The Rock Climbers Training Manual

[Prometeo Archuleta]

Internationaldistribution is still in-work, so I don;t know where it will be available yet. Wehn we have information on international distribution we will post an announcement. At this time there is no plan to create an e-book.

Just recieved your book here in the uk and havent had the chance to get round to fully reading it but from what i have scanned it looks very helpful not only for my own climbing but helping with my personal coachin of other climbers.

Also would like to say thanks for the note inside it was a nice touch.

Bonjour mocfilm.

Merci pour votre rponse.

Je ne connais pas du tout le procd de ce service.

Il y a t il un prix au mot la page au livre?

Je serais intress de savoir le prix de la traduction .

Merci cordialement olivier

I am Fede, a spanish engineer and climber living in the UK. I think your book is a superb tool for any climber wanting to improve and I would like to offer myself to help with the translation to spanish in case you consider it any time.

I would recommend finding a qualified guide in your area to take you out for a day and see how you like. A good guide can also teach you some basic skills and help you get started on the right path.

Good luck,

Mark

Just purchased your book and the Trango rock prodigy. Former 5.12+ climber starting over basically and living in North Idaho, not much chance to get outside and do routes for the first phase Basic Fitness this time of year.

Awesome overview, I like the chapter breakdown.

This book is a great leap forward for climbers who are interested in training and learning about the physiology and psychology of difficult rock climbing. The Anderson Bro's have done a service to the rock climbing community, I hope the book is well used.

I'm looking forward to reading it. Even though most of my projects are more mountain oriented at this time, having some big strength or power to apply as necessary can only help. I've been doing a variation of the program as previously revealed here on MountainProject for a few years (without the emphasis on periodization) to fill in when I'm not getting out so much and it works.

+1 that the book rocks.

I have to admit reading through it may have made me hungry to get strong.

One of the things that I like the best is the awesome motivational pictures sprinkled throughout the book. Makes me want to plan climbing trips just to hit some of those locations. Of course they are all pictures of HARD stuff so I will need to train for a bit first.

Yes, buy this book. Coming from someone who never trains, I crushed this book in about 3-4 days and I couldn't be more excited for this program. If Mark and Mike can balance careers, kids, not being 25, etc, and can still crush 5.14, then I'm sold. This seems like a similar, but more realistic approach than Horst's guide to training.

Still working through the book, although I've gotten through the first 11 chapters.

I HIGHLY recommend it. I'm just now entering my peak phase and have finally pushed that mid-5.10 plateau. I'm looking forward to improving in oncoming seasons!

The book is extremely well written, has great images, is clear, concise, and will be beneficial to anyone who uses it.

Yep -- I finished this book about a week and a half after getting it, and am now in week 3 of the program I put together based on what I've learned.

It really is a textbook on the science of training for climbing, and how to put it all together into a focused training program. Great review, Mark & a very big thanks to the Andersons for their continuing contributions to the community.

I really liked the "Quick start guide" (can't remember the page number right now, but it's in the early part) for those who are just anxious to get started right away without reading all the nearly 300 pages. This book is big and heavy, which is awesome! I haven't been able to read it as much as I'd hoped up until now, but I'm slowly picking my way through it now and it hasn't disappointed yet.

another thing that is really handy - there is an appendix section (p298-299) that has small figures of the various schedules and individual workouts, and shows what page they are on. really handy if you are quickly wanting to go find one of them.

there is a LOT of info in this book. i really like the section on nutrition. when i was younger i could eat anything and everything, but i am starting to get to that age where this is (sadly) coming to an end.

One of the best aspects of the book is that they tell you why you do everything and offer scientific evidence when it exists. The best book for climbing training out there, and will let you taylor your program to your goals. Sometimes I find the text a little long winded, but that is a very minor complaint.

I agree that this is a great book. I've read a lot of training books. They are usually the type of book that I would like someone else to read and explain to me. This book summarized a lot of what I've read in simple language, and the authors frequently encourage you to skip parts of the book, if you'd like, that do not directly relate to training.

Two recommendations for future editions:

1. Add an index. I know they are hard to do, but it would make the book much easier to navigate.

2. Remove the ads. It seems that a lot of publishers are doing this in climbing books. I can understand ads in magazines, where most of the money is made through through advertising, but it seems odd to see them in books where the income comes from the purchase price.

Even so, I'd highly recommend buying and reading the book as soon as you can.

Just got my copy today, so I read the parts that were of greatest interest, scanned around the rest.

Very specific.

Just what I wanted ... specifics about exercises, about equipment, about rest, about periods, specific arguments to justify choices based on (the necessarily sketchy) science. I'm not looking for a new overall program, but two or three new key pointers or perspectives in each area of training that I hadn't heard of or thought of would be worth the price and time of the book (and just ignore the ones that I don't agree with, or that don't apply to my situation).

Unlike Eric Horst's Training book which tends to offer multiple approaches, e.g. like six for finger strength (which you can either take as extra value or just confusing) ...

This book focuses you really well on one approach and hammers out the details, tells you their "right" way, step by step. If you want options to mix and match with some other successful elite climber's "right" way, buy a seond book. Works for me.

specific reactions / questions:

I would feel that dance, especially classical dance is an activity most comparable to climbing, especially in terms of complexity and unnatural form. While finger strength is most important strength-wise, skill is paramount. The redpoint vs onsight difference in beginner climbers shows this especially well. So I would take any power-sport comparisons with a huge brick of salt.

i think there are several key things that really limit the length of each of the phases, and therefore the cycle for an 'advanced' trainee. note that by 'advanced' i don't necessarily mean a 5.15 climber - i mean someone who has followed a training program for a while.

first - an advanced trainee will likely start the phase at a level that is much closer to their current limit than a beginner will. what i am saying is that with the knowledge from numerous previous cycles, the advanced person will have a lot more accurate guess for the first workout. on the other hand, someone without a lot of history would (and should for that matter) err on the side of going too easy. it might take them 4 or 5 workouts just to get up to where they could have started. the advanced person will also have a better guess of how much to increase the stimulus from workout to workout, which will also keep them up closer to their current limit.

my experience with this is that my strength phase is shorter than it used to be. i used to go 10 to 12 workouts and have consistent gains. now, i get about 6 to 8 workouts before i really have to evaluate whether i should switch over to power. in the past, i also really thought that it was essential to milk every last bit of strength i could out of my phase, and do the workouts until i was completely flatlining. now, i am really convinced that it is beter to switch over a bit earlier, just when it seems i am starting to plateau.

the real reason for this is somewhat psychological and somewhat physical. i found that if i really milked the strength training too long i would start regressing. this is pretty normal (although i didn't know it way back then). this is psychologically not good - you need to go into your power phase amped, not bummed. you want to feel like you are still marching forward, not backwards. also, if my strength phase ran too long it made me really, really tired overall and did not help my performance at all.

finally, it also comes down to optimizing the decay rates versus the gain rates of the phases you are doing. you can only improve for so long, and the gains you have also decay at different rates among themselves. for example, if you do a good strength phase, but then horse around for 3 months trying to put together a power program, by the end of the power program your strength has decayed enough to not really be optimal for building the power. then you would go into the PE program, strength would have long decayed, power wouldn't be optimal and declining, etc. by the time your PE was in good shape, strength and power would be long gone.

it just all kind of works out to the time periods naturally.

Slim good points. I agree with your classification of training stage by amount of previous training, vs. current rock climbing ability.

I am very glad to see that there are others out there beside me tracking their training and adjusting as necessary to get the best results over time. Your adjustment from a longer to a shorter strength phase is one of these adjustments. A clarifying question, during your strength phase do you apply a linear loading pattern on the fingerboard? By that I mean in general does session #[N+1] use a higher stimulus/load then session #[N], where N is sessions 1-10?

In general most fingerboard workouts I have seen and most strength phases follow a linear pattern where session [N+1], will generally have a higher load, until progress has plateaued and the focus then switches from strength -> power or something similar. There is nothing wrong with this approach as I think consistent gains can be made for a very long time this way, but I think there is an avenue to create larger gains in the strength phase through the incorporation of more complex loading patterns. The linear progression assumes that progress can be made from session to session throughout the phase, whereas an undulating loading pattern may follow a pattern such as this:

Day 1:Medium Load, High Volume

Rest Day

Day 2:Medium Load, Low Volume

Rest Day

Day 3:High Load, Medium Volume

Rest Day

Rest Day

This pattern aims to increase the loading pattern over a week of time, this undulation could be extended to a 2 week or 1 month cycle. As of yet this idea of undulating loading patterns for fingerboard/strength in rock climbing has yet to be explored in any large way, but is used heavily in other sports where strength development is needed. I am not sure the best way to began the experiment, but I have been thinking and tinkering with the ideas for some time now and would like to see these ideas start to evolve in the sphere of training knowledge for rock climbing.

Great conversation!

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