By Matt PincusPublished On: May 6th, 2017Categories: Bouldering Strength And Power, Training Tips, Transcript Highlights0 Comments

With all the training information out there on training for climbing, it’a easy to learn what exercises you should be doing and how to do them properly. The real question, however, is how to design a program so that you are training efficiently. By training efficiency, we are talking both about being able to fit your training into your busy schedule and focusing on the most effective types of training so you can minimize risk of injury by reducing the amount of strain you are placing on your body.

To help you focus on training efficiency, here’s an excerpt from Will Anglin‘s TrainingBeta Podcast in which he talks about how he fits his training into his busy schedule of coaching, shaping, and route setting.

Give it a read and then check out the full episode and transcript. In it, Will covers a lot of topics that will help you maximize the effectiveness of your training while minimizing both the amount of time you need to spend training and the risk of injury you are exposing yourself to.

Will Anglin on Training Efficiency:

Neely Quinn: I think this conversation is heading in the direction of efficiency, which is what we were talking about before the interview started.

Will Anglin: Definitely.

Neely Quinn: I think a lot of people are like you. You said that you were working 50 or 70 hours a week or something right now?

Will Anglin: Somewhere between 50 and 60. For the past month it’s been stressful

[laughs] and before that I was really only working 35-40 and I felt then that I was working a lot and didn’t have a lot of time to train. Now I’m like, ‘Man. I really wish I had that time again,’ so I’ve had to condense my training into much shorter sessions and sometimes two really short sessions in a day, because those are the only places I can fit in 30 minutes here and an hour there. It’s really forcing me to decide. I have 30 minutes and how can I get the most out of this 30 minutes? Whether it’s fun or not, what can I do because I have all this stuff I want to climb and I can’t just not train.

Neely Quinn: I think that a lot of people can relate with you. A lot of people have jobs, they are in school, they have jobs and school, they have kids, so can you go through a typical week for you?

Will Anglin: Yeah, so today…

Neely Quinn: And this is for training for bouldering. Sorry to interrupt you. This is you training for hard boulders.

Will Anglin: Yeah, definitely bouldering focused. Because I have limited amounts of time, there’s – I can’t necessarily focus on a lot of different facets of my climbing. Even that has to be more focused so I’m pretty much either training strength or power and those are the only two things I pretty much ever train. The reason for that is strength is always, like if you can only train one thing, you should train strength. I don’t know – that’s the end of it. Strength will help your endurance, strength will help your power, strength will help your strength endurance. Increases in strength help everything. If you increase your endurance you’re going to get better at endurance but you’re going to be lowering your strength, like that’s just going to happen, and if you train your power you’re going to get more powerful which, to some people you might think, ‘Oh, I’m getting stronger because I can do this move,’ but the reason you’re doing that move is because you’re doing it more powerfully and you’re not doing that move because you had an increase in strength. You’re doing it because you had an increase in power.