***GIVEAWAY!! In honor of route season being upon us, we’re giving one lucky winner $246 worth of route climbing essentials! What You Could Win: 1. A 30m 10.1mm Sterling Gym Rope (worth $96) and 2. A 1-Yr Route Training Program membership (worth $150 and great for endurance training- learn more about what that means in this article). Awesome! Enter by the end of the day on June 1st! Click here (link no longer available) to enter! ***
Steph Davis, pro-climber and base jumper, has this excellent article on her blog, highinfatuation.com, about what she recommends for training to improve your climbing endurance.
“The key to having better endurance is being able to recover while on the climb. Rather than looking at a pitch as one long stretch of climbing, start looking at it as different sections broken by rest-able stances…..
Even before you leave the ground, look up at the route. If it’s in the gym, see if you can spot the biggest holds on it. If it’s outdoors, look for areas with small ledges, dihedrals or obviously bigger foot stances. You may be able to predict some rest stances even before leaving the ground. If you can find rests on the route, suddenly you only need to climb hard for a short section before you get to your recovery place, effectively breaking up the route into many small sections instead of one big enduro-thon.” -Steph Davis
In this article she recommends two key tips to focus on: training your forearms to be better able to recover on large holds and incorporating a few key yoga poses into your training (they help get your body used to relaxing in odd positions, handy for some of the climbing positions we can find ourselves in). Also, increasing your power can help make individual moves seem less hard and reduce the pump build-up.
Read on to learn more from Steph Davis about how to train your forearms to recover, which yoga poses to focus on, and ultimately how to build your endurance……
CLICK HERE: Training for Endurance
(photo courtesy of highinfatuation.com, originally from Climbing Magazine and taken by Chris Noble)
