickly and no one can touch it it's one of those things but as soon as the climb requires access to a position that he's unable to get into all that strength goes out the window and I think that's really where like in order for an athlete at this level to progress and they are really strong usually the issue is that they lack an understanding of the positions that they need to occupy or they understand that but lack the ability to actually occupy the position because once they can get there the strength is already accounted for like the ability to produce force is usually accounted for but the ability to you know what to do with it I find it is less map you're making a face yeah can I push you on this a little bit please expand on what you mean by occupy a position okay so to to continue my my uh Quinn yeah sorry Quinn under throwing sorry Quinn and to and to kind of piggyback off this earlier concept of like if you're not in the position it's exponentially harder there's not like an infinite amount of like strength you can gain do we agree on on that point like it gets like you're you're you're up against this kind of diminishing returns zone right you're not going to get like I was talking to you earlier Matt I was like there is one point where I just like put 40 pounds on my on my finger strength and like eight to ten weeks or something like that it was when I first started hanging like that's not going to it's not going to happen to me again you know like that would be sick but it's just not that's not how that works so you take somebody like Quinn who's very strong like he can get stronger but he's not going to get way stronger right so if he's out of these positions there's like there's a cap to his strength and there's only so much out of the position that he can feasibly be before the move is just not possible and so what I mean by like occupying the position it has to do with that relationship where like if you're in the position this strength requisite goes down and if you're out of the position it goes up exponentially and if you're not in a position where you can pile on a level of strength that would allow you to be out of that position the only dial you can turn is occupying the position so like doing a complex move the air quotes right way is what you're talking about getting your body in the correct position for the move sure like this is like we often talk about like the box in climbing and this is like directly related to that you see a lot in comp climbing for sure and a lot in outdoor climbing a little bit less like this is one of the things that I think is the most difficult to replicate on a board and where I think like really strong board climbers can can hide from having to work on this by just cranking on flat pieces of plywood but when you introduce a level of like dimensionality to this scenario where you kind of need to be like inside two holds or like occupying like when the wall like curves in or if it curves out and the way that you're positioned in space relative to those holds becomes really consequential that's where I see this like really rear its head for the really strong climbers who don't have the technical experience or the mobility or the flexibility to manipulate space in that way gotcha I think that's so would it be fair to sum that up like kind of a pull out of the things we brought into from the beginner section of this meat suit competence but on steroids yeah like like we said coming back to that word refine like it it has to get refined and those what happens here is those boxes get smaller right like the margin for error gets smaller where on for for a last experience climber on an easier boulder problem the space in the air could like that range could be like a foot your hips could be a foot one way averse the other way and realistically you're still basically in the position and it's still basically gonna work the harder harder that climbing gets the narrower that like band of space gets where if you're a little bit out or your foot so on the foothold just a little wrong so that like your your heel like that lever is in a wrong spot and you're half an inch too far away from the wall it just doesn't go and then all that's often one of those things like where you see climbers like making progress on hard boulders where they'll get on the like try and hold the position or get someone to push them in and like they're trying to like find where exactly that is and you have an entire body to articulate to try and find what that position is and learn it and then be able to move in and out of it and remember it and all that other stuff but that for me is like the the thing for people who are really strong but seem to underperform when they're either in a comp or go rock climbing it's usually that that is the problem it's like a level of nuance that's being missed around body positions and and exactly how to do moves yeah that makes sense and I think the mobility dialogue comes back into play here where will you I think you put it well like you know we throw around like the words flexibility mobility and we don't have to go all the way down like if you've if anybody's ever worked with me before you know that's a a ride I can ride for a long time mobility is a big thing for me but in general at this point like you you are a strong athlete if you're in advance strong not good but how many diverse ways can you be strong is really the question you need to be asking yourself I think of like cool you're strong from here to here maybe you're v14 from here to here but if I take your arm out here and you're only v8 okay cool we just found like your lowest hanging fruit right like now now that's like an area in which you need to train that's an easy thing for this person to start identifying to does that feel like an accurate summation there yeah and I think I'd I'd expand it a little bit to based on what we've talked about in the intermediate where like you're really exploring like the goal of that exploration in the intermediate area is to kind of give you like an internal language around sensation and if you've if you've kind of short-cutted that through kind of the through that intermediate zone you can end up in like an advanced arena where you're asking your you may not know it but you're asking your body to do something that it's not done before and you don't have the experience being in those positions and when you've not been there before it becomes really difficult to like even talk about and that's sort of where like when I a way you can address this is like getting pushed into a move on a polar problem or something like that or something that I do a lot is I'll like pull on the wall it if I'm trying to learn a position I'll pull on and I'll try and stay there as long as I can and what I'll find starts to happen is like little parts of me will kind of start fatiguing and my position will slowly start shifting as like I fatigue and as I'm doing that I'm learning things like about what my joints are doing in the space and like how the holds start to kind of change their feeling whether it's the foot or the hands and in some instances it might look like I'm not moving at all but it's just slow stuff and I'm learning like what to flex and what that feels like um and trying to like internalize some of the physical cues I'm feeling um at least that's kind of how it feels to me I don't know the y'all might be be different um but that that might be totally off the wall but that's kind of how I do it if I'm trying to like learn something that I don't understand uh in the context of like a climbing position yeah I think to me that's like a really good way of identifying what it is that you need and then I think it still comes back to like the thing we talked about ahead of time will is like training through a greater range of motion and acquiring strength where you don't currently have it right and like you know maybe it takes one or two forms I suppose like one is like oh cool this is the position I need to occupy and I cannot right like I need to change I need to acquire those strength capacities that will allow me to acquire that position or now that I'm in this position and I'm starting to fatigue maybe I found a more economical way to to occupy this position than I thought was the only way before I got up here you know what I mean yeah I think it's I'm hearing both of those things it's like yeah sometimes this process helps you identify movement you know limitations or mobility limitations or things and that's the guiding light something to work on but it's also just a process of having more nuance around exactly how your body feels in a position or in a move and realizing like you might have plenty of mobility to do it a slightly better way you just haven't explored it yet so let's start to explore those different sensations slowly that's interesting I feel like I'm I wonder if you're the same way will like hearing you describe that I I feel like this is something I haven't ever thought about very much because I think I'm very intuitively a sensory based climber I think I just like really notice this the feeling of positions and when something feels right it clicks and I remember it and it might shift over time like maybe as I start to build a little strength in that position I can do it a slightly more economical way or a way that sets me up better for the next move or whatever but but yeah I've I think for a long time I didn't appreciate that that wasn't as intuitive for other climbers you know because of course we're all different and so I think I have a strong whatever that is like connection to kind of that I don't know in my body kind of sensory thing and and some people learn differently so it's definitely a time to like start exploring that more yeah I'm not saying anything profound here yeah sorry no that's that's great I and that's like you said people are wired different and for some people that comes really naturally and for some people that concept is super foreign and you know whatever that's the case it doesn't necessarily matter like the like for you if if that kind of sensory information like that just feels really natural to you and that's how you operate and you don't aren't like intellectualized to it that's okay like for you potentially over intellectualizing it could have negative repercussions at least my perspective on it is like the goal is to get is to get yourself to a place where you are operating in what I call like feeling mode that to me is what it feels like mastery I don't have to think about it I don't have to intellectualize it like the Bruce Lee like when it's time I don't hit it hits all by itself like it just happens and I think the more you can like either whether and whether this is like a very conscious purposeful thing but like the more you can get towards feeling I think the the more the closer you're getting to that mastery component but like with everything else there is kind of like the opposite side of the coin as well where you can leave some stones unturned you know like it's it's tough to understand if you're operating purely on feeling when there may be other options open and so I think there's always kind of attention back and forth between those two things like I think this is a pretty common thing I've certainly for me where and I remember when I first kind of started to land on this and be like holy shit it's crazy how I can take the hold like a half a pad different and the move feels completely different so like I'll be I will have been trying a project over and over or taking a hold the same way and I am having that kind of sensory experience and it feels fine it just feels really hard but sometimes it'll take like a moment of stepping away from that and and kind of turning the analytic mind on for a second and looking at the hold and being like based on what I'm feeling like is there a dial to turn here like if I take the dimple with my ring finger instead of my middle finger like there's a there's a pretty complex feedback that happens with those sorts of microbiota like as soon as my hand changes position my wrist is in a different place to then changes like where my arm can be and then that changes like where my trunk like a very small change in the hand can completely open up a whole new realm given a specific move and so being able to kind of go back and forth between those things I've found helpful but you know that is kind of just a meanic dough I don't think it is a you anecdote if I might be so bold I think yeah I think I agree well this is something I threw you not long ago and I think resonated with you that there's a study done in biomechanics and kinematics where they study how what I think the study was done on golfers of I'm remembering correctly where they take a bunch of shitty golfers people have basically never golfed and a bunch of elite high-level golfers maybe they're I don't know what their handicap is I don't even really know what a handicap is they're good golfers so and they put a bunch of like EMG stickies on them to see like what muscles are turning on when right so they're trying to figure out like the hypothesis is that the elite golfers are going to be able to recreate the same sequence of muscle activation more consistently than the novice golfers but what they found was exactly the opposite that the more elite golfers have almost they have way more variability in their kinematics in terms of what sequence of muscle activation happens in a given task which is really interesting to me that and it shows a couple different things they're like number one they just have more degrees more margin for error and more degrees of freedom so if it's me golfing I'm really shitty I've only played like two rounds of golf in my whole life I have to have everything go absolutely perfect within a very fine range for me to accomplish the outcome I'm looking for to have it basically like not go into the trees or into a lake or something right versus the tiger woodses of the world who can have a whole bunch of different shit happen things can go wrong along the way and they can still have a positive outcome which like upon first reading I was like how the hell is that possible right it's like it seems so counterintuitive it seems like they would be recreating the same set of kinematics over and over and over again and I think that that relates very closely to what you're articulating here Will and that like the feeling that you have is kind of all that matters like if you're a coach you're familiar with external and internal queuing right we're telling somebody what feeling they should have is not really the way to convey that information and this study backs that up right there is no feeling that you should have it's because it's yours and it's probably going to change every time you get on the wall too right so a long long little bit tangential thing but I think is really interesting and I think alleviates a little bit of pressure in trying to get ourselves or athletes that we work with to do it the right way like oh well your hip has to do this then your body does this then this this is this well maybe right but the better you are the less that becomes true yeah nerd tangential I think that's great I mean it's it's again I feel like almost everything like I want to just bring it back to the intermediate climber because that is really the chunk where you have an opportunity to do a lot of stuff really right as far as the way you go about it you also have like a a lot of opportunity to do it you know I think what we would consider the incorrect way and I think this is where a lot of my beef with the strength metric stuff comes from because it's it's one of those things that is it seems really easily digestible easily trackable easy to train for easy to like move the needle on and but what it really comes down to is I think at least in my opinion like the breadth of experience because what I sort of feel like when if you're if you're leaning into the strength metrics at the expense of what you're doing with your climbing what you're exposing yourself to it's almost like you're you're just sharpening that one firing pattern to use your analogy with the golfer it's like you're yeah you're you're creating a scenario where if you're perfect you're crushing but if you're anything but perfect you're done and the way that the real world usually works and the way that like you know by at least my experience with with climbing and rock climbing especially is that that is super rare and what actually results in more successful outcomes is having having more opportunity to be successful uh degrees of freedom like yeah like more things can happen and I can still send you know it's like if if I don't hit that hold perfectly or like I like kind of move a little wrong going to something that doesn't completely derail what's happening it's like oh I've been there before I know how to like remanipulate what's happening to turn back and do a successful outcome rather than like kind of balancing on this knife edge and if anything goes wrong I've just tipped completely off and and now I'm back on the ground or I'm hanging on the rope or whatever it is Lawrence Esefoe another friend of ours and coach who we talk with a lot introduced at least me to the this concept of affordances which I think is essentially what you're saying with uh degrees of freedom but the more affordances you have the more movements that you have open to you to create a successful outcome the easier it is to actually have a successful outcome as opposed to just relying really heavily on a very narrow set of opportunities. Man you're that was really fascinating that actually captures I think part of what I was trying to talk about much earlier in the conversation when I was saying that like you know I've I've grown so much as a climber in my own last six years despite having not gone up the grades very much I have way more of that like that's what I've experienced is that you know I used to be able to climb at my current limit or close to my current limit if everything aligned perfectly but I had like no margin outside of that and now I just feel like I can enjoy my whole world of climbing so much more because conditions don't have to be as perfect I can do things a lot faster because I don't have to have them you know perfectly refined I can climb a lot more different styles and things and it yeah I just I just have so things can go wrong I can still get up the climb and feel good about it like I can make all those little micro adjustments halfway through a move if I don't catch a hold correctly um I expect that eventually that will all lead towards you know higher peak performances um but it just it just feels a lot better to be able to climb that way and and not have to have the perfect try to be able to get on top of stuff like that's it's really nice and it makes you feel like a better athlete it just makes you feel like a much better climber because you are a better athlete yeah yeah for sure yeah I think when we were like beating around this idea when we first were writing this stuff for the podcast and we talked about this like internal feeling thing I stopped while I was like well that's like how I define athleticism right like if if you can't do that at all your chances of being a good athlete in whatever endeavors like pretty low in my opinion so I think that like you saying like you feel like a better athlete is like yeah it's because you are you are better by every metric yeah now I have like better language for it yeah that's the affordability thing that's really interesting yeah thanks Lawrence coach Lawrence and new England yeah is he coaching for the a school team is it brandy he works for senior team anymore um what's the big chain of gyms in New England I'm totally blanking here central rock central rock okay central rock and runs their CCS programs yep if you're in the New England area go hang out with Lawrence he's the man where are we at are we uh are we well I was just about to say I think we've we've handled a lot of the advanced climber as far as or at least I think as far as like the climbing portion of it is concerned do you all agree or do we want to touch any more on that I think we're good okay cool um yeah the I think that kind of leaves sort of our our last remaining point and then I think we can sort of sum it up and wrap it up um like what role does the non climbing off the wall physical preparedness training like what what does that look like for an advanced climber we've talked about it a little bit um R&D I think kind of as we've addressed some of these other things um but this is a this is a thing that uh um I just did another thing that that uh Matt and I have been talking about recently um you don't need to reinvent the wheel I think that's that's like a thing of critical importance like you know we talked about this kind of optimization problem and like kind of getting distracted by certain things or thinking that like there's some new special way out there to do it that's going to to get me like the kind of gains that maybe I was feeling earlier on in my career it's really not about that it's more about almost doubling down on the stuff that you know works and honing the like programming and application of that and I think that's uh like that's what I want to kick kick to the max I feel like this is this is an area I've been learning a lot from him on recently yeah no pressure Matt uh that's good uh it's true I mean it's definitely a pet peep of mine as well but like so I just got off the phone with an athlete that I'm working with who is real strong real real real strong by whatever metric he come up with and he felt like cool I just accomplished all these goals I'm climbing B whatever now which is like a long term goal for this athlete what's next like what's the I feel like I just leveled up what's the next thing and those like you're you're doing it right like there there isn't a magic bean thing here and the analogy I give is Usain Bolt where dude's the fastest man to ever walk the planet there's no magic version of sprinting that he starts doing after he wins an Olympic gold like all the things that he did to get there he continues to do and the same principles that you learn from the first time you start training still apply no matter how good you get if you are a trainer you're familiar with the said principle which is specific adaptations to impose demands or progressive overload like two really basic foundational principles of being a trainer you still use those things until you decide that you don't want to get better anymore and there there's no magic sauce there there's no Instagram workout that you don't know about that's gonna all of a sudden change these things it's just fine tuning the things you're doing right so when Usain Bolt is running sprints at some point he started running with a parachute or a sled behind him with some weight and maybe he adds the parachute gets bigger and maybe there's a little more weight on it but he's not not sprinting at any point in the progression and I think that's really what this comes down to is like you never level up to the point where you're ready for like all these new things and it comes back to our maybe our tool conversation way early on in the conversation and what feels like maybe yesterday if you've hung on this long for our talk but you know like some of those things that maybe you passed on earlier you can pull out from that box that you described Stephen of like let me put this aside for later but other than that like you're doing the same stuff over and over again because it got you here it's the only way forward there isn't a magic thing so stop looking for it yeah I know that seems silly and maybe a little preachy but I would say like 90% of the athletes that I encounter of any grade range but particularly the advanced ones feel like cool I've covered a lot of ground and they put in a lot of hard work to get where they're at I'm not trying to take that away from them but the hard work is gonna continue to be what moves you forward there isn't a thing you're missing yeah to me that's relaxing to hear like that you're not missing anything keep doing the stuff you're good at it's gonna work yeah I mean I think this is a good chance actually to clarify something from our last conversation will I had someone reach out to me on Instagram can't remember who it was I forgot to write down their question here because I kind of answered it for them but I wanted to bring it up today it fits right in here so someone reached out after our last episode will and asked you know you guys I'm confused because it sounds like you were saying two things that were contradictory you were saying don't copy the pros don't do it Adam Andre does that doesn't make any sense but then you're also saying we're all just meeting bones we're all skeletons like we all kind of have the same raw ingredients as as organisms and like we need the same types of stimulus and stuff and he's like I don't really get how to hold both of those things but it's to me it's and I want you to speak to it too but to me it's what you guys are talking about right now which is like we have the tools that we have as climbers we have things that work there's maybe going to be some new interventions and stuff as this port grows but like we know that hang boarding helps we know that doing some weightlifting can help we know that spending time on different types of bouldering you know terrain and stuff can all be really helpful we're all using the same tools you can definitely take an exercise from a pro that is going to serve you towards your goal and scale it to your ability that makes sense that absolutely makes sense and it'll make sense for you to continue with that exercise or tool as you progress as a climber and iterate on it in a way that helps you move towards your new goal over time if it's continuing to work for you like that makes sense too so the difference there is that we're not just copying pasting like I'm going to train exactly like Adam Ondra six days a week when I'm a beginner climber because that makes no sense like you know you need different things that's what this whole conversation has been about like there's different focus areas for you at that stage in your climbing versus you know someone who's been doing it for 25 years and is literally an Olympian so I kind of spelled all that out and hopefully that was helpful for that person but I wonder if you have anything to add as far as that goes like helping people make sense of like when should I not copy a pro when when is it appropriate to take specific inspiring ideas from people and scale them to where I'm at yeah so I think what I'm going to do is kind of combine what Matt just said with something from the very beginning of what we're talking about we're talking about tools changing over time and and the opportunity to misuse a tool and Matt gave the anecdote about the kind of Paul Robinson hangboard pull-up thing and what Matt said is that like the it wasn't that that exercise was good or bad but it represented a different kind of stimulus for a Paul Robinson that it would like represent for Matt Jones at that time right so it doing pull-ups on crimps like that's that's an extra that's a tool like then depending on your goal and whatever like that could be useful but doing it exactly how Paul was doing it for Matt all of a sudden max effort day where for Paul totally like middle zone just kind of maintenance stuff and so I think that's really where the the difference starts being important because it is all the same that like we're all bodies skeletons muscles like this said principle is a said principle progressive overload is progressive overload those things don't change but the capacity of an athlete does change over time and so different things represent different things for different athletes at different times so you could look at Adam Andra and if you like really looked at his training nuance you'd be like oh what's Adam's goal and we know that Adam's goal is doing something and we're like wow the training that he's doing is all these things that hit these different parts of Adam so that he can climb this route or whatever prepare himself for some challenge and if we're able to look at it that on that nuance level we can take the same process that Adam's using we could take some of those exercises maybe that he's using we could use the way that he's structuring it but we would have to scale it and we're like okay well I have this goal so these things maybe aren't going to apply as much to me like I have this level of capacity as an athlete so I probably can't like train in this way six days a week what I'm watching Adam do looks really hard to me but it might not be that hard for him and so understanding that like maybe what looks really hard is actually a maintenance level for him and so I'm misinterpreting a maintenance level like a maintenance day for a professional climber for a hard day and then and then I am misapply that to myself so I think that's that's great the mismatch happens yeah very well said that was great all right do we have any loose strings to tie up as far as advanced anything from our original outline the beginner intermediate advanced did we touch on strong not good and good not strong for advanced and do we feel ready to wrap this up I feel good for a wrap up that likewise all right yeah this has been incredible very very dense I'm sure I'm sure you guys are going to benefit from going back through some of that again once again I will try to break this down in a way that makes the most possible sense and put little notes and timestamps in the show notes for this episode so if you want to go back and revisit anything I will definitely break out where we started talking about beginner intermediate advanced and I'll add some keywords to kind of clue in on different subjects that we talked about within each of those so yeah go check that out at the nuggetclimbing.com I will link to both of these guys where you can find them and follow them Matt Jones and Will Anglin and what they are up to thank you both for doing this this was a lot of preparation on your parts before I even stepped in here I really appreciate you doing that it made my job very easy today it was very fun and this has been like a nugget filled masterclass for folks and I think a lot of people will probably get a lot out of this so appreciate you both we've got a ton of listener questions that I think we're going to dive into maybe we'll take a little break if needed but patrons stick around we're going to be doing that next and we'll put that out as an extra yeah anything else before we wrap this up thanks for letting us nerd out we appreciate the free reign man thank you for having us of course very fun for me very fun for me and yeah I appreciate you both it'd be fun to do this again if there's another topic or a series of topics that's you know that you guys find yourself talking about between yourselves and going back and forth about it's always fun to have you both on or it's fun to have you on Will and it's great to meet you Matt and great to have you on for the first time and we should all do this again it's been it's been a blast thank you thanks for listening everybody we'll see you next time hey friends if you're still with us I ended up doing another hour with Will and Matt we tackled tons of questions from you guys from patrons from some folks on Instagram we covered many many topics we talked about the future of AI and climbing we talked about how to train for long boulders if you only have a moon board we talked about how to know if your training's working who should hire a coach and when you should hire a coach we talked about why Will hired Matt as his coach and what he learned from that and what Matt had him do that was different from what he was doing before we talked about how Will designed the layout for the tension board to and we all shared our worst injury stories and how we overcame our injuries and what we learned from them and a lot more there was a lot of really great stuff in that so if you want even more from these guys there's an hour-long extra that is available right now for patrons who support the show for five dollars per month or more and there's a free trial so you can go listen to it for free considered a Christmas gift from me to you you can learn more at patreon.com/thenogicliming there's so much good stuff going on over there at patreon and it's a great way to support the show all right happy holidays to all of you i hope you have a beautiful holiday i hope you get to spend time with friends and family and get some rest and i look forward to continuing in the new year all right much love to all of you thanks again and we'll see you next time [Music]