The Secret to Training Endurance? Ditch the Rope.

Part 1: Endurance Is “Fatigue Management”

It was the early 1990s, and Frank Dusl was making the same transition that many American rock climbers were: He was rebuilding his style of climbing from vertical granite crack climber to overhanging limestone sport climber. There were so few steep routes at the time that the ones that did give a good pump were well-known and sought after. Climbers would flock to the few developed caves in the country, and desperately seek to “get endurance” by doing lap after lap on pumpy terrain.

For some, it worked, but for Frank, pure pump-fighting endurance ceased to be the problem. It was doing hardmoves on long and steep climbs—not just jug hauling—that was holding him back. It was in the garage behind his parents’ house in Lander, Wyoming, that Frank happened into learning big lessons in training applicable endurance.

Across the globe, climbers figured out the same things over and over: that they didn’t need multi-million-dollar gyms to get good (and in fact these might be a liability to getting good), that being able to do hard moves over and over again was what we really needed, and that it was discipline and drive that created success. Importantly, we learned that this could happen in a garage—no autobelay needed.

Fatigue Management

When it comes to “endurance,” what we’re really talking about is the ability to output power over and over again in a state of increasing fatigue. Because of this, I like to look at the practice not as endurance training, but fatigue management. The rock is not asking us to have a high VO2 max and massively oxygen-adapted muscle fibers throughout our bodies. We don’t need to be able to sprint, nor do cyclic exercise for hours at a time. It’s asking us to be able to be calm enough to relax when fatigued, to be able to move blood in and out of the working muscles efficiently, and to maintain the ability to do hard moves in less-than-ideal situations.

We need to address climbing better when fatigued, and we can do that in our training. Rather than seeking out a crippling pump—something any spring-break frat brother can figure out at the Chuckawalla Wall—we need to seek out climbing as hard as possible without getting pumped in the first place. If you want your arms to be “trashed,” do 10 supersets of bicep curls and wrist curls. If you want to make it to the lip of the cave and still be able to clip the anchors, read on.

More—and More Difficult

There are two main ways to address your stamina. You can do more “stuff” over a given time period, or you can do the same amount of “stuff” but with greater intensity.

These two values refer to your system’s “power” and its “capacity.” We tend to get confused and think of system power and muscular power as synonymous, but they aren’t. System power simply refers to your body’s ability to generate energy from a given system, which results in what we might call “power-endurance.” Muscular power is our ability to generate force quickly—the kind of power we get from training on a Campus board or by doing explosive weight training. Meanwhile, capacity increases would see you able to do more boulder problems or routes at a given difficulty in a day, whereas improvements in system power would see you be able to perform at a higher difficulty. We can address both of these abilities right at home.

Frank’s Garage

In Frank’s garage, he had some weights and a couple of hangboards. He also had 10’ x 12’ climbing wall that we’d now call a spray wall. On this wall, he’d finish out a day’s climbing or catch a session on a snow day. Many winter days would find Frank and friends climbing at Sinks Canyon until the sun fell behind the mountains, driving back to town eating snacks, and then hitting the garage for a few more hours’ work. There was the normal selection of boulder problems, but it was the circuits that were magic.

Over many months of climbing, Frank built out a 50-move circuit on the board, mostly on bigger holds and with plenty of good feet. It was a pumpy journey with big moves and awkward positions, which made it all the more like true rock climbing. Rather than building additional circuits as he improved, though, he simply made the choice to remove the best hold from the existing circuit and replace it with a worse hold. In this way, what used to be a rest would become a crux, and he might need several weeks before he could send the circuit again.

For variety, he would work the circuit backward, from move 50 down to move one, and could eventually link the thing in either direction. Over several months, the holds got smaller, the circuits longer, and his ability to do pretty damn hard moves several minutes into climbing improved. A lot. In fact, near the end of a year of this kind of training, he offhandedly said, “I don’t get pumped anymore; I just lose a little contact strength.” It wasn’t a boast; it was just an observation.

Let’s look at what was happening here. Frank first built the capacity to climb on the wall for a full session, then he started building the ability to do longer and longer links until he reached “performance duration” at 50 or so moves. This is a critical aspect: You don’t need to be able to climb continuously for 20 or 30 minutes…ever. Although well-intentioned, ARC-style endurance efforts tend to see us climbing at more-than necessary durations and at less-than-quality skill levels and difficulties. Built on the idea of the long, slow distance training that endurance athletes do, this kind of training doesn’t really serve climbers well—our fatigue comes from muscular overload and not from a lack of cardiovascular fitness. Even an elite marathoner gets very little out of going slower and longer than race distance. I’m all for building capacity in climbing, but doing more efforts in pitch-length intervals is simpler and more specific to our needs. If we want more capacity, we need to do more of these intervals—like Frank.

Once at 50 moves, Frank began to develop system power, essentially going harder for roughly the same duration. He took his time. Often, climbers expect to advance every single session, but true endurance is built one long and boring session at a time, often over several years. The crazy thing about building the ability to climb 50 moves at a time is that throwing in a crimp here and there starts to be less and less of a problem. By doing these workouts many times, one finds that at any given point in the circuit, doing a hard boulder just isn’t that hard anymore, since you’ve improved your ability to not get pumped.

Part 2: The Secret Is…A Bouldering Wall?!

What Do You Need?

First of all, let’s look at why a home wall—like the one in Frank Dusl’s garage—will be better. One of the issues with doing bouldering intervals or circuits in a commercial setting is the inability to control for intensity and duration. If I go into my local gym, pick four V5s, and crush a big 4×4 session, there is no chance that a month later—after the wall is reset—I’ll be able to replicate that same session nor increase its difficulty by “just enough.” The load ends up being too variable, based on the nature of the set and the whims of the setters. The continuity of the training process, from session one to, say, session eight is not progressive. Chances are that any progress I make will be a result of dumb luck. This works OK for a climber in the first years of training, but cannot help us progress once we’re closer to our genetic limits.

Thank goodness for your home wall, where you can leave the holds and problems fixed indefinitely, thus giving you an easily benchmarked and customizable training tool. It turns out your spray wall is way more useful than you’d ever hoped.

“Endurance” is a big target. For most of us, deciding what, precisely, we need to improve will help a lot. There are three main ways in which training can help improve our fatigue management:

1. We can get better at managing several hard moves in a row, being able to do the same duration at a higher power output.
2. We can get better at going slightly longer, doing greater durations at the same power output.
3. We can improve our ability to recover between efforts, whether at a sketchy kneebar rest or while sitting on a crashpad between burns on a problem.

When you’re first starting out, all of these things can be addressed at the same time, often unconsciously: The simple act of climbing stimulates your ability to do the sport, without any plan or instruction. Consider that all of us learn the most complex motor tasks of our lives in the first couple of years of breathing, with no coaching and no verbal instruction. We simply try to roll over, crawl, stand up, and walk until we can do these things. Climbing is the same way. Once you get pretty good, though, improvement starts to require focus.

If you’re training on a home board and reading about getting even more endurance, you’re likely well past the glory days of novice-level adaptations. Like me, you might go through a full month of training and not be all that sure that you got fitter. Diminishing returns are tough.

In part three of this article I will outline three different session types. Each is designed to address one of the main training goals above. Step one is to pick what you think you most need from your training. Step two is to focus on one and only one of the session types for an entire training cycle, which is normally 8 to 12 sessions over 4 to 6 weeks. Sorry for the broad range there, but there are a broad range of climbers reading this!

These sessions aren’t meant to dazzle. They are not built to torch, trash, or burn your muscles. They are meant to cultivate a slow, steady increase in managing fatigue while climbing. If you’ve never done 12 progressive endurance sessions, you’re in for some boring training whose efficacy you’ll often question. Remember that although getting endurance is boring, having it is not.

12 Sessions?!

Wait…12 sessions?! One of the things that a lot of people don’t get about training endurance is that it takes time. In general, people go too hard in the initial session or two, end up wiped out, and then drift away from the training. Many of us see a short term “boost” in endurance from a couple weeks of getting pumped and think that that’s all there is to it. Most of the climbers I work with who have “bad endurance” simply haven’t trained that system completely—they gave up too soon.

If you’ve ever started a running program, you will understand that it isn’t until the sixth or eighth or tenth run that you start to have the legs and lungs for faster or longer runs. Climbing is the same in many respects, and taking the time to develop good fitness may very well change your entire rock-climbing experience from here on out.

Patience.

The Bigger Picture: A Quick Note Before You Start
When it comes down to it, most of us think we need to improve all of the facets of climbing fitness, all the time. How, then, does your need to build your endurance balance with your finger-strength sessions, your limit bouldering, your yoga, your alpine training, and your actual days outside climbing?

The truth is that training for a sport as complex as climbing is not about balance, but compromise. When I suggest that a climber simply not do a finger-strength workout for two months, or avoid limit bouldering for a few weeks, it’s usually summarily dismissed as bad advice. The thing that I keep coming back to is the limited adaptability of the human system, and the infinite value of specialization we can achieve with enough focus.

We’ve all been sick or injured or traveling and didn’t do our hangboard program for days or weeks or months. Somehow, though, we were able to come back from that layoff and perform once again. Doing a full endurance phase is no different, except that you’ll actually still be climbing and will probably regain your finger strength or bouldering power or whatever all the more quickly. Home-board endurance is no walk in the park, and I’ll be surprised if you lose that much finger strength anyway, given the fingery nature of bouldering boards/spray walls.

Take a chance on focusing. Spend two or three sessions a week hammering away at one ability. I think you’ll like what happens.

Part 3: 6 Fail-Proof Bouldering-Wall Workouts

Linked Problems

In this session, we are looking to increase power-endurance for a specific route or boulder style. Some routes or problems, especially near your limit, will require more than just “endurance.” Say you want to do the Right Martini (V12) at Hueco Tanks. By checking out some videos online, you can easily figure out the duration it might take you, the movement, and more. For such a problem, you won’t need to be able to climb five minutes nonstop on jugs, so your training time would be better spent working on big moves between crimps, and doing work intervals closer to two minutes.

With this in mind, you can be very specific with hold types, angle, and the difficulty of the problems. In general, you’ll start with a good bouldering warm-up that ends with some longer problems to get a bit of a pump in the arms. Rest 4 to 6 minutes, then set up for the session.

The standard session comprises 4 to 8 sets of two linked problems, both around your flash grade or just slightly easier. You will climb problem 1 to its end, then downclimb on open holds, but avoid shakeouts and taking too much time on the way down. Once back close to the bottom, traverse to the beginning of problem 2 then climb that problem to the top. You can also choose to do the same problem twice. Don’t fall into the trap of always making the second problem easier—it will come back to bite you. When in doubt, do the easier problem first. If we continually add easy climbing on after harder climbing, we allow our bodies to adapt to using lower-threshold (weaker) muscle fibers as we fatigue. The goal of power-endurance training should always be to maintain the highest power possible in each effort.

Most athletes will complete one set in 60 to 90 seconds. Aim to start with at least a 1:5 work:rest ratio, so if your set takes 90 seconds, you’ll rest about 8 minutes before the next set. If you see solid performance across all sets, you can increase the difficulty of the problems in the next session. If your performance tapers off, add a couple of minutes of rest between each set. Don’t decrease rest time between sets! Although this will make the session more difficult, it is a less useful adaptation than resting plenty and doing harder moves in the work sets.

This session takes 35 to 75 minutes after warm-up.

I recommend doing just 4 sets in session 1, five in session 2, and working up to 7 or 8 sets for the remainder of the training cycle.

Extended Circuits

Extended circuits are similar to what Frank Dusl did back on his home wall. There are two ways to approach building your circuits.

Method One

Do a problem 1 to 2 grades easier than your flash grade, then add in a technical (i.e., not just downclimbing on jugs and huge feet) traverse/downclimb back to the base of the wall, from where you launch into the next problem. Over the course of several sessions, you’ll dial in the beta, then add more climbing back up, in circles, etc. You can incorporate existing problems, but try to avoid super-easy sections. Consistent climbing difficulty allows you to better recognize the signs of fatigue and of improvement. Once you get to your ideal circuit length (over 50 moves is rarely useful), you can start trying to send it, hopefully a few times per session. This method works best for walls with fixed hold patterns, such as the Grasshopper, Tension, Kilter, or MoonBoard.

Method Two

If you have a wall where the hold patterns aren’t fixed—on which you can move holds around—this second method can be very educational and entertaining. Here, you’ll figure out a very easy (technical moves, yet on big holds) circuit from 20 to 50 moves long—your adaptations will be specific to the circuit length, so feel free to customize based on your training goals. Once you have a long circuit sorted out, your goal is to send it maybe 4 out of 5 tries per session.

A typical session will involve doing the circuit, then resting at least five times as long as you climbed—and maybe more. You don’t want to start set two noticeably fatigued from set one. Ideally, the first session or two will leave you thinking that you haven’t trained hard enough. If you send 4 out of 5 circuits in a session, take a look at the circuit and try to eliminate the easiest move or change one of the biggest holds out for a more challenging one. Small changes can make big differences.

Remember that it’s not just smaller holds that make a problem difficult; look for difficult hold matches, hard cross-though moves, dynamic reaches, and bad footholds. Circuit setting is an art in and of itself, and is worth paying attention to as you train. Often it is the awkward nature of climbing positions and not the holds themselves that makes outdoor climbing so tough. The better we can simulate that experience, the better our training will transfer to the rock.

Timed Intervals

I have two favorite workouts that use the clock. The first is boulders on the minute (OTM), and the second is density sessions.

OTM Sessions

In OTM sessions, we usually limit the sets to 10 minutes, meaning that you’d do one problem each minute for a total of 10 problems before taking a 10-minute break. The problems on home walls tend to be short and powerful, but for this session you want to be sure that you’re climbing for less than 35 seconds at a time. If your problems are taking any longer, you’re going to end up getting terribly pumped really quickly, which is not the goal of the training.

For most climbers, I find that two sets of OTM problems per session is a good place to start: You work for 10 minutes, rest 10 minutes, then do 10 more problems/minutes. Factoring in your warm-up, this session takes just 40 to 50 minutes. If you’re unused to this kind of training, start with the easiest problems you can find. For example, session one might see you do 10 V1 problems, rest 10 minutes, then do 10 more V1s. Next session, add in two to three slightly harder problems, and progress the problems after that as tolerated. Eventually, you’ll average out to V2s, then V3s, and so on.

More advanced climbers can aim for three or even four sets per session, but the true value here is to add difficulty to the repeated problems rather than to add massive duration to a workout. The training outcomes of multiple sets result in high capacities for repeated efforts, whereas harder problems will lead you to harder individual sends.

Density Sessions

A second timed series that works well on a home wall is a density session. Density sessions are all about fitting more work at a given workload into a fixed time period. For this workout, we’ll again use the 10-minute timer, but this time, we will go just a bit harder on the initial problems. Instead of aiming for easy as possible, as we do in the OTM session, these problems should be one to two grades below your flash level. Once you’ve determined the difficulty of the problems, make sure you know several problems in this zone well. Playing around with your app or trying to onsight will slow you down substantially.

Once you’re warmed up, set a timer for 10 minutes and start climbing. Note each problem as you complete it, and rest as needed between problems. At the end of 10 minutes, take a break of 10 more minutes, then repeat another 10 minutes of density climbing. In this workout, you might get only 6 to 7 problems in 10 minutes at first. This is fine. In the density sessions, we’ll advance the climbing differently than we do in OTM. Rather than trying to increase the difficulty of the sets, we will instead pursue more total climbing per 10-minute block. This might look like just one more problem per workout, but over the course of a full cycle of endurance, the changes will be great.

As I noted previously, the value of any of these sessions is in the sum of several of them, not in the fatigue of the first. Careful and slow progress through 8 to 12 workouts will yield excellent and noticeable results.

Customize Your Workout

If you’re getting pumped silly on routes, starting with a series of linked problems might be your best bet. If you just can’t recover at rests, OTM or density workouts can show good results. If power output starts to fade on long boulders or short routes, extended circuits can be of great use.

Although each of these sessions produces slightly different results, you can incorporate all of these session styles into your long-term training plan. Focusing on just one style of session tends to show better results, and taking the time to step back and take a look at what’s truly holding us back is a big key.

Steve Bechtel is a lifelong climber, and has been coaching climbers for most of his adult life. He is the cofounder of the coaching company Climb Strong and the education director for the Performance Climbing Coach seminars. He lives with his wife, Ellen, and their children, Anabel and Sam, in Lander, Wyoming.