My winter hasn’t exactly gone according to plan. I went down to Hueco in early January to escape the depths of Wyoming winter and get a strength and power dose on some of my favorite boulders on the planet. 

Initially, I felt strong and with a month-long stay planned, I was confident it would be a fruitful trip. Unfortunately, that optimism came crashing down when, on our fourth climbing day, I fully ruptured the A2 pulley in my left pinky. 

I was completely devastated. For now, suffice it to say that not being able to climb has left me with some spare time, and I’ve been reflecting on past periods of success or major progression during my nearly twenty years of climbing. 

While some of this is simply daydreaming (and maybe plotting for the future), I do believe there’s been some value in this reflection. One of the greatest mistakes we can make as athletes is to find something that works so well that we stop doing it in the name of finding something better. 

Read that last sentence again. It makes no sense, yet I see climbers do it all the time – and have definitely been guilty of it myself. 

So with this attitude of finding what works and sticking with it in mind, enjoy this little trip back through my climbing. Here are four times in my climbing when I felt I made major progress and..

• what I thought was responsible for it then
• what I now believe led to the growth in my climbing
• and the lessons I will be carrying forward with me as I return to climbing over the coming weeks and months.

A Semester in South Africa

In college, I was lucky enough to spend a semester of my junior year of college studying abroad at the University in Capetown. The six months I spent living in South Africa were an important learning experience for me in many ways. I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t take this time as an opportunity to climb – A LOT. 

When I flew to Capetown, I had been climbing on and off for four or five years. I only bouldered and my entire outdoor tick-list consisted of a couple of V0 to V2 boulders, two V4s, one V5, and one V7. When I left South Africa six months later, I had flashed V6 and climbed ten V8s. Needless to say, I was psyched. 

What I Thought Was Responsible

Upon returning home, friends asked me what I had done to get so much stronger. My response – with absolute confidence – was that it came down to the climbing I did on the 45-degree spray wall in Capetown’s City Rock gym. 

In today’s age of app-based boards, it may be hard to imagine, but neither I nor my friends had ever seen a board before. We just climbed on the gym’s set boulders because that’s what we had access to. I confidently informed all of my friends about the superiority of board climbing and how it had completely revolutionized my climbing. 

While I still love board climbing, I think giving the board all the credit here is missing the bigger picture. As I mentioned before, I was a pretty new climber before this semester abroad. What I didn’t say was that my climbing during these initial years was pretty start-stop. I would climb and train a lot over the summer when home from college, but my climbing would become sporadic at best while away at school. What this means is that my time in ZA was the first time where I ever really climbed several times a week for 6+ months. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I increased my total number of lifetime outdoor climbing days by at least three or fourfold. 

Additionally, on my third day in Capetown, I went to the climbing gym for the first time and the first South African I met was Marijus Šmigelskis. Marijus was one of the principal developers of the bouldering around Capetown and one of South Africa’s strongest climbers. He took me under his wing, loaned me crash pads, toured me around, and generally facilitated my getting out bouldering during my time in ZA. Having Marijus to climb with is not an insignificant detail. Not only was I climbing more consistently than ever and getting outside more regularly than ever, but I was doing so with someone who was far stronger and more experienced than me. Looking back now, I can’t overstate the impact of having someone there to tell me when I was being an idiot had on my climbing. 

What Actually Happened

So what actually caused the big jump in my climbing level during this time? 

I think it’s safe to say that it wasn’t just the board. More accurately, my time in South Africa offered me the ability to show up consistently – both indoors and outdoors – and be surrounded by climbers who were both stronger and more experienced than me. While this period is the most striking example of how showing up consistently and being surrounded by better climbers led to a leap in my performance, it is a common thread in all of these examples and a set of conditions I actively try to create in my climbing. To put it simply, good climbers climb a lot and there’s little to no value in being the big fish in a little pond. 

Post-College New England Bouldering

Fast forward a year and a half. At this point, I had graduated from college and was back living with my parents working at a law firm over the summer and fall while I saved up money to move to Wyoming that winter. 

Looking back on this time, I actually think of it fondly, but at the time let’s just say that I couldn’t wait to get on with moving out West. Being back under my parents’ roof felt like being back in high school and I was ready to get on with the rest of my life. 

While I might not have been excited about my living situation or job, I was psyched on climbing and I climbed a lot. During that summer, the local climbing gym built a 40-degree board that eventually became a Moon Board and, somehow, I convinced them to let me set it as a spray wall. Back showing up consistently, I upped my bouldering level over the summer and fall from V8 to V11.

What I Thought Was Responsible

Again, I credited the board. 

As with my time in ZA, I won’t say that the board had nothing to do with it as I probably averaged about four sessions on it a week, but looking back on this period what I really think spurred this jump up the grade ladder was the combination of being back showing up and the fact that this was the first time in my life I was living like an adult. To put it bluntly, being back under my parents’ roof and working a 9-5 job meant I wasn’t acting like a college kid. Drinking less and sleeping more meant I was not only having more sessions, but I was actually recovering from them. 

What Actually Happened

Looking back now, my take-home lesson from this period: showing up is the first step, but having quality habits surrounding recovery is essential. Climbing and training are the fun parts. Recovering from this fun takes work. It’s not as fun or glamorous as trying your hardest at the boulders or in training, but it’s an active process that’s an equally important flipside of the same coin. This truth has become more and more apparent and important the older I get. I wish it weren’t true, but I suspect that trend will continue. 

A 6-Month Bouldering Road Trip

Moving forward again, I had moved to Jackson, WY, and was working as a bartender. During these years, I didn’t get outdoors bouldering as regularly. I was preoccupied skiing and while there’s more developed bouldering now, at the time there just weren’t as many developed areas within easy driving distance. 

That said, each spring and fall I would go on seasonal bouldering trips and I was still climbing at a solid V10/V11 level. While I was happy to have consolidated myself as a “double-digit boulderer,” I also started telling myself the narrative that the main thing holding me back was access to boulders and the ability to try them without time constraints. 

So I did what any psyched climber with more of an eye on the present than a concern for the future would do: I bought a van, quit my job, and hit the road for six months spending at least month-long stints in Joe’s Valley, Moe’s Valley, Las Vegas, and Hueco Tanks. 

To date, these six months have been the most productive of my climbing career. Heading into this trip I had climbed a total of thirty-two double-digit boulders including one V12. At the end of the trip, that total had doubled to 64 including an additional three V12s. 

What I Thought Was Responsible

To say I was over the moon would be an understatement. This was a level I had always dreamed of climbing at and honestly never thought I would. Returning to Jackson to resume working and refill my now depleted bank account, I was convinced that simply having consistent access to climbing and the ability to try boulders without time constraints was the key. 

I do think there’s an element of truth to that statement. It sounds a lot like showing up and that’s certainly what I did on this trip. There’s no disputing that it is responsible for a large part of my success. There are two problems, however, with this interpretation:

1. Living on the road unemployed for long stretches of time isn’t sustainable.
2. It doesn’t tell the whole story.

What Actually Happened

Ultimately, I attribute it mostly to one thing and that’s a simple intention I set at the beginning of the trip about how I was going to keep showing up during these six months on the road. You’ll remember that I said I had started to believe that it wasn’t just not having access to hard boulders but also not being able to try them without time constraints that were holding me back. 

To counter this issue of time, I told myself that I didn’t have any set dates where I had to be anywhere. I would simply stay as long as I had projects I was excited about, conditions were good, and I was having fun. 

Additionally, I committed to not climbing too much in any given session. Why get destroyed and wreck your skin if you can just come back tomorrow or after a rest day? Whenever I started to thrash myself on a project, started doing major damage to my skin, or realized that I had made all the progress I could on a boulder for the day, I would simply remind myself to “do the right thing” and shut it down for the day. 

Essentially, I committed to being patient. 

Being patient is easier to do when you are on an open-ended road trip. It’s a lot harder to do when you feel like your time on this project or climbing, in general, is really limited. Something being hard, however, doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. Committing to “doing the right thing” – even when it’s the less fun option in the short term – solves a lot of problems both in training and performance. Simple, not easy. 

So where does this leave us in terms of what I’m taking with me from the experience?

Road trips and extended stays in climbing areas are great. Make them happen when you can. When you can’t, however, be patient and don’t let wishing you had more time to climb prevent you from doing the right thing. The training progress that’s going to be meaningful or the sends you are going to be really proud of take time. Don’t be in a rush and don’t look for shortcuts. There aren’t any. 

Actually Committing to Sport Climbing

The next major jump in my climbing performance came post-road trip when I decided to actually commit to sport climbing. Before this, I would go sport climbing but it always felt like something I would only do when I couldn’t boulder and I was well aware that my bouldering level far outpaced my sport climbing abilities. I had climbed 13b but each 5.13 I did felt like a major undertaking akin to or harder than climbing a double-digit boulder problem. 

Lucky for me, Lander is only a three-hour drive from Jackson and, because I definitely didn’t want to stop climbing outside as much as possible, it seemed like the right time to start taking sport climbing more seriously. 

This newfound commitment to sport climbing also coincided with the release of the Anderson Brothers’ book The Rock Climber’s Training Manual. Like many climbers, I bought a copy and jumped in with both feet. This was the first time I had even used a hangboard systematically and unsurprisingly my numbers skyrocketed. How could this not translate to sends – especially on the short, fingery routes around Lander? 

The good news is that it did. Over the next two years and a couple of cycles of the Anderson Brothers’ program, I went from having done nine 5.13s total to twenty-six and my first 5.14. Excited, I finally felt like I could stop offering the disclaimer that “I was mostly a boulderer” to everyone I met at the cliff. 

What I Thought Was Responsible

Looking for an answer to why I was climbing so much better on a rope, I attributed it to the gains I made on the hangboard. Finger strength is important and my fingers were objectively stronger on paper. How could this not be what had made the difference? I was all in on the hangboard being the ticket to the higher grades.

Looking back on this now, it’s clear to me how oversimplified that explanation was. Having stronger fingers certainly didn’t hurt, but I would now say it was a minor element in what led to this progress in my route climbing. As I said, I had climbed 5.13’s before this, but if I had to describe my previous sport climbing efforts it would be that I essentially pulled on and, while completely terrified of falling, I tried to boulder my way to the top before pumping out or saying take. In other words, the opposite of how you would describe a composed or skilled route climber. 

What Actually Happened

During this period and for the first time in my climbing, I committed to working to change that. Some of it was getting more comfortable trying hard above a bolt and falling. Some of it was building endurance and capacity by sport climbing more regularly. Some of it was going through the redpoint process and making the projecting mistakes we regret but learn from. All of it involved being ok with pushing outside my comfort zone and taking what I perceived at the time to be steps backward. 

It’s clear to me now that I was learning the fundamentals of climbing on a rope and removing major performance inhibitors like the fear of falling. We can sum it all up by saying I learned how to sport climb and shifted my identity as a climber to allow myself the time and space to do so. No amount of finger strength was ever going to override the need for these lessons and I’m really glad that I put the time in at the cliff to gain this experience.

Putting It All Together

So what can we take away from this trip down memory lane? 

To me, the common thread here is that progress is seldom the result of the training details. It’s not what board you climb on, what hangboard protocol you follow, or any other training minutiae we are all guilty of obsessing over. 

Instead, periods of dramatic progress can almost always be traced back to the following:

Show up and show up consistently.

Yes, you have to try hard, but simply being there at all is the first step. Consistency is going to beat intensity every time.

Cover the basics and the fundamentals first. 

This means principles. Whether that’s learning how to project a route/boulder or giving yourself enough time to recover from the training you do, any short-term progress you make is going to stall out if you don’t respect these realities. 

Remove performance inhibitors. 

Look for the gaps in your training AND in your performance. We all know that we want to train our weaknesses. Apply that same kind of thinking to practicing and improving your climbing in the performance space.

Be patient. 

Improving at rock climbing is hard work AND it takes time. It’s easy to say that “we should play the long game.” It’s a lot harder to actually do so. Simply trying to do the right thing even when it’s the less fun option is a good place to start. 

All of these points are simple in theory. That doesn’t mean they are easy to do. We all care a lot about our climbing and that makes it easy to lose this zoomed-out perspective on our own climbing. This is where getting some outside perspective on your climbing can really help. 

As a coach, I’d love to work with you and give you that perspective. 

Yes, I can help you with the minutiae of your training program, but, as we’ve seen throughout this article, these details are not often what causes the big jumps in performance we are all looking for. Let me help you see the bigger picture so you don’t stop doing what has gotten you this far in the first place.

Stay the course. Keep showing up.

Work with Matt on Your Climbing Performance

Whether you’re in the middle of your outdoor climbing season, you’re preparing for a big trip, or you just want to get better at rock climbing, Matt coaches climbers of all abilities on an individual basis no matter where you are in the world.

He’ll sit down over Zoom and talk to you about your goals, your strengths and weaknesses, your time limitations, and the equipment you have available. After you talk, he’ll make you a program specific to your needs on the TrueCoach app that you can follow and communicate with him through.

He’s helped hundreds of climbers get smarter about their training and stronger overall. He’s super easy to work with, very smart, dedicated, extremely responsive and responsible, and he’ll get you the results you’re looking for without overtraining you.

Follow a Pre-Made Training Program from Matt

If you’re not quite ready to sign up for one-on-one coaching with Matt but you do want his expertise and a structured plan, he designed both our Performance Bouldering and Performance Route Training Programs, which are super affordable, beautifully laid-out training plans you can access from your phone.

Matt uses the same kinds of drills described in this newsletter in both of these programs. You get targeted performance climbing practice, power endurance drills, and all kinds of other skill practice in each session. Plus you’ll get strength training sessions laid out for you using weights, bodyweight, and TRX.

There are 3 levels to choose from in either the bouldering or routes program, and you get access to Matt in free office hours once per month to ask any questions you have.

You can log your workouts in an online logbook so you can track your progress, and you can try the whole thing for free for 7 days.

 

​

Photo of Matt Pincus by Nate Liles | @orographic_visual

---

If you want this kind of content to show up in your email inbox as soon as it’s published on TrainingBeta, you can opt into our email list here. ​