What We Talked About

• How he prepares for free solos
• His hardest sends
• Why he built a gym devoted to training for climbing
• How olympic lifts and crossfit workouts help climbers
• How to build fitness
• The future of training for climbing

Related Links

• Matt Lloyd’s gym: www.mountainstrongdenver.com
• Article on Climbing Mag by Matt about overcoming fear

Training Programs for You

• Check out our Route Climbing Training Program for route climbers of all abilities.
• Our other training programs: Training Programs Page.

FrictionLabs Discount

FrictionLabs (my favorite chalk company by far) is offering you a discount on their awesome chalk – woot!

Please Review The Podcast on iTunes!

• Link to the TrainingBeta Podcast on iTunes is HERE.
• Please give the podcast an honest review on iTunes here to help the show reach more curious climbers around the world 😉

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 today we’re on episode 41 and I first want to apologize and tell you that I’m sorry that I didn’t have anything out for you guys for the last two weeks. Last week, I was in Chicago visiting my three-week-old nephew who is the cutest thing that I’ve ever seen in my life, so I was fully focused on him and not on the podcast. The week before that I just had no interview to give you, and sometimes that just happens.

So, moving on, I’m here now and today I have Matt Lloyd, who is a longtime friend of my husband, Seth. They started climbing on the same climbing team with the same coach. They started going to Rifle together and Matt became known for – he’s been in magazines featuring him because of his head game. He does X- and R-rated climbs and he does free solos and he climbs .14a, so he knows a bit about climbing and training.

He actually started a gym himself and it’s in Denver. It’s focused just on climbers, which is something that I haven’t really heard of before. There’s a climbing gym, there’s a bouldering wall in the gym, and it’s kind of a CrossFit hybrid sort of set-up, but he’s going to tell you all about it. I just think that it’s really interesting and cutting edge and he’s going to tell you about how they train their climbers, what differences it’s making, and he’ll give you a few workouts in here, so listen closely for those.

Before I get to the interview I want to let you know that FrictionLabs, our very loyal sponsor and my favorite chalk company, is giving you guys some really great discounts on their stuff, on all their chalk and their new products. If you go over to www.frictionlabs.com/trainingbeta you’ll find them there, and sometimes they’re deeply discounted so definitely check that out.

Alright. Without further adieu, here is Matt Lloyd. Enjoy the interview.

 

Neely Quinn: Welcome to the show, Matt Lloyd! Thanks for being with me.

 

Matt Lloyd: Thanks for inviting me.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah! So, for anybody who doesn’t know who you are, can you tell me a little bit about yourself?

 

Matt Lloyd: Sure. My name is Matt and I live in Denver, Colorado. I own a little training facility here called Mountain Strong Denver and I’m a long time rock climber.

 

Neely Quinn: Alright. You are a long time rock climber and I don’t know if you actually started off with my husband but I know that you guys used to climb a lot together.

 

Matt Lloyd: Yeah, I was a full-on gym rat. Seth Lytton and I climbed in the gym everyday and learned to kind of cut our teeth outside together, getting schooled and humbled repeatedly on our first missions out. That was probably 15 years ago.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah. Were you guys on the same climbing team?

 

Matt Lloyd: We were. In fact, Seth was on the Beta team at Rock’n & Jam’n and I was on the Alpha team, which I think is really pertinent being that he is a vastly better climber than I am. I really have to drive that home.

 

Neely Quinn: There was an Alpha and a Beta team?

 

Matt Lloyd: Yeah, I know. It sounds kind of ridiculous but we really liked to build a hierarchy into people so they could…

 

Neely Quinn: Feel bad about themselves?

 

Matt Lloyd: Yeah, exactly. Feel bad about themselves really early on.

 

Neely Quinn: That’s surprising. So he never graduated to the Alpha team?

 

Matt Lloyd: Well, he actually did. I think in order to be on the Alpha team you had to climb a 5.11 on the lead cave and Seth was climbing 5.12’s and the coach was like, ‘You should come to the Alpha team,’ and Seth was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m good enough. Those guys are so good.’ I think Aaron, the coach at the time, was like, ‘I think you’re going to be okay, you know?’

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah. Did you guys share Chris Roger as a coach?

 

Matt Lloyd: We sure did, who was kind of an awesome coach and maybe serendipitously, I’ve become a little bit like Chris. He was sort of an abusive/awesome coach. A very common phrase from Chris Rogers might be: I would fall off a climb and say, “You know, Chris? That was just too hard for me.” Instead of encouraging me, he would be like, ‘You know what? You’re right. It’s just too difficult. When life gets hard, Matt, you should just quit,’ which incited all of us to try as hard as we can rather than to go home, of course, because we were going to prove him wrong.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah, he used to do some crazy stuff to you guys.

 

Matt Lloyd: Yeah, it was awesome and I think that maybe we need a bit more of that hard coaching, but lovable at the same time.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah. I think it really shaped who Seth is as a climber, where he’s just like, ‘You just have to try hard. You just have to try hard all the time. You try hard until you fall.’

 

Matt Lloyd: Yeah, and that was really a lesson I learned from Chris Rogers and Aaron Prowty. One of the most standout moments is I can remember Chris trying some problem in Hueco. I can’t remember the name of it, but there’s a kneebar in it and he had gotten this large wound in his knee from repeatedly doing the kneebar and falling, so the wound hurt. He was unable to do the kneebar, kind of a knee scum, so he falls off the climb and sits there. He’s pretty calm. We asked him if he’s going to go again and he says, “Yes,” so all of a sudden, he leans over and takes his fingernails and drives them violently into the wound, stabbing the wound as much as he can, ripping it open, and then screams and then lets go of it and then gets on the climb and just sends it. All of us are like, ‘What? What?! What are you doing? I cannot believe that.’ He was like, ‘Well, if I made it hurt a lot before I got on it it wouldn’t hurt as much when I was actually on the climb, so therefore it mitigated the pain.’ So, that was kind of my mentor in climbing.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah. Coincidentally, I don’t know if you know this and it’s really off topic, but he just had a mountain bike accident where he had a huge gash bleeding everywhere out of his elbow. He was alone and he decided after he fell off his bike and did that and was bleeding and was dizzy from bleeding, that he would take another loop around the trail. Then he went to the hospital.

 

Matt Lloyd: Yeah, I’m kind of glad he’s a doctor these days. That’s the kind of person I would want anyway.

 

Neely Quinn: Well, a psychiatrist. We could on and on, but anyway – okay, so tell me a little bit more about your climbing. I heard stories about you sending pretty hard stuff when you were younger and I’ve read about you doing more free solo stuff and continuing to push your limits, so tell me about some of your highlights.

 

Matt Lloyd: The Matt Lloyd highlight reel. I think it all starts with a conveniently low IQ but the way that I kind of started was climbing in the gym all the time and I got really lucky, kind of, in the early competition days in the DCL, the climbing league in Denver, and the early USA climbing – I believe it was called the JCAA back then. We competed and I had a lot of fun. I don’t know that I was that good at it, there just weren’t that many people competing which made it easy to go to nationals. I had a good time and explored getting outside but in my years of climbing I never excelled as much at pure difficulty as I might have liked.

I really cut my teeth climbing in Rifle and worked my way up the grades and kind of got into that hard .13/easy .14 range and kind of hit this giant wall. I realized for me to progress, I had to progress not only in this pure physical realm, which was really hard for me, but I found space mentally that I really enjoyed leaning into. That’s kind of how I got into ice climbing and trad climbing and doing a fair amount of ropeless climbing as well, because I really enjoyed that head space. It was a place where I was able to see gains as I pushed into them.

Early on, you would hear people say things like, “That route is not difficult, it’s just scary.” To me, something that is scary is inherently difficult. It’s just not difficult for a physical reason. It is difficult for another reason so I really enjoyed that, so I spent years and years climbing in Eldo and seeking out those R- and X-rated routes and everything in ice climbing is in that exciting realm, and that just kind of made my way into soloing routes, only really as a byproduct of not having partners for the days that I wanted to go climbing. I decided early on that climbers go climbing everyday so I climbed five days a week for probably 15 years with almost no exceptions. I looped a motorcycle and broke my wrist so I took two months off for that but other than that, there was no breaks. That kind of leads me to where I am now.

 

Neely Quinn: I have a lot of questions. Will you talk about the head space that you enjoy being in, and how would you describe that headspace?

 

Matt Lloyd: Well, what’s interesting I think is, the kind of climbing that I do, people sometimes assume that I like being scared or that I’m very good at not getting scared. Neither of those things are true for me at all, actually. I kind of consider myself quite a bit of a coward and I get scared pretty easily but what I really enjoy is kind of mastering that fear and figuring out how to mitigate it, and that’s normally mitigated through my physical ability to figure out how to hold the crimper just right or really toe in and get the right body position or just memorize the moves in general. I really enjoy this game of finding something that’s scary and then finding a way to make it easy, or at least easier.

About a month ago I soloed a route in the Flatirons called The Yellow Christ. It’s an incredibly technical .12b/c thing and my first burns on it, I couldn’t even send it on top rope but I climbed on it for about 10 days just messing around. By the end of it, I was able to climb it 10 times in a row before I soloed it, just on top rope, just sussing it out. I don’t know that it was being a stronger climber. It was just being comfortable with those moves, getting the muscle memory, and then having this mental reassurance that I can accomplish something to a high degree.

 

Neely Quinn: You beat it into submission.

 

Matt Lloyd: Yeah. To actually enjoy mastering something, I think that’s the most succinct way to look at it is – a lot of people, they get on a route and their goal is to send the route but when your goal is to solo a route, my goal is to do it absolutely perfectly, with no mistakes. I think that there’s a big connection with Olympic lifting there. There are so many things you can do wrong. Just sending a route, to me, isn’t just what I want. I want to climb it perfectly, so if I climbed it and maybe I lost a little bit of body tension but I still stuck the next move on top rope, when I know that I have to solo it, that’s unacceptable. I’d lower down and try the move again and then maybe I stuck the move 10 times in a row but in my head it still hasn’t been done to the degree that I find perfect, I really enjoy that. Maybe some other people might find that frustrating or repetitive, but anyone who’s done a move well and done a move poorly can recognize the great variance between the two. I spend my life in that little space.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, so what’s your hardest climb? This has an endpoint here, this question.

 

Matt Lloyd: You know, I probably couldn’t put my finger on it exactly, but maybe as far as a sport climb goes, The Prowler in Clear Creek or Grimora <spelling>, I don’t know, kind of in the .14a range. Nothing too exciting.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, so when you got to the top of those .14a’s, were you like, ‘Lower me down, I’ve got to do it again. That wasn’t perfect enough.’

 

Matt Lloyd: No, but what is interesting for me is I didn’t send those routes trying as hard as I can. The Prowler is a great example. I spent about 10 days climbing on that route and I think I probably could have sent it on my third day of effort but each day I got on the route I didn’t really try as hard as I could. I was more figuring it out. I played on it and I really sat there and figured out every move. The day I did send it, Nelson from Mind Frame Cinema was there and when I sent it, I lowered down and I sent it again maybe 15 minutes later. It was because once I locked in the moves and figured it out – because I had spent 10 days playing on it – I had it totally locked down as easy as it could be, to the point where I could consider soloing it at some point or something to that effect.

I think there’s a lot of climbers where they do a really great job of trying hard and they are an excellent onsight climber, they push themselves to this brink where they do things they didn’t know they could do at a given moment. I’m at the other end where I master each move and it gets to this point where I’m positive I can do this move. There’s no effort involved.

 

Neely Quinn: So wait – how hard is The Prowler?

 

Matt Lloyd: It’s .14a.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. What would you say is your hardest free solo?

 

Matt Lloyd: .13a.

 

Neely Quinn: Wow. I’m just wondering what the difference is like, like how far below your max is where you’re comfortable free soloing.

 

Matt Lloyd: Well, I would say by and large I’m comfortable free soloing .12a and under. I’ve done quite a few routes that are harder than .12a but they have to meet really specific criteria, like the route has to top out, because I’m not interested in soloing something with a harness and a rope or something. That seems really contrived, so the route has to top out, so it essentially has to be like a large boulder problem. I can handle cruxes, they just have to powerful, not friction-y so there’s a lot of caveats to the style but yeah – maybe if I’m a .13+ climber on average, I’m hanging out in the .12a and under category.

 

Neely Quinn: I’m just going to interrupt here for a second to let you know a little more about FrictionLabs, my favorite chalk company, as I said, which – by the way, somebody came up to me in the gym the other day and they were like, ‘Is it actually your favorite chalk company or do you just say that because they’re your sponsor?’ and I said, “Hell yeah! Have you tried it? It really does make a difference. The amount of magnesium carbonate in their chalk really allows it to stick to your hands better. It keeps your hands drier for longer and that’s what I’ve found and that’s why I love it so much.”

They have three different blends: the Unicorn Dust, the Gorilla Grip, and the Bam Bam. It’s all the same thing but some are just chunkier than others. The Unicorn Dust is my favorite. It’s, like it says, it’s just dust and for that reason it really sticks to my hands the best.

They also have hand salves and files for your skin and they have some new products that are really exciting, so it’s kind of a one-stop shop for hand care in climbing. If you want to check it out for yourself, go to www.frictionlabs.com/trainingbeta and now we’ll go back to the interview.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, so let’s talk about training. I want to leave us enough time to talk about what you’re doing now for a living and all that. Actually, wait – I have one more question before we get into all that. You said that you would climb five days a week, pretty much without exception. I know that lot of people out there are going to be like, ‘How the hell did he do that? I can’t do that. I have a job, I have all this stuff.’ How/were you a sponsored climber? How were you funding that? And, were you working at the time?

 

Matt Lloyd: Well, I guess I’ll answer that in two ways. There’s the paying for it way and then there’s the physicality of climbing everyday. Basically, I did have a handful of sponsors over the years, and I guess I do, but mainly working odd jobs and I would find ways to work early or late because you can’t really climb when it’s dark outside. I would go to work, find ways to work in the hours when it was dark in a way to be free during the daylight hours, and another thing is I’m really lucky and I live in Denver. It’s absolutely reasonable to drive to Eldo and climb for one hour and drive home, and I can do that in a two and a half hour period if there’s no traffic. I really took advantage of that, and the second part was climbing five days a week, there were a lot of people that would be like, ‘That would be hard on my body,’ but I have lots of easy days and hard days. I might have a day where I’d go climb four pitches of 5.5’s and I’m just soloing around. That is really fast and easy, then there’s days where I’d spend six hours hucking myself at steep shenanigans, so it’s really just a variety of climbing days.

 

Neely Quinn: That’s interesting and yeah, I guess that makes sense that you would have to vary it a little bit so you don’t totally waste yourself. Did you find that you got injured a lot when you climbed that way?

 

Matt Lloyd: No, I actually think that – and I have no scientific reason to back this up, but my gut is that – our bodies adapt very well and by climbing everyday I kind of raised this bar in my body to what it could handle and I basically stopped getting injured. I find that people get injured, and myself specifically, when I take three days off and on my fourth day I try as hard as I can, and then take three days off and then try as hard as I can, I feel like that shocks my body. During the days off, I’m getting used to doing nothing and maybe low impact exercise or whatever. I start climbing very hard and while I feel very, very strong, because my muscles and tendons are recovered, I feel a little bit shaky, a little less comfortable on the rock, I’m more likely to have a foot pop and that kind of tradeoff feels a bit dangerous to me. I actually felt pretty healthy. I mean, you don’t get sore from walking but I think that’s because we walk every single day so our bodies have adjusted to that over our lifetime.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah. Okay, and were you training outside of that when you were climbing that much? I mean training in the gym?

 

Matt Lloyd: No, I’ve kind of had a pretty big ebb and flow with training in my life. I’ve always exercised outside of climbing but I only really started training, and I use those words really separately, in about the past five years. A lot of that was to mitigate some reoccurring injuries that I had accrued over 20 years of rock climbing. That’s kind of why I approached it in the first place – training – was to fill in those gaps and then that kind of turned into its own beast.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, and what’s the beast that it turned into? Tell us about your business.

 

Matt Lloyd: My business, Mountain Strong, was born from this idea that I would go to the climbing gym – I’d worked at rock climbing gyms for the better part of 15 years. That really helped pay for those days out climbing. I found that it didn’t really fill this void for me. I wanted a place to try hard and to stay focused and be around people that were really energetic and passionate. While the climbing gym is those things or can be those things, it certainly wasn’t dedicated to that. You know, you have the birthday party element, you have the recreational climber, or kind of the dating hour element, that I think is really prevalent in most climbing gyms, and I really just wanted a space for me and my friends to train. I had a friend that owned a warehouse and he gave me a 12’x12’ corner and we built a climbing wall, and I had some weights, and it was dirty and dungeony and dark. My friends would come in there and we would just be maniacs and throw ourselves at it with no idea of what we were doing, but we had a moment one day where I was like, ‘This is what I want to do with my life. I love this space.’

A really good friend of mine, Andy Raether, is one of the better climbers in the country and him and I got along because I think we both feel a certain way. I almost like training as much as I like climbing. They’re equally fun to me, hence, now we have Mountain Strong, which is a training facility here in Denver that only caters to people looking to get better performance in their climbing or in their sports endeavors in general.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, so I’ve been in the gym and it’s awesome, but would you describe what it looks like?

 

Matt Lloyd: Yeah, it’s pretty small. It’s kind of the size of/it’s about 3,000 square feet which is much smaller than a commercial climbing gym. It’s basically a CrossFit gym. We have Olympic weights, we have lots of gymnastics equipment so lots of rings, and then we have a 900 square foot bouldering wall which is meant to look like a World Cup wall. It has four panels and the problems are set to be trainers, not recreational boulder problems.

 

Neely Quinn: What does that mean?

 

Matt Lloyd: What does that mean to me? The problems are not meant to be overly cryptic. They don’t tend to have wild, difficult to decipher moves. They are pretty straightforward, allowing us to focus on one specific aspect of climbing and that, in here, is strength/power. We believe that you’re going to learn the technical aspects of climbing on real rock, so we don’t bother with that. Real rock is difficult to decipher and technical and there’s lots of smearing on footholds. I think if you wanted to make something similar to that it would be very difficult to do in a gym, but what we can do is really isolate the athletic portion of climbing and so that’s what we try to do. We try to deduce it down to it’s most simple form and that way we can use it as a part of a workout, similar to using dumbbells or any other kind of modality.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, so a lot of the walls in your gym are overhanging, correct? You don’t have many slabs in there.

 

Matt Lloyd: No slabs in the gym.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, so what else is in the gym?

 

Matt Lloyd: We have Olympic lifting equipment, rubber mats, and gymnastics equipment and that is about it. Maybe some kettlebells.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, and also you’re not the only one who works in there. What is your role in there and tell me about the other people who work there.

 

Matt Lloyd: Well, there’s three of us and we have incredibly different backgrounds. There is Will Gordon, who is a swimmer, a D1 swimmer from Penn State, who is a business partner of mine and he coaches as well. Then we have Anne Malman (Delbovo) who is a pole vaulter from Florida and she came up and is also our CrossFit coach. They are also both Olympic lifting coaches.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, and what about you? What’s your role in the training area?

 

Matt Lloyd: I kind of represent the climbing portion. One of the dynamics that we very intentionally set up were we wanted to bring modern training that exists in other large scale, highly developed sports like track and field and swimming, we wanted to bring that to climbing where we believe that most people train in a very archaic and old fashioned way. Teaming up with people that don’t have a climbing background, I feel that they aren’t indoctrinated into the dogma of climbing and what works and what doesn’t. They come from this different, more modern view on training and I represent and kind of ground that in real world experiences with climbing, because sometimes you come up with this idea for training for climbers and a real climber is like, ‘No, that doesn’t actually apply,’ so we kind of balance each other out.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, so it’s a lot like a CrossFit gym in that you guys are running classes at various times in the days and it’s kind of structured sort of like a CrossFit class would be.

 

Matt Lloyd: It is, exactly. We have one hour classes and we have a coach and we have the whole workout planned for you. Yeah, it mimics that very, very closely.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, so give me a sort of outline of what a workout tonight that you’re going to do will look like.

 

Matt Lloyd: Today’s workout could be/generally there’ll be a warm-up element, so we spend about 20 minutes really warming up the body. That’s something we really pride ourselves on. We take a long, slow warm-up. We do mobility and then we follow that up by working on a skill. We believe in fundamental gymnastics movements as being highly applicable to climbing so we develop people’s ability in the muscle-up, both strict and kipping, the front lever, and then we work on Olympic lifts like the snatch, or power lifts like the deadlift.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, and you also got certification as a CrossFit coach, right?

 

Matt Lloyd: I did. I just kind of had been doing it and I wanted to learn a little bit more about it so I went down that avenue, recently, actually.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. How do you feel Olympic lifting plays into climbing? Why are you stressing it for climbers?

 

Matt Lloyd: I think it is highly technical and in conjunction with that there’s a speed element and there’s a strength element, which you would regard as power, that is not as apparent in a lot of other modalities in fitness and training. Working one without the other is not as advantageous to a climber. A climber has to have this finite ability to pull, right? That’s very important but you’re not pulling in this vacuum, as people would say, you’re doing it under these dynamic circumstances. Sure, there are times when I’m really static and slow and careful, but when you’re kind of on the edge and you’re trying to do something that’s close to your ability level, there’s a lot going on.

I find that something like the snatch, there’s a lot of room in there for you to make a lot of mistakes so not only do you have to pull really hard on that barbell, but you’re thinking about your back position and you’re trying to think about your hip flexion and I think that that conjunction – conjunction? Is that even a word? Junction – there you go. I knew I was wrong there. The junction of dynamic, powerful movements meets being highly technical, thoughtful body position and body awareness is really similar.

I’ve often compared climbing to golf in the fact that the technical aspect is as relevant as the power. I know people that have climbed 5.13 that cannot do a pull-up. It’s important to train our ability to learn body awareness and Olympic lifting does a great job of teaching body awareness.

 

Neely Quinn: How have you seen it affect your own climbing and the people who come into your gym?

 

Matt Lloyd: I’ll answer this for me first. For me, I’ve noticed it in the fact that I’ve filled in these little voids that are a weakness in my body and that allows me to have more control, and that control correlates really well to making a move more possible in different avenues. That sounds really esoteric and random but what it really means is that you’re having more core tension and control and power. I can do a move more slowly, allowing my hand to grasp that hold better and the power allows me to have control of it like, for instance, not letting your feet swing off and – while it doesn’t stand out, it wasn’t breathtaking, it wasn’t one day I started Olympic lifting and then I started sending everything, but it’s little moments where that strength really becomes apparent, this body control to keep yourself stable in space. I think the way we might describe that is gymnastics, our controlling our body in space. I think that it’s an underdeveloped skill and moving a barbell around is an effective way to train that.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. Have you seen climbers come in and they’re like, ‘I really want to climb this grade. Can you help me?’ and they do it after you’ve trained them, or you guys have trained them?

 

Matt Lloyd: Yes, I have. The irony of this is going to sound really silly, but I don’t actually think it was our training that did it. That happened a lot. People would do our training and then they would come back like three weeks later and they’re like, ‘Thank you. I’ve just climbed my first .14 or my first V10 and I really appreciate it.’ While I think we certainly helped them, a lot of times people do it on their own. You do your own work and you earn whatever grade it is that you climb. You put in the work that is necessary to climb a .14 and if you don’t send it then you haven’t done the work necessary to climb that thing. I think the reason they have had success is we structure their training and we offer an environment where people try really hard. I think, in a way, that is more relevant than the physical performance that we make so important. It doesn’t matter how strong you are, in a way, if you’re not able to effectively try hard. We’ve created this environment where people can try hard.

 

Neely Quinn: And try hard on a regular basis, because I’m assuming they come back and you tell them, “This is how many times a week you should be here.”

 

Matt Lloyd: Yeah. Something that we’ve been kind of striving for is people come in and they want to work out one day a week and we say, “That’s great, but it’s probably not going to do a whole lot for you.” It’s just not an effective way to approach it. You go and climb outside and one day of weight training – it’s certainly not going to hurt you, but we definitely think three days a week is a reasonable starting spot. Most of us here are training five days a week. They’re not all hard days but five days tends to be that magic number for us.

 

Neely Quinn: And are you having them train three days a week, at least, and then trying to go outside and send? Like, at the same time?

 

Matt Lloyd: Yes, but with a little bit more thought than that. I believe, personally, that the fewest number of moves you can pull in training are the best number of moves because if you’re injured it doesn’t matter how strong you are. We are trying to not have people have three-hour climbing sessions. We want to keep those numbers of moves on plastic down to a minimum because I believe overtraining injuries tend to be – well, let me take that back. I don’t believe that they are overtraining. I think that if you pull enough moves you end up doing a tweaky move. I don’t think it’s a product of overtraining. In fact, I think a lot of people misuse that word. I think you can have a lot of quality hours of training but as people get fatigued, they are more likely to tweak themselves, especially when engaging in really complex, shouldery movement. We want to really protect people so our workouts are built around that. We’re not working hard. In a one hour workout you’re really only working hard for maybe 15 minutes so you’re leaving feeling really fresh and that way we’re quickly going into that one-rep max kind of terrain and then coming right back out of it.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, do you have a workout right in front of you? Like, an exact workout of what people would do?

 

Matt Lloyd: Absolutely. Here’s an example of a workout we’re doing this week: it is 10 rounds for time, which all of our workouts are going to be, either time- or task-oriented. The reason we do that is we believe intensity is one of the most important things in a workout and I have to go through this before I tell you the workout because it’s kind of relevant.

If I ask you to do 50 pull-ups and I gave you 24 hours to accomplish that task, the stimulus on the body would be really, really low, okay? You’d wake up tomorrow and you’d feel fine, there would be no soreness, and because that stimulus would be low there would be no hormonal response on the body and very little strength would be acquired from that, but if I said “Neely, you need to do 50 pull-ups and you have 130 seconds to accomplish that task,” even a very, very, very strong climber might have a hard time doing that. They would probably feel very sore the next day and there would be a large stimulus on the body.

The way that I could even extrapolate that one more step would be look at your average construction worker. They are picking up very heavy loads, moving things around all day, working with their arms, but they’re not exactly super strong, yoked, high-end athletes. That kind of shows us that the intensity with which the task is done is very relevant to the outcome in the athlete’s body, so our workout for this is 10 rounds for time and that means that we’re going to accomplish whatever task it is and then we’re going to record that time, kind of incentivizing the athlete to do it quickly. It’s 10 pulls on the rower, so they’re going to sit down on the rower and pull as hard as they can 10 times. They’re going to jump off that rower and they’re going to grab a campus board and do one maximum campus reach with each hand. They’re grabbing that campus rung and they’re pulling as far as they can and they’re just touching as high as they can and coming back down to the first campus rung, so that’s one effort on either hand. Then, they’re climbing one boulder problem with a weight vest. In this case, it’s a 10-pound weight vest.

Now, they’re repeating that whole process 10 times, so if you think about it that might sound like a lot but they’re really just doing 100 pulls on the rower total. They’re doing 10 pulls on either hand on a campus board, and then 10 boulder problems. That is the entire workout.

 

Neely Quinn: And there’s no rest in between any of those sets?

 

Matt Lloyd: No, that is none at all. It’s going to be as quickly as they can go, maintaining a high level of performance. We have workouts where we say speed is relevant and we have workouts where we say quality is relevant. This one is a quality workout so what that means is they are going to move a little bit slower, so I’m not saying they’re running from the rower to the campus board, you know? They’re going to make an effort on the campus board, they’re going to shake out for a second, and then they’re going to do another effort but they’re going to use the least amount of rest possible in order to do a quality effort.

If I gave you this task and gave you two hours to do it, it just wouldn’t have a stimulus on the body so we’re trying to shrink that into a really small amount of time to keep that intensity up.

 

Neely Quinn: You said that’s the entire workout?

 

Matt Lloyd: That is the entire workout, yeah. That whole workout would probably take 16 – 20 minutes tops.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, so they come in, they warm-up for 20 minutes, they do this workout, and then they’re done.

 

Matt Lloyd: They’re done. You walk out of the gym. What we’ve done here is we’ve really focused on strength. We have that one weighted boulder problem and I have a little note here on the side that says it’s going to be 60% of your max. If you’re a V10 climber you’re picking a V6, which if you think about 10 times on a V6 with a weight vest, it’s going to be a pretty difficult task but it is based on <unclear>. You’re not doing much campusing but they’re really big pulls. You’re trying to recruit as much effort as you can. When you accomplish this 17-minute or 16-minute workout you’re not going to feel like doing anything afterward, at least not for a while.

 

Neely Quinn: So what if you have a V2 climber come in? What do you do with them?

 

Matt Lloyd: The exact same thing. We can scale any of those workouts and that’s something we spend a lot of time figuring out. The rowing in that workout, for instance, those pulls on the rower, that’s scalable to anyone because it’s just a rower. You kind of pull as hard as you want to. The max reach campus rungs we either swap that out with somebody doing a strict pull-up, if they’re a V2 climber and pull-ups were difficult, or if they’re even more difficult they could be doing a pull-up with a band around their foot to make it a little bit easier.

Another example of a scale for that thing would be you’re doing the campus max reach but you’re putting one foot on the wall, so that way we could scale it down for somebody who’s not at that ability level, but they’re still getting that stimulus of active jump, of push down on the lower campus rail, and that opening up for a big reach. Then the weighted boulder problem, simply take the weight off or make the boulder problem easier.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, so you have to go through every person and make sure they’re doing the right thing before every workout.

 

Matt Lloyd: Yeah, absolutely, and that’s where coaching comes into it. I think that a good coach is able to scale the workout. My job is that if a 5.14d climber comes in here and a V2 climber comes in here, right? And they come and do the workout, I’m going to make them do the same amount. They’re both going to be at 90% of their ability level for about 15 minutes, so the workout will take both of them the same amount of time and they’ll put the same amount of effort into it, and I do that by scaling up or down the difficulty of any individual movement.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, would you mind going through another workout?

[laughs] Sorry.

 

Matt Lloyd: Sure – no, they’re kind of wildly different.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah, do a wildly different one.

 

Matt Lloyd: A wildly different one. Well, here’s one that has a large cardio element to it. This is going to be 30 boulder problems up and down, four times, so again it has that time restraint, but in between each of those boulder problems you’re going to do two burpees between the first one, four between the next one, and double each time with a max number of 30 burpees. You’re kind of adding a lot of burpees in between so we’re trying to keep that heart rate really, really high. That’s just a long, grinding workout and by having those burpees in there, we’re getting that heart rate really high, which is diminishing people’s ability to do technical or minute movements and so it’s almost mental training at that point.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, and how long would that workout take them?

 

Matt Lloyd: Well, this would be an example of a capped workout. I’m going to cap that workout at 60 minutes. So, we have workouts that no one finishes and we have workouts that people finish in less than the amount of time but that’s where a cap comes in.

 

Neely Quinn: And how hard are the boulder problems for them?

 

Matt Lloyd: In these situations, again, that would be a scaling question and it would just depend on their ability, but we normally have notes where whether someone is going to be functioning at a one-rep max – meaning they’re climbing their hardest boulder problem possible, or they’re functioning at 20% or something like that. It just depends on where we are in our programming and that’s where our programming comes in, because as we plan a six-week cycle or so, we’re trying to have a high volume at one point with a lower intensity and that intensity is going to ramp up, giving us lower volume and more weight.

 

Neely Quinn: That was my next question. So when people come in, do they sign-up for a six-week cycle? Do they sign-up for a month? What do they do? What do you guys offer?

 

Matt Lloyd: You know, they don’t. This is the one compromise we make. We – basically, we program six weeks at a time and people just sort of jump in where they jump in. Now, I realize that that is not the best way to handle it but I also realize another thing and that is that you’re not going to get strong in six weeks. I just know people want to think that that’s going to happen and there are things you can improve in six weeks, but your core ability to move weight over a distance, over a certain period of time, is probably not going to change in that time. What that means to us is while they might jump on at a random part in our programming, over the next three months as they are a part of it they will kind of homogenize to our system, kind of get in sync with it.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. Can you tell me about a workout where you do incorporate the Olympic lifts?

 

Matt Lloyd: Sure. An example was yesterday: we did 30 clean-and-jerks for time and that is a straight up CrossFit workout. It’s called ‘Grace’ and we make our climbers do it. You are just taking a barbell from the ground to the overhead position as fast as you can. It’s a reasonably heavy weight – 135 pounds for men, 95 pounds for women – and that’s a great example of where CrossFit blends really well with climbing training. That’s a full body stimulus. You’re kind of as out of breath and your muscles are screaming at you at the exact same time. We scale it so that workout should take everyone about four minutes to complete, 4 – 6 minutes, so essentially if 135 pounds is too heavy for you to accomplish 30 clean-and-jerks, we will lower that weight. I think I did the workout with 115 pounds, so everyone adjusts the weight.

We try to set a standard that everybody is individual so we expect people to change the workout to work for them. We don’t expect/we don’t want people to show off and do the heavy weight just to ‘be the man’ or something because, like I said, not getting injured is our most important aspect. We design our workouts for an elite athlete and then we scale down for everybody. There are workouts where no one does the workout exactly as it’s written. Everyone finds a way to scale it.

 

Neely Quinn: That’s my – I did CrossFit for a little bit and what I found for myself, and I’m imagining I’m not the only person, is I’m really competitive, whether I like it or not. If my coach were to say, “Alright, you’re going to do this for time,” of course I wanted to be the first one finished. Sometimes that would make my form pretty shitty, so how do you get around that?

 

Matt Lloyd: How do you get around it? That’s a great question and I’m going to answer that in two different ways: when you ask people to do something for time, you’re really asking them to compete. I mean, there’s just no other way to put it and the reason we’re doing it is that competition element is how you try hard. Go to the climbing gym sometime and just watch people in the bouldering area and ask me if they’re really trying hard. Like, they’re sitting around and they’re talking and they’re hanging out. They’re not training, by and large. Obviously, there’s exceptions to that rule. Adding that competitive edge is how you get people to really dig deep and kind of push into that limit in their ability.

Now, we recognize that when you are trying as hard as you can, your form is going to degrade to some extent so this idea – and CrossFit gets an incredibly bad rap for this, and some of it is deservedly so and some of it I don’t think as much, but when you’re doing a snatch in a workout your snatch isn’t perfect, right, as you get tired. We think that’s okay to some extent. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It has to be safe, so what I’m doing as a coach, we walk around and correct people’s forms to keep them safe while at the same time keeping that intensity level up.

If you had to do something perfect, you would never be able to do it fast enough – well, not for years, maybe, be able to do it fast enough to have that intensity level. In our case here, I’m going around and if I saw you trying, and let’s just say you’re doing push-ups, and all of a sudden you weren’t going to the floor or your elbows are flaring out to the side, kind of putting your shoulders in a vulnerable position, I would just correct you constantly and then stop counting those reps if you didn’t correct them. So, it’s really the coach’s job to make sure that safety and quality is there during that intense workout, which is a challenge when you have a lot going on and it’s one of the reasons we keep our classes really small. They’re a max of 10 athletes per coach.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah, that does make a difference because it’s hard to watch people and be counting and be motivating them.

 

Matt Lloyd: Well, I don’t count. Our athletes are responsible for counting their own reps. I mean, I try to count somebody every once in awhile, just to hold everyone accountable. We want to have this environment where no one’s cutting corners but for the most part, we trust people to count their own reps and work their way through it. We’re really looking to just keep people safe and make sure they’re working hard.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. That’s great. I think there are probably a lot of people listening who are like, CrossFit – I mean, they have the same issues with CrossFit as I’ve just discussed and it seems like if you do it responsibly, it can be good.  I’m assuming you’re not sitting here telling me that things are working for people and things are going really great and then what’s actually happening is you have a bunch of athletes with really heinous injuries. I’m assuming that’s not the case.

 

Matt Lloyd: No, it’s not. I think – look, just to be totally fair, I don’t think there’s any answer/I don’t think if you want to get good at climbing, I don’t think you should stop climbing at your local climbing gym and go get a CrossFit membership and just start hucking yourself at weights everyday. That is not the answer and I am in no way saying it is. I’m saying that every different style of training has aspects that are really effective and I think the intensity offered in CrossFit is effective, so we have to find a way to apply that. Now, are there downsides to things? Of course. If a tool is totally safe it might not be very effective just because it doesn’t have the ability to cause change, you know? The more powerful a tool is, the more change it can incur, the more likely it is that that tool can hurt you, so you have to use it responsibly.

We joke that there’s a – sometimes when people get into training we call them the ‘high schoolers.’ They are not high schoolers, they are grown ass adults, but when you’re in high school and you discover drinking you’re like, ‘Let’s party hard! We’re gonna party every night as hard as we can,’ okay? Those people exist in training. You hand them a barbell and they’re just ripping that thing, as heavy as it is, every day as fast as it can go until they blow their knees out, or their elbows, or whatever it is, or their shoulders. Our job as a coach – I can’t tell you how often I walk up to someone and I’m like, ‘Hey, you should drop down in weight,’ and they go, “No, no, no. I’m cool,” and then in the middle of the workout I just walk over and take the weights off for them and I put the lower ones on. I just make the decision for them because I take it as my personal goal to not get people injured.

It is my biggest concern, and I think that is the part that’s missing when you go to most climbing gyms or most training facilities, people are given this incredible workload but they’re not worried about you getting injured. Me, coming from a background of being a climber that climbs everyday, missing one week of climbing due to an injury incurred in the gym is not worth it. It’s just not worth it, so there are days – I had an athlete last week whose shoulder was bothering her. We stopped in the middle of the workout and I was like, ‘That’s that. We’re only going to do some stretching, mobility, we’re going to do some recovering stuff.’ We got the rollers out, we just did a bunch of recovery work because that’s what needs to be done. They were pissed about it, you know? They wanted to train. They wanted to have that intense workout but that’s not what they need to be doing on that day and that’s where this individuality of the individual athlete really becomes very important. The coach needs to know when and how often someone needs to take a break. I think that’s something that’s very difficult to do on your own.

The same thing goes on the other day. I have an athlete that has a hurt foot and today was a running workout. He was like, ‘Oh, I’m just going to cycle today,’ and we were like, ‘No, come run with us. You’ve got to lean into it sometimes.’ I’m not a doctor and I don’t know but my job is from the outside, to try to get the ego out of it and just look at what’s best for that individual.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah, it’s kind of an art, it seems like.

 

Matt Lloyd: Yeah, and there’s some guessing. I make mistakes and I’m by no means a master, you know? In fact, I’m probably on the rookie end of this but the thing is that we approach our training like we have not figured it out yet. This is not some kind of – I’m not telling people who are listening to this, “Do exactly what we are doing.” What I’m saying is that we’re trying different things, we’re trying to record what’s working and what isn’t, and then constantly trying to switch it up and see what is. I think approaching it saying, “I’m not a master at it,” allows you to continually learn. The minute you have a coach or a trainer or a friend that’s like, ‘This is how you do things. Every other person is wrong,’ I think the learning stops and you’ve totally inhibited your ability to grow.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah. Do you think this is the future of climbing training? Do you foresee that gyms like this are going to be all over the country or in gyms?

 

Matt Lloyd: Absolutely, I think, without a doubt. I said this a little bit earlier. There’s this thing, and for years I’ve done it, so I’m not giving anyone a hard time, but I was like, ‘Hey bros, let’s go to the climbing gym and train,’ and we’d go there and sit around and put burns on boulder problems. Okay, that is not training. I can guarantee you there are no NFL players right now getting ready for the Super Bowl going, ‘Hey bro! Want to go play some football?’ It just doesn’t happen.

Swimmers aren’t randomly hopping in the pool and as soon as they get tired they jump out of the pool and they’re like, ‘Yeah, I’m just going to chill for a second, you know? Hang on and I’ll just get it next burn.’ That just doesn’t happen, okay? I think that we need to learn from other sports. This idea that climbing is so different to every other sport is asinine. Just jump out and say it. It is the same as a lot of other sports. I know we want it to be different because we’re cool and we’re climbers but I think that we can learn from other sports that have gone through these growing pains.

A great example that stands out in my head is distance running. There was a period when distance runners trained by running as many miles as humanly possible every single week. They just ran as much as they could. Then, kind of in the Prefontaine era, someone kind of figured out/they were like, ‘Oh shit. We need to let these people rest,’ and then all of a sudden the times started dropping aggressively, right? I think that that’s an example. We need to learn.

Another example is if you look at CrossFit, for instance. There was, in the early days of CrossFit, people were trying to not eat or eat as little as humanly possible and they weren’t getting very good even though they were ultra skinny and ultra cut. Their performance was dropping. I read somewhere recently that the average body fat of an Olympic athlete is 13%, which is pretty high when you think of super muscle-y athletes. That is not a super muscle-y athlete and my point with climbing here is there are things that we think are true that have already been disproven in other sports. We do not need to go through and learn them all for ourselves. We can step out and be like okay – a football player is learning to jump high not just by running out onto a field and jumping up and catching footballs, but by doing weighted squats with rubber bands that get more difficult as they stand up. Gradiated efforts like that.

We can learn from other sports and I think that’s where the future of climbing is. As we kind of grow up together, we can figure this out and I think that the climbing gym is obviously going to continue to be around. It’s an awesome place. I tell all my athletes they should go and climb at the gym and have fun. They should try hard boulder problems but it becomes its own thing. That’s going to become a place to just get some mileage in, learn some moves, have fun with your friends, but when you want to train you’re going to want a place that’s dedicated to that. Part of that means you can’t have a birthday party in there. You can’t just throw barbells around when people are just hanging out so I think that those spaces are going to have to separate at some level.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, a few questions. Number one: body composition of people that come into your gym. Do you see them changing? I know that a lot of times we look at CrossFitters and we have this image of them in our head that they’re just burly, you know? A lot of climbers are trying to avoid that. I know that your programming is a little bit different but what’s the body comp changing into with your people?

 

Matt Lloyd: So, first off, absolutely. It’s kind of been weird. I have all these people come up to me and I think the first thing I noticed putting people through the workouts is that everybody, no exception, they’d come up to me and be like, ‘Hey man, I know this is weird but I was checking myself out in the mirror the other day and thanks, dude.’ I’m like, ‘Um.’ You know? Everybody has it. All of a sudden people have muscle but here’s a quick little thought: your body size is a reflection of your diet, not of your training, so you could train really aggressively and really hard five days a week and not gain any huge, big bulky muscles if you keep your calorie intake down, okay?

When you hear people say, “I can’t do CrossFit because I just bulk up too easy, you know?” That’s not true. If you took control of your diet you can mitigate gaining too much muscle. That’s a product of the food you eat and I just hear that a lot, like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to bulk up.’ I’ve lost weight since I started CrossFitting but I look different, just because that weight is kind of in different spots, but I’ve kind of bounced between 170 and 190. For me, a good sending weight is like 175 or 177, so we take that into account but for sure, the high intensity interval training tends to just burn a lot of fat so one of the things we tend to notice a lot is people cut weight pretty dramatically with our training.

 

Neely Quinn: They cut weight? Or they cut fat? Like, have people come to you and been like, ‘Look, I’ve gained weight but I look different,’ because I hear that a lot with CrossFit people.

 

Matt Lloyd: For sure. It generally works like this: you start doing our training, everyone loses weight right off the bat. Their body weight goes down and then – that’s at the two month mark – their body weight starts to really drop, and then all of a sudden that body weight goes right back up to where it was but their body composition is totally different.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, and then speaking of the HIIT workouts, I’m assuming that a lot of what people get from your workouts is more fitness, because the high intensity level training, for me at least, it gave me a lot more cardio fitness and just a higher workload. Do you find that that’s the case?

 

Matt Lloyd: You know, I do. Earlier you asked me if my training made people better climbers and I kind of gave you this soft answer of “Yes, no, maybe?” Allow me to refine that a little bit. The interval training we do here really does improve your fitness. How that applies to climbing: what happens is there’s a little known fact, and that is your heart rate greatly impacts your ability to accomplish tasks that are delicate or precise. It has been recorded – not by me – but it’s out there in the world of science that over 90 beats-per-minute, our ability to do fine motor skills deteriorates rapidly. That is why you get symphony musicians that take beta blockers or why Formula One race car drivers are doing tons of cardio or strength training, right? What they want to do is increase your body’s ability to deal with work so your heart rate can remain low during effort, so that your precision can remain high. This is highly applicable to climbing.

Another example of that would be fear, right? This is how it comes in: so there’s two ways for your heart rate to go up. One is that you get scared and you have a hormonal response in the parasympathetic nervous system and we see things light up and our heart rate goes up because we are frightened, okay? And the other one is by effort.

If you wear a heart rate monitor, and I totally suggest that any of your listeners, if they feel like it, go out there and get a heart rate monitor. Put it on when you are doing a project burn on something that you really want to send, rather that’s a boulder problem or route. Look at your rest heart rate and look at it when you’re done putting in a max effort burn, and that can be a six-move V2 if that’s your limit, or it could be a 100-move 5.12, okay? You will be totally shocked. It’s near, mine at least, personally, when I come off a .13+ or something at the gym and I really want to send it, like a long term project, my heart rate is near my max level heart rate. It’s about 170 beats a minute, which is really, really high. That shows you that training our fitness level is really important in being precise for our sport because I need to get that heart rate down. You can do that through a myriad of ways, but one of those tools is fitness. By getting our heart rate down we are able to be far more precise in our movements.

 

Neely Quinn: And it seems like HIIT training is more efficient than going for jogs, or am I wrong about that?

 

Matt Lloyd: Oh, absolutely. If you guys feel like it, go to your local marathon. I would like you to take a seat and just look at people’s body composition. There are a lot of fat marathoners and there are a lot of fat marathoners that will burn you at the marathon. Long, slow exercise is a terrible way to get strong and fit and really change your body composition. Now, there are things that long, slow – we call that LSD, long, slow – distance training does really well and that is it can improve your VO2 max by having capillary growth. There are advantages to it but not by itself. Going out for a slow jog is a waste of your time in this humble athlete’s opinion. I think there are more efficient ways to use your time than that long, slow training.

 

Neely Quinn: I’m assuming you guys are doing more, like, sprints when you are doing running.

 

Matt Lloyd: Yeah, generally we do not run further than 400 meters at a time and generally that’s kind of the distance. We’re running 100 – 400 meters at a time because it’s long enough that you suffer a little bit but it’s short enough that you can go fast and keep that intensity up.

 

Neely Quinn: Can you give me an example/can you describe a workout to me that has running in it like that?

 

Matt Lloyd: Yeah, sure. Here’s a workout for you for time, again. You run 1,200 meters, which is long by our standards, and then you owe us 48 ring rows on the rings, and then you run 800 meters, and then you owe us 24 pull-ups – those are kipping pull-ups, so you can do them quite quickly/pretty fast, then you owe us a 400-meter run, and then you owe us 6 muscle-ups and you do that whole workout for time. What’s interesting about that is we’re asking you to do things that are getting progressively more difficult and technical as your heart rate is getting higher and higher and higher, so you have to recover. You come in and you roll in from that run and you’re getting it back, and you’re getting it back, and then you just have to dive into what amounts to being a strength movement for a lot of people.

That workout took people 15 minutes or so to complete and the climbers specifically, when you see 24 pull-ups they’re like, ‘Oh, it’s no problem. Easy,’ but you come back from an 800-meter run and jump in on those pull-ups – I had 5.14 climbers breaking those bad boys up into sets of five because they couldn’t do more than five pull-ups at a time. That might not make any sense to the average person but having that cardiac cost while you’re running and then trying to drive into something is really difficult to do, but it’s really important because that’s what route climbing is. You bust a bunch of moves, you pull the first crux, and then you get your rest hold. You’ve got to recover before diving into the next boulder problem. It sounds like, to people, ‘Oh, this is so different to climbing,’ but it’s not. It’s really similar.

 

Neely Quinn: This is awesome. I wonder what trainers who are listening to this are going to think, and I would love for you guys to email me and comment on this post, wherever the podcast ends up, and tell me what you think about what Matt’s saying. I think that it’s good and not a lot of coaches are doing it, so…

My other question here, because I said I have a few, was about fingers. Are you guys doing/do you have hangboards in the gym?

 

Matt Lloyd: Yes, we have hangboards and I guess that is something that I didn’t mention earlier. One of the things that we incorporate into almost every workout is a small fingerboard session. On some workouts it’s larger and some workouts it’s smaller but generally there’s a fingerboard element because, as much as I want to escape it, finger strength is the single most limiting factor to a climber’s performance. I always laugh, and I’m going to hack this quote, but I believe Tony Yaniro said this a long time ago, that ‘if you can’t hold onto the holds there’s nothing to endure.’ I really find that incredibly pertinent to climbing, like, people are often training endurance and I think that, in a way, you just get the power, learn to do the moves, and then you will get the endurance when you need it and you can peak it right before. That power is really important, so we dive into some fingerboard sessions.

We actually, just to give credit where credit is due, I steal/use some of Mark Anderson’s awesome work that he put into his Training for Climber’s book – I don’t actually remember the title of it exactly but there’s some really good information in there and we apply some of that to our fingerboard workouts here in the gym. We use that in conjunction with our general conditioning and strength training.

 

Neely Quinn: So you’re not doing it for hours at a time? You’re just doing it for a few minutes?

 

Matt Lloyd: No, just a few minutes. I would say our average fingerboard workout is 3 – 5 minutes. The climber is warm at this time, they’ve done a few boulder problems perhaps, because this occurs at different points in the workout, but again – I guess we haven’t spoken about this but when we went through the workouts, some of our workouts are just power-related so there’s no cardio element to them whatsoever. That could just be max weighted pull-up or your two rep max and you have six efforts at that. That’s the workout for the day. Where that goes with the fingerboard training is we try to get people onto the smallest holds that we possibly can on the fingerboard. We’re not really messing around with the medium to large holds for long hangs. We’re spending a lot of time in the five seconds on, five seconds off realm on the smallest holds they can possibly hang on to.

We think that fingerboards are a great place to get strong because they limit the number of moves you can pull. It’s really hard to blow out a shoulder on a fingerboard and since we’ve established that finger strength is very pertinent to climber’s’ ability, your time is better spent on a fingerboard than it is on a boulder problem in a training circumstance. We can really isolate just the finger without risking hurting the shoulder. Imagine if you were getting on a really dynamic, fingery route at the gym and you hurt yourself on your shoulder while you were training your finger. We’re trying to isolate those things to keep the number of moves pulled to a minimum to kind of alleviate the risk of injury.

 

Neely Quinn: That sounds very efficient.

 

Matt Lloyd: [laughs] Well, like I said, I know that someone’s going to listen to this and be like, ‘I know he’s totally wrong on this idea.’ Who knows? I could come back in six months and be like: ‘Hey, you know, I’ve changed my mind on this or that,’ but this is where we’re at right now and it seems to be really effective. Just on that fingerboard thing, if you get on a very fingery boulder problem there’s a lot of variables, right? You’re jumping to holds, the holds are very irregular in shape, there’s opportunity to hurt your fingers, but on a fingerboard where you can grab the hold perfectly, lean in, and then hang from the smallest hold possible there is less room to injure yourself. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. It absolutely can, but there is less room to have a large, traumatic injury there so it’s a good place to gain that finite strength, that absolute limit of your ability. Then, what you do is you take that tool that you’ve developed and then you go and apply it on a boulder problem and, preferably, you go and apply it on something you want to send, you know?

The truth is, if you want to climb a V14 boulder problem, go get on that V14 boulder problem and don’t stop trying until you send it. It might take…

 

Neely Quinn: Woah! That was a big comment.

 

Matt Lloyd: I think it’s true. I have never tried a route and not sent it unless I stopped getting on it.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah, but have you tried a .14d?

 

Matt Lloyd: No I haven’t, and that’s a great point. No, I haven’t, but what I have seen is climbers who are 5.10 climbers/5.11 climbers – what I mean by 5.11 climber is that they’re sending 5.11’s – I have seen them get on 5.13c in Rifle and just project the shit out of them and send them, and they’re not a .13c climber at that point. They’re a sender of a .13c so that’s where that strength training thing doesn’t really apply. I think you can just figure out one route with enough effort. I can guarantee you this: climbing a whole bunch of 5.10’s will never make you climb a 5.13, so the opposite of that argument would be that climbing a 5.13 can make you climb a 5.13.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, yeah – I can agree with that.

 

Matt Lloyd: Or probably.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah. Okay, so if people want to train with you in the Denver/Boulder area, how do they find you?

 

Matt Lloyd: They go to www.mountainstrongdenver.com and we have a list of some ramblings there that they can check out and shoot us an email or if you have any questions or anything, I’m available at matt@mountainstrongdenver.com.

 

Neely Quinn: Cool. Well, I really appreciate your time. I think I’ve got all the answers to my questions that I wanted so thanks.

 

Matt Lloyd: Thank you very much, Neely. I really appreciate it. I really am impressed and glad that there are people out here having these conversations because I think that there’s a lot of room in climbing for us to grow and after all, that’s really what it is about, kind of getting us out of the Dark Ages and figuring this out so that we can do the best that we can, because I think that’s most of our goals. We just want to find our personal edges and I think that podcasts like your’s allow people to do that in the most efficient means possible.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah, well I thank you for your work. Obviously, you’re doing a lot to push the sport forward yourself, so thanks.

 

Matt Lloyd: Right on. Well, take it easy.

 

Neely Quinn: See ya.

Alright, I hope you enjoyed that interview with Matt Lloyd. You can find him at www.mountainstrongdenver.com like he said and if you are in the Denver or Boulder area and you feel like getting your ass kicked in a workout, I highly recommend it. I didn’t actually do a workout when I went there and visited but I did watch one and a couple of my friends were in the class and they were dying. They were psyched and the instructors and coaches are really motivating and I think that that’s more of what they’re trying to emphasize, is just it’s really hard to motivate yourself and having somebody in a place where it’s safe to kind of go crazy, that’s what I think they’re trying to do.

Hopefully we’ll have some TrainingBeta programming in there soon. They’re experimenting with it and using parts of our programs but we’re trying to figure out a good relationship because I would love to have TrainingBeta programs all over the states or all over the world someday. That would be great.

Okay, so moving along, next week I have Jorg Verhoeven, or maybe the week after that. He does some alpine stuff and I probably just butchered his name. I’m really sorry if I did. I have some more offwidth climbers and some more alpinist-type climbers and mountaineers, so I’m trying to diversify and I’m doing that partly because of your really great suggestions, so thanks for those.

If you want more help with your own training we have all kind of resources and Kris Peters is doing online personal training where he’ll make you a five-week program, with or without Skype and email support. Basically, if you want a program made for you, he’ll do five weeks and it’s based on how much you can train, what your goals are, what your limitations are – if any, and what kind of equipment you have available to you. That’s $100. If you want email and Skype support you’ll talk to him throughout the five weeks and that’s $200. It’s totally worth it, in my opinion, if you’re working to meet some goals for the spring or even this summer. You can start now.

If you don’t have that kind of cash we have our much more affordable programs, like our subscription programs start off at, like, $12.50 a month and you get three workouts per week. They’re all unique and you can/we have our bouldering and our route climbing programs, depending on who you are.

I’m also actually taking some clients right now for nutrition so if you’re interested in that just email me at neely@trainingbeta.com or info@trainingbeta.com. That comes to me, too.

So, I think that’s it. Thanks for listening. If you want to give me an honest review on iTunes I would love that. Other than that, I’ll talk to you next week. Have a great one!

 

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