24-week mountaineering plan: strength questions

Hey all,

I’m in week 2 of the 24-week mountaineering plan and excited to be making progress after getting a lot out of reading both books! Thank you to the authors and to everyone here who has contributed.

I’m preparing to climb the Pico de Orizaba in January, a fairly non-technical general mountaineering goal. I have plans to climb Rainier and perhaps some of the other Cascades volcanoes next July, and beyond this am looking to generally improve base fitness and strength and start working on technical climbing skills. I am interested at some point in transitioning to more technical alpinism but I have a long way to go.

I have a few questions, mainly around modifications to the strength training portion of the plan.

None of my current goals involved fixed rope ascension. Should I replace this component of the strength training with something else? What would folks recommend?

I’m also interested in trying to fit in 1-2 sessions of low-intensity, technique-focused gym or outdoor climbing per week as long as this wouldn’t interfere too much with my main goals. Any suggestions on when, how, or if to fit this in?

I am fairly untrained and could probably benefit from a longer strength transition period. Should I consider extending this phase beyond 8 weeks to build a better strength base before the max strength workouts?

Since the Turkish Get-up is a fairly technical movement, I looked up videos to get the form down and found the standard version to be significantly different from what’s illustrated in the book. Is there a reason for this difference, in terms of working different muscles or different movements? Additionally, if I’m finding the learning curve steep on correct form for the get-up, is it worth getting it down for what is essentially two more weeks of using the exercise? Are there other exercises you would recommend in its place?

Finally: do the time allotments for aerobic training sessions include warm-up time?

Thanks in advance for any replies. I’ve already learned a lot from perusing this forum.