If you know the history of rock climbing in Yosemite, you know that many of the famed Stonemasters would winter in Joshua Tree. There, with no long routes, John Bachar and friends invented the Half Dome Day (20 pitches in a day) and the El Cap Day (36 pitches). Climbing marathons were born. This decades-old practice is a valid and often-overlooked training tool. I was reminded of this time-honored tradition as I laced my boots for a competitive climbing marathon this last weekend. The event, a fun, tongue-in-cheek celebration of the birth of sport climbing, has as its signature event…
Author: Steve House
When it comes to rock climbing training, building a solid foundation is just as important as perfecting advanced techniques. While trail runners and mountaineers often rely on extensive aerobic base training for endurance, climbers need a more tailored approach to improve their performance. This is where ARC training—short for ‘Aerobic, Respiration, and Capillarity’ training—comes into play. Similar to a long Zone 2 run for mountaineers, ARC training serves as the cornerstone of climbing endurance, establishing the base fitness that supports strength, power, and power-endurance during climbs. ARC training specifically targets the forearm muscles, a critical area for maintaining grip and…
Watching a master’s seemingly effortless performance of any high-skill activity, from dance to music to athletics, leaves us slack-jawed time and again. Is it just good genes? Does he avoid some of your favorite vices, like beer and ice cream? Or is it something else, something that should be intuitively obvious but is often the last place we think to look… Only Perfect Practice Makes Perfect Here’s something of a mantra that we’ve been sharing with our athletes for years now: “If you practice it wrong, all you do is get really good at doing it wrong.” Professional athletes make it…
Blood-oxygen saturation meters have become ubiquitous in high-mountain base camps, but the numbers they display are frequently misunderstood and misused. A low O2 sat reading at altitude is not, on its own, a diagnosis of anything. It does not tell you whether you are acclimatizing well or poorly, and comparing your number to someone else’s is clinically meaningless. How you feel, how you eat, and how you sleep are more reliable indicators of your readiness to continue climbing than any number on a screen. This article draws on the perspectives of Steve House, who has extensive high-altitude climbing and guiding…
Why Rock Climbing Is Different from Other Sports What do an NBA basketball player, a gold medal runner, and a professional tennis player have in common? They are each incredibly fit. And that fitness will not ensure they can climb well. Rock climbing is a skill-based activity, primarily. Fitness matters, but if you are a highly skilled rock climber who is reasonably fit, you can probably still climb at a high level. The opposite is not true. You probably cannot send 5.12 slab without good footwork technique, no matter how many pull-ups you can do.This is the fundamental reality of…
The most time- and energy-efficient training tool for building climbing-specific grip strength is a hangboard. If you don’t have one at home, I’m sure your climbing gym has several. I own two boards, both from Metolius: the newer Contact Training Board, which I love for the huge variety of incrementally smaller-size grips, and the longtime standard, their Simulator 3D, which has somewhat easier grips. Read more: Training for Rock Climbing Hangboard Training Routine This little hangboard routine is one I made for myself for those times I first begin to think about rock climbing, usually sometime in March and again…