LONG/ (if you want the short version skip to IN SHORT)A little background, I started climbing when I was 18. By 20, I was redpointing 13a and bouldering v7 outside. At 21, I was in the same spot. At about this time a couple friends of mine started to improve quickly. One of them went from v8- v11 in 6 months and the other did close to the same.... however even though I was climbing with these two the whole time doing exactly what they were doing in terms of climbing days/ climbing type/ training/ diet/ etc.

After I while I noticed something. Most the difficult boulder problems outside we're crimpy and this is what these two were sending. I thought, Okay, I need to train crimps, also I noticed these two were some super low body fat guys and i should do that as well. At the time I was working full-time and going to college part-time. It was difficult to spend every little bit of time extra climbing. I started climbing almost purely on crimps and typically twice a week I would do 2.5 hours of cardio after climbing, so I had an empty stomach, and was just burning fat. I'd typically burn 1200 calories just from the cardio. I'm 6 ft and over a period of one year I went from about 175 to 157. I started bouldering harder outside and the weight, of course, made a difference.... then the injuries started coming. Up till this point I had elbow tendinitis three times (from lock off training on a system board) which ended when I stopped training lock offs and one arms. Also I had had one finger injury, from a big move off a mono.

For the next two years I slowly progressed but the injuriess kept adding up. In total, between the age of 20-23 I had elbow tendinitis three times and 8! different finger injuries. I hurt my right pinky once, right index finger twice (still scar tissue on that one), my right middle finger pulley once, my right pointer finger pulley, my right pointer finger first digit on the tendon not knuckle. My left hand middle pulley from the mono and then the FINAL one came. At this time, I had sent about a dozen v10 and a dozen v9s outside. And was working hard to get the elusive v11. I was falling on the last move of an 8 move v11. I fell there three times. IT wasn't the crux, quite frustrating. This is for perspective. I had been climbing v10 for 1.5 years and done a dozen of them but couldn't get a v11... my friends were doing v12's.

Regarding my friends, there was something very obviously different between us. In a period of three years I had roughly ten different injuries that would require anywhere from 2 weeks to 3 months off. Meanwhile, guess how many they had? Yep, none. NONE NONE NONE NONE! WTF!

Quite frustrating. Clearly, some of us are built different. One of them is bouldering v13's and flashing v11's now.

Anyways, so one day I'm bouldering at the gym on a v7, it had a big move off a slopey crimp for the right hand. It was well below my limit so I thought no big deal. I go to pull off the slopey crimp with much of my weight on my right hand and just as I hit the next hold my right hand pops off heavily weighted in a crimp position and I hear a POP! I had heard many pops at this point and I thought great... here it goes again. As it turns out, it was an injury to the right hand, middle finger, middle knuckle. This time it was different, it was BAD! It was so bad that I took three months off total, without touching hold. After this break I went to try some 5.10 routes, STILL extremely painful, so bad I took off another six months. Once again, I tried to climb, after 9 MONTHS OFF and it hurt too bad. I could tell it was still maybe 20% healed. I took off another two years. I started climbing again and it hurt but it seemed okay as long as I didn't crimp and I stuck with endurance stuff instead of bouldering or power crimping or campus boards. I started a business and get very busy and climbing stopped being a big part of my life... I still went a few times a month and loved it but it wasn't the same, it had been years and my finger was barely better, how could I ever get to the level I was once at? My answer, it's impossible. IT will never happen. I kept climbing a bit here and there. 5 yrs after this injury I started climbing a bit harder making sure to never crimp anything... if there was a crimper, I'd open hand it with three fingers, which made it harder. I mangaged about v7 and 5.12- throughout this period. After about 6 years I started taking it seriously again, however I coudn't crimp anything so I was very limited... always looking for open hand boulder problems on pinches and slopers.... trying hard not to get sucked into crimping by peer pressure or from my ego. I made it to maybe v8's... only slopey/pinchy/compression type stuff. I was back up to about 175 lbs.

Short version, I am VERY injury prone, I had an injury so bad it took years to heal and after 9 years is still about 80%, I've had a total of 10 injuries, 7 fingers.

So, how did I get to V12? THIS IS FOR ALL YOU CLIMBERS WHO ALWAYS WISHED YOU COULD GET BETTER BUT INJURIES PREVENTED YOU FROM ACCOMPLISHING YOUR CLIMBING GOALS AND REACHING YOUR FULL POTENTIAL I FEEL YOU! IT SUCKS! All of what I'm about to describe was done while working full time running my own small business.

What I'm about to describe is simple to understand and difficult to do.

Haha, this is so long i had to use multiple posts. Hope you guys like it.

DIET:

-Fact, all the top climbers have very low body fat, if you want to climb at YOUR best you must have low body fat. If you aren't sure the fat makes a big difference and you don't want to take my word for it, do this test. By a weight vest and put 20lbs in it. Then go boulder and see how well you do. After that do this. See how many pull ups you can do with the weight vest on and without it on. Here are my numbers, with weight on, 9 pull ups, with weight off 24 pull ups.

My friend told me to do this, he said I needed to cut weight, I didn't believe him... then I did it. In the last three month's I've gone from 175 lbs to 159. FYI, I've gone from v9 to v12 in three months. Luck? NO, I don't think so.

How I cut weight. Well, the truth is, I JUST DON"T EAT MUCH ANYMORE :) there's no secret. I've calculated there's about 3500 calories in a pound so if you eat 1500 calories a day and you burn 2000 calories a day, you will lose about 1/7 of a pound a day or one pound a week. I think this is a balanced way of doing it, if you go more extreme than this... You'll likely not be getting enough of the nutrients and fuel you need to heal and get stronger from climbing. Obviously, when your eating less calories than usual, it's more important to eat healthy when you do eat. I won't go into what to eat, but feel free to ask.

A couple rules to follow that help.

1. Don't get fixated on how many calories you burn/eat in a day.... spread it out... look at it based on how many you eat/burn in a month. If you have one bad day, don't let it get you down... you have the rest of the month to make up for it... as you see losing weight improving your climbing performance (you will!) it will motivate you to stick with the new diet.

2. Eat small meals/often. Let's assume (i don't know the real numbers) that as an athlete, your body can burn 1800/calories/day even on the days your don't work out (more if your bigger than me, less if your not), it stands to reason that over a 24/hr period I burn about 75 calories/hr without working out. If I binged and ate 1000 calories in one hour.... maybe I'll burn 200-300 of them sitting there watching tv and the rest goes to fat. Instead, I eat about 300 calories at a time, give or take, about six times a day, of course I add a little to this on days I work out. This allows my body to burn it and use it instead of store it for fat.

3. Don't lift alot of weights, naturally you want to do light weight/high reps for injury prevention such as push ups to prevent elbow tendinitis and shoulder exercises to prevent shoulder injuries. My brother, can lift MAD weight, he can do 12 pull ups with 90 lbs hanging off him, He can do 10 pull downs on the machine with the ENTIRE STACK of 265 lbs... however he has been stuck at v7 for years.... he's 185 lbs and 6 1. He can squat four plates three times (over four hundred pounds) etc. He is carrying at LEAST 15lbs of muscle you don't need to climb hard, so if your goal is to climb hard, don't get unnecessary muscle. MYTH, you need to be able to do one arm pull ups or massive pull ups to climb hard, fact, I know dozens of ppl who climb v12 and harder who can do one or 0 one arms, including me. It's unnessary weight. It's overkill.

4. What do i eat? Typical day. Non exercise day
9am- Kashi GO LEAN ceral w/o milk just dry, I know, doesn't sound good, I don't mind Wink 120 calories, one cup. Also, a morning latte 12 oz, I order with half the sweet stuff, about 200 calories. Maybe a bit or OJ too. YOU must eat right when you wake up or shortly thereafter.

Noon, ONE chicken taco with cheese and salsa. Yep just one.

3pm, Some more kashi about a cup, and a small latte, single shot only one cup.

5pm, a little kashi.

7pm, one of my bigger meals, I love food so this is my chance to eat real food, try not to eat your last meal later than this. I'll get a steak or a couple slices of pizza and a salad with spinach or kale, etc. about 500 calories.

By midnight I'm ready for bed AND starving, to ease the hunger pains, I'll eat a few kalamata olives or a few wheat thins so I an fall asleep.

Drink lots of water all day!

5. Do cardio, I climb about every other day, two days off if I'm really beat. I try to do 30-60 minutes of cardio and injury prevention exercises on EVERY day off from climbing.

Feel free to ask questions. I'll be posting what I do to train for climbing and some real injury free power training breakthroughs I've made in the last few months in this thread in about 2 hours.

I can't wait until jt512 sees THIS post. Of course he may have read it and gouged his eyes out already.

I'm ~160 lbs 5'11.

That diet sounds awful. I agree on the unnecessary fat in the lattes. I'm pulling v9 pretty consistently right now and I'm ~160 lbs 5'11. I'm going to continue completely disregarding my diet and running about twice a week and I'll get back to you in 3 more years. I betcha I don't have to starve myself to get to v12.

i've been stuck at v9/v10 for 2 months now after 2 years of climbing. i'm already 5% body fat, some 140+ lbs at 5'10". it's frustrating since i have no weight to drop and i'm looking for that elusive v12 by the end of this year. never had an injury yet. just keep falling off the crux of v11's because i'm simply too weak.

anyone have an opinion on whether 2 months is a plateau or just impatience? was really looking to hit v12 by year's end, though.

ceebo brings an excellent point. it's better to not get injured by erring on the side of caution than to crank too hard and be gone for 2 years.

any training schedules that have broken plateaus? i've heard MWF is good, some people do 5 days/week and some do every day.
my v12 friend says never use heel hooks and if there are no obvious feet, campus. sloppy footwork means stronger hands to compensate which ultimately in the long run is better. he climbs 5 days/week.
my v13 friend says gymnastics with rings. climbing is all about movement, so shoulders and footwork are key to doing hard moves. he climbs MWF.
any opinions welcome.

comments on weight vests or other tactics? i've heard switching to route climbing can help (as a boulderer).

"Stuck" at V9/10 for two whole months...you poor thing! My vote is for is for impatience.

Actually, I don't think his diet is too far off the mark. His target caloric deficit of 500 kcal/day is about what I recommend. I'd eliminate the high-fat dairy completely. If you're only consuming 1500 kcal/day, 400 of those kcals (27%) shouldn't be two 200-kcal lattes. That's a lot of fat that you don't need, and a missed opportunity to consume protein and carbohydrate that you do need. Anyone willing to eat dry kashi (read: dirt-flavored sawdust) twice twice a day, ought to be able to switch to non-fat lattes.

Similarly, substituting extra chicken (which had better be grilled, not deep fried) for the cheese on the taco would provide badly needed protein in place of unneeded fat. Obviously, the pizza has to go; and if you have to eat red meat, it should at least be very lean, but better yet would be white meat chicken or a lean fish, like halibut.

Jay

But seriously, is a diet like that likely to be sustainable? I mean dry Kashi 3-time a day? Really?

You seem to have left out Belgian beer and Pecan Sandies. I'm sure this was a simple oversight.

But seriously, is a diet like that likely to be sustainable?

If you would burn 2000 cals by sitting on the couch all day, but you also burn 1000 cals by climbing . . .