A few years ago I felt like my rock climbing overall hit a brick wall, so I decided to take a deep dive into fitness and training to figure it out. I quickly became overwhelmed; with all of the information I was finding, I seemed to have even more questions than when I began. With such a vast amount of information, I kept searching and trying things, hoping for the “magic fix." Sorry to say, in all reality, there is no “magic” workout, diet, or plan that will make everything easy. If it were that simple and easy, wouldn’t we all be Olympic athletes? I am no expert trainer by any means, but I’ve shared what I have learned and discovered with friends at my local gym and thought I should/could share this information with others. Climbing has always been a passion of mine; I have been doing it for as many years as I can remember, and I feel like the knowledge of training is always a gray area.

Over the years, as I gathered more information, I realized something that has not only helped my climbing but my life as well. All this information, whatever it may be, was simply a road map to find and figure out how to achieve my goals in a way that worked for me. That is the key part: “Worked for ME." This is the most important thing to understand when it comes to training for any sport. There is no magic fix, exercise, or diet that will work for everyone, no matter what we are trying to achieve. We all have different needs—nutritionally, physically, and mentally—and we need to figure out how best to balance all three of those in a way that works for us. I believe that finding the right balance for your body and life will help you reach your goals, whatever they may be. That being said, I am going to take you through my own process and hopefully give you some tools to use as you build your own climbing journey map. This is going to be part of a series of articles we will call Self-Climbing Coach 101. In part one, we will cover the basics, setting up our goal, and making a foundation to build on. In part two, we will get into the details of training more specific muscles geared more towards climbing and improving upon our foundation. In part three, we will focus on taking what we've learned and using it for the entirety of our climbing journey.

We are going to start by simply asking ourselves three questions: What is my end goal? When do I want to achieve that goal/need to achieve that goal? How am I going to hold myself responsible? The goal here and with this article is not to give you a detailed plan to follow. Our goal is to help you build your own plan that works for you mentally, physically, emotionally, and nutritionally.

Let's start with number one. What is my end goal? Don't overcomplicate it; what is the ultimate end goal we are training for? That is all we are looking for here—a simple, measurable goal. This answer should not contain more than a few sentences. For our example and the duration of this series, we will assume the role of a beginner climber. The only rule we will set is that we are able to measure our goal in some way. We will use this goal throughout the article: I want to climb at a level of a V4 boulder problem. That is all we are looking for; we have a simple, attainable, measurable goal. We have answered our first question; this is going to be easy! Now let's move on and dive into the fun!

So we have our goal set; now we need to figure out and lay the map for achieving that goal, which brings us to question number two. How am I going to achieve that goal? This one is not going to be as simple, as this is the point we need to build the foundation on which we build. This will be your road map for the duration of this goal, as well as future goals, so make sure to spend some time on it. To help us answer this one, we are going to build four pillars for our foundation. Each pillar will focus on a different aspect of our plan; our four pillars will be as follows: fitness, nutrition, time, and accountability. We will carry and build upon this foundation as we expand and achieve our goals. Our fitness pillar will be built with the exercises and workouts we will use to achieve our goals. Our nutrition pillar will be built by establishing healthy eating habits. Our time pillar will be where we set a schedule of some sort. Lastly, our accountability pillar will be where we hold ourselves accountable for the duration of the goal.

Let’s start with nutrition, as no matter how hard we workout, it won't matter if all we eat is cake and ice cream, even though they are amazing! . I am not a dietitian or nutritionist; I do not claim to have the answers; this is only my opinion and what has worked for me. That being said, I like to avoid the word “diet” as much as possible, as it has such a negative context. We all have different nutritional needs based on our lifestyle, so we need to find what works for us, do some research, but try to avoid limitations. By avoiding limitations, we are more easily able to follow and stick with something long-term. Like I said, this process is hard. We want to build a foundation so that we can easily achieve our goals without feeling overwhelmed. By asking ourselves all of these questions along the planning process, we eliminate the questions down the road. So back to building our nutrition pillar. We want to establish healthy eating habits without limitations; that is key! And how do we do that? I like to start with a few simple things: Do I have any dietary restrictions? If so, what are they? What are my current eating habits? Are they good or bad? That is all we are going to focus on to keep it simple. Then really pay attention to what we are eating and putting in our bodies for about two weeks to a month. During this time I want to focus on two main things: what am I putting into your body, and how do I feel. In terms of what is going on, we are trying to focus on getting all the nutrients we need from whole foods. We want to avoid highly processed foods, eating out every night, or eating birthday cake every night, even though it is so good! A good way to help with this is to use some sort of food tracking app. I like myfitnesspal and chronometer, as both have free options, are easy to use, and give us the information we need. We are looking to track a few basic things: how much we are eating, but don't stress or focus on this too much right now. What kind of foods are we eating, what nutrients are we getting, i.e., are we eating a balanced diet or are we heavy on fats, carbs, or proteins? These need to be adjusted to achieve our goals, but for now focus on a balance that is maintaining weight and feeling good to you and your body. Once we have this down, we can start to adapt to better align with our goals.

Let's get started with our fitness pillar. Again, we will be using our goal: I want to climb at a level of a V4 boulder problem for this example. So first off, where do we start? Well, with any fitness goal we need to start with, you guessed it, more questions! I know, more questions, but remember we want to try and answer all the questions now to avoid more later, and if we build a good, solid foundation, it will be easier to adapt as we achieve and progress with our goals. So let’s start with a simple, basic assessment of our overall fitness. How often are we at the gym? Are we already in good shape? If so, then great, keep it up; if not and we could improve, we always can; that is the point of all this, right? We want to start with a solid foundation; our fitness foundation is just that; we want to establish a good, healthy base of fitness to build off of. We are going to start with four exercises and cardio. Remember, if we are training for climbing, our goal is not to look like a bodybuilder. We are going to start with squats, deadlifts, bench presses, and pullups. We will be building on this later, but for now, let's start here. Squats, deadlifts, and bench presses are some of the best workouts for overall fitness; they are relatively easy, don't require a lot of fancy equipment, and are great workouts to build a good foundation upon. So enough talk, let’s actually build a workout! We will also start working on the time management pillar simultaneously here as well. To start, let's start with 2-4 sessions of training a week. We can adapt this based on how we are feeling or if we have a climbing trip planned! We will look at a simple plan for both 2 and 4 days. For a two-day schedule, we are aiming for one gym day and one climbing day; for a four-day schedule, two gym days and two climbing days. If you have 3 days, add an extra climbing day. Once we have figured out a schedule, 2 days, 3 days, 4 days. A gym day might look something like this:

A warm-up routine: we want to aim for 10 minutes of light to moderate work to just get the body warmed up and feeling ready. This can be anything you want, running, biking, or yoga; the goal is to warm up the body. Once we achieve this rest for 2 minutes and jump into the next step, rest can be used to set up for the next part.

The workout: our workout consists of four workouts done in pairs. We are going to do 4 sets of 5-10 reps of each exercise with 30 seconds between sets and a 2-minute rest between exercises. We are aiming for failure at 10 in all of our exercises. For pullups, if you can’t do 5 yet, that is totally fine; add a band to help, wrap it around the bar, and put a foot in it. If you are the hulk and can do more than 10, add weight until you can't do more than 5 again; once you hit 10 again, add more weight, and so on. For deadlifts, squats, and bench presses, use a barbell. We are going to use the same principles for the weight as we did with the pullups. We want to be at least five but no more than 10. Once we hit 10 reps, we add weight until our failure is at 5 reps again and so on; however, do not exceed 2x your bodyweight with any of these, as again, we aren’t going for bodybuilding status here.

Group one: pull-ups and deadlifts.

5-10 pullups. 4 sets

5-10 deadlifts with good form. 4 sets

Rest for 30 seconds between sets, 2 minutes between exercises.

Rest for 4 minutes between groups one and two.

Group two: squats and bench press.

5-10 squats

5-10 bench presses

Rest for 30 seconds between sets, 2 minutes between exercises.

Tip: Keep a journal for your training, put in climbs, weights for your exercises, notes to yourself, etc.

That is it for our gym day. It should be about 30-45 minutes and will help us build a great base fitness. Four-day schedules just do this twice a week, but not two days in a row. Now let's look at the climbing days.

Climbing days are going to be structured a little differently. While we want to have fun while we climb, we still don't want to just fling ourselves around on the wall. We are going to be focusing on climbing drills and techniques to build good habits. Once we are comfortably climbing around v3-4 with good technique and form, we will add more climbing-specific strength training into our program. Climbing days are going to be focused around three main things: strength, technique, and endurance. The biggest one being technique. We do not need to do all three in the same session; we will try and focus on two per session. I usually break it up like this technique will be our floating one; we will pair it with either strength or endurance. A strength day would look something like this; maybe there is a new set at the gym that looks really cool! Our main goal on a strength session is to climb at our limit with good technique until we feel used up. During these sessions, the goal is not necessarily to finish a problem; we are projecting at our limit; the goal is to make progress. A good rule of thumb is that once we feel like we are desperately throwing ourselves around, it is time to stop. Endurance sessions are going to be a little different. We are still climbing with good technique; only now we are going for more climbs at a lower difficulty. The goal with this is to build the climbing muscles and be able to climb harder for longer before we get fatigued. Strength at the beginning of our climbing journeys will mostly come from simply climbing. We need to learn not only how to use our muscles, but let our body build those muscles and get used to holding our weight on weird-shaped things with our fingers! Still with me? So far it doesn’t seem that daunting, I hope. Again, we want to make this attable and achievable so we don't give up. As far as time for climbing sessions, there really isn't a magic time; allow it to naturally flow. We want to feel worked, but not to the point we couldn’t climb a ladder! A good starting point is to aim for about an hour of limit climbing and about one to two hours for endurance climbing. Remember, no matter what we are doing, limit climbing or endurance; we are still practicing good technique!

Look at that! We have four pillars down; we have built our fitness pillar with core exercises that will grow and adapt with us as we progress and add to them. We have found time and made a schedule to hold ourselves accountable for achieving our goal! We have a good idea of how and what we are going to eat to keep our body fueled so we can achieve our goals! We have built our foundation and laid out our map to achieve our goals. All that is left is to follow the map and don't forget to have fun along the way!

A few years ago I felt like not only my rock climbing but my fitness overall hit a brick wall, so I decided to take a deep dive into fitness and figure it out. I quickly became overwhelmed, with all of the information I was finding, I seemed to have even more questions when I began. Some questions that came up were: Where do I Start? How do I know if it is working? How do I know what to do when? How often do I train? With such a vast amount of information everyone seems to think that their way is the “magic fix”. We have all seen the ads on Instagram and tik-tok claiming they have found the secret to getting in shape. In all reality there is no “magic workout, diet or plan that will make everything easy. If it were that simple and easy wouldn’t we all be Olympic athletes? I am no expert trainer by any means but I’ve shared what I have learned and discovered with friends at my local gym and thought I should/could share this information with others. Climbing has always been a passion of mine, I have been doing it for as many years as I can remember, and like I said I think it is time to share my knowledge. Over the years, as I gathered more information I realized something that has not only helped my climbing but my life as well. All this information, whatever it may be, was simply a road map to find and figure out how to achieve my goals in a way that worked for me. That is the key part “ worked for ME '' This is the most important thing to understand when it comes to training for any sport, or better yet it is the most important piece to our finding happiness and fullness in our lives. There is no magic fix, exercise or diet that will work for everyone, no matter what we are trying to achieve. We all have different needs; nutritionally, physically and mentally and we need to figure out how best to balance all three of those in a way that works for us. I believe that finding the right balance for your body and life will help you reach your goals whatever they may be. So let us take a trip together and start answering some of our burning questions. So I thought I’d share what I learned. This is going to be part of a series of articles we will call Self Climbing Coach 101. So take a little rest and let's get started! Start by simply asking yourself three questions: What is my end goal? When do I want to achieve that goal/need to achieve that goal? How am I going to hold myself responsible?

Let's start with number one. What is my end goal? We will use climbing as an example here. Don't over complicate it, what is the ultimate end goal we are training for? That is all we are looking for here, a simple measurable goal. This answer should not contain more than a few sentences. For our example we will assume the role of a beginner climber. The only rule we will set is that we are able to measure our goal in some way. We will use this goal throughout the article: I want to climb at a level of a V4 boulder problem. That is all we are looking for; we have a simple, attainable, measurable goal. We have answered our first question, this is going to be easy! Now let's move on and dive into the fun!

So we have our goal set now we need to figure out and lay the map for achieving that goal, which brings us to question number two. How am I going to achieve that goal? This one is not going to be as simple, as this is the point we need to build the foundation in which we build upon. This will be your road map for the duration of this goal so make sure to spend some time on it. To help us answer this one we are going to build four pillars for our foundation. Each pillar will focus on a different aspect of our plan, our four pillars will be as follows: Fitness, Nutrition, Time, Accountability. Let's dive in and start building! Our fitness pillar will be built with the exercises and workouts we will use to achieve our goals. Our Nutrition pillar will be built with establishing healthy eating habits. This one is hard so we will spend some time on it. Our Time pillar will be built with a schedule of some sort. Lastly our Accountability pillar will be where we hold ourselves accountable for the duration of the goal.

Let’s start with nutrition as no matter how hard we workout it won't matter if all we eat is cake and ice cream even though they are amazing! . I am not a dietitian or nutritionist, I do not claim to have the answers, this is only my opinion and what has worked for me. That being said, I like to avoid the word “Diet” as much as possible as it has such a negative context. We all have different nutritional needs based on our lifestyle, so we need to find what works for us, do some research but try to avoid limitations. By avoiding limitations we are more easily able to follow and stick with something long term. More questions I guess! Like I said this process is hard, we want to build a foundation so that we can easily achieve our goals without feeling overwhelmed. By asking ourselves all of these questions along the planning process we eliminate the questions down the road. So back to building our nutrition pillar. Like I said we want to establish healthy eating habits without limitations, that is key! And how do we do that? I like to start with a few simple things: Do I have any dietary restrictions? If so, what are they? What are my current eating habits, are they good or bad? That is all we are going to focus on to keep it simple. Then really pay attention to what we are eating and putting in our bodies for about two weeks to a month. During this time I want to focus on two main things, what am I putting into your body, and how do I feel. In terms of what is going in, we are trying to focus on getting all the nutrients we need from whole foods. We want to avoid highly processed foods, eating out every night, or eating birthday cake every night, even though it is so good! A good way to help with this is to use some sort of food tracking app. I like myfitnesspal and chronometer as both have free options and are easy to use and give us the information we need. We are looking to track a few basic things: how much we are eating, but don't stress or focus on this too much right now. What kind of foods are we eating, what nutrients are we getting, I.e. Are we eating a balanced diet or are we heavy on fats, carbs, or proteins, these need to be adjusted to achieve our goals, but for now focus on a balance that is maintaining weight and feeling good to you and your body. Once we have this down we can start to adapt to better align with our goals.

Let's Get started with our fitness pillar. Again we will be using our goal: I want to climb at a level of a V4 boulder problem for this example. So first off, where do we start, well with any fitness goal we need to start with you guessed it more questions! I know, more questions, but remember we want to try and answer all the questions now to avoid more later, and if we build a good solid foundation it will be easier to adapt as we achieve and progress with our goals. So let’s start with a simple basic assessment of our overall fitness. How often are we at the gym? Are we already in good shape? If so then great keep it up, if not and we could improve, we always can, that is the point of all this right! We want to start with a solid foundation, or fitness foundation is just that, we want to establish a good healthy base fitness to build off of. We are going to start with four exercise, and cardio, remember if we are training for climbing our goal is not to look like a bodybuilder. We are going to start with squats, deadlifts, bench press, and pullups. We will be building on this later, but for now let's start here. Squats, deadlifts and bench presses are some of the best workouts for overall fitness, they are relatively easy, don't require a lot of fancy equipment and great workouts to build a good foundation upon. So enough talk let’s actually build a workout! We will also start working on the Time management pillar simultaneously here as well. To start let's start with 2-4 sessions of training a week, we can adapt this based on how we are feeling, or if we have a climbing trip planned! We will look at a simple plan for both 2 and 4 days. For a two day schedule we are aiming for one gym day and one climbing day, a four day schedule two gym and two climbing. Once we have figured out a schedule, a 2 day or 4 day. A gym day would look something like this:

A warm up routine: we want to aim for 10 minutes of light to moderate work to just get the body warmed up and feeling ready. This can be anything you want, running, biking or jumping jacks are my go to’s. Once we achieve this rest for 2 minutes and jump into the next step, rest can be used to set up for the next part.

The workout: our gym day workout consists of four workouts done in pairs.We are going to do 4 sets 5-10 reps of each exercise with no rest in between exercises and a 2 minute rest between sets. We are aiming for failure at 10 in all of our exercises. For pullups if you can’t do 5 yet that is totally fine, add a band to help wrap it around the bar and put a foot in it. If you are the hulk and can do more than 10, add weight until you can't do more than 5 again, once you hit 10 again add more weight and so on. For deadlifts and squats use a barbell, for bench press I like dumbbells, only have one barbell as well, but a barbell can also be used if you want. We are going to use the same principles for the weight as we did with the pullups. We want to be at least five but no more than 10, once we hit 10 reps we add weight until our failure is at 5 reps again and so on, however do not exceed 2x your bodyweight with any of these, as again we aren’t going for bodybuilding status here.

Set one: pull ups and deadlifts.

5-10 pullups.

5-10 deadlifts with good form.

Rest for 2 minutes and repeat 3 more times.

Set two: Squats and bench press.

5-10 squats

5-10 bench presses

Rest for 2 minutes and repeat 3 more times.

That is it for our gym day should be about 30-45 minutes and will help us build a great base fitness. Four day schedules just do this twice a week, but not 2 days in a row. Now let's look at the climbing days.

Climbing days are going to be a little different and less structured than our gym days for now. While we still are not going to just fling ourselves around on the wall, we are only going to be focusing on climbing related exercises and drills. Once we are comfortably climbing around v4-5 we will begin to focus on adding more on climbing specific strength training into our program. Climbing days are going to be focused around three main things: Strength, technique and endurance. We do not need to do all three in the same session, we will try and focus on 2 per session. I usually break it up like this technique will be our floating one, we will pair it with either strength or endurance. A strength day would look something like this, maybe there is a new set at the gym that looks really cool! Our main goal on a strength session is to climb at our limit with good technique until we feel used up. During these sessions the goal is not necessarily to finish a problem, we are projecting at our limit, the goal is to make progress. A good rule of thumb is once we feel like we are desperately throwing ourselves around it is time to stop. Endurance sessions are going to be a little different. We are still climbing with good technique, only now we are going for more climbs at a lower difficulty. The goal with this is to build the climbing muscles and be able to climb harder, for longer before we get fatigued. Strength in the beginning of our climbing journeys will mostly come from simply climbing. We need to learn not only how to use our muscles, but let our body build those muscles, and get used to holding our weight on weird shaped things with our fingers! Still with me? So far it doesn’t seem that daunting I hope, again we want to make this attainable and achievable so we don't give up. As far as time for climbing sessions there really isn't a magic time, allow it to naturally flow, we want to feel worked but not to the point we couldn’t climb a ladder! A good starting point is to aim for about thirty minutes to an hour of limit climbing, and about one to two hours for endurance climbing. Remember no matter what we are doing, limit climbing or endurance, we are still practicing good technique!

Look at that! We have four pillars down, we have built our fitness pillar, with core exercises that will grow and adapt with us as we progress and add to them. We have found time and made a schedule to hold ourselves accountable for achieving our goal! We have a good idea of how and what we are going to eat to keep our body fueled so we can achieve our goals! We have achieved it! We have built our foundation and have our map to achieve our goals! All that is left is to follow the map and don't forget to have fun along the way!

Here are two basic examples of a 2 and 4 day schedule. You will notice that they both have more days built into them, use them as a base. It is okay to two days in a row based on how your body feels, but make sure to have at least two rest days!