TBP 277: Climbing Sessions to Train Power Endurance, Endurance, and Strength

We all know that reaching big goals in climbing can take time. While it's really tempting to think that training for two or four, even six weeks is going to make huge improvements, it usually just doesn't. Coach Matt Pinkis is wanting to work with people more long-term to really make progress in their climbing and make a dent in their strength and their skills and all of it. So he's doing a sale right now on his one-on-one coaching. From wherever he does all of this via Zoom and the training app called True Coach. And he's offering $20 off per month, which normally it's $2.95 per month and now it's $2.75. You can pay that all up front or the three-month payment plan or a six-month payment plan. But in that time, he really wants to get to know you in your climbing. And so you start off with a 90-minute Zoom call so that he understands where you're at, what equipment you have, any injuries you have, and your goals. And then you get your first four-week program within one week of that Zoom call. After that, you do monthly check-ins that are an hour each on Zoom. But during the whole time you get access to him pretty much daily on your True Coach app, where your program lives. He'll look at videos, he'll talk to you about exercises that aren't maybe going the way you want them to go. He'll talk to you about motivations slumps. He'll talk to you about tactics and red pointing. And anything that you have questions about, he'll help you with. And also, if you do this six-month program, he's offering a masterclass on how to structure a super-effective bouldering session and a Q&A session in the middle of it and dressing the most common issues in people's training. Another masterclass on effective red pointing tactics for root projecting, and then a final Q&A session at the end. You can pause these six months of training at any time and it never expires. So you can actually start whenever you're ready to start. It doesn't have to be right away. You can find that at trainingbeta.com/mat6, the number six. So trainingbeta.com/mat6. And this offer ends next Friday, November 22nd. This is the training beta podcast, and I'm your host, Neely Quinn. Thanks for joining me for another episode all about training for climbing and just all things climbing. I'm coming at you from the Red River Gorge. I'm having a great time, though I am having some hamstring difficulties. I don't even know how really I got this hamstring thing, but it's really hamstringing me. Sorry, I've been cracking myself up with that one on steep roots. So I'm having to change plans. I was on this amazing climb called Silky Smooth, but it's very steep. It's like deceptively steep and there's heel hooks and it's just too much on my leg. So I'm having to change plans, but I'm really grateful to be here and the rock is just amazing and it's great. But back to why I am creating podcasts. I had coach Matt Pinkis on the show because I wanted him to talk about how exactly he helps his clients train power endurance. And strength and power because we talk about these things and a lot of us want more of them, but we don't necessarily know exactly how to get more of them. So I asked him to write up an outline for this and talk about some sample sessions for each of those categories and then just some background information to understand so that you can sort of create your own program around these things. There are obviously a thousand drills that you can do for each of these energy systems, but we just wanted to make it very simple. These are some things that you can do to increase these things and he's going to be very clear about it. So I'm going to let Matt take it from here. Here's coach Matt Pinkis. And if you like what he has to say and you want to work with him, you can always do that. You can go to trainingbeda.com/matt and see all of his services there, including his six month package that he's got going on right now for this week. Okay, here's Matt and I'll talk to you on the other side. Enjoy. All right, how's it going Matt? It's going well, Neely. Thanks for having me back on the show. Yeah, for sure. This is going to be, I don't know if it's going to be quick or not. I don't imagine it's going to be too long, but I wanted to talk about, like, because even in my own training and climbing, I'm like, all right, well, I'm going to train strength right now or I'm going to train power endurance, like I did before this Red River Gorgeous trip. And I'm like, well, what do I do? There are so many options. What's the best option, you know? And I know that other people have that same question. So that's why I asked you to put together this podcast. Thank you very much for doing that. So yeah, why don't you tell me what we're going to be talking about today? So yeah, we're going to be talking about different session types and ways for sort of differentiating between them. And hopefully, you know, I'm going to give you some sample sessions so that there's some like, actual advice there that people can try out. But as usual, you know, you asked me to put this together and instead of answering your question directly, I tried to take a security route and give some of the thinking behind that and kind of share maybe some, some of the principles maybe behind how I kind of envision breaking down different session types. So that my hope there isn't that we're going to give like some exhaustive list of sessions here. But they will kind of have some idea of how to differentiate between them, what the intention behind those things are, and how that can inform sort of your training decisions on a day to day basis. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so first of all, some people listening to this might not know what energy systems are. And so I would first like you to just give us a very brief overview. And we've done this on a different episode where we talked about energy systems. It was with you and Alex and me. But just as a little refresher, can you just explain that? Yes, energy system just refers to basically the pathways through which we're converting energy. And you like in our muscles like what's applying our muscles with energy? And so, you know, in like the broadest stroke terms, the, let me see if I can get these right, the anaerobic a-lactic would be like our short form strength power expression. And so that's like, I think it's up to like 12 seconds. Then we'd move up into sort of our anaerobic lactic. And that's that super bumpy kind of acidic feeling, you know, power endurance zone. And then we'd move up to the aerobic system, which is, you know, what powers everything from walking from your desk to the fridge to, you know, long, long reclining on, you know, an Alpine Ridge or, you know, a long, judy section below your limit and recovering at a rest, things like that. So those are sort of the main three that we're usually talking about with, with climbing. But I think the main thing to note here is they all contribute every single time we pull on the wall and do a climbing move. So it's not, they're not exclusive in any way. It's not like, oh, this is an endurance route. So I'm only using my aerobic system. Even on really easy moves, you still use your, you know, strength and power of your anaerobic, a lactic system, as well as, you know, if the duration of that contraction or whatever in that specific muscle goes past 12 seconds. Then you're like, oh, cool. Now, if it's a high enough intensity will move into the anaerobic lactic. And so they all contribute all the time. So it doesn't, we shouldn't be trying to sort of fully separate them out. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. And okay, I have to say this as the nutrition professional here. And because climbers come to me all the time wanting nutrition advice and were trained very heavily by the media, et cetera, to focus mostly on protein. But like those, the two systems, the first two systems, your anaerobic systems are fueled by glucose. And you can get away with fueling your aerobic system with fat, but it also takes glucose. And so one of the best things that you can do to fuel yourself is have enough carbohydrates. And this is broadly speaking, like some people can get away with fewer than others, but, but I just want to pull a little plug in there for carbohydrates. Okay, we can continue this conversation now. Okay, so that's a quick description. Thank you for that. And really what we're trying to get to today is like, if you're trying to train a specific thing, language. like you said, it's hard to just train one specific thing because we're kind of like toggling between these systems all the time as climbers. It would be different if we were runners and we were just going out for like a very slow jog and then that would be endurance. Yeah, that would be our Robic system, right? Right. So like maybe you can, maybe like arching very low level arching could be considered that. I don't really know because even when you're arching, it can be a little bit hard. But anyway, what I want people to get out of this is understanding what kind, what things to do in your sessions to train certain things depending on your certain goals. And I know that a lot of what you're going to say here is like, it depends. And that's how it always goes here. But hopefully people will come out of this with like, okay, well, this is my goal. And so I think that I can put this information towards my situation because of that. Yeah. And so I think my hope here, right, is that while it, the reason it always ends up in it depends with a lot of these answers is because it depends on you and your goals, right? But what isn't this, this depends as an answer are sort of the logic behind kind of making those decisions. And so hopefully we're going to kind of, I think, take a bit what might seem like a circuitous path here to get to like, hey, this is a session you can do. But I think that if you bear with us, understanding the sort of why behind that will help you cut through the, that it depends on a personal level. Yeah. And just to prepare people, we, Matt, is going to go through like sample sessions for the different kinds of energy systems and like things that we trained for. So you will get some very usable information from this. But Matt, start us off here. Like what, what are the first things that you want people to understand about all of this? Um, the first thing I want is that we wanted, we're trying to differentiate between sessions here. So I think the top sort of highest level that we should do that with is, is this a training session or is this a performance session? And you want to, I think you want to be really clear with which category everything you're doing falls into. And so if we, let's look at performance first here. And I think here we could say that the desired outcome of any performance session is sending or moving towards sending, right? And that any physical stimulus that comes from that is sort of secondary. Right? Like I don't, most people don't come down off their like lifetime hardest red point going like that was so awesome. I'm, it's cool. I did the root. But mostly I'm happy. I got a great endurance workout. Like, right? Like you don't, you don't care. For sure. You probably got, if it was a long read, you probably got a pretty good endurance stimulus, but you're like, I am psyched. I just sent. Right? So that's really the main desired outcome there. On the other side, like in training, we're looking, we're, training is, we're trying to apply a desired stimulus for a desired outcome. Like a specific stimulus for a desired outcome. And, and so any performance outcome is secondary there. So, you know, you might be in your training session and maybe you send a hard boulder problem, like you're climbing on the moonboard and you send a benchmark. You've been working on for a while. Like that's awesome. You should enjoy it. But I think in a productive training session, you didn't go in there being like, I will do whatever I can to send this boulder problem today. It's more like, no, I'm here looking for, and if you're having like a hard limit bouldering session or whatever, you're looking for the strength and power stimulus. So, and the performance outcome is secondary. And that, and I think the way to maybe visualize that is like, if you on that same moonboard problem, if you fell, you know, matching the last hole three times from a stimulus perspective, that's like pretty much the same, right? As one time where you hold held it for a split second longer and you're like, I controlled it, I can take the send. You know, that matters if you want, you know, you want to do what you say you do, but it's not from like getting a training work, like the actual physical stimulus from it. It's not as, it doesn't, that's a distinction that doesn't really quite matter as much. Right. Yeah. So, there's a, there's the training stimulus when your performance climbing, like yes, you are getting a training stimulus. And there's the like intentional going into the gym or even outside to get just the training stimulus without the focus being on the sending. Yeah. So, what else do you want people to know about? Well, it's, what's maybe just start with performance sessions here. And I think it's, uh, and we'll kind of go through because I think, yeah, it's like easy to be like, yeah, if you're trying to send, it's a performance session. But obviously, even in a training session, you pull on and you try hard to send, like that's part of what makes climbing so fun is that it's, we're trying to do that all the time. Um, so I just kind of want to go through some, some performance sessions because I think a lot of people often conflate what is actually a performance session as thinking it's a training session. So, I think maybe we'll kind of, we can run through a couple of these, um, and, and then we'll kind of move into training sessions from there. So, like I said, the obvious example is you're at the cliff or the boulders and you're, it's a projecting session. Your goal is to send or to like work towards sending whether that's like doing the crux move for the first time or doing a link on your project, high point, low point, you know, one hang for the first time, whatever it is. And so I think that's what everyone jumps to when they think of performance. Um, I'd also lump in like, you know, you're going out and you're having a flash or on-site day, maybe like you're in the red right now and that, you know, like there's a lot of roots, you know, you might have a day where you're going around and you're like, hey, I'm just trying to do these roots first try and practice that. Um, I still think that's sort of, that's a performance based session. Uh, these sessions, I think it's also important to say can be indoors or outdoors. I mean, you and I both, um, climb outside a lot. And so I think our mind defaults to that. But if you're, you're an indoor climber and that's great. And that's so these same kind of sessions apply. So it could be your indoor root project, your indoor bouldering project, your board climbing project, your, you know, indoor root flash challenge, whatever it is. Um, it's all still the same idea. Um, okay. But the key characteristic here is that you're trying climbs primarily to succeed on them. Um, you know, you're like, I would like to do this climb. It looks cool. It will challenge me. That's what I'm going to try to do. Yeah. So that's where the obvious one. Is that, that makes sense? Yep. Okay. I think some other types of performance sessions that are less clear but fall under performance are anytime you have like a sort of volume-based goal. So I want to send X number of Y grade boulders in a session or I want to send, you know, X number Y grade roots in a session. Um, I think that's still, well, it's not just, hey, I want to do this one root. And maybe it's not even specific to any given root or boulder. But I think that's still a performance goal. Um, and so sessions like that where I'll be, you know, I'll hear people like, oh, I want to do two five 12s today or something like that. Um, that's, that's performance climbing. Uh, got it. Yeah. Um, I think social climbing sessions with friends, loosely speaking, fall under this category as well. And I think that's one, maybe people would lump in with, uh, with sort of training in their heads. But I do think that's sort of more often than not. It may be not for everybody, but more often than not, that to me falls under performance. We're like, hey, I'm with, we're like, yeah, you're like sessioning bolder with friends. You're like, I'm with my friends. I want to do this boulder. They're trying to do the boulder. We're working on it together. Um, you know, it's like, maybe it's your two same night bouldering session or something. Um, now again, as we said, there's still, there is a like training stimulus to performance climbing. So it's not like you're not getting anything out of that. But it's, I think the important thing to remember here is that you're going to get this training stimulus out of all these sessions we just talked about, but that's not the primary goal session. Like nobody goes in on for their like Tuesday bouldering session being like with a bunch of friends being like, all right, I don't care if I hang out with my friends. I don't care if it's a good time. I'm just trying to get a strength and power stimulus. Like, no, you're, if you're like doing it weekly and it's your social session, if that's how you're sort of describing it, then you want to do the boulder problems and do them with your friends. Same with, I want to send my project. I want to, um, you know, that, that outcome is more important than, than optimizing the stimulus. So you can see the stimulus as a bonus, but I don't think you, you, you don't really want to make choices in your performance climbing to try to optimize any stimulus. So that'd be the example of like, again, we'll, we'll use you in the red right now. Like, you, I don't think you should be like going out to the cliff to try. I don't know what you're trying, but to try your project and be like, well, it definitely makes sense for me to like go multiple back up to the section to figure out my beta better, but I really want it endurance stimulus today. So I'm just not going to do that. And I'm just going to go up there, get pumped. And even though I don't really know what to do in this session. And if I fall off, I'll just come down and try again and do that several times because that'll give me more endurance, right? That's like, now you're sort of like trying to optimize for a stimulus, but it's actually putting you at odds with your performance goals. >> Mm-hm. Got it, yeah. >> So, and then I mean, I think the last one I wrote down for performance sessions, and I think this one's fairly obvious, it's just competitions. But yeah, like, you know, you might have been having a great time doing it, but you're sort of doing it for the outcome. >> Cool. Yeah, so those are performance sessions. >> Should we move to training sessions? Or do you have questions about any of those? >> Nope, no questions. Yeah, let's move to training sessions. Like, what constitutes a training session? >> So, like I said, I think training is a systematic application of any intervention to achieve a specific stimulus and a list of desired adaptation. So put that into English. I think it's, hey, we're going to do whatever style of training because we want to get the specific stimulus to that so that we adapt to it and improve it in that way. So it's targeted, it's not random, right? And I think we can, like, sort of further divide training sessions though into sort of what you want, or mostly looking to talk about, which is like, hey, this session provides a physical stimulus. Like, I want to train strength. I want to train power endurance or train endurance, but also those that are helping us, like, learn a new climbing skill, more like practice-based sessions. So I think that's kind of my next, if we like, move down into the divisions if our, like, top one is training performance. I think under a training session, right, we can, we should be differentiating between sort of physical training sessions and practice sessions. >> Got it. >> And so I think what's, maybe look at practice sessions here first, if that is helpful. Or I think that kind of makes sense in my head. And so I think what is important to keep in mind here is that there's no denying climbing has physical demands, right? Like, if you want to do a hard sport, you need to be strong, you need to have good power endurance, you need to have endurance. But it's also a highly skilled activity. And improving at that requires deliberate work. Once you're no longer just brand new to the sport, right? And so we've recorded a whole podcast on drills. But I think that's sort of the main way that we'd be looking to sort of structure a practice session, is through the use of drills so that we can focus on improving sort of individual attributes of our climbing skill. >> Got it. So, yeah, I think maybe I can give a sample session of what maybe a practice session could look like. And then that might make things a little more clear. So. >> And again, we've done a whole episode, which I'll link to in the notes for drills, for all levels of climbing. So. Yeah, I think a sample session might look something like maybe you do kind of off the wall finger warm up, like some kind of no hang work to warm your fingers up going. That's something I've been incorporating more and more into my own training. And to most of my, if people I coach is, coach is training is just like getting a predictable load through your fingers initially before you start climbing. So I think you could still do that here. Then maybe you do your sort of initial climbing warm up. So maybe that's a warm up ladder style of what's your filtering in this example. Maybe you start at V0 and you do one to two problems per grade up to your flash level. Just to kind of get moving, get feeling good and be able to try hard. And then you maybe want, I think this is the optimal time in any session to include a drill. And that is immediately post warm up, you're still fresh, both physically and mentally. So this would be the time to do some do-over practice. And so there's a, we went through like a bunch of different drill examples in that other episode. But I think one we could use here is like one like a climbing. And so this is a example of a drill I use to help teach sort of momentum and commitment and a willingness to sort of jump. Because if you, so what you do is basically pick a bolder problem. And it needs to be a little more overhanging since you're only going to be using one of your legs at a time. And it would, you'd probably want it to be about your flash level. It should be something you could climb pretty reliably with both feet. And you'd try to climb it once, just using your left leg and once just using your right leg. And that would, that's going to force you to create momentum out of these disadvantageous positions. So I use that a lot for climbers who are sort of have really good footwork and are good at sort of like the, the tick-tacking. Like you could jump to that, that jug or you could do three foot moves and pull the with static. Obviously in our performance climbing, you choose whichever feels more efficient to send that bolder or to send that route. But there you want to be prepared for both, or you want to have the ability to both tick-tack your feet up and do that move static, but also to be able to just pop to the jug. Because so that you are prepared when you run into the situation where there aren't feet to tick-tack your feet up with. So you'd perform that on a bolder or two. And you know, be willing to fail, be willing to feel silly, try again. You'd kind of engage in like those deliberate practice. Got it. Right. And after each of these skill drills, whichever one you picked, then you would do your main climbing sessions? Yeah, then you can move on. Maybe, maybe it's a performance climbing session from there. Maybe it's a, you know, maybe you'll, you'll, you'll move into one of these sort of physical training sessions that we're going to talk about in a second. But I think the, the key point here is, especially if you're new to trying to use drills or do deliberate practice, it takes a lot of attention. So it's not something you want to do all session. I think it pays to just be really focused with it and get good at doing that, doing this like small portion of your session first before you worry about expanding it. You know, you could obviously do more once you get used to it. But having less practice that's higher quality is going to be better than sort of saying, like, I'm going to spend all session working on clipping today. So whenever I get to a ball, I'm just going to, I'll just try to take a deep breath. Like, yeah, you should try to do that in your climbing. But that's not really deliberately working on the skill as effectively. Right. So yeah, I think it's, whatever I'm coaching somebody with this kind of stuff, I say, like, hey, this is like your, eat your vegetables portion of the, of the workout. Like, bring the focus here. You get out while you put it into these kinds of drills. Do it and then, hey, go have fun from there. Like enjoy the rest of the session and don't like hold yourself real to a really high standard while doing the drill, but be then, then you can go about the rest of your climbing. Right. Cool. So those are training skills. And so that's sort of a practice session. And now we're going to go into these different energy systems, the physical, you're calling them the physical training sessions. Yep. So where do you want to start here? Well, so this is what you were, this is, I think, what you were getting at with the topic when you first suggested it. Right. So this is like, you're like, hey, I want to train strength. I want to train power. I want to train endurance. I want to train power endurance. What do I do? And so I think this is a good, that's a good way of sort of breaking it up is like, by those primary energy systems. And so I think we can sort of lump strength and power here together. And then we can look at power endurance and then we can look at endurance. Okay. Cool. So let's go in the same order. We'll kind of move up through the energy systems, just like we did in that brief overview. And look at strength and power first. So sweet. I think bouldering, no matter what style of climbing you're training for, whether it's bouldering itself, overhanging, sports, and the red, multi-pitch routes, tread climbing, whatever. Bouldering is going to be king here in terms of training strength and power. It's still high skilled and it's just going to let us get access to a higher number of high intensity moves than getting on a route is going, ever going to. And it's, it lets us try them sort of over and over again in a more productive way. We're like, you know, often asked people I coach, so like try a hard move seven times before they sort of give up and write it off as too hard. Like seven tries where they make no progress. That's, if you do that on every move that you like feels hard the first time up a challenging route. And it's a training session like you better have a very patient glare if you're doing that all the time, right? So it's just easier to do this in a bouldering format. Like you just pull on, you try. You fall, you learn from that, you rest, you try again. And so, should we go through like the sample session there? Yeah, let's do that and then I'm going to ask some questions about it. So same start, kind of off the wall, finger warm up, using a handboard or a no-hing device, whatever works for you. I think this would be a reason we're spot to put in any finger training that you are doing. You know, choose a non-fetiguing program or protocol and do it when you're fresh right here. Then I think you could move to something like board climbing, spend 90 to 90 minutes to you know, two hours counting that sort of initial climbing warm up, working on boulders that sort of force you to figure out challenging moves. Like moves you can't do first try, moves that require refining beta and moves that make you sort of bump into your current strength and power sort of ceiling. And then you sort of do that. I think I'm moving away, I've already used it once in this episode, but I'm trying to stop using the term limit bouldering because I think it's confusing to people. Like if you go limit bouldering and you send, was it a limit boulder? Right, I know it sounds silly, but like I hear all the time people will be like, well, I know it was a limit bouldering session, I put three sessions into this problem, I did it today, but I probably should have been trying something harder because it was a limit bouldering session. It sort of carries this implication that it's like, if you ever succeed, you, it wasn't hard enough. I don't think that's really productive. I kind of liken it to like, you'd fire any strength coach that ever suggested you improve your deadlift by just going in and doing your one rep max a couple times and then leaving. Well, I don't think that that, I don't understand that because it's limit bouldering, it's not beyond your limit bouldering. Yeah, but that's just like trying to find a knife-sege of like difficulty, right? And there's so much that like what's nice about that, like in the deadlift example, right? Like if you take 10 pounds off your one rep max, right, it's no longer your one or a max, and that's really predictable. Like you, you can look at the parabell, you can add it up and you know exactly what that is. Like there's formulas out there that help you calculate all these things. But in a bullet problem, you're like, like, I don't know, how do you tell if it's like, oh, this is actually like 85% of my max or this is 95, this is 90. Sometimes a lot of times, to me, I know it feels like 100% of my max until I kind of learn the movement a little bit and then it feels like 60% of my max and you're like, I don't know, like where exactly is it, right? And so I think that it's just not, there's nothing wrong with trying boulders at your limit. Like I said, we want to be trying moves that push you into that to like confront that strength and power ceiling. But I just don't think we need to be like fixated on the idea that it's like it has to be my limit for it to be helpful. I think it's important to kind of succeed somewhat regularly here. And so, well, yeah, also because there's a definite sensation that you get when you do three to six moves in a row rather than one move. Yeah, exactly. And I think it just, the main reason I'm trying to stop using it in terms of I think it just carries more sort of the possibility for the session to go off the rails a bit more in negative ways than if we just another format I've been playing with a bit more for people who want a bit more structure to their bouldering session. There is, is like saying, hey, focus on three boulders, right? And it's not always going to go perfectly this way, but this is what you should be shooting for. And that's, you know, if you have problem a, problem b, problem c, problem a would be something you tried previously and maybe you were really close to doing. And then you come back and you send, like, great, tried this in the previous session or two. Got it sorted out, showed up fresh, excuse. Then bouldered b would be something you maybe tried before, but Warren is close to sending had more work or, you know, refinement that you needed to do to, to eventually send. And so you then you'd invest more effort in sort of doing those links, refining your beta, practicing those moves. And then boulders c would be something that you hadn't tried before, so that you're kind of exposing yourself to a new boulder problem. A new service. Yeah. And so when it goes really well, right? Obviously boulder a, well, tick, send, that's out. Then the next session, boulder b becomes your boulder a, boulder c becomes your boulder b, and then you try a new boulder c. Now, obviously, it doesn't always go that way, right? Like, you're like, oh, well, hey, I sent my boulder b. I thought I was going to send boulder a, I didn't, or I actually hate boulder c, so I'm not going to use that one again next time. That's all fine. Like, I don't, you shouldn't think it's not like a failure of a session if you're, if you don't like hit that format perfectly, but I think it does give you some, some idea of like, hey, this is like kind of what I think you should shoot for. Yeah. And through this session, we've talked about this before, but like, you're resting until you're feeling ready again, right? Yeah. I think then that's really important. This, this session has nothing to do with power endurance, it, or shouldn't have anything to do with power endurance or endurance. This is just about high quality efforts. So if you're getting sweaty, you're getting pumped, like, you're not resting enough. And in general, one of the other things I like about this three-boulder format, and I think anyone listening to this is going to, who is used to trying a lot more problems, he's going, well, I'm not going to try that many things. And you're like, well, if you combine that with resting more, you're also not going to try as many times. But each of those goes, it will be higher quality. You'll be able to sort of express your full strength and power. And that's the whole idea is to kind of be bumping into that ceiling. And so those high, your efforts will be higher quality. And you'll probably send more boulders even if you're trying less and fewer times. But you'll also be getting a more effective stimulus out of that. All right. So this is strength and power. Oh, and then after that, in your outline here, it says, after this session, you could go do general strength, like weight training in the after the session. Yeah. I think that's a reasonable time to fit in some of your weight training. And we, you know, we also just recently put out an episode all about that. So with sample sessions, whatever. But that could easily be pumped in here. But I think the reason I added that is, I think it's important to say, even though this session is after strength and power, right, that that was the desired physical stimulus, you wouldn't want to go in the other order. Like you wouldn't want to go into the weight room, do your general strength work and then go climbing. Right. Because you're for teeth. Yeah, exactly. And climbing is going to be just higher skill. And so like it's more complicated movements like, you know, sending a hard bullet problem is more complicated than doing a death left. So you want to be, you want to be fresher to handle that kind of more complex skill movement. Right. Okay. So when and who would want to do this? I think, like I said, anybody, if you're, if you're climbing objectives revolve around like moving over rock with the moves are at all difficult. So then everybody. And I think this should kind of be a staple of your training pretty much near, like year round. Like how often? That's one of the, if you're a boulder or how often several times a week, maybe. Um, like, so you're just limit bold, you're sorry, you're three boulder formatting several times a week. It sort of depends on if you're in season, your out of season, what else you're doing in your training. Um, but I think, you know, if you're experienced with board climbing, maybe you could do that up to three times a week. I think any more than that is probably kind of productive. Um, twice, like twice a week usually feels pretty good to me. If I, when I start pushing beyond that, I get carried away and I get psyched and I want to, I usually see the quality of my session decline. And so if you were a boulder, I think you'd want to, you know, have this session where you're really focused on just like hard, hard, hard for you things in this kind of way. You'd want to, I mean, it's, you want to do it as sort of frequently, I guess, as you can recover well enough to do it. And so you should really monitor like the quality of the session to determine how often you would do it. So it's like, if by adding a third session, all three of your sessions get worse, then you're better off with two. And if by adding a second one, both of them become worse, then you're better off with one. Okay. Yeah. Got it. And if you are a root climber, how often do you want to be doing this? Still think like when you're training in the training season, um, once twice a week, maybe is what I usually shoot for for the myself and root athletes that train. Um, it depends on like how much you're emphasizing any of these other energy systems during that period of your training, right? Because again, we're, we have to deal with the sort of the overall cumulative training load. So you're like, it's great to be like, yeah, it's the offseason prioritize strength and power. I think that's something you hear often for advice given to root climbers. And I think it's good advice. But the devil's in and the details there. And so if you're also trying to do several, maybe you're working on your aerobic endurance and you're trying to do some really high volume sessions there, you're gonna have to recover from those. So if you're like, oh, I'm trying to train aerobic endurance twice a week and I'm trying to boulder hard two to three times a week, like now you're probably again gonna run into that, like, you know, I'm sacrificing quality here. - Yeah, not recovering. - Exactly. Yeah. I think I, you know, I've been joking with some friends recently that a really simple training plan for her root climber might be something like climb on a rope whenever you can, always board climb once a week, never more than once a week, never less than once a week and lift weights once a week. Repeat, repeat forever. And like, I think there's like some truth to that being like a really good, but it like programmed to maybe follow. And I think most people can like find times where they can stick to it, but it's shockingly hard to actually stick to that because by the time you factor in partners, schedule, weather, right? And you're just like, and you know, desire to send, like pretty quick, you're like, oh, shoot. Yeah, I didn't board climb this week or, oh, well, it's raining this week, so I wasn't able to get out or, you know, my partner fell through for Saturday, so I couldn't get out, what, you know, and then you end up board climbing more or whatever. So like, but I think that's like again, something that's pretty, it can be a reasonable thing to shoot for. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. It's, it's a good reminder. It's good for climbers to hear. Yeah. Okay, so I want to make sure that we get through all these. So let's talk about the power endurance one, and then I'm going to give you some general questions at the end. Okay, so power endurance, so to roll back, that'd be our anaerobic, like a lactic, or sorry anaerobic lactic system. They were working in primarily here, like, broadly speaking, so sorry, like anaerobic capacity. Think the best way to train this, again, just for logistically speaking, like not needing to monopolize a route and your player's time would be interval style training on a bouldering wall. We also, whenever we talk about any kind of endurance, whether it's power endurance or endurance, I think it's really important to not neglect the skill side of like executing when fatigued. And so our goal here is to like increase the amount of high intensity work we can handle in a given time. Like it's not just to get as pumped silly and repeat a couple times. Ideally, we're sort of operating above that sort of super pumpy level, and increasing that our sort of capacity to handle that work there. Does that make sense? - I don't understand what you mean. What do you mean by that? - So like, if we wanna make sure the moves we're doing are hard enough that if we kept doing them, we would fall before we got debilitating we pumped just in our forearms for the most part. When we're really trying to train this like high end power endurance. This is like, I'm taking this from like Steve Beckville's idea of like, high low endurance training, right? Where we sort of, for most of the year, we avoid that super pumpy middle zone, and we work on building the capacity to like do more climbing below that super pumpy zone until like stay aerobic, and then also we work above it where now we're like doing more powerful moves where we can't, and we do more of them and sustain that. - Sort of. Yeah, let's just talk about this session and then I think maybe it'll explain it. - Yeah, so same warm up, right? Like off the wall, predictable load through the fingers. I usually include one of my program in this for athletes like 20 minutes of open bouldering here. It's a good time to get fully warmed up when you're like new to the session. It's a, I suggest using this time to really make sure you have your beta dialed for whatever boulders you're going to use in your intervals 'cause the last thing you wanna do is like fail during one of your intervals 'cause you're like, oh, whoops, I went right hand, I was supposed to go left hand or I forgot, my left foot goes over there and now my right. And that's like a silly mistake and that really undermines the stimulus, right? And this session is designed around the stimulus, so we wanna kind of optimize for that. So this 20 minutes is a good time to like make sure your beta's dialed, repeat those boulders initially, and then once you like, you're gonna do them a lot of times if you do this session regularly. So eventually you're like, I got the beta, I don't need to, the last thing I wanna do is do another lap on this thing. And so then you could use that time to like, yeah, go just make sure you're fully warmed up. Ready to try hard. Maybe you got close on a project and you know, your previous session and you give it a couple tries before you like, takes seven to 10 minutes and rest before starting your intervals. - Okay, and then what do the intervals look like? I like using on the minute boulders here. - So you'd simply like, you know, on a running clock like you do a boulder at the beginning of minute one, you finish it, rest the remainder of that minute, do a boulder minute two and so on. And a session I really like there is to pick eight boulders and initially you could do two sort of rounds of that with like 10 minutes rest in between. So you do like boulders one through eight, on minutes one through eight, rest 10 minutes, and then repeat again. And then that can get progressed up to three rounds once you're used to it. So do you like do the boulders rest 10 minutes, do the boulders rest 10 minutes, do the boulders again. - Okay, so you must have to have like a playlist or something. - Yeah. - If that's a thing in the moon board app or the culture app or whatever. - Yeah, and there is, you can like create a circuit and neither of those. And I actually think the boards work really well here because the boulders are the right length for the most part. - Yeah, 'cause it's really hard to do set boulders in less than one minute sometimes and get down to your phone. - And, you know, we're only, we're really looking for like a, for it to take like 20 seconds here. So you have like four seconds to rest, like 20, 25 seconds. Because otherwise we don't want a negative work to rest ratio here. What I mean by that is like where the work interval you on the wall is longer than the rest time you get before you have to go back on the wall again. 'Cause when you go into that either even or negative work to rest ratio, it's hard to keep the intensity high enough. - Okay. - And so that'd be like your classic four by four and anyone who's like done a classic four by four, right? Where you just like do a boulder, jump down, immediately do another boulder, jump down, immediately do another boulder, jump down, right? Like maybe you feel good on the first one, maybe you feel all right on the second one, then like when you're setting those up usually, it's like, oh god, like boulder, boulder three, needs to be easier and boulder four, that would be pretty easy where I'm like, I'm getting pretty pumped kind of thing. And so there's always, there's this big decline in the intensity. And so by leveraging a more positive work to rest ratio, something where it's like twice as long or three times as long, even depending on the length of your interval, but here like twice as long, like 40 seconds of rest, 20 seconds of climbing, that's gonna let you keep the intensity higher and get a better stimulus. - Mm, okay. So you want the intensity to be as high as it can within the time frame. - Yeah, exactly. - That's what you were saying. - Yeah. - Instead of getting like pumped silly, which is what ends up happening for me when I'm doing roots because like sometimes I'll do board interval sessions for this but a lot of times I'm doing doubles or I haven't been doing triples, but like you get silly pumped and you're doing hard moves. So like would you recommend against doing that on roots? - I'd recommend against doing that on roots all the time as your primary form of endurance or power endurance training. - Yeah. - Like, and I get it, I think I've fallen into that trap before earlier in my climbing as well 'cause that's the sensation we feel pretty much every time we fall off. You're like, oh God, I got pumped. It'd be, I better practice being pumped and like being able to keep climbing when I'm pumped 'cause then I wouldn't have fallen off, right? But I think we can do a better job of training in a way that resist our, that increases our ability to not get pumped in the first place. - Okay. - Not to say like you're not gonna get pumped at all in your project, like when it's performance, yeah. You're probably gonna get a pump silly and you're probably gonna have to work through that and you absolutely should and you should try hard. But I think it's not something that, it's not like a gold standard, we should be chasing all the time in our training. - Okay, got it. Okay, and then you said to, you could progress to three rounds of this with 10 minutes of rest in between. - Yeah, and I think that's like a good session. That's what, I'll program, that's what I usually do myself when I'm doing this style of training and what I'll like progress anyone who's new to it up to. But that's a, you know, that's a lot of hard boulders. And so I think jumping straight into three rounds, like basically spend, if you do it for four weeks, once a week, let's say you could do two weeks at, like week one, two rounds, week two, two rounds, week three, three rounds, week four, three rounds. And you're just kind of a little more progressive in your approach there. I think that'll go better for most people. - Okay, and what kinds of people, would you recommend this to, like, what kinds of goals would these people have? I think this is a great session for reclimers. I think it's also a reasonable session for builders to do if they're targeting longer bulldozers. Yeah, like a lot of hard bulldozers, like hardest bulldozers in the world at this point, not all of them, but are long. And so, you know, if we go back to our energy systems, like if our anaerobic, a-lactic system is only really powering our efforts for 12 seconds, like max, then we're, like we said, we're going to be using this energy system. And so, you know, if you're climbing a 30-mover older problem, right, you're certainly going to be falling into this energy system. So, this could be, I think, as a reasonable intervention there as well. Well, honestly, it seems like this could also be helpful for people who want to just be able to do more bulldozers in a day, too. Yeah, I mean, there's certainly a work capacity component to it as well. Yeah. And that's where- And that's like- That's part of the reason why we started by saying, like, hey, all these energy systems work together at all the time. Like, we're sort of applying these divisions to these sessions to help people have a framework for, like, choosing what they're doing. But there's also just like there's training stimulus to performance climbing, and that you can send- you might send a hard bulldozer during your strength and power session, and that's like, hey, that's a send. You get, like, there's a performance opportunity during that session. There's kind of like second and third order kind of consequences or benefits from these sessions as well. So, it's like- Yeah. Yeah. By doing this session, if you- if like doing, you know, I think for like a higher-end root climber, doing 24-boiler problems at, like, flash-level plus or minus one kind of thing in a session, isn't going to feel like a ton of work. But for a boulder who's used to only focusing on, you know, five to six-moved boulders, yeah, that might feel pretty crushing it first. And so, like- Yeah. But yeah, that- like, having that work capacity is certainly going to be nice the next time you're like out at the boulder and you're like, I've given three or four tries, I've learned it, but I don't- I'd like to be able to give 10 tries that are all high quality before I'm like kind of smoked. Yeah, totally. Okay, let's move on to endurance so that we can get a full view of this. So, what's endurance and how would you- what's the sample session? So, this is like a- we're sort of simplifying here to say that this is our aerobic system, right? So, the goal is to target that here. I think whenever possible, like most of the time here we're talking about root climbers, right? And so, I think that whenever possible, this should be done on a rope and done on lead. For most people, unless you're very experienced, because this is ensuring that the skill side of endurance isn't neglected. Right, especially if you're doing like a strength session and then a power session, or power and endurance session, both on boulders, like we want to get that skills in on ropes. Exactly. If you're a root climber. I think that- Similarly to how I said like a reasonable program would be born climbing once a week, getting ever more than once a week, but always once a week. I think another, you know, the other side of that for the root climber would be like making sure you're climbing on a rope really regularly. So, I think that a good check to put on yourself as a root climber is like, if you're going weeks and weeks at a time without tying in in the name of root training, I'm not saying like, hey, like you can have a bouldering season if you want. But if you're like, I am training for a trip and you're like not ever tying in because you're sort of optimizing in your head, your workouts away from that, you're neglecting the skill side of endurance. And I've done that before. I went all the way to Spain to get used to climbing on rock again after what I thought was a great training cycle where I basically didn't climb on a rope and I climbed terribly. And then I came back after three weeks of being in Olyana and I had like my best rifle season ever. And I was like, well, you know, that's cool. Like I'm glad I had a really good season, but I could have done without the like transatlantic flight and spending three weeks abroad like sucking to get used to climbing on a rope again. Like I would have rather had done that at home. Yeah. So, so yeah, keep the skill side. And this skill side is like, if you're falling, being comfortable, vulnerable, managing your pump level, right? Like being able to rest, being able to, you know, breathe, and attain a good breathing rhythm. Like it's all of that. So we don't want to like, I think we, whenever possible, we want to make sure that stays part of the session here. Okay. Yeah. And this is to build like your base level of endurance of aerobic. Yeah. Yeah. So capacity, like, yeah, exactly. What does this do for a climber to train this? Well, so it's going to let you do more climbing, like at a, ideally a higher intensity, where you aren't getting pumped yet. And then it's going to help you recover at rest better. Okay. Yeah. That's important. So the idea here is if we're, if we're, if we can avoid being in that power endurance zone as much as possible on roots, it's always going to happen. Like we said, it all three, all these energy systems contribute every time. But if we can do the majority of our climbing with our sort of strength and power system, right? The anaerobic a lot of tech and the aerobic system. It's, it, they're less, they're a more efficient and be there's less like waste product. Like, you know, that's the middle power endurance system is when we like get pumped out of our mind and get that, you know, governing the sedic sensation or forums and then we explode off. Yeah. Right. So it's like, that's what we're trying to avoid. And so if we can spend more time, you know, in the aerobic climbing and then have that anaerobic a lactic system like our strength and power available at the crux, then we can do the hard moves, get back to better holds with a highly developed aerobic system, then be able to start recovering again more quickly. Yeah. Got it. And I think it's without getting too technical here, where anytime we say aerobic, right? I think people immediately think like, oh, running or just like general fitness, but we are talking like developed aerobic system like in our forums here. Like it, it's like local localized endurance not just general endurance. Yeah. So then what would the sample sessions look like? Um, so I think I came up with two different ones here, because I know that not everyone, you know, can always do this or has access to a rope gym. So I do think that's like, I'll give that one first, because I think it's probably better. That's like more skill specific here. And then I have a sort of boldering like wall option as well. So the root session would be like, go in, do one to two pitches just to get warm, like standard recliving warm up. And then you could do root laps where like if you and I were climbing together instead of just like you go do a pitch, then I do a pitch, then you do a pitch. Um, you could start out by doing like, we could do triples. So like you'd go, you'd do three pitches, then you'd rest. Well, I did three pitches and back and forth. Um, and a progression I like there is to move, uh, is to do two sessions at each of these, uh, before progressing an actual, but something like two sessions of three by three. So three rounds of triples, then two sessions of four rounds of triples, then you could go back to three rounds, but you quads. So four laps per root and then, uh, finish with two sessions of four by four. So four laps, four rounds of four laps per root. Okay. Um, two, you two sessions, two days were. Yeah, exactly. So like, if you, and these are, these are big sessions, they're hard. It's a lot of climbing volume, right? So it's hard on the skin. You should like have tape and snacks and food available here. Uh, but like, so once a week's probably enough here. Um, and so you know, you can do like, this would be like a two month kind of progression. Yeah. And are they looking, are they looking to fall off at the end? Are they looking to like complete all of the moves? No. Yeah. So because we're looking to stick to this aerobic system, we, you should be, you know, sending pretty much, uh, the goal again isn't to get like super, super pumped. And so we want to stick to an intensity where you're operating kind of like right below that level where you start to get really pumped or lose like the ability to actively manage your pump where you're like no longer. Yeah. So you'd have to bring the difficulty level. - Way down. And what you're getting at here is like, everyone who ever tries this session for the first time, myself included, always jumps to roots that are too hard. Like, and then basically after the first round, you're like shit, I need to scale things way back, or there's this going to fall apart. And so like the first time I did this kind of training, I think I was training for a 13D in the VRG, and I started doing these on 10 days. So like way, way easier. And that felt, it was like, it was hard. Like, you know, it's not that you aren't going to get fatigued, and it's not that you aren't going to have to try hard. during this kind of training, but you just don't wanna lose that control element. And a good marker of this is whether you're staying in a conversational intensity. So if we're doing this session together, if I can talk to you in short sentences and be like, "I'm so sick of doing this route. "My skin hurts. "I really wish we were bouldering today." And complaining as we went, that would be a good sign that I'm staying aerobic. If suddenly I'm like, "Really folks, "don't my breathing or having to hold my breath "and really use a lot of tension for a crux." And I'm stuck in that kind of, then I'm probably crossed over in them. It's too hard. - Yeah, like if you come down in your arms or super pumped, like you've done something wrong. - Yeah, certainly in the early rounds, definitely, but in general, yeah. I've kind of softened on this a little bit because I think when I've, what I just said is how I've always described this. But I think it leads to this idea of like, well, you can't ever try harder, experience any pump while you're doing this. And that's definitely not true. It's just that you want to be able to actively manage it. So while you're climbing one of these routes, you might get to a crux and be like, "Oh man, that's like feeling a little harder." Even though it's much easier than your normal climbing because you're fatigued. But then you're gonna get through that and you get back to better holds and you're like, "Oh, okay, I can kind of shake out." - I can't recover here. - That's a really good description of that. 'Cause I've always been confused about that. That's helpful. - Yeah, I think that's important 'cause it's not that you shouldn't try hard. And I think it leads to this idea of like, you're like, "Oh, I had to try a little hard. I should probably go easier next time." But like, no, you want to kind of increase the difficulty gradually. And so like, you know, when I said I started on attendees, I think I finished like at 11, somewhere in the mid five or 11s. By the time I was like going on the trip. And felt like, and I went and said, so it's like, you can progress as you go here. It's not that you can never feel up. - All right, and then what was the bouldering one, the bouldering session? - So you could use like a tread wall circuit board. Like you could set a circuit on a spray wall. You need a wall that's ideal. Most people are gonna need a wall that's super, super steep with a bunch of hold options here. But you can do something like 10 minutes on, 10 minutes off on the wall. It's a good option. I did the exact session last Sunday on a tread wall. I've definitely had more fun while climbing. But I think it was, yeah, like it's winter, ee here right now, like there's snow. So normally I'd like to do this kind of, like I feel like I can maintain my endurance pretty well living in lander 'cause we can get outside and climb on long-ish routes most of the time. But it was cold and snowing. And so I was like, well, I'll do it here. And so that was the session. We don't have a commercial climbing gym or like certainly not a root gym. So I was like, well, that's not an option. So I'll do it on the tread wall. - So we asked for questions on Instagram for this episode and Andy Jacobson asks. - Can I add one thing? What are-- - Just to wrap this up before you. - Yeah, no, this is about this one. So you can add whatever you want. So this is, he said, options for training endurance on a 40 degree board. I feel like that would be really hard for anybody. - Yeah, I mean, I think it is really hard. You're gonna have to get creative with this, well, first of all, you're gonna hope that your board has big enough holds. For your ability level, which like how you set up a board, is a whole other topic. I think you're also going to want to play with, you know, there's nothing magic about 10 minutes here. Right, like I said, like, oh, 10 minutes on, 10 minutes off. Kind of think, there's nothing magic about that. What is there is a one to one worked rest and the fact that you're staying aerobic. And so maybe, you know, maybe it's like four minutes on and resting enough that you can stay, you can keep going aerobic there. So I'd prioritize staying aerobic and figuring out a work interval that works for that. And I'd worry mostly about that, then I'd worry about the rest interval. So if you need to rest more to like accumulate enough. So it's like, let's say you did four minutes on on a 40 degree wall, right? That's probably going to be a pretty high level of effort. For most people, I know it would be for me. Yeah, you'd have to have jobs. You'd have to have jobs. And you'd also probably, you'd probably want to rest more than four minutes, especially initially, where you're, you know, because otherwise you'd like, well, I did it once. I tried to do it twice, I made it two minutes, and I fell. And then you're like, oh, yeah. So then you're not accumulating that sort of time under tension on the wall. And like maybe Andy Jacobson was using endurance, but referring to power endurance or whatever you want to call it strength endurance. And we've already discussed that. Yeah. What was the thing that you wanted to add before I just wanted to kind of give a recommendation about when this kind of training should take place? Oh, yeah. And I think that again, we're mostly talking about reclining here. And I think that is, you should try to maintain some amount of endurance, mostly year round as a recliner. I think it's like unless you're going to go have a bouldering season or something. Like I think it takes, there's no shortcut to this kind of endurance. You just have to kind of like, it sucks getting it. Like, you know, I've painted it a couple times. Like, oh, yeah, I did the session. I've had more fun or like, oh, I'll be complaining to you. And my sentence is, well, we do this. So like, once you have it though, it takes less to maintain. And so the last thing I wanted to was like, every what it fully go away. And so that can come from, you know, you maintain a pretty high level of endurance, right, by going to sports climbing outside. But there's no way you're going to come back from your trip in the red with worse endurance than when you left Colorado, right? Like, and be like, oh, well, I haven't, but you're probably not going to do any root four by fours while you're in the red. You're just going to go climbing and trying to do roots. So you can maintain a lot of that by just going in going to sports climbing or, you know, going to reclining. But I think sprinkling this in and sort of throughout your year is a good idea. Like, once every couple of weeks, once every week, once every month. Yeah. I mean, it needs to be a high enough frequency that-- because in during any kind of metabolic adaptation, like we're talking about these metabolic pathways, like the energy systems, they're going to be a least persistent sort of adaptations. So again, I'd shoot for something like, I don't know, try to get on-- if you're a root climber, try to get on a rope once a week for most of your year, like unless you're going on a bouldering trip. And I'm like sort of hesitating here because I don't have exact-- I'm sure there's like literature out there about how long it takes for this to detrain and exactly how often you should do it. But for most people, that ends up, it gets too complicated based on life and scheduling and other things they want to do. So I'll use myself as an example right now. I'm trying to-- I just finished sport climbing outside for the year. It's wintering now. I'm trying to bolt the outside a bit right now. But I'm also aware that strength and power are my main training focus right now. Going to Waco, kind of right after Christmas, for a couple weeks, I'd like to climb hard boulders there. But once I get back from Waco, I only have like five to six weeks until I go to Spain for a month to climb in Margarita. So like the last-- and I want to be-- I'm not trying to go to Spain to get fit. Like I'm trying to go to Spain to climb hard roots. And so I'm sort of like, while I'm focusing on strength and power, ideally climbing some boulders outside when the weather allows right now, but certainly also getting ready for Waco. I'm trying to mix in like, once a week to once every two weeks of some kind of endurance work. And that-- and I'm trying to not stress over exactly what it looks like. So I said like, yeah, it was like snowing. So I went and did 10 on and 10 off on the treadmill. But hopefully this weekend it'll be nicer. And I'll like-- maybe I'll go bouldering on Saturday and go do some easier like volume-level roots up in sinks on Sunday or something. Yeah, that makes sense. I think that's good to put it in perspective using a human like that. Yeah, because it's like, yeah, I want to be fit. I don't want to lose-- I feel really fit right now from an endurance perspective. I was climbing on endurance roots. I don't want to let that totally go away. But I also don't need it to stay 100% topped off from now on too. Because also it's like the easiest thing to regain. I mean, yeah. So you can regain it within a month before going to Spain. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. OK, I'm going to do one last question here from Instagram. We didn't get that many because we just put it out. But Matt.rb says, mixing low aerobic in parentheses and durants with max strength or limit boltering in one session, which I think is something that a lot of people try to do, so what are your thoughts on that? - Know that anytime you're combining, like, system, or sessions designed to target any energy system, there is like an increased recovery cost. So you're probably going, it'll probably take you longer to recover from combining those than it would if you did like the high-end strength work on Monday and then the aerobic stuff on Tuesday, rather than just doing it all on Monday. So that, I think that'd be my first point. The second point is anytime you're combining different training modalities, you always want to keep in mind two sort of things. You want to move from most intents to least intents and highest skilled to low skilled. So if you were combining those two, you certainly wouldn't want to go do root laps or 10 on 10 off circuits, and then go try to boulder after. And I think most people would do that sort of common sense wise, 'cause you're like, yeah, I'm like annihilated palm to my skin hurts from doing all this, this training, I don't want to boulder anymore now. And even if I did want to, I probably, I'm not going to be effective at it. Like there's no way I'm going to hit those high level of strength and power anymore. So you always want to move from, it's the same ideas as why we said like you wouldn't want to train, train general strength in the weight room before your bouldering session. So bouldering, having it working on your high and strength and power in a bouldering session is higher intensity than this low level endurance work. So you do the bouldering first, then do the endurance after. And then I think my last point with that would be, I gave the sort of volume recommendations I gave here. Are definitely for standalone sessions. So you would probably want to reduce that quite a bit. And so. - And then rest more. - Yeah, exactly. So maybe it's something like, you know, if you're training in a modern commercial gym, maybe it's like you go board a climb for a bit, then you go grab a harness and you do like one or two triples or something. - But I have a feeling that's not something that you ever prescribed to your clients. - Don't really very often. One thing I do end up prescribing though is like, it's for clients who are at a recline gym to like sort of having a more performance oriented session. We might, whether like trying to send a hard route or trying to send a route and X number of tries or whatever kind of parameters we put on it, they might after it finish with like a single triple or a single double, like just to get some more kind of targeted and system work. - Yeah, that sounds. - But, but I, you know, it's not something I program all the time, but like, 20 people do combine sessions that way. - Yeah. - All right, so what we got through in this interview, this conversation was like some information that people could use to create sessions for themselves, create a training plan for themselves, and also like even me knowing a lot about training, I'm like, I don't know how to make a training plan for myself. And so that's where like you would come in, and I just wanna give you as a coach, I wanna give you an opportunity to tell people what you are offering right now for these next couple weeks with your coaching. So why don't you go ahead and do that? - Yeah, so I'm offering like a six month coaching package. And the idea there is I really wanna kind of work with athletes who wanna take a longer term view of their training and have enough time to like, really commit and put the work in to move the needle there. The, you know, the winter season's coming up for a lot of people in North America at least. That means it's like more of a training season. And so I think it's kind of a good time to buckle down and commit a little bit to having a coach, having a plan. You know, a lot of what we talked about in this episode was, you know, well, it depends, you could do this, you could do that. And, you know, by having a coach, especially committing to one for working together for a longer time period. Those are the questions that we can answer. And it stops being, it depends. And it starts being, well, I know exactly what I'm doing. And it's a planned out with like thought and reason behind it. Nice. And do you have anything else to add to that? Now, hopefully people found this helpful. Like I said, hopefully this doesn't come across as like an exhaustive list, because it definitely isn't. This is just like a way of kind of differentiating between your sessions. And I think anytime you, there's more, more intention behind the decisions you're making in your training, in your performance and your climbing in general. It's never a bad thing. So this is just a way of sort of logically looking at and thinking about these things. It's not, it's certainly not the only way. Great. Well, thank you very much as always. And I hope that your tread wall climbing gets a little bit more fun, Matt. (laughing) Well, you know, thanks for having me. I can't promise that my tread wall climbing will get more fun. But hopefully it'll result in feeling fit and ready. When I'm in Spain and March. So, it'll certainly, at least in my mind, I'll take all the boring tread wall sessions in the world, if it means I'm smashing roots in Margel F. Hell yeah. All right, well, I'll talk to you soon and thanks again. Thanks, bye, nearly. All right, I hope you enjoyed that talk with Coach Matt Pinkis. Hopefully you learned something and you can even take one of these or all of these sessions into your own training. I wanna remind you that Matt does have this six month promotion, which you can find at trainingbeta.com/matt just on his normal services page. Or if you wanna go straight to it, you just go to trainingbeta.com/matt6 all one word and that's the number six. So, wish me luck here with my hamstring and finding a project that doesn't hurt it. I'm really, really wanting to project right now. I've had a lot of fun just on-sighting this past year, two years, I don't know, but I really wanted to project something. So, I am quite sad that I'm having a hard time finding one, but I had a session with Natasha Barnes actually for my hamstring and that was quite helpful. She gave me some really clear exercises to do, which I'm able to do just here in my living room. She's great. If you need help with some injury that you have, I highly recommend her, Natasha Barnes. And I have no affiliation with her. I'm just saying she was pretty great. So, that's all I've got for you today. You can always find us on Instagram at trainingbeta. All of our resources are always at trainingbeta. Tons of free information there. So much free information there. You can check us out. And I always love positive reviews wherever you get your podcasts. So, thank you so much for listening all the way to the end. And I'll talk to you next time. (upbeat music)