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Transcript

Neely Quinn: Welcome to the Training Beta 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 number 51, where I talked with Sean McColl. He’s a well-known Canadian climber who has climbed V15, I think he’s the only Canadian to have done that, and .14d. He also competes a whole lot.

He’s 28 but, as a kid, he started climbing on the Canadian Youth National Climbing Team and he won the gold medal in lead climbing in his age group at the 2002, 2003, and 2004 Youth World Championships. In 2006 he won in both the bouldering and lead climbing categories and he started to do adult competitions after that. He’s been super successful at that. He’s done a lot of podium finishes and he’s won some national competitions and he continues to do many, many of these things every year.

I wanted to talk to Sean because a lot of us know Sean McColl as this crazy training guy, like Patxi or Adam Ondra or something, and there are videos all over of him on the campus board doing crazy stuff. I got the opportunity to sit down with him – not with him, but over Skype – and talk about how he trains. Hopefully you guys will get something out of this. No, he’s not like the average climber and so you may not be doing exactly what he’s doing but I think, actually, his approach is really interesting and I learned something from it.

Before we get into the interview I want to let you know that Friction Labs, my favorite chalk company, is giving you guys some awesome discounts on their stuff/on their chalk. You can go on over and check that out at www.frictionlabs.com/trainingbeta .

Alright, without further adieu, here is Sean McColl. I hope you enjoy it!

 

Neely Quinn: Welcome to the show, Sean. Thanks so much for being with me.

 

Sean McColl: Thanks for inviting me.

 

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

 

Sean McColl: Alright, let’s see – my name is Sean McColl, I’m 28 years old and I started climbing when I was 10. I started climbing with my whole family; we wanted to do a sport altogether. I guess a lot of people know how I started. I was competing really quickly, I started to train really quickly, and two really big key inspirations, my coaches, were Andrew Wilson and Mike Doyle. Now I’ve been climbing for 18 years. I do World Cups, I travel the world, honestly, I get to do what I love. That’s kind of me in a nutshell. We’ll get really specific. I’m sure we’ll have more specific questions but if you have a question that we don’t get answered, feel free, obviously, to contact me after.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. So, you’ve been climbing for awhile and like you said, you started competing at a young age. Do you feel like you just were naturally gifted at this? Or what do you think set you apart? Were you just able to become pretty good, pretty quickly?

 

Sean McColl: I think it’s a combination of things like every athlete. One is the drive. The second is that I’m very competitive, and the third is that climbing was not my whole life as I was growing and learning as an athlete. I think a whole bunch of things combine to make really good athletes and I think the fact that I didn’t only have climbing in my life made me just love climbing even more. I always had other things. I was in school, I played soccer, and I played piano and I also rock climbed. I loved doing the whole mix of things and it wasn’t until I was maybe 22 or 23 when I did climbing 100 percent of the time, all of the time.

 

Neely Quinn: That’s interesting. It kind of reminds me of Eric Hörst’s kids who do football and soccer, so climbing for them is sort of a seasonal thing. Is that what it was for you?

 

Sean McColl: It wasn’t so much seasonal, because I was always kind of climbing, but if you only rock climb you’ll be missing a lot of muscle groups. Where, to be a good boulderer and lead climber and speed climber, or just to be a good lead climber or just to be a really good boulderer, you really need to me more of an athlete nowadays. The problem, I guess, 10, 20 years ago, there weren’t as many climbers so you had people – I guess you’ll always have climbers who will not have your typical athletic build, but now there’s more and more people into the sport. I think we’re going to see more climbers who have an athletic build who are just really versatile in other sports, so that you grow up and do baseball and basketball and soccer and rugby and climbing. If you’re a really good athlete and you excel in climbing, I think it will be those people who will be the new standard of climbers in the world.

 

Neely Quinn: So do you take that into your training now? Do you do other sports or cross-train a lot?

 

Sean McColl: I think I was actually really lucky in that I did cross-train and do other sports as I was growing and now it’s less important. I can kind of see the end of my competition career, even if it’s in five or six years, but it’s more important when a climber is 15, 16, or 10, when they’re growing. That’s when it’s really important for them to be doing other sports, to be getting muscles in their legs, learning really good hand/eye coordination – it’s really everything. Whereas once you’ve built those blocks and you can start climbing a whole bunch, it kind of just – I’m really trying to say it’s a lot more important to do all of those things as you’re growing as an athlete. Once you get to a certain age, if you’ve never done any other sport and you’re 30, and you try to play soccer, it’s super hard. You just don’t have the coordination to kick a ball if you’ve never done it before whereas if you’re 10 and you start doing it, or even earlier, if you’re five or six, and you learn to do every sport in the world then you can pick them and pick specific ones to excel at.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah, it seems that the younger you are the better. Tell me a little bit about the evolution of your training. When you started, when you were 10, did you start training right away or were you just climbing a lot?

 

Sean McColl: No, when I started at 10 and even now – I don’t know at what age people start climbing. I’ve heard some people say they started climbing when they were 12 and others say that they’ve been climbing since they were four or five. What’s too early, really? In my opinion, it’s never too early to start climbing as long as you’re not doing only climbing. If you’re just really into sports and you happen to be a good climber, that’s really cool. Like I said, I played soccer.

When I started climbing at 10 it was just for fun. I just loved the feeling of climbing, seeing what I could do, trying to get to the top of each wall, and then I got, obviously, introduced to the grading system. They were like, “Maybe you can go do that red one over there. Or go do that line in the gym.” The world just kept getting bigger and bigger but I didn’t really do strict training until I was maybe 12. I’d already been climbing for a couple of years but even at 11 or 12 it wasn’t that strict. I would just come in three days a week and climb with my friends. And yeah, it’s called ‘training’ but at the end of the day, I think back on it and I just loved it. It was like going to soccer practice. Was it training? Yeah, it’s considered training, but I loved it. I was getting active, I was getting cardio, I guess I was even working out my upper body, but for me it was like being at a playground. I happened to be good at it, I guess, right from the get go so I always had motivation.

 

Neely Quinn: I just did an interview with the coach of Team Texas, a kids’ climbing team who crushes, and we were talking about whether or not kids should be fingerboarding or campusing. Is that something you were doing and what are your thoughts on that?

 

Sean McColl: I never touched a fingerboard or a campus board until I was at least, I think, 16, or 17, or 18? Somewhere in there. I’ve heard a lot about it in the last couple of years and I do strongly discourage it if the athlete is under 16 and I don’t even have any medical background – it’s just the stuff that I’ve read. I’ve read stuff about growth plates and I honestly, it’s not a domain I have a lot of knowledge in, but I know that as the kids are growing, if you mess up the fingers when they are that young, the damage is irreversible for the rest of their lives. The fact is, they don’t need it.

What I’m saying, dead hanging and campusing on pretty small, maybe like one-inch grips or one-centimeter, whereas if they’re doing pull-ups, it’s considered a sort of hang but you’re on a jug. I would consider that okay. It’s more conditioning in my mind. It’s not/it’s only when you’re getting really small and you’re putting a lot of stress on the tendons, especially when they’re growing, that’s what I tell people to avoid, at least until they’re 16.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. So what were you doing between the ages of 12 and 16 that you call ‘training?’

 

Sean McColl:

[laughs] You’ll have to ask Mike and Andrew. What was I doing? I guess I was doing a lot of climbing. Even when I was 12, bouldering was not really much of a thing yet. It was something we got to do for fun but a lot of the time it was lead training. Andrew was a firm believer in getting all the different climbing movements engrained in our heads and he knew the grades would come later. So it wasn’t just that I was trying to climb harder grades and harder grades, it was just, “Can I do a knee drop? Can I climb on slopers? Can I climb on crimps? Can I do a little jump?” He was really focused on learning the different types of climbing movements and he also thought it was really important to do route setting, to figure out/to get into the head of the route setters.

I think that also adds to the athlete that I am today because I kind of tried it all. You really do have to try it all. You have to try coaching and route setting and training and different types of training, like train five hours a day and see if you can handle it or train two hours and take an eight-hour rest and train another two hours. The more stuff you try, you can figure out more and more what works for you and then keep doing that. Keep moving along.

 

Neely Quinn: What did you find works for you and has that changed up until now? Like, how much you can train and what kinds of training you can do.

 

Sean McColl: I mean, a big misconception is that I train every day for three or four hours. When I tell people, when they’re like, “Hey Sean, how much do you train?” and I’m like, “Ten to 15 hours a week,” they’re like, “Woah, what? Don’t you do this professionally?” Yeah.

I know Adam Ondra. He’s at the upper echelons and I think he trains 20 to 25, and that’s conservative, I think. He is built that way. He loves training that much and he admits that he’s constantly tired. Before competition season he has to have a really big tapering session but I’ve found that – I’ve tried to train 16 hours a week <unclear> and I’m just too tired and my training sessions are just less efficient. Everyone has to learn it but I’m really comfortable doing 10 to 15, and of the 15 hours a week it’s not all climbing. There will be some dead hanging and some fingerboarding and some – off the top of my head it’s hard to come up with the percentages and everything but I try to do cardio. I do floor-based exercises with bands, which is actually kind of new for this year and last year. I obviously do bouldering and lead climbing, circuits, I don’t really do any speed training although I should, since I do World Cups in them and everything. Then I do a bit of cross-training like, abs, and I like playing soccer with my friends or playing basketball. I guess it’s not considered training but it’s more for fun.

 

Neely Quinn: So 10 to 15 hours a week, and is that what you’ve been doing for the past, how long, 10 years or so?

 

Sean McColl: I mean it goes/it definitely varies. I never say, “I have to train 10 hours a week.” I play it extremely by ear so when I’m competing a lot in a season, I’ve done nine competitions in a row on back-to-back weekends on nine weekends in a row. If you account for those competitions and you don’t consider them training, I was only training five hours a week, because I would train on Tuesday and Wednesday, maybe for two hours each but mostly just to recover, then I’d rest two days and be back in a competition. It’s really an average of when I’m actually training and then you take into account that, generally in December, I take three weeks when I don’t do any rock climbing so then it’s zero. That’s my off-season. I play everything by ear, I listen to my body, and if I’m feeling really tired one day I’ll leave training and I’ll go home.

 

Neely Quinn: Do you work with a coach or trainer?

 

Sean McColl: I do not. My last coaches were Mike Doyle and Andrew. They were the only coaches I’ve ever had and I don’t think I could work with another coach.

 

Neely Quinn: Why’s that?

 

Sean McColl: Number one is trust. I just don’t trust anyone better than myself to teach me or to tell me how to rock climb. It’s probably – well, I know it has to do with my personality. It’s because I don’t like people to tell me what to do and stuff. It’s hard for someone to say, “Sean, you climbed that wrong,” and I’m like, “Okay, can you explain it to me?” “Well, you did this move wrong.” “Well, that’s debatable,” and then we have a conversation about it. For me to just blindly trust someone, which is kind of what you do with your coach, even though you have a discussion, it’s only those two people that have coached me that I know it would work. So if Mike came back and wanted to be my coach, I would say yes but he’s probably the only person in the world.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. Mike, you heard that. Do you take inspiration for your training, your routine, your structure, from anybody? Do you read up on training?

 

Sean McColl: I [laughs] do not read up on any training. That might be weird, actually, but no, I don’t do any reading on training but I do a lot of listening and then I do a lot of testing. Someone will say, “What do you do in training?” and they’ll say, “I do this, this, and this. I do three-hour circuits once a week, because I find it really helps.” I’ll be like, “That’s interesting. I haven’t done that,” and I’ll kind of get more of a definite plan of how to do it, like how many rests they took, and I’ll try it. I try it at least once because if I don’t try it once I can’t say if it’s good or not.

I try almost every training that I hear, as long as I don’t think it’s dangerous, and if I find it works or if I liked it or if it just suited me then I’ll do it more and then sometimes I’ll incorporate that into my training. Sometimes I don’t, and sometimes I try it once and think it didn’t work for me or it’s too hard, but I really think that it’s that adaptability – because I don’t have a coach, I kind of need it. I also know that if I do the same training for too many years in a row it will start to stagnate a bit and I probably will hit a plateau.

 

Neely Quinn: When you say you do a lot of listening, who are you talking to? Or are you listening to podcasts or what do you mean by that?

 

Sean McColl: I would listen to podcasts if I found the right podcast to listen to [laughs] but a lot of it’s through just my friends in the World Cup circuit. Obviously my girlfriend, I’ve learned a lot from her. She’s actually the one who introduced me to circuit climbing, like, five or six years ago. Before that, we didn’t, or I didn’t, really do any circuits, we just did lead climbing and that was maybe two in a row or three in a row, or maybe up-down-up but the concept of circuit climbing was really cool and now that’s a full incorporation into my training.

A lot of people in the World Cup circuit, like I said, will just say, “What do you do for training? What do you do for lead training? What do you do for bouldering training? Does it work?” Mostly just talking to my friends.

 

Neely Quinn: Do you mind me asking who’s your girlfriend?

 

Sean McColl: Oh yeah. She’s Mathilde Becerra and she’s from France.

 

Neely Quinn: Is she a World Cup climber, too?

 

Sean McColl: She is.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, that must be convenient. So…

 

Sean McColl: Yeah and…

 

Neely Quinn: Oh, you go.

 

Sean McColl: I was just going to say she’s predominantly a lead climber but over the past couple of years she’s actually excelled quite a lot at bouldering and then this year for speed. She’ll try to go to Paris for the overall World Championships and I think she can do really well.

 

Neely Quinn: Speaking of which, do you consider yourself a boulderer or a route climber mostly?

 

Sean McColl: So that question doesn’t have an answer for me and I choose also not to answer it because I don’t want to be labeled as one or the other. I want to be a climber and I want to be good at everything to do with climbing. That might sound poor – there’s a better word for that but <unclear> I want to be good at everything. I wish I was better at trad climbing so I could say I’m a good trad climber, because I know I’m not good. It’s an area of climbing that I know that later in my life will probably be very appealing to me, but I just don’t have enough time to do it right now.

I take the disciplines that I can do right now, so bouldering, lead climbing, speed climbing indoors. I love doing those. I also love doing overall. Then you take the even more bit of Psicobloc climbing for the first time in my life, which was a lot of fun, then you go to straight outdoor climbing so outdoor bouldering, outdoor lead climbing and you could also throw in free soloing but I choose not to do it. It’s not something that excites me. It doesn’t/I have no will to do it. I know that the people that do it, not that they think differently, but they’re in it for different reasons and for me. I do/I predominantly do competitions but I love climbing outside, bouldering and lead. I just want to be the the best climber that I can be.

 

Neely Quinn: I think that’s a sufficient answer. It’s an ambitious answer. Do you have a season where you only climb outside or are you always doing both?

 

Sean McColl: Unfortunately, I don’t have enough time to climb outside as I’d like. It’s just the truth so I usually do, starting in January, I start training, knowing that the World Cup season usually starts in April so I have a good four months to go from my off season to World Cups. Usually I train really, really hard for about two months where I’m just constantly tired and I hope to do a few competitions end of February and March, basically to gauge where I am. This year I did have a string of three or four competitions in a row which included the Canadian Nationals and I actually competed in the French Bouldering Nationals as well and they really help me gauge, “Am I weak? Am I strong? Am I reading boulders correctly? What do I need to work on? Am I/do I have my warm-ups still down? Do I feel shaky?” Just everything to do with competing, I can gauge. Then at the end of those three or four weeks I still have about a month and a half before the World Cups start, which is when I really need to be ready.

Every year I kind of get a little better at gauging or tapering for the World Cups but, actually, in the past couple of years I’ve always really struggled for the very first World Cup I go in the year. It’s probably because I’ve overtrained before and I don’t taper enough before it but every year I try to figure out, maybe I taper for two weeks, or 15 days, or 16. I’m still figuring it out and it’s also because I have so many competitions in a year that I’m not worried about one World Cup. I know a lot of people only do four or five in a year but I do, like, 20 to – I think I did 26 competitions last year and 28 the year before. I’m competing the whole year so I’m not worried about not being strong at the first one.

 

Neely Quinn: When does World Cup season end for you then?

 

Sean McColl: [laughs] I guess that goes hand-in-hand. The bouldering season usually ends just before June, with the exception of one that’s in August. The lead climbing season starts, generally, in the first week in July so there’s no buffer in between the two seasons. Which means that, unfortunately, I’ll probably be pretty weak in the first couple of lead comps because I’ll still be in boulder mode or the last couple of boulder <unclear> sort of lead training, which will mean that I would have a little bit less strength but I’m aware of it. I just start lead training, if I can, sometime in June and generally the first couple in July I don’t have as much endurance but I know that I’m really strong from bouldering season. The lead season goes through most of the fall and ends, generally, in Slovenia in the middle of November.

 

Neely Quinn: And then you…

 

Sean McColl: And right after that [laughs] – I didn’t mean to cut you off – I have a break and generally I use that time and I go climbing outside for a three or four week trip. Last year I went to Bishop, which was amazing, and as soon as I got home from Bishop I go back to Vancouver for the winter and I just stop climbing. I didn’t touch a single hold, indoor or outdoor, for almost a month.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. Man, I have so many questions. I talked to Adam Ondra about this, about how/about training for World Cup bouldering as opposed to route climbing. Basically, he said that it doesn’t matter because if you’re strong enough, the routes are going to feel doable. You just said there’s this transition period for you but, in general, you’re kind of banking on your strength and power to get you through routes?

 

Sean McColl: Not really. I mean yes, in a nutshell, I’m more powerful than most lead climbers but if I can’t physically climb 60 moves in a row on either hard moves or easy moves then I’m not making it through the routes. It’s that part that I need to get my body up to.

I think that when you were talking to Adam, he’s always more fit to climb routes than me because he doesn’t only do bouldering for four or five months of the season. Does that make sense? Because I know for a couple of years he did do every bouldering World Cup and every lead World Cup and I imagine that sometime in the bouldering he either a) never stopped lead training in the bouldering season or b) had to retrain lead just to remember how to climb 60 moves. Because he’s a stronger climber than me he might get it back quicker. It used to take me two months then it went down to six weeks, five weeks, four weeks, and now I can actually get back my endurance in two or three weeks. He might just get it back faster because he had less time off or he might just train lead through the whole bouldering season, just to make sure that he doesn’t lose it.

 

Neely Quinn: When you/so, for those three, four, or five weeks, whatever that you need to get your endurance back, what are you doing to train for that?

 

Sean McColl: Now I do mostly circuits. So…

 

Neely Quinn: Can you tell me what you mean by that, ‘circuit climbing?’

 

Sean McColl: Circuits/circuit climbing, I train usually in a bouldering gym, so I don’t have access to lead. If I do have access to lead then I just go and do routes. I’ll do, I don’t know, nine routes in a day or six and with adequate rest. Circuit training – how am I going to explain this? You’re aiming for circuits of either 25 to 60 moves and I’m trying to them ‘x’ amount of times in a training session. The longer the circuit is, the less times that I do it just because my skin usually hurts. Let’s say we have a 30-move circuit. I’ll try to do it four times then rest for 20 minutes then do it another four times then go home, eat, rest for four hours, and then do exactly what I did in the morning that night. In total, I did 16 times on a 30-move circuit.

 

Neely Quinn: So you’re doing 4X4’s on routes.

 

Sean McColl: Yes, but in between every 4×4 I rest…

 

Neely Quinn: For 20 minutes or four hours…

 

Sean McColl: No, like six minutes.

 

Neely Quinn: Oh. I see. So you’re doing the 25 to 60 moves, resting six minutes, doing it again four times…

 

Sean McColl: So I do that four times then there’s a 20-minute rest, I do it again, but if it’s a 60-move circuit I’ll only do it two or three times then rest 20 minutes then do it again. Usually I play it by ear, because sometimes I’ll do it four times or five or six and I’m just completely destroyed and I’m done. Then sometimes it depends on how new the holds are or what kind of moves there are, how powerful they are, but when you go up to 60 moves the moves are not very hard, but it’s hard just because there are 60 of them.

 

Neely Quinn: Are you generally doing this on boulders?

 

Sean McColl: Yes, but I usually fill the wall with <unclear> holds so I can set my own routes.

 

Neely Quinn: So realistically, – actually, I was going to ask: where are you? Like, where do you live and where do you train now?

 

Sean McColl: I’m currently in/I live in Chambéry, France and so here we have, actually, a really good club, Chambéry Escalade, and so we have a really nice bouldering gym. Here there actually is a lead gym but generally I can do most of the routes pretty quickly so I fall back to circuits because it’s more accessible.

 

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Alright! Back to the interview.

 

Neely Quinn: If you had your own wall at your house or something it would be one thing, but if you’re trying to do 60 moves on a bouldering wall at, like, a time when there are even a few people in the bouldering area, do you feel like you’re kind of monopolizing the area? Or how do you navigate that?

 

Sean McColl: I’m fortunate enough that I don’t have to generally deal with that. Not because I’m an asshole and just say, “Hey everybody, get out of my way,” but because I pick times to train when a) there’s not going to be anybody in the gym or because our gym actually is not a public gym. It’s not privately owned, it’s run by the city, so there will be a two-hour session where only the 250 of our club can go and train, and then it gets even more distinguished where it will be only the ‘competition one’ and ‘competition two’ kids can train for these two hours. We’ve put in extra sessions explicitly for the World Cup climbers where I can train, or where we can train actually, from 10-12 in the morning and we’re the only people supposed to be training there. I know I can go from 10-12 and there will be, at maximum, six other people there to train.

 

Neely Quinn: All of whom understand what you’re doing or are doing the same thing.

 

Sean McColl: Yeah. Because in a public gym, doing what I’m doing is impossible. I know it’s impossible. I know even when I was training as a junior, the junior team trained from 4-7 and people hated it because they knew there was going to be 16 kids monopolizing every wall and we were probably loud and obnoxious [laughs].

 

Neely Quinn: So then, how would you suggest, if somebody wanted to do circuits and they were a 9-5er, how would you suggest they do that?

 

Sean McColl: [laughs] Uhhhh…

 

Neely Quinn: Let’s stretch the imagination.

 

Sean McColl: I don’t know, I mean, a home wall is not a bad idea but generally it’s a lot of work. If you’re a 9-5er and you need to do circuits, I think your best bet is to do it on the weekends. If you’re going to the gym and you get there at 6:00 or 7:00 and you’re there for a couple of hours, I know that’s like peak times for gyms. Generally you’re not going to be able to do circuits. I don’t have a solution for that because I’ve trained at night and I’ve trained in a lot of gyms and I’ve seen what it’s like. Most of the time when I go to gyms like that it’s like, I’m either going to do boulder problems or I’m going to go into the corner of the gym and do conditioning because I can condition all by myself without disturbing other people. I can time my rests a lot better and everything that goes with that.

 

Neely Quinn: What would be the second-best thing to do? What about doing doubles or triples and only taking a certain amount of rest?

 

Sean McColl: If you can, get a group of people, like four or five, that want to do the same thing as you. Then, if you go to a certain wall, generally you can’t have more than four or five people bouldering on the same wall and if you’re really efficient with your timing, there’ll always be one person starting their circuit as one person is finishing. Then you’ll be resting for, I guess that is about four or five times your climbing time. Ideally that would work for four people on a climbing wall but if you have four or five, I’m sure you can just make it work. I guess that would be your next best solution, is to monopolize the wall, but at least you’re doing it in a group of four or five, which is basically what you see at the gym anyways.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah, and what about routes? What if they wanted to train on routes?

 

Sean McColl: Routes…um…do people climb routes in gyms anymore? [laughs] No, they do. I don’t know. I actually haven’t been to a public route climbing gym in a longer time so I don’t know what, really, it’s like. Do people line up for routes or is it kinda just you ask? I imagine you could always just do a route and look for the next route you want to do, which would be in a 5 to 10-minute rest and make sure that you got on in your 5 to 10-minute rest because the hardest thing, usually, is if you do your route and then you’re like, “Okay, I’d like to climb in 5 to 10-minutes,” and then you wait for 30 for some route because there was a two-person line and a person worked it for 12 minutes. I guess the biggest thing is just efficiency. Make sure you can climb a route, and it’s always better to climb an easier route, maybe you’ll just make it to the top more easily, than to have a rest that’s too long.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, so I will go into the gym and do three’s. I’ll do three routes in a row but I’ll lower down and then walk to the next one, so I do have a rest but it’s very short. What do you think about that? Because I think that’s common, to do two’s or three’s like that.

 

Sean McColl: I guess it all depends on the height of the gym, but I know that one thing you can do if you’re/instead of doing three’s is to go up a route but just go to two-thirds and then downclimb it back to the bottom and then go to the top. Even in gyms that are 45-feet tall that actually works pretty well. You go up two-thirds, you go to the bottom, then you go to the top.

 

Neely Quinn: Because then you never have to come down and get off of the wall.

 

Sean McColl: And you’re never resting, which is really key.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. I know we have sort of a limited amount of time so I wanted to get into more details about your training schedule. Would you mind going into a week of your training?

 

Sean McColl: Yeah, yeah. No problem. Should we say, like, this week of training or more like during my lead season?

 

Neely Quinn: Um…okay, so are you tapering right now or are you in full training mode?

 

Sean McColl: Um…[laughs], I don’t even know what I’m doing right now. My next World Cup is a couple of weeks. No, I haven’t started to actually taper yet but I’m mostly trying to do just new boulder problems. I’m physically very strong. I feel strong. I did a couple competitions and I felt like I was route-reading well and I was solving the boulders and I was climbing the boulders. I was understanding them. What I’m trying to do now is just do as many new boulder problems, new angles, new route setting, just to prepare for the World Cups because everyone knows that in World Cups you don’t have to do five V12 boulders, you just have to do all of the boulders. Or you have to – it’s better to do five boulders – I’m not making much sense [laughs]. In World Cups it’s really key to not miss a V6 or V7 boulder because the grades are so irrelevant in a bouldering competition. You just have to do all of the boulders and if you do all the boulders then it comes to tries, obviously, and that’s when tries become important.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. So, yeah, I guess this week, what’s your schedule like?

 

Sean McColl: Generally in bouldering season, I guess we’re still in the 10 to 15, and in bouldering I think I do less training than when I’m doing it for lead. I don’t even know how to do it day-to-day. I basically wake up in the morning or the day before and I’ll say “Oh, I’ll train tomorrow at this time and I’ll do this.” I do have a few things that I do during the week. I try to do cardio, let’s say twice a week, so that would be riding my bike to the gym and back. It’s about 16 kilometers and takes me about 40 minutes there and back, so I try to do that twice a week, we’ll say, but I really just like the whole cycling part. Then I have a/I guess you would call them cross-training workouts, that I actually just picked up last year. I do them with bands, like Therabands, so a lot of stuff on my lower body, through my legs and quads and my glutes, just to make sure that I have power through my legs. Often, climbers are always working their upper bodies so they don’t have a strong core or lower body, and more and more the climbing competition style is pushing more towards athleticism and people that are just better athletes are excelling a lot better at competitions, so I think it’s really important.

I have six different workouts that I basically do one a day and then one day a week I get to have a rest day for that. The workouts take between 20 minutes and an hour and that’s on top of my training. So we have the cardio, we have that, and then we have actual climbing, which is four or five days a week, for in between an hour and a half and two and a half hours of climbing. I used to do campusing and dead hangs but now that’s fully phased-out because I feel that I’m at my strength that I need to be for the World Cups. Now it’s a lot of doing new boulder problems that get set in the gym at any level. If I can’t onsight V3, V4, V5, and V6 then there will be one in a World Cup that I don’t onsight and that one will cost me. I always do every new boulder problem that goes up in the gym and I try to repeat boulder problems that were a little bit strange for me, or hard, or on a weakness. Then I try to make boulders that are at my maximum.

What I really struggle with in competitions is trying 100 percent. I have a hard time, if a move feels really hard, I have a hard time trying really hard, especially in training. In competitions I guess I’m a little bit better at it but sometimes I’ll fall off a boulder and I’ll just have to try harder. Sometimes people will say, “Well, why didn’t you try harder the first try?” It’s kind of an ongoing battle.

Lastly, I’ll do, which I’ve almost kind of phased out now, conditioning. I was doing a lot of conditioning before, mostly like abs, I guess a bit more campusing, pushups and pull-ups, and – but a lot of abs.

 

Neely Quinn: How many times a week do you do that?

 

Sean McColl: This is the hard part. I don’t set a number. It’s different from week to week and it’s crazy. I do log all my training so I could go look at it and tell you how many days a week I trained in every week of the year but generally it will go, like, I train five or six days a week if you count just doing something. A rest day would be where I basically sit at home and do nothing. If I go out and I do cardio, then I trained that day, even though I didn’t do any rock climbing. If I go and I do a 20-minute workout, I warm-up and I do my 20-minute Theraband workout, I consider it a training day. No, I didn’t climb, but I consider it a training day. There will be days that I go and I climb twice in a day so it’s really hard to say what I do but I train probably six days a week and I’m climbing for probably four or five of those days a week.

 

Neely Quinn: Can you give me some sort of idea what the conditioning is? Is it one time a week? Five times a week?

 

Sean McColl: Um…it’s probably, well, the bands I do everyday because I have six workouts that take 20 minutes to an hour. For the conditioning I usually do it two or three times a week but a lot more at the beginning of the season when I can really abuse my body, where I can be really dead-tired because I don’t have any competitions. Now, I’m not going to do any crazy, crazy ab workouts because I’m going to be tapering pretty quickly for the World Cup season.

 

Neely Quinn: With your ab workouts, can you give me an example of one of them?

 

Sean McColl: Um…there’s front levers. You do a normal front lever for as long as you can hold it, so I generally can hold it for 15-20 seconds. Then I come down for a five-second rest but it’s always hanging, then I do another front lever with one leg bent for as long as I can hold it, go back down, five-second rest, then I switch legs, which leg is out. That’s usually 10-15 seconds each leg then I go down. Then I do L-sits, where my toes touch the roof of the wall that’s in front of me. I do that 10 times without using momentum and then, to finish it, I do knee lifts with no momentum, and I do 20 of them. So that’s all one set and I do that three times.

 

Neely Quinn: Wow.

 

Sean McColl: That takes probably 30 minutes. No, it doesn’t take that long. Maybe 20 minutes, and then I do banana boats on the ground where you’re on your stomach. I’m trying to do the thing where you’re kind of in a handstand – a planch. I’ve been trying to learn how to do a planch because the muscles are so new to me, it hurts after five or 10 minutes of trying to do it.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay.

 

Sean McColl: Sorry – I lost my train of thought. Basically, I just try to do that to exhaust my abs to where I can’t even do a sit-up without it hurting.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. That’s pretty intense. And then you’ll also do campusing, push-ups, pull-ups, and are you doing weighted anything? Pull-ups?

 

Sean McColl: No, I never/I don’t do any weighted stuff just because I don’t need it. I used to do it a little bit when I was growing as an athlete but I haven’t actually used weights in a while.

 

Neely Quinn: Did you use to use weights in other ways besides weighted pull-ups?

 

Sean McColl: I don’t think so, no. We had a weight vest hanging around when I was training. We just kind of tried them a few times. We thought it was cool so we would sometimes use it but it wasn’t a thing where it was like, “Oh, let’s always use the weight vest so that we’ll always be better at competition.” We never did that.

 

Neely Quinn: So you’ve never been into doing any sort of weight routine, like, even shoulder presses or anything like that?

 

Sean McColl: No…no. I’m not that person, no.

 

Neely Quinn: I mean, is that something you’re against?

 

Sean McColl: No, I’m not against it, I just find that my training is hard enough with my own weight. I don’t know why I would need to add any.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. So, we got a question that asked about your finger training program specifically. I know that you’re not doing that right now, but when you were, and I’m assuming that was a couple months ago, what kind of board do you like to use?

 

Sean McColl: So, I’ll use any board, actually. [laughs] I don’t have a favorite board, and I actually like using different boards because as soon as you get used to one board, it’s easy. You’ll be really good at fingerboarding on one board and you’ll go to a comp and you’ll be like, “Oh, I’m really good at finger hanging or I’m really good at hanging,” and then you’ll get a hold that’s different and it’s like, “Why can’t I hang on that one? Well, it’s different than my hangboard.”

I don’t know. I’ve never been attached to one hangboard but I guess it would all depend on just the depth of whatever I’m hanging on. My routines for hangboarding would usually go: I hang every minute, for as long as I can, alternating arms. I’m resting for about 1:45 for the same arm and I’m hanging for 5-15 seconds.

 

Neely Quinn: Do you ever add weight to yourself?

 

Sean McColl: I’ve tried it, like I did add weight three weeks ago after a pretty long rest. I was like, “Oh, I should just try this with weight and see if I can do it,” and I <unclear>. I did it about the same time as when I was training for it normally but I figure if I can add weight, why don’t I just do more sets using my own weight?

So I do alternating hands on the minute, every minute, then after about 20 minutes I do both hands hanging, so two-handed hangs. I also do two-handed hangs on the minute, every minute, so I’m only resting about 45-50 seconds, and I do that for another 20 minutes. If I was adding weight maybe I would only be able to do it 15 times whereas I just do it until, basically, pure exhaustion, and then I can’t really hang on anything. I lean towards that kind of method over adding weight.

 

Neely Quinn: That’s really interesting. I’ve never heard of anybody doing that. Where did you/did you just come up with that on your own?

 

Sean McColl: I think I did but I might have seen it or heard it from somewhere else. I’ve kind of adapted it into that and that’s what I came up with. It’s easy and I don’t have to think at training. I don’t have to think for 40 minutes. I’m just hanging and it’s easy to go on the minute.

 

Neely Quinn: Then how often do you do that every week?

 

Sean McColl: I do dead hanging longer into my training season than I do campusing but I kind of just do campusing or dead hanging when I want to, not feel strong but, remember what it is to do those movements. Sorry, I forgot what you asked.

 

Neely Quinn: I asked how often you do it every week.

 

Sean McColl: [laughs] I usually do it no more than three because, usually, once I do that type of workout I’ll usually climb after it for an hour or an hour and a half, but I’ll actually be really tired. My fingers will be opening up on pretty good holds and usually I try to rest the day after. If I don’t rest the day after doing a dead hang workout, I’m really tired that day of training. If I take that day into account, I can’t do it more than three days in a row – I’m sorry, three days in a week.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. Let’s see. I have a few minutes left and I wanted to ask you about injuries. Do you ever deal with injuries?

 

Sean McColl: That’s a really good question. As a competitor, I think to be injured is probably the worst thing you can do for your career. A lot of people are like, “I didn’t mean to get injured.” I also think that injury comes from/if you don’t – everyone can feel when they’re going to get injured, generally, a lot when it comes to fingers. They’re like, “Oh, my fingers were a bit sore and I thought I might injure one and then I did that last boulder at the end of the day when I should have gone home and I hurt my finger,” or something.

The injuries you can’t see are like when you jump off a boulder problem and you hit the corner of a mat or in between two mats and you sprain an ankle. I’m not talking about those kind of injuries. I’m talking more about the things in your body where you can feel it. I think that diet is really important to avoiding injury. Everything you eat, everything you shouldn’t eat, and hydrating. That’s actually something that I’ve improved, I don’t know, like 500 percent in the last couple of years because of my girlfriend. Now I feel like I eat really well, I’m always hydrated, and I can almost train as many hours in a week as I want. I feel less tired and it’s a whole combination of things but I think staying injury-free for a competitor is the number one thing they should focus on.

 

Neely Quinn: Can you just give me a really quick breakdown of the kinds of foods you eat and don’t eat?

 

Sean McColl: I eat healthy. I eat all foods. I’m not vegetarian. I’m not vegan. I try to eat all my food groups. I try to eat a couple of each food groups every day. I try to eat protein, I try to get enough iron, and so all of these things are things that everyone knows they should do so I just make sure that I do do it. I just actually added it on my ‘frequently asked’ questions on my website because so many people were actually asking it now.

I eat four or five times a day. In the morning, I eat bread with peanut butter or butter on it. I also have a bowl of cereal with, usually, I’ll have a whole grapefruit and I have a lot of coffee with sugar and milk. Actually, almond milk, now. For lunch, if it’s a training day, I’ll eat something that will give me energy so pasta, rice, the carbohydrates. Also, bread and, generally water, actually. At training I’m generally hydrating. After training I’ll usually have a snack, which is sometimes a bowl of cereal but generally it’s fruit, so I eat an apple or sometimes I eat two apples. Then I eat dinner, generally pretty late, 8/8:30, and for dinner there’s always protein, probably a bit of carbohydrates, but a lot of vegetables. I forgot to say that during lunch, also, it’s key to have protein. Then, for dessert, at the very end of the day at, I don’t know, 9:30, it’s a yogurt with a bit of muesli and sometimes something sugary as well, like a bit of chocolate.

 

Neely Quinn: Cool. Well thanks for divulging all of that. I’m sure everybody will appreciate that. It’s like, pretty…

 

Sean McColl: Another thing with diet that I, not that I realized but, kind of just learned is that yeah, you should have pretty low sugar. In general, everyone eats just too much sugary food. Salt, yeah, I guess that should be also low but that’s something I just don’t eat too low of and then fat. A lot of people eat high fat. High fat and high sugar are the two most common, and if you’re eating a lot of sugar and your body doesn’t process it right away, your body produces insulin, which just converts the sugar back into fat. I watched a documentary, I learned more about it, I was more conscious of what I eat, and I feel like I’m a lot more healthier at eating because of it.

 

Neely Quinn: Do you feel like your energy levels are pretty stable?

 

Sean McColl: Yeah, they are pretty good. Another fact is I don’t drink pop. When I’m training I don’t drink alcohol. I don’t/there’s lots of other things that deteriorate people’s diets and then they wonder why they get injured or why they don’t have enough energy or why they can’t train.

 

Neely Quinn: One last question, I promise. How much sleep do you get?

 

Sean McColl: I try to get nine hours a day. Generally I go to bed at 11:30 and then I try to not wake up before 8:30 or 9:00. About nine hours a day.

 

Neely Quinn: Do you want to give a shout out to any of your sponsors?

 

Sean McColl: I mean, everyone knows who my sponsors are but one thing to say is I wouldn’t be where I am in my life without my sponsors. I know that it’s a relationship and everything, but they saw potential in me whatever years ago and so I’m really happy to have all of my sponsors. I don’t need to list them but thanks to them, and if you support them, thanks to you as well.

 

Neely Quinn: Awesome. Thank you very much for your time and good luck this season.

 

Sean McColl: Thank you.

 

Neely Quinn: I hope you enjoyed that interview with Sean McColl. If you want to follow him you can go to www.seanmccoll.com or he’s on Instagram @mccollsean and on Facebook at Sean McColl.

Coming up on the podcast I have Kyle Clinkscales, who is the head coach for Team Texas, which is a team of kids that crush. Alex Puccio actually came from that team and Delaney Miller and a bunch of other, just, crushers. I wanted to talk to him about how to train kids and what he did that was so spectacular with Alex Puccio and all of that, so that’s coming up.

Other than that, on Training Beta I hope that you guys have noticed the new podcast episodes, the ‘Ask Kris’ episodes, those mini-podcasts, basically. They’re about 15 minutes long and it’s just a conversation between Kris Peters and me about certain, really specific topics of training. I’ve gotten really good feedback about them and I hope that you’re liking them. If you hate them and you really don’t want me to continue them just email me at neely@trainingbeta.com or if you love them, let me know. It’s kind of a new thing and I like it. It’s a short burst of information that’s really digestible. I have another one this week that will actually come out before this episode airs on route training versus bouldering training, so that’s interesting. If you guys ever have any suggestions for topics, just email me at neely@trainingbeta.com .

A little update on me. I am still training with Kris. I was sick last week and so I kind of took the week off because I really didn’t want to get any sicker or make the sickness go on and on and on. I think that’s terrible. I gave myself the week off. I was kind of due for a week off anyway, and now I’m pretty much back to training. I’m still seeing gains, which I’m psyched about.

Other than that, if you ever want any help with your training we have so many resources for you and they really work. I was looking through a bunch of testimonials the other day and I’m just blown away by how much success people have had. On all of the pages for each of the training programs I just recently put up a bunch of testmonials from people so if you want to check out what people have said, you can go to www.trainingbeta.com and then go to the ‘training programs’ tab at the top and you’ll find all of our programs there.

I hope that you guys are finding something useful out of these podcasts or our site or our programs to help you get stronger. I also love success stories and I want to interview more of you guys, more of my listeners who are climbing, you know, like what a normal, mortal human can climb. I want to have more of you guys on the show so if you think that you’re a good story, just email me and let me know.

Thanks for listening. Have a great week! I’ll talk to you soon.

 

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