No matter how strong you get and how good your endurance becomes, climbing routes near your limit will always involve some kind of on-route resting. While on harder, more sustained routes the rests often become marginal and may not allow you to camp out and try to fully recover, success climbing routes almost always involves managing your fatigue and pump levels.
To help you become more efficient and effective at resting on climbing routes, here’s an article by climber, coach, and trainer Alli Rainey about how to manage your time while you are resting. In her article, Alli covers different resting strategies and describes how they can be applied both to climbers who have a tendency to try and sprint through routes and to climbers who attempt to rest on every hold.
“For hard redpoint projects without awesome rests, I almost always have to train the rests as well as the moves. I experiment with lengthening and shortening the rests, seeing how this changes my performance on the next sequence of moves to the next rest. I usually settle in after a few tries on what feels like the best breath count for each rest. I count my breaths as I shake out at the rest. Then I move on from the rest into the next section of the route. The breath count can range from 10 to 500 breaths. It really depends on the quality of the rest!” – Alli Rainey
While Alli is right, and on any route near your limit you will have to spend some time “training” the rests, her article goes into more detail by breaking down the necessary decisions one has to make about how to manage your time at a rest. Specifically she covers:
- Where you rest
- How often your rest
- Training for rests
- How long you spend resting
Ultimately, spending your time working out and training how to most effectively rest and recover on your project may not seem like the best use of your time and is certainly not as fun as sorting out the next sequence of moves. However, improving your ability to recover while climbing and gaining a better understanding of what climbing pace works best for you is one of the quickest ways to improve your route climbing.
Click through below for the complete article. Give it a read and then try out some of Alli’s suggestions next time your out at the cliff.
Click Here: Managing Climbing Route Rests – Alli Rainey
(photo courtesy of Edwin Teran; @edwinteran)
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