reminiscence

An improvement in later performance due to rest or non-practice.

For sure rest is a real and direct influence on performance, and there have been both designed studies and case studies to support this. But in 'Ted's' case, two straight months of no climbing wouldn't bear out a climbing performance increase in and of itself in my opinion. That is a verrrry long rest and would allow for significant detraining to occur in skeletal muscle.

Additionally, bcombs, your running wouldn't have any transfer effect to specific muscle requirements for strength or power in climbing (except, possibly, for keeping certain muscle groups generally conditioned for muscular endurance [like your core, your legs, and your hip stabilizers]), and it probably aided you in the general aerobic requirements of any climbing you did.

This is a very interesting topic, with so many things to think about.

For sure rest is a real and direct influence on performance, and there have been both designed studies and case studies to support this. But in 'Ted's' case, two straight months of no climbing wouldn't bear out a climbing performance increase in and of itself in my opinion. That is a verrrry long rest and would allow for significant detraining to occur in skeletal muscle.

aeril if I have a criticism of your (frequently very good) posts its that you tend too look at climbing from only the phsiological point of view, not taking fully into account the kinesiological, cognitive and emotional aspects of climbing performance.

There are many times when a climber comes "off the couch" and does something amazing despite a loss of fitness. Those of us who have a few years under our belts have seen this, and done this many times.

…we don't really understand the relationship between muscular fitness and performing at a specific level.

Also, as Jay’s reference stated, there is no known or recommended value for time off in order to see performance improvement, so it’s hard to make any certain claim.

In my personal experience, you can take several months off of climbing, and come back a technically better climber. The phenomenon appears not to be solely due to rest, but to the very avoidance of the activity (ie, "non-practice"). It's almost as if, during the time away from the activity, you lose the bad movement habits, and retain the good ones.

I have taken periods of climbing off long enough to lose considerable climbing fitness, yet am often able to do routes just as hard as when I was fitter, finding that my balance and movement on those routes has improved during the layoff. Combine that with losing 20 lbs I think could account for a 2-letter grade increase in performance during a layoff.

Jay

Most sports have on- and off-seasons, so athletes get periods of time off more-or-less automatically.

So, although I think you have a really good point in the mention of the cognitive and emotional aspects, I am not sure this occurs consistently enough to have statistical significance?

jay, you mention that the 11mm rope would only serve to make my balance worse...

...but the results didn't really support that.

climbers doing long pitches end up with a fair amount of rope weight (and often rope drag), that can affect their climbing, i can't count the number of times i've seen somebody slowly get shut down as they pass the 100', 120' 150' mark on a pitch crying about the weight of the rope, despite the fact that the climbing wasn't very hard.

aerili, i do actually have a pretty good idea of the definitiion of sport specific exercise

and what i am trying to say is that lumping ALL of them into one category and making a total blanket statement about what will cause improvement and what will cause decline, is going to be difficult to prove. for example, adding a weight belt to a gymnast for a beam routine is probably going to be a pretty bad idea. on the other hand, offensive and defensive linemen performing blocking drills with sleds of different weights is substantially different.

the main difference is that when a gymnast performs a routine, he/she is performing at the same weight, on the same size balance beam, etc. similarly, a tennis player's racket, ball, etc weigh and perform the same. however, the offensive lineman's opponent varies in shape, size, weight, strength, speed, and skill. to prepare for this, altering sled weight can give a broader experience spectrum.

All you have to do is provide specific studies, and it would also be helpful if you ahd some sort of letter to from the scientific community saying this is the held belief, otherwise I am sure there are plenty of experts who would disagree with you. A good case in point is global warming, people like to come out and say that the scientific community and experts agree to the causes of global warming, when that is just not the case. But people throw that out there, and the lay people believe it because the opposition isnt as vocal in having their side heard.

All in all, I really dont doubt your expertise and knowledge in this field, I just want to make sure that you are citing your sources and not making overarching generalizations in a complex science. :)

Global average air temperature near the Earth's surface rose 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.32 °F) during the twentieth century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes, "most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations,"[1] which leads to warming of the surface and lower atmosphere by increasing the greenhouse effect. Natural phenomena such as solar variation combined with volcanoes have probably had a small warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950, but a small cooling effect since 1950.[2][3] These basic conclusions have been endorsed by at least 30 scientific societies and academies of science, including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries. The American Association of Petroleum Geologists is the only scientific society that officially rejects these conclusions.[4][5] A few individual scientists disagree with some of the main conclusions of the IPCC.[6]

Climbing is full of very complex motor skills that are all 100% specific to performance, which is the topic at hand in this thread

One other clarification: activities like straightforward jumping and running are considered “low skill” movements, i.e. they aren’t terribly specific and the “language” used by nerves to tell the muscles how to perform them is relatively simple when compared to more complex motor skills. Climbing is full of very complex motor skills that are all 100% specific to performance, which is the topic at hand in this thread.

Thread drift: I am really surprised that you call climbing highly complex. Running takes kids years to learn - typically they walk at 12 months after only a couple of months of trying, and then take 8 years or more to run with decent co-ordination. And Dr J and others have demonstrated jumping as something that I see to be a highly developed, complex skill in basketball. On the other hand, lots of 4-6yr olds can throw themselves up, down and around jungle gyms fluidly, using many of the climbing motions, not to mention climbing trees and plastic.

If additional weight is used, all factors in terms of how you move will be altered, even if it is not to a large degree. But this still results in a negative transfer of skill--it programs your nervous system to direct your motor units (i.e. muscles involved) to contract in a pattern or method that allows them to move you and your adjusted motion in as efficient way as possible, thus setting up and reinforcing new muscle memories. The late, great Mel Siff, a true ICON in the exercise and sport sciences research field, puts it this way: by simulating your exercise (in this case you are apparently simulating outdoor, real world climbing while adding resistance in a mode you don't employ when climbing in actuality), "that simulation of any movement with significant resistance is inadvisable since it can confuse the neuromuscular programs which determine the specificity of the actual movement. If one tries to replicate the sporting movement too closely in the gym, there will usually be changes to the centre of mass, speed of movement, lines of pull, moments in inertia, and the centre of rotation that will alter the fine neuromuscular skills required for the sport and therefore may impede sporting performance."

I'm not sure if that was understandable, but I hope so. It does take a bit of knowledge about how the muscles and nervous system work together, as well as some basic understanding of physics as they apply to the human body (kinesiology).

To answer your second question (a strength training regimen for climbing without adding weight): there's no single answer as to how to best accomplish this, and it all depends on what kind of performance you're looking for too. One thing to understand, though, is the difference between GENERAL CONDITIONING for a sport (best time to get bigger and stronger, more flexible, etc.) and SPECIFIC CONDITIONING for a sport (in other words, work on your technique).

The only place you should "add weight" is when doing general weight lifting--here you can add as much weight as safely possible to strengthen whatever you want to strengthen because weight lifting exercises have no transfer effect on sport skill. (In other words, hamstring curls won't make your heel hooking technique better, although they might make it easier because you're stronger, but it shouldn't negatively impact your technique because the exercise is so fundamentally removed from the neuromuscular patterns required for heel hooking.) These exercises do condition your body to withstand demands placed on the joints in any situation, including climbing. Campusing, hangboard, traversing, etc. can also be considered general conditioning since they are supplementary training to assist in developing the motor skills and conditioning the fitness capacities encountered in climbing AT A GENERAL LEVEL.

These qualities are then developed into sports specific strength, speed, power, endurance etc by the actual sport itself. You can now incorporate sport specific "drills" while climbing, which many people talk about on this forum; this may include things like laps or burns on a route, downclimbing (although again, I think this mainly makes you better at downclimbing, although it may assist in training to improve hand and forearm lactate threshold), repeated tackling of certain kinds of climbing (i.e. OW, liebacking, etc.) and so on. If you needed to climb with lots of additional weight (like a pack for instance), then I would incorporate training/climbing with a pack under the most specific conditions possible (because then you get true transfer of skill), not during one's general conditioning.

If you have more specific questions, then try pm'ing me.

Additionally, can anyone with a background in gymnastics or ballet chime in? Just curious, because these are two sports that are extensively steeped in training that also have very complex motor skills and strength demands.

Thanks!

What is particularly interesting is that I haven't seen jt512, aerilli, or fluxus once suggest that weighted fingerboard training or campusing has appreciable application to improving climbing through increasing hand/finger strength. This is despite such recommendations in both Performance Rock Climbing (pp. 109-114) and the Self-Coached Climber (pg. 161, 163), two books for which I have tremendous respect.