The magnitude of your commitment must be equal to the size of your goal. That principle sounds obvious, but it is the one we see violated most often by athletes who come to us with ambitious objectives. They are big on dream and small on commitment. Understanding what elite-level mountain performance actually requires—in terms of training volume, consistency, and years of development—can help you calibrate your own goals and your willingness to pursue them. Let’s start by looking behind the curtain at what three very successful mountain athletes’ training actually looks like. What Does Elite Mountain Training Volume Look Like?…
Author: Steve House
Work hard? Rest hard! If your idea of post-workout recovery is flopping onto the couch with a beer and chips or a quick dash through the shower as you race off to work, you might want to reconsider your approach. Chances are you take the improvement of your performance in your chosen sport pretty seriously and want to maximize the gains from your training. The Toll of Training Training requires many hundreds and even thousands of repetitive movements. Lack of recovery, rather than too much training, is often the cause of poor or no adaptation. If you are pushing your…
We are fortunate to live and train in a time when physiology testing is becoming more available and accessible. Either at home or through local labs offering testing services, athletes can better orient themselves and their training by knowing their biomarkers. In endurance training, understanding your metabolism is the key to increased performance, and the test is called the blood lactate test. While the Gas Exchange Test offered by many physiology labs, if administered correctly, can be held up as the gold standard for determining your metabolic response to exercise, a simpler and cheaper alternative exists. Many labs offer blood…
Ultimately, climbing in all forms combines fitness, skill, and judgment in varying ways dependent on the climb and conditions on that climb. Fitness alone can take you far on a route like the North Col on Everest, which requires few technical climbing skills. But fitness by itself is less impactful on a technical route that requires a high skill component. We spend a lot of time, ink, and pixels talking about improving fitness. But how does one best improve technical skill? Everyone involved at Uphill Athlete has spent most of their life dedicated to a technique-intensive sport, whether that be…
When doing ARC training or accumulating pitches during a climbing marathon session, it can be easy to lose your concentration and let your form slide downhill. Here are some technique drills you can work on while you log the vertical. If you have your own favorite climbing drill, email us your suggestion and we’ll add it to the list! If you are looking to incorporate drills into a robust training session, see the article: Training for Rock Climbing. Rock Climbing Technique Drills Pick one drill per session. When your mind wanders to that Weiss beer waiting for you at the…
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…
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…
What do an NBA basketball player, a gold medal runner, and a professional tennis player all have in common? One, they’re each incredibly fit. Two, that fitness won’t ensure that they will be any good at rock climbing. This is because rock climbing is a skill-based activity, primarily. Fitness affects your climbing performance, but if you’re a highly skilled rock climber, and relatively fit, you can probably still climb at a high level. The opposite is not true; you probably can’t send 5.12 slab without good technique. To excel at rock climbing, you have to develop climbing skills. Read More:…