About Kris Hampton 

I’ve received a lot of requests for interviews about movement and technique drills, and for good reason! Movement and technique in climbing are as important as strength, power, and your mental game. So I got to thinking about who would be a good fit for this interview, and obviously Kris Hampton of Power Company Climbing came to mind. I get to hang out with Kris regularly when we teach together at the Performance Climbing Coach seminars, and since his teaching topics include movement and technique, I thought he’d be a perfect person to interview.

Kris is a climber and a climbing coach/trainer, as well as a business owner and podcast host. He runs Power Company Climbing, and has grown his website into a climbing training hub, where he offers written articles, training programs, personal training, the Power Company Podcast, seminars, and videos. We sort of grew up as businesses alongside each other, and for that reason–and many others–Kris and I have an interesting sibling-esque relationship that I really enjoy.

Kris has been climbing for a long time now, and he’s morphed from a Red River Gorge enduro-fiend to a much more powerful climber. He trained himself to be more powerful partly by using the drills we discuss in this interview. He now uses the drills regularly with his clients with great success, and even our trainer at TrainingBeta, Matt Pincus, uses some of them with his clients. So Kris has been a really great resource for a lot of people on the subject of movement and technique.

We realize that movement and technique are difficult things to talk about without seeing them in action, which is why I haven’t done more episodes on the topic. So after the interview, Kris kindly created a video to sum up what we covered.

Check out Kris’s Power Company YouTube channel for more videos, and his website for more training resources and his Power Company Podcast. He also has an ebook devoted to movement drills on his site.

He’s also given you 25% off his Movement Skills for Climbers eBook: 25% Off Code: trainingbeta

Kris Hampton Interview Details

• Most common deficits in people’s technique
• How to get comfortable on smeary feet
• Is movement and technique training just for beginners?
• The main tenets of movement practice
• Drills for tension, rhythm, accuracy, pace, and weight
• When and how often to do these drills

The 6 Drills We Talk About

These are the 6 drills you’ll hear Kris describe in the interview:

1. Dead Stops
2. 3-Second Hover Drill
3. Sloth/Monkey Drill
4. One-Touch Drill
5. Pace Drill
6. Heavy Feet Drill

Kris Hampton Links 

• Power Company Instagram: @powercompanyclimbing
• Power Company Website: powercompanyclimbing.com
• Power Company YouTube Channel
• Movement Skills eBook from Power Company
• DISCOUNT CODE for Movement Skills ebook: “trainingbeta” for 25% off

Training Programs from TrainingBeta 

Do you want a well-laid-out, easy-to-follow training program that will get you stronger quickly? Here’s what we have to offer on TrainingBeta…

• Personal Training Online:  www.trainingbeta.com/matt
• For Boulderers: Bouldering Training Program for boulderers of all abilities
• For Route Climbers: Route Climbing Training Program for route climbers of all abilities
• Finger Strength : www.trainingbeta.com/fingers
• All of our training programs: Training Programs Page

Please Review The Podcast on iTunes

Please give the podcast an honest review on iTunes here to help the show reach more curious climbers around the world.

Photo Credit

Photo of Kris doing skills drills on his home wall by John Wesely @lightningsnaps 

Transcript

Neely Quinn: Welcome to the TrainingBeta podcast where I talk with climbers and trainers about how we can get a little better at our favorite sport. I’m your host, Neely Quinn, and I want to remind you that the TrainingBeta podcast is actually an offshoot of a website I created, trainingbeta.com, which is all about training for rock climbing.

Over there we have regular blog posts, we have training programs for boulderers or route climbers or people who just want to train finger strength or power endurance. We also have online personal training with Matt Pincus as well as nutrition consulting with myself. I’m also a nutritionist. Hopefully one or more of those resources will help you become a better rock climber.

You can find us at trainingbeta.com and you can follow us on social media @trainingbeta. 

Thanks for joining me on episode 137 of the podcast. I haven’t put an episode out in a while and I’m really sorry about that. I had every intention of putting one or two out while I was in the Red River Gorge these past three weeks but then things happened. We had a moldy house we were staying in so I had to take a few days of my rest days to get us out of that house and into a much cooler house that had ping pong and pool and darts – by the way, darts make you very sore for climbing so beware. [laughs] 

Also, I had some computer problems so the stars sort of aligned accidentally for me to have a vacation, which is really rare. I travel a ton and climb, which I am so grateful for, but usually I end up working on those trips a lot on the rest days and in the evenings so this time I was forced to play pool and darts, which was fun. 

I did end up having a really good trip to the Red. I did one of my objectives which was Easy Rider, this 13a that has always scared the crap out of me because of this ledge that you can maybe fall on. It’s probably an irrational fear but I got over the fear and I ended up doing it in about four tries, which was great. I got to do it on the last sunny day. 

It was very cold there. I don’t do well in the cold so I didn’t climb as much as I wanted to but I did also do Tuna Town, which has also always intimidated me. I was super psyched on that and on my first attempt I got to take that monster whip off of the top [laughs] which was super fun, actually. It’s crazy that I say that now because I haven’t historically loved monster whips. 

Anyway, I got to do a ton of other beautiful Red River Gorge climbs. I just love that place more than any place in the world but now I’m psyched to be home and I’m going to take some time off of climbing, honestly because I’m tired of trying hard and being cold. I’m going to take a couple weeks off.

Moving along, I have Kris Hampton on the show today. Kris is the owner of powercompanyclimbing.com. He’s been around for a while and our websites are sort of similar. He has a podcast, he has blog posts, he sells training programs in ebook form as well as doing online training. He has a crew of people who do training for him. Also I work with Kris at the Performance Climbing Coach seminars. He coaches on drills, like movement, as well as some mindset stuff. 

I’ve been getting a lot of requests lately for episodes on movement and technique because obviously that plays a huge role in how well we climb, how good our technique is and how well we move. I’ve been resisting doing more episodes on that topic because it’s really hard for me to comprehend a very visual thing, like a drill or a movement, without seeing it. I’m more of a visual person and I think a lot of people are so I didn’t know how this was going to go. I knew Kris would be a good person to talk about it because he talks about it all the time in his clinics and at the PCC.

We didn’t actually have a plan going into this but it ended up being very organized and cohesive and I thought that he did a very good job of describing these drills. The things we’re going to talk about are – he breaks things down into tension drills, rhythm drills, accuracy drills, pace drills, and weight drills. He’s going to explain all of the drills that he uses to encompass those skills and then what all of those things actually mean.

He has also made a video, kindly, for us so that it’s not just an oral thing. That video is on his YouTube page which is Power Company Climbing but it’s also on the episode page on trainingbeta.com for this episode. You can find it there and it’s super helpful. 

Last thing is he also has a ‘Movement Skills for Climbers’ ebook and he gave you guys a 25% discount code, which is TRAININGBETA. If you want to buy that book you can go to powercompanyclimbing.com and find it over there. Again, it’s ‘Movement Skills for Climbers’ and use the code TRAININGBETA at checkout if you’re interested.

Without further adieu, here’s Kris Hampton and I hope that you enjoy this. I’ll talk to you on the other side. 

Neely Quinn: Welcome to the show, Kris. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Kris Hampton: Thanks for having me again.

Neely Quinn: Yeah. You just got back from a really long trip. Do you want to tell me about it?

Kris Hampton: Well it started at the Performance Climbing Coach seminar where I saw you and your lovely face. That was, I think, the best one yet honestly. I really, really enjoyed the group we had and the facility was good and I think I really just enjoy having that level of camaraderie with you and Tyler and Steve and Charlie and Chris and Mercedes and everybody who is there. I just think it’s a super fun four or five days for everybody. Then, I went to Red River Gorge for Rocktoberfest and did a workshop and a talk in Cincinnati and then a talk in Saint Louis. I just got home so too many days, too much work, and not enough climbing.

Neely Quinn: Which seems to maybe sum up your life for the past couple years. [laughs]

Kris Hampton: Yeah, it kind of does though I’ve done a lot of climbing more recently, but lots of travel. Probably too much of it and a lot of work.

Neely Quinn: A lot of work. I wonder about that sometimes because I see you doing all these clinics and I know that you have online clients, you’re running a business, and I wonder how much climbing has had to take a backseat to that and if it’s been worth it to you.

Kris Hampton: It has. It’s taken a bit of a backseat for sure but I found myself in a situation where I was changing careers not too long after we talked the last time, actually. I changed careers, moved to Lander, Wyoming and my now-wife was getting her master’s so she wasn’t working and it was just this ‘now’s the time.’ If I was going to build this business and make it a thing I need to work my ass off and I’m the only person with an income in the house at the time and so I just got stuck into building this business. 

I really love it and love creating all of the things that we do and honestly, I’m totally happy not climbing a ton. I just really enjoy what I do. I definitely want to start climbing more and I have been.

Neely Quinn: Do you think that you can now?

Kris Hampton: Yeah. I have a pretty nice schedule here where it’s get up in the morning, do a little work, warm up in the home gym, go out to a boulder project, come back home by noon or 1:00 and finish the workday. I’m climbing probably four or five days a week even if it’s just a couple of hours a day.

Neely Quinn: That’s awesome. That’s a really nice benefit of living in Lander.

Kris Hampton: Totally. There’s rock everywhere. 

Neely Quinn: It must be nice. I mean, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I live in that.

Kris Hampton: Yeah, you live in a climbing destination, too.

Neely Quinn: So it sounds like it’s all been worth it. You definitely have built something big and well-known in the Power Company so good job. 

Kris Hampton: Thanks. A lot of it is modeled after conversations we’ve had and what you’ve built and so I appreciate you doing what you do as well so that it opens the door for a lot of people.

Neely Quinn: Yeah, well we’re both doing the community a service, I think. I think it’s cool now having a peer who I can talk to about these things and we can share our knowledge with each other.

Kris Hampton: Yeah, that’s why I like the Performance Climbing Coach seminar so much. Getting to hang out with you guys in whatever AirBNB we’re in. This last AirBNB was weird but…

Neely Quinn: In the way that it was so pink? [laughs]

Kris Hampton: It was very pink. Very pastel. 

Neely Quinn: At the PCC – bringing it back to this interview – can you tell us a little bit about what you do, what you teach at the PCC?  

Kris Hampton: Essentially what I deal with are what I like to call ‘the unmeasurables’ or ‘some of the unmeasurables,’ not all of them by any means. Things like movement and the language of coaching, how to give feedback and how to direct people into places that you want them to go. 

Movement and technique is something I think is really massively important for climbers and I feel – and maybe this is just my paranoia in it – like it gets lost in the conversation when there are so many more measurable things you can do. A lot of the science and data which again I think is hugely important, that conversation is really strong right now so I’m trying to keep movement and technique and how to coach it and how to do it in a really deliberate way, I’m trying to keep that in the conversation.

Neely Quinn: Which is super important and I’ve gotten several emails recently from people saying, “I’d really like you to have some more people on the podcast talking about movement and technique.” Of course you came to mind and that’s why we’re chatting today. The reason that I haven’t had more people on talking about this, and this is what I said to the guy in the email, is because for me personally it’s a little bit difficult to talk about without actually seeing what we’re talking about. When I just called you we started the conversation by both agreeing that it is difficult to talk about but you do it all the time, right?

Kris Hampton: Yeah, I mean most of my clients are remote. Even though I travel a ton, the large majority of my time is still spent here in Lander talking to people remotely either through messaging or video. It’s a tough conversation to have. It’s kind of obtuse or abstract in nature so it’s tough to really nail down the best way to talk about it but I’m willing to try.

Neely Quinn: I’m willing to try, too, so thanks. 

Maybe we can start with: what are the most common things you see people lacking in terms of technique and movement?

Kris Hampton: I’m going to be a little dodgy probably in this conversation because I know you’re going to want me to give you really specific things but I think that’s one of the hard parts about the conversation. It’s so wide-ranging that I can’t be super specific. 

I would say one of the big, global things that I see people lacking is just awareness of mastery. Climbers are super interested in success. If we do the move, we did it. If we top the boulder, we were successful. There’s a level of mastery that seems to be missing. Climbers don’t want to go back to a boulder. ‘I don’t want to unsend that thing,’ so they won’t touch it again once they’ve done it. But there’s a lot of room for improving the way that you climbed it, the way that you’re moving in several different areas, and if you can just build the awareness of, ‘this could get better and I could be a little more masterful of how I climbed that boulder or how I did that move,’ then I think your movement, your technique, begins to automatically get better over time as you are more and more and more aware. I would say just awareness of mastery and not being satisfied with success is the biggest issue I see.

Neely Quinn: So really being self-aware and noticing what you kind of suck at or what you’re not…

Kris Hampton: Yeah, just being honest with yourself.

Neely Quinn: That’s the thing. Then putting yourself on things where you know you’re going to be working on it, right? That’s what I don’t get. I’m like, ‘I’m pretty bad on smeary feet. I have a hard time trusting them.’ So do I just go slab climbing?

Kris Hampton: Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s a lot about checking in with your ego and deciding: do I feel uncomfortable here? If you do, that’s probably a good place to be as long as it’s not overwhelmingly uncomfortable. Getting comfortable on smeary feet could start with slab climbing and then I would take it to more vertical terrain and then lightly overhanging terrain and forcing yourself to use those bad, smeary feet. Even if there’s a good foot available, trying the move with more smeary feet – on handholds that you feel comfortable on – might put you into that discomfort level enough that you’re learning something from it.

Neely Quinn: So taking baby steps.

Kris Hampton: Exactly. It’s no different than the discomfort with falling or with leading or whatever. Jumping right into your project level boulder or route and jumping on the hardest smeary feet you’ve ever tried to use is going to be a little too overwhelming so taking baby steps into it is super helpful.

Neely Quinn: Right. You know, it just occurred to me that one of the reasons it’s difficult to talk about this topic is we don’t talk about it very much. When I say things like ‘movement’ and ‘technique,’ I don’t even know exactly what I’m talking about [laughs]. You think that as a person who’s been climbing for 20+ years, I’ve got pretty good technique. I think I know the movements that I need to do. We think it’s just this beginner kind of thing, like we need to learn drop knees and how to twist and all these things, but that’s not necessarily true is it?

Kris Hampton: That’s not necessarily true. You hit on something really interesting: we know what we know but how can we know what we don’t know? I think that’s a really strange question to ask but if you take a beginner who has never seen a drop knee and you say, “Do a drop knee,” they don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. It’s not much different. There are moves that Jimmy Webb knows how to do and that are in his wheelhouse that I’ve probably never experienced and if I don’t know those I’m not going to recognize them. 

I think a way to find those things is just through being open to exploration, being open to getting uncomfortable when you’re in the gym or when you’re outside, in a deliberate-practice setting, whatever that is. Not tying yourself down to: this is the list of techniques that’s viable. Pretty much anything goes. There aren’t any rules. If you can come up with a new movement that works or that you’ve never seen before, then it works.

I had a conversation with John Sherman years ago and he talked about when he was in his heyday in Hueco Tanks, they walked right past all of the compression boulders because they had no concept of what that was. It wasn’t a technique they knew, it wasn’t a way they climbed, so if there weren’t down-pulling holds they didn’t recognize it as a boulder. It just took some exploration for someone to discover, ‘Oh hey! I can climb this thing,’ and now those are valid techniques in that list.

Neely Quinn: That’s the thing – when you say to me, “There are things that Jimmy Webb has done that I’ve never done,” I’m like, ‘Well, what are those things? I want to see those things. What does that mean?’

Kris Hampton: That’s the cool thing about climbing media now being so readily available. You get to see all of these interesting moves. Like bicycling wasn’t a thing when I started climbing. I didn’t know what that was but I learned it watching videos of these much better climbers and seeing. ‘Oh, look at that! How does that work? I want to try that. I’m going to go find a situation in the gym where I can experiment with that and see how it works and try to understand it.’ Through lots of practicing and trying to understand it and trying to create situations for it, it’s now a technique or a movement that I recognize relatively readily. I can intuit when to use it. I can feel, ‘Oh, a bicycle would work. Is there one available?’ That’s through tons and tons of practice after seeing it in a video a decade ago, or whatever.

Neely Quinn: Right. I mean, the difference between climbing and other sports, like say soccer, is that in soccer you go to practice, you do these drills and you do these techniques and you practice them over and over and over. I don’t think you could say to me, “Neely, these are the five drills that you have to do for the rest of your life to become a better climber,” because there are so many movements in climbing. It’s so much more nuanced, or am I wrong about that?

Kris Hampton: No, I think you’re totally right. Honestly, I think it’s a pretty common – ‘mistake’ is the wrong word but I think it’s a relatively common wrong path that people go on to try and say, “Let’s work on heel hooks. Let’s work on toe hooks. Let’s work on drop knees. Let’s go down this list of techniques that are all available.”

What we try to do is pin it down to the bigger, more global ideas, so things like tension or rhythm, accuracy, things like that. We build lots of drills that you could take to a climbing wall where you might be doing heel hooks, toe hooks, drop knees, flagging, whatever, while being super aware of the tension that you’re using or the rhythm that you’re using and using those things in and out of all of these techniques. Gyms are amazing and setters are really, really good so they will give you a way to learn all of these individual techniques, heel hooks, toe hooks, drop knees. It’s the rhythm, the tension, things like that that the climber really has to be aware of to learn.

Neely Quinn: Okay, so now we’re getting somewhere. There aren’t specific movements that you have to learn, it’s more about how you carry yourself.

Kris Hampton: Sort of, yeah. I mean, you do have to learn those movements.

Neely Quinn: Yeah, I didn’t mean that…

Kris Hampton: But I think we have a construct available to teach climbers those things, whether it’s through beta sharing or just going into your gym and watching people climb your projects, watching videos online – it’s really easy to see those techniques and go and try to imitate them. What matters is how you do them. That demands that you’re climbing with awareness and really trying to master them instead of just being satisfied with success. Not to hammer away at that but I’ll keep coming back to it I’m sure.

Neely Quinn: So you said, “Tension, rhythm, and accuracy.” 

Kris Hampton: Yeah, those are three of them for sure.

Neely Quinn: What others are there?

Kris Hampton: Off the top of my head I think you can separate pace from rhythm a little bit. I think pace is really important. I think we could go all sorts of directions. Things like weight – and I say that in terms of how much weight are you putting onto your feet in all of these moves, whether it’s heel hooking, flagging, drop kneeing, whatever the technique is. Are you putting the weight through your legs/through your lower body? Or are you trying to support your weight with your upper body more than you should?

There are lots of global ideas that can work with every technique that’s available.

Neely Quinn: I’m assuming you have drills made up to accommodate all of these things and to help us practice?

Kris Hampton: We do, and we’re always building new drills. If I find a client who has a specific issue that I’m seeing – maybe they have really great tension at the beginning of moves but then as they make a move they lose tension, specifically when moves are dynamic. We’ll create a drill specifically for that situation to sort of recreate that situation over and over in different positions, different angles, different grip types, and really force them to try to be aware of that tension right at the end of moves.

Neely Quinn: Can you describe a drill that would do that?

Kris Hampton: We have a drill called Dead Stops that Nate Drolet made up. Essentially, you’re trying to climb with momentum and what we want you to do is every single move on a boulder problem, right before you latch the hold, try and stop your momentum. We find this works best on a difficulty level that’s lower than project but harder than warm-up so you can’t quite stop your momentum most of the time but you will slow it down through lots of tension. Asking people to really be aware of creating that tension right at the last minute, you start to see them be able to slow down their movements and be a little more precise at the end and not crash down onto holds at the end of big moves.

Neely Quinn: What’s wrong with crashing down onto holds at the end of big moves? 

Kris Hampton: Number one, it’s more energy. If you drop onto a hold it’s harder than if you’re standing there and can just take it gently. Number two, it’s not nearly as precise. If you hit the wrong part of the hold you don’t have the time to readjust. Number three, it’s just hard on your joints, especially if your shoulders are completely disengaging. It’s hard on your fingers. Longevity is important for becoming a better climber and if you’re just crashing onto every hold you go to then you’re going to have a hard time sticking with it for very long without getting hurt.

Neely Quinn: That makes a lot of sense and it seems it would be a really hard drill to do, actually, to keep tension or to stop yourself before you grab a hold. 

Kris Hampton: It is pretty hard to start with momentum – a lot of people tend to create all this momentum and then just let all their tension go and just crash down onto things. To bring Jimmy Webb back up, if you watch videos of Jimmy, he’s a master at this technique. He’ll do these giant moves but he never crashes onto holds. He takes everything really carefully and with real intention and you can see it in pretty much every video of him climbing.

Neely Quinn: This drill is reminding me of the 3-Second Hover drill. I don’t know what people call it. Is that similar?

Kris Hampton: Yeah, really similar, just done with momentum and a little faster instead of grinding through or coming to that grinding halt. The holds will have to be big enough for you to do that and the moves will have to be small enough. I’d rather explore it just outside of those ranges as well and we do the same sort of hover drill.

Neely Quinn: Can you describe the hover drill while we’re talking about it?

Kris Hampton: Yeah. We actually add a part on that a lot of people don’t do. A lot of people are familiar with hovering right before you take the next hold. You do a move, right before you take the hold you just hover over it for a couple of seconds. It kind of forces you to own that finishing position. Most people associate it with locking off and I think it’s much bigger than that. You have to really own the entire position and making sure that you’re recognizing the tension required to own that position is what I ask of climbers when they’re doing that hover. 

We also have added a hover in the beginning of the move because there are some people who have a much harder time with starting positions and they always have to use momentum. They can’t lock everything down in the starting position to begin a move and sometimes that’s necessary. If I notice that people are doing moves only with momentum, I might have them get in their starting position and release one hand. Start the move, release one hand, and then pause for three seconds or so and then continue grinding through that movement to teach them how to do moves without beginning it with momentum.

Neely Quinn: It’s interesting because while that’s a technique drill and a method drill, it’s also a strength drill, right?

Kris Hampton: It is for sure. I think there’s a blurred line between tension and strength. Holding tension in these positions can be really massive for climbing, just technique-wise. If you are getting stronger in that position then that’s just a bonus.

Neely Quinn: I think it’s just a blurred line in general between technique and strength in climbing.

Kris Hampton: Definitely.

Neely Quinn: So we’ve gone through a couple tension drills. I’d like to go to rhythm because I’m not sure what you mean by that and I’m sure other people are wondering, too.

Kris Hampton: You’ve seen our Sloth Monkey drills that we do at a lot of our Performance Climbing Coach seminars. This is one that I use a lot for people. Essentially, you do a boulder once moving like a sloth. Constant, really slow, really controlled movement but in a rhythm. A really slow, constantly moving rhythm. Then you contrast that by climbing the same boulder more like a monkey would. Monkeys don’t climb in such a way that they load up and dyno and match and dyno. It’s called ‘brachiation,’ this really flowy fast rhythm. They allow their momentum to carry into the next move rather than stopping and readjusting and making decisions, looking for the right feet and then doing the move. They just allow the momentum to carry them through. 

I think both aspects, the really slow sloth-like climbing and the faster brachiation-style monkey-like climbing, are really important and they have totally contrasting rhythms. What we find is that if you can switch between those two rhythms and all the places in between the two, then you start to open yourself up to being really efficient through cruxes, through the easier climbing on problems and routes, and it’s not a stop-and-start jerky sort of thing. It becomes this more rhythmic, fluid, flowing sort of climbing. I think all of us associate that sort of style with good climbing. When we see it we know it and we’re like, ‘Oh, that person is a good climber’ and a lot of that has to do with the rhythm that they use when they climb. 

Neely Quinn: Right, that kind of reminds me of Adam Ondra on Silence or any of his climbs. He goes really quickly.

Kris Hampton: Yeah, he goes really fast and then if you look at other climbers who move slower, they still move at a good rhythm. They still have this really good steady pace and they can change it up when they need to. There are several videos we show in our tension workshops of Adam where he moves really fast through a section but then when it gets really hard and precise, he can slow it way down and grind through the movements to make them correct and he can immediately explode back into that pace that he’s known for.

Neely Quinn: Is that kind of what you’re wanting to go after when you’re teaching people these drills? Like, ‘This is what you can use in appropriate times. Either one of these.’ 

Kris Hampton: Yeah, exactly. Remain aware through this entire drill and then start to make decisions about: when is this appropriate and when is it not? It’s really important for practicing anything to make mistakes and to try to understand why it didn’t work or why it did work. When you start to understand, ‘Okay, this monkey-style didn’t work in this hold arrangement for this reason. Either the feet were too precise or the hands were too precise and I couldn’t quite get in them, or the distance the holds are apart, I need to load up differently,’ whatever it is. You start to see these patterns and learn more about, ‘Okay, when I see this sort of pattern outside or in a comp or whatever, then I know I can either allow my momentum to carry me through there or I’m going to need to slow down, reset, move more deliberately.’

Neely Quinn: Right. I have been training for the Red River Gorge and I asked my friend Alex Stiger – we’re similar sized and she is stronger than I am – “How do you think I should train for the Red and transition between Rifle climbing and the Red?” She’s done it successfully. She was like, ‘Well, I think you need to do this, this, and this for training but also go into the gym and climb fast. In Rifle, you’re basically crawling up the wall really slowly and in the Red you’re just trying to beat the clock.’ I thought that was really interesting because I’ve never even thought about training rhythm, which is what we’re talking about, but it makes sense.

Kris Hampton: Totally, and she’s exactly right. Rifle has this slow crawling pace and the Red, you’re just racing the pump clock. The more efficient you can be while being fast, the better you’re going to climb in the Red. If you can move at whatever your top efficient speed is comfortably then you’re just going to climb further before that pump clock catches up to you.

Neely Quinn: I guess for me it’s just really hard to think like that. When you’re at the gym and you’re trying to flash something or even do it second try, you’re still not very acquainted with the beta and for me, it makes me go slower. I don’t think I’m alone in that. Is it just the kind of thing where with this drill you just go for it and it’s okay if you fall and that’s kind of the mentality?

Kris Hampton: Yeah, absolutely. It’s not saying that it’s bad to slow down. I think it’s totally valid and sometimes necessary to slow down but if you can, get comfortable or get closer to comfortable climbing at a faster pace and allowing momentum to carry you through moves. That can feel a little bit like this wild abandon or something, allowing momentum to carry you if you’re a controlled sloth-like climber naturally like I am, but I’ve definitely found that practicing this over time has made my onsight speed considerably faster. I’m just faster at making decisions, I am okay with making mistakes and I know that I can recover from them. That’s something that I’ve learned through all of this, trying to climb with a faster rhythm than feels comfortable to me. 

Neely Quinn: That makes sense. What you just said about your decision making is faster now does make sense that you have to practice that.

Kris Hampton: Yeah, that’s one of the things that sort of came out of this drill later. After doing this drill quite a bit with people I was able to see that some people just really value the “correct” – I’m using air quotes here – decision. If you watch videos of Adam Ondra, he looks sloppy a lot of the times because he doesn’t need to be precise there. He just needs to get through faster and he values that more than that precision that you have to really slow down for. People like being able to make the right decision so they’ll slow down. In the middle of trying to do something with a more monkey-style they’ll just put the brakes on and try to find the right feet instead of just letting it go and trying to get through.

Neely Quinn: Right, so there’s something to be said for throwing caution to the wind sometimes and therefore saving energy and brain space.

Kris Hampton: Yeah, totally. You get more comfortable in it if you practice it and you start to learn when it’s a good idea and when it’s not.

Neely Quinn: So that was a big rhythm drill that you do, the Sloth Monkey drill. Is there anything else that you want to say about rhythm?

Kris Hampton: I think we all have our natural sort of rhythm/style/pace that we climb with and I’m certainly not saying that there is a best rhythm and that you should change your style to meet that. All I’m saying is that if we can expand in both directions, so if you can learn to climb with more tension, slower, more precise, and if you can learn to climb faster, more rhythmic, with more momentum, then all you’re really doing is widening your skill set. That’s just going to make you a better climber. It’s not about changing who you are, it’s about adding to who you are. 

Neely Quinn: That’s a good clarification. You’re not saying that a slow climber is bad or that a fast climber is bad.

Kris Hampton: If you look at Adam Ondra versus Jonathan Siegrist, Jonathan comparatively crawls up the wall but he’s still a massively good climber and better than 99% of the people who are going to listen to this podcast. You could emulate either one and still be on the right track to getting really good.

Neely Quinn: Okay, cool. So that’s rhythm and the other thing you had mentioned was accuracy as a main tenet. What is accuracy and how do you train it?

Kris Hampton: There’s a bunch of different drills that we use. I’ll give you this example: I did a session with a guy in Saint Louis a while ago and when I watched him warming up he was readjusting on each hold like three times. I asked him, “Are you aware that you’re doing that?” and he said, “I didn’t do that.” I was like, ‘Okay. Let’s climb another warm-up and let’s purposely try not to adjust.’ He’s like, ‘Okay, whatever.’ He climbs again and I turned on a video camera. He climbed again and he readjusted on every single hold three or four times and when he came down I said, “Do you know you’re doing that?” He said, “I didn’t do that. That’s not happening,” so I showed him the video and he’s like, ‘No way. I had no clue that I was readjusting that much.’

Neely Quinn: That’s crazy.

Kris Hampton: You can see in that video in particular that as he reaches for a hold he looks away, he hits it a little wrong, readjusts a bunch of times until he’s happy. Even though they’re jugs and he could hold them no matter how he hit them, he felt like he needed the right place. A lot of us do that. It becomes habitual so we’ve just built drills to a) slow you down when necessary. That comes back to rhythm and tension. And b) how to be okay with hitting holds slightly wrong and continuing to move off of it because you know that you can and you don’t feel like you have to adjust. That goes with hands and with feet. 

It can feel really, really slow to be precise at first. If I’m asking you to place your feet really deliberately and then don’t readjust it, you can swivel on your toe or whatever but don’t move your foot placement, it will slow down a lot. As you get more and more comfortable at it it starts to speed back up and then you can work it back into your natural, normal rhythm and style. 

We have several drills that sort of force you to slow down and be really aware and then we’ll speed it back up. 

Neely Quinn: What is one of those drills?

Kris Hampton: The main one, and actually this one sounds really elementary and a lot of people laugh when I tell them to do it, we just call it One Touch. All of these drills have videos on our YouTube page that should be pretty easy to find. This One Touch drill is exactly how it sounds. We want you to touch once with your hand, touch once with your feet, leave that placement there and continue climbing. You very quickly realize that you’re very bad at hitting the right spot or you have a habit of shifting and it takes a lot of mental energy to not shift. Or, it’s a drill that you’re pretty good at. If I notice that you’re pretty good at it already I may never give you that drill to do.

If you take it to a warm-up, on a super juggy warm-up, it’s going to feel really easy. When I take that to a more moderate level climb, almost everybody tends to readjust out of habit, whether it’s their hand or their foot or whatever. I think good climbers tend to readjust their feet less but they do slow down and place their feet a little slower than their natural rhythm allows. Then the hand movements become a really habitual thing for a lot of people. We’re just forcing you into this thing where we’re asking you to be really mindful, really aware of trying to place your feet at the same rhythm that you’re climbing with and put them there precisely and don’t move them once they’re there. 

It’s a super simple drill to do and as you make it to harder and harder climbing it gets really frustrating for a lot of people.

Neely Quinn: Really?

Kris Hampton: Yeah, I think a lot of people don’t realize how habitual it is until they’re having to be mindful of doing it.

Neely Quinn: Like you said, especially as the climbs get harder.

Kris Hampton: And something else in the same respect as saying, “There’s not one best speed,” is there are times when readjusting is part of the sequence or you did hit a hold wrong and if you have time to readjust on it, you should, but that’s not always the case. A lot of the time I’ll see people readjust 3-4-5 times and then end up right back in the same spot that they hit originally. If you could just convince yourself that, ‘Here’s where I hit it. It’s totally fine. I can move off this and I’m gone,’ then you’re just saving tons and tons of energy and tons of time. So it does happen that readjusting is what you should do and in the One Touch video – actually, it’s in our Perfect Repeat video – I mention that part of my sequence is I hit the hold this way and then as I move through it I readjust into this position. Sometimes that’s just part of the beta so it’s not a bad thing inherently.

Neely Quinn: I think we readjust because we want it to feel better, we want it to feel easier, and so making us move off of holds that don’t feel as good as we want them to is also sort of a strength drill as well well as a technique drill. Once again there’s this crossover.

Kris Hampton: Yeah. I think it’s always going to cross over. I don’t think we can help it really.

Neely Quinn: But mostly for me it would be, ‘I need to gather the confidence that I can move off a hold even if it doesn’t feel perfect,’ and I think that’s what this drill is probably all about.

Kris Hampton: Practicing that drill made my onsight climbing leap forward hugely years ago. I just got really good at not searching for the better parts of holds and instantly knowing, ‘Okay, this is fine. I can move off of this. I’m just going to.’ There would be a lot of times when I would onsight a route and somebody standing nearby would be like, ‘You totally missed that jug,’ and I’m like, ‘It didn’t matter, did it?’ 

Neely Quinn: So the One Touch drill is the main thing for the accuracy, or are there others that you want to mention?

Kris Hampton: A lot of the drills sort of hit on several of these bigger, global ideas. The Sloth drill is an integral part of being precise and keeping tension all the way through moves so that you can slow things down whenever you want to, then that moves on eventually into the Dead Stop drill that we talked about. That’s a little bit of the Monkey drill coming into the Dead Stop because you’re creating momentum and then trying to stop it. A lot of these drills sort of play really nice with each other and lead you into some of these other tenets that we try to hit.

Neely Quinn: Cool. So that’s tension, rhythm, accuracy, and you had mentioned pace and weight. Do you want to talk about either of those?

Kris Hampton: Yeah, they’re pretty simple. If I find that someone just can’t climb faster – me, for example, because I had a really hard time for years letting go of this value of being really precise and moving “perfectly” or whatever, again air quotes – I’ll just ask you to climb faster and really think about it, not just go through the motion of, ‘I’m going to do this as fast as possible.’ Try to find that line where you’re just about to be out of control but you’re still in it enough that it’s effective. It’s a tough place to find. 

You brought up Adam Ondra and he’s definitely the expert on this. You can watch him climb and it always looks like he’s a little out of control but he’s obviously not. That’s how he sends the hardest things in the world. He knows exactly where he can go and how far he can push that line before he gets out of control. Most of us don’t know that. We just stay in our own little box and climb at our own pace. If you’re somebody that climbs really slow then I’ll ask you to speed it up on purpose. If you’re somebody that climbs really fast and misses a lot of things I might ask you to slow it down and just be really aware of what benefits that has. 

Neely Quinn: You know, I was thinking about this. If I’m contrasting my own self, I’ve never been an endurance athlete and I know that it’s something I would like to improve, my ability to stay on the wall for a really long time. If you compare me with Jonathan, who you said before is one of the people who is not a fast climber, per se. His endurance is incredible and he’s always been an endurance athlete and his resting heart rate is like 50 or below. Mine is like 75 [laughs] and I just wonder, if you know these things about yourself then maybe that’s when we do start training speed. Maybe I do start training speed because I know I have to be better at that. I’m not genetically predisposed to being an endurance athlete. What do you think about that?

Kris Hampton: No, I think that’s totally the way it should be approached. I think just the way we are as humans and the way we receive feedback tends to make things go the other direction. If someone just constantly says or if you believe yourself, ‘I’m just not predisposed to being an endurance climber. I move slow and I’m an intensity climber,’ or whatever, if you label yourself all of those things and you take that on as your identity, then a lot of people will never try to push faster because they just don’t feel like they can or that it’s valuable to them. 

That sort of gets into the other side of what I do at the Performance Climbing Coach seminar, talking about feedback and growth mindset and being understanding that you can grow in all these different directions no matter what your identity or labels have been. In your case, I think that would be brilliant if you could take that knowledge that you’re naturally this kind of climber and then try to push it into another direction.

Neely Quinn: It’s hard to do something that is uncomfortable but it makes you think.

Kris Hampton: Yeah. I think in this last Performance Climbing Coach seminar I mentioned that once upon a time I remember saying out loud, “Who needs power when you’ve got technique?” That was because I’d heard so many people say that I have really good technique and I was this endurance climber and that’s how I identified. ‘I’m this endurance monster.’ As a result of that, I thought, ‘Why do I need power? Why even try it? I’ve gotten this far doing this so why should I expand into that area?’ I was clearly very wrong and now that I’m training more power and doing a lot more bouldering, sport climbing harder grades seems way easier than it ever did back then.

Neely Quinn: For you, you’re saying that you have used these drills to improve your speed and your pace and all that.

Kris Hampton: Oh yeah. I use these drills a lot and I mix and match drills. You keep bringing up that a lot of these drills will also help build your strength or help build your endurance or whatever. Even if I’m doing an endurance workout, I might pick a specific rhythm that I want to climb with and do it through that entire workout and just recognize when I break out of it and why, and can I get it back, and just push myself to be a little uncomfortable at all times.

Neely Quinn: I want to talk to you more about when and how often and all that stuff about these drills, like when we should do them, but I do want to get to the last thing that you mentioned which was weight. Then, maybe I’ll ask you about that. Can you talk a little more about weight? Maybe a drill that you use?

Kris Hampton: We have a drill that we call Heavy Feet and I think John Kettle, who you had on, has a really similar drill. I use this one as a warm up drill a lot, just to get people into the feeling of really putting their weight through their feet. All we’re asking is that while you’re climbing on any angle, not just on vertical – a lot of people go straight to, ‘This is how you climb on a vertical wall’ – but even on a really steep wall, I want you to just imagine yourself being really heavy through your feet and through your legs. Putting all your weight down there and moving that way. 

It’s not always the best way. Sometimes movements should be initiated through your upper body and you’ll start to understand that. Some moves just feel harder when you’re putting all your weight through your feet but some moves are going to feel a lot easier and you’ll just start to understand when and how to really drop your weight into your feet and let your feet carry you when necessary. 

Neely Quinn: Again, people can look at all of these drills. You do great videos and people can find you on YouTube.

Kris Hampton: Yep, we’re on YouTube and I’ve got a really inexpensive ebook that sort of outlines the principles of deliberate practice and gives you a bunch of movement drills. It’s called ‘Movement Skills for Climbers’ and it just walks you through how, when, why, and what these drills mean for you.

Neely Quinn: I’ll put a link to that ebook in the show notes for this episode and I’ll also put a link to your YouTube, which is Power Company Climbing, right?

Kris Hampton: I think so, yeah.

Neely Quinn: I’ll find out. [laughs]

Kris Hampton: Pretty sure. [laughs]

Neely Quinn: So that takes us through a good amount of drills for people to do. Now, people are probably wondering when they should do these drills, how often, and how they should incorporate them into their climbing sessions. Any guidelines on that?

Kris Hampton: Yeah, I think I can make it pretty simple. Any new skill that you’re learning, you want to do it when it’s a really low-intensity environment. While you’re warming up is a great time to try out totally new things, on your easiest warm-ups. If you’ve never done a bicycle, if you’ve never toe hooked, try some toe hooks when you’re warming up and not just the boulder that somebody set as a toe hook. Try to find examples of it. Try to make it work for you and learn why it works and how it works and when to recognize the situation where it might work. That would be new skills on very, very easy terrain.

As you’ve learned those skills a little bit just start stepping up the difficulty so you’re a little bit uncomfortable. You’re learning your best when you don’t look like an amazing climber. It might be a little bumbly, you might feel a little awkward, you feel like people are watching you and maybe they are, but they’re probably saying, “Man. I wish I could dig into something like that instead of always being concerned about people watching me.” Whenever you’re feeling that little bit uncomfortable within a drill, that’s probably when you’re learning the most.

Now as you get pretty good at a drill you could take it to harder and harder terrain and start to use it in performance. A lot of us will have these moments where we’ve tried this thing, we’ve learned this thing, and then we just do it without thinking or we recognize it on this new problem on the wall. We’re like, ‘Oh, I can see the toe hook there and I know that’s the beta.’ That’s when you really start to reach this level of mastery. It doesn’t mean you should stop there. You should continue trying to find new situations where you can use it but start at your easiest with new skills and just work them up. Keep them in this slightly uncomfortable place until you’re recognizing them in the wild, so to speak.

Neely Quinn: So there’s no hard and fast rule like one day a week you should be doing drills for this amount of time or anything like that.

Kris Hampton: No. I do some sort of drill in every single session, usually during my warm-ups or in my final warm up zone when I’m trying pretty hard and I know I’m going to do the problem and I can put a little bit of my focus, a little bit of my processing power toward thinking about this drill.

Neely Quinn: So you’re going to go climbing after this interview, right?

Kris Hampton: I am.

Neely Quinn: And you’re going to go try a boulder?

Kris Hampton: Yep.

Neely Quinn: Like a project?

Kris Hampton: Yep. I’m going to try a project that requires me to keep really tensioned in this gaston position so when I’m warming up I’ll do some really specific tension drills focused on pushing between my opposite foot/opposite arm and really keeping tension with just those two points of contact on a wall that’s about the angle that I’ll be projecting on. I’ll warm up in my gym then I’ll go out to the boulder and try it.

Neely Quinn: Okay, so you’ll warm up in your gym.

Kris Hampton: Even if I were warming up outside I would try to find situations that I could practice this tension I might need or practice this rhythm I might need. 

I think last time we talked I was projecting Transworld Depravity, a 14a in Red River Gorge. When I ultimately did it, part of my warm up was climbing this 5.11 that I knew really well but I would climb it really fast and with this really fast rhythm, letting momentum carry me through, because that’s how I had to climb both the 12c intro section and the 13a middle section. I had to climb it with that slight bit of abandon and rhythm to be really efficient so I would practice it in my warm up.

Neely Quinn: That makes sense. I think when people think of drills they’re thinking of a coach with a stopwatch out and you have to do so many of them and blah, blah, blah. It sounds like what you’re saying is these things can basically be you on a route with an intention.

Kris Hampton: That’s what they should be however, the next Performance Climbing Coach seminar I’m going to bring a stopwatch and a whistle because that sounds really cool. [laughs]

Neely Quinn: Yes, it’s very official.

Kris Hampton: It should be you with an intention. I think that’s a really good way to put it and we could have saved ourselves an hour if you had just said that right in the beginning. [laughs]

Neely Quinn: A lot of the people who listen to this podcast, and I’m assuming yours as well, are 5.10, 5.9, sometimes 5.11 climbers.

Kris Hampton: I think only 5.14 climbers listen to my podcast.

Neely Quinn: [laughs] Okay.

Kris Hampton: [laughs] No, you’re totally right. 

Neely Quinn: I think a lot of them are beginners, like people that have been climbing less than a year up to a few years. I think that there are certain things that beginners do need to know like we were talking about at the beginning. 

When I first started climbing I remember trying to boulder in the cave really unsuccessfully. Finally a friend was like, ‘Hey, you need to twist your body and do this with your feet and you can wrap your heel around this.’ I think that most of the time in the community people are pretty vocal and they’ll help each other but a lot of times we’re not. Are there drills or technique practices that beginners should know about? Can you direct them to any videos? Or what do you think about that?

Kris Hampton: I kind of lay out a little bit in our Movement Skills ebook for ‘this is really good if you’re a beginner climber.’ A drill we call Hip Shapes, which is essentially climbing a set boulder and trying to do every move twisting and then trying to do every move square. Again, you start to learn when one works and when the other works better so you start to recognize those situations and be able to apply the “correct” – in air quotes – technique to that situation. Things like Hip Shapes, Heavy Feet, One Touch, and our Sloth Monkeys I think are really, really beneficial and I would go as far as to say almost required for most beginner climbers to learn those things initially. Whether they learn them through our drills or not, almost every up-and-coming climber who gets to the point of 5.12 or beyond knows some degree of those drills.

Neely Quinn: Right. You’ve just reminded me of me climbing with my friend Bri. We’re both really short. She’s even shorter than me, just for the record, but…

Kris Hampton: [laughs] Is that possible?

Neely Quinn: It’s weird because we’ll do the same route and I’m the one who’s twisting all the time. I’ll be back-stepping and get my body all scrunched up so that my hip is against the wall as often as possible. It’s just how I’m comfortable. She’ll do these moves square onto the wall and sometimes I wonder if I’m doing it wrong because it looks way stronger the way she’s doing it. My question for you is: is there a right or a wrong and what could I maybe learn from her and vice versa in this situation?

Kris Hampton: I don’t think there is a right or a wrong in most cases. There might be a right for you and a wrong for you, to answer, but there are no hard and fast rules for technique. If you’re climbing and someone just gives you this blanket advice to keep your hips to the wall then they’re full of it and you should ignore that person at all costs because that’s just a blanket rule that doesn’t apply to everything. Maybe it works for that move but there are going to be moves where keeping your hips away from the wall is better. Different people have different strengths so for her, that square, more powerful move might be much better and for you it might feel really hard. That’s one of the beauties of climbing. We all get to find our own way.

To further answer your question I think that you do and could learn a lot from her if you were to try things her way. You guys could swap techniques and she could do everything twisty and you could do everything square and you’re both going to learn that sometimes it is better for me to be twisty and sometimes it is better for me to stay front-on and do this move more powerfully. Like I said, that just widens your skill set.

Neely Quinn: You just made me imagine the next time I climb with her, we could share a warm-up and do it twice. She could do it then I could try to do it like her.

Kris Hampton: Totally. You could climb it freestyle and she could climb it Neely-style.

Neely Quinn: And we could be screaming beta to each other like, ‘No no! Don’t back step there!’ I think that would be really valuable. I think what you’re saying is that we all have something to learn from each other and maybe we can branch out a little bit sometimes. 

Kris Hampton: I remember a story in Rock & Ice or Climbing, one of the two, years ago interviewing Dave Graham, Joe Kinder, and Luke Parody. They talk about how when they were all in the gym bouldering together back then a lot of the times they would try to do boulders a bunch of different ways based on the climbers that they sort of idolized. They might climb a boulder the way they thought Sharma would and then they would climb a boulder the way they thought Yuji would or the way they thought Francois Legrand would. I think that’s a really, really important way to widen your skill set and it’s no accident that Dave, Joe, and Luke are all really, really good climbers. I think they built that from the ground up.

Neely Quinn: That’s so cool. It takes a lot of ingenuity and thinking outside the box, too. I think you mentioned Dave Graham earlier – or Jimmy Webb. These people who just make up these movements, or Carlo Traversi.

Kris Hampton: Dave is a wizard. He’s like the Tony Hawk of rock climbing. He’s created all these new ways to climb and that’s what it takes. Those guys weren’t happy with just succeeding. They weren’t happy with, ‘I got to the top of the boulder. On to the next one.’ It was, ‘Let me see if I can master this and climb it like Sharma, climb it like Yuji, climb it like Francois, climb it like Fred Nicole. I’m going to try to climb it every style imaginable and master it.’

Neely Quinn: Well, we can’t all be like them.

Kris Hampton: We can’t but we can try.

Neely Quinn: We can try to think outside the box and we can try to practice the things that we know work. 

I think that you’ve given us some really good tools to go in and start incorporating some practice into our sessions. Do you think there’s anything that we missed? I mean, of course there’s always things to talk about. 

Kris Hampton: I think you really hit on it right there towards the end that there is no right or wrong way. All of this is just an experiment and if it works, it works. There aren’t rules to this so if it works, do it and try to make it better and try to understand it and try to realize when you can do the same thing again. Just play, experiment.

Neely Quinn: Yeah, play because it’s fun.

Kris Hampton: It is. It’s a lot of fun.

Neely Quinn: Thanks so much for your wisdom and for coming on the show and talking about sort of a nebulous topic to talk about.

Kris Hampton: Nebulous. That’s the word I was trying to come up with at the very beginning and all I could come up with was abstract and obtuse. Nebulous.

Neely Quinn: All of the above.

Kris Hampton: I need a shirt that says “nebulous” so that way I can remember it. Thanks, Neely. I appreciate you having me on again.

Neely Quinn: Thanks and enjoy your time at home.

Kris Hampton: Thank you. I will. Come visit.

Neely Quinn: Alright I will. 

I hope you enjoyed that interview with Kris Hampton. You can find him, like I said, at powercompanyclimbing.com and then on social media @powercompanyclimbing. He did make that video of basically everything we talked about. It’s just for this episode that he made this video. He’s really good at cranking those things out. You can find it on his YouTube page which is Power Company Climbing or on the episode page on trainingbeta.com and if you just go to TrainingBeta and search ‘Kris Hampton’ you’ll quickly find this episode page.

Thanks, Kris, for your wisdom as always and also thanks for the extra work. He mentioned the ebook ‘Movement Skills for Climbers’ and again, if you want to take advantage of that, the coupon code is TRAININGBETA. 

Hopefully that helped you maybe put a little more organization around what to do for skills and drills and hopefully this will make you a better climber. I know that I’m going to start putting more of these things into my own climbing and I’m pretty excited about it.

Coming up on the podcast I talked with Marina Inoue. It goes sort of full circle because she trained with Nate Drolet, who is one of Kris’s trainers at Power Company, and he had her do a bunch of these drills. We talk about that in the podcast and she talks about how much stronger that made her, just doing drills in her warm-ups and through her sessions. I thought that was a really good anecdote to just prove how much these things work. I think Marina is going to be next on the podcast. Either Marina or Mercedes Pollmeier, I’m not sure, but I have a lot coming up on the podcast so stay tuned. 

I’ll probably put one out next week as well before Thanksgiving so you can have that on your drive or your flight to wherever you’re going. Hopefully you have a great holiday, for all you American listeners. I will be staying local and I’ll be podcasting for the next month pretty regularly and then I get to go to Florida and sit in the sun, which I’m pretty psyched about.

Remember that we have resources for you at TrainingBeta. You can find subscription programs for route climbers and boulderers where you get three new workouts every week and you go through cycles where you’re training power or power endurance. It’s not linear but it sort of helps you maintain what you’ve gained in previous cycles while focusing on a new thing in a new cycle. You can find those at trainingbeta.com/programs.

We also have a bunch of ebooks. You can do nutrition with me if you’re interested in optimizing your diet and you can also do more personalized training with Matt Pincus. You’ll find all of that at TrainingBeta.

Last thing is we do have a community page on Facebook all about training for climbing. There are like 12,000-13,000 people in there talking regularly about training and injuries and just kind of gabbing about what works for people. You can find that at trainingbeta.com/community and that will link you straight over to Facebook.

That’s all I’ve got for you. Thanks so much for listening all the way to the end. I really appreciate you and I’ll talk to you soon.

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