Being a climbing training website, all of us here at Training Beta obviously love taking our training seriously. Personally, one of my favorite feelings in climbing is completing a training cycle where I truly know I have been disciplined and executed exactly what I set out to accomplish.
However, while this can be a great feeling, we can also all probably relate to the feeling of having taken this commitment to a training schedule a little to far and tried to force ourselves through a training session we clearly weren’t recovered for. Here’s an article by Alli Rainey that explores our desire to be disciplined with training and how at times this can both help and hurt us.
“When I was a much younger climber, I truly believed that sticking to my rigid seven-days-a-week training schedule and diet meant that I was a supremely disciplined athlete. No matter how I felt on any given day when I awoke, my training and diet plan provided me with structure and control over my reality, and I had supreme faith that by adhering to this severe program, I would at some point in the future prevail, that I would be able to mold (or should I say, “beat?”) my body into the climber I dreamed of being.”
This type of attitude is definitely prevalent in climbers who are trying their hardest to milk every bit of potential out of their bodies. However, as Alli goes on to point out, while this kind of unwavering discipline to a training program may seem like you are really trying your hardest to improve, it could in fact be sabotaging your efforts.
Instead, when it comes to training for climbing (and for life in general), Alli advocates a more balanced approach that prioritizes not only listening to the feedback your body is giving you, but also consciously making an effort to break routines and shock the system. By doing so, she believes you will not only give yourself enough rest and time to recover, but you will also prevent yourself from plateauing as your body becomes accustomed to a training routine.
“Don’t get me wrong here. I still like routines and tend to want structure and to want to cling to routines, for sure. But awareness of this helps me mess with them more readily; knowing that regularly messing with the routine schedule or training plan will probably help push my body in a new direction, whether I change how many days or how intensely I train or where I climb or what I climb. Resting more can be good; there’s not a set number of days per week that a person must climb or train in any given week in order to achieve their optimal potential… In fact, I strongly believe that the best way to improve at anything is to strike that delicate balance between consistency and variation – making sure things are never too routine and predictable, but that the same pertinent themes are repeated often enough to encourage whatever areas need the most improvement to improve.” – Alli Rainey
Check out Alli’s whole article by clicking through bellow. Her argument is a good reminder that while we all want to improve and feel like we are doing everything in our power to do so, it’s often times just as important to take an extra rest day as it is to keep blindly plugging away on the campus board and not give your body a chance to recover. Training breaks your body down. Rest between training sessions is actually when you get stronger.
Click Here: How Being “Disciplined” Can be Undisciplined
(photo by Louis Arevalo; courtesy of allirainey.com)
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