Lindsey;
I’m going to address your post point by point so have pasted it here.
This seems like a really stupid question but bear with me. I’ve been following the training for the new alpinism books and I’m on week 6 of the base period (Max Strength). I don’t really know how to count climbing and strength (though strength is a bit easier) into the training plan.
This is an essential question to get answered since it will form the whole basis for logging and accounting for training load. The reason for counting hours is to have some way to account for the accumulation of the stress LOAD from training. There are two principle ingredients in the load: Duration (time) and Intensity. These two factors are of course inter-related and it is really the combo of them that creates the load. Simply tracking volume of low to medium intensity aerobic work is a good way and so hours make a convenient measure since you are comparing apples to apples if you run for an hour or do a 2hour approach to a climb. However when it comes to accounting for the load of strength training, either general like lifting weights or specific like cragging) time is not a great measure. You can intuitively see that climbing 10 pitches of 5.6 is going to have a different training stimulus than climbing 2 pitches of 11c. The stimuli are different and the load is going to be different.
For climbing, I’ll assume I’m supposed to count time on the wall, but if I go climb somewhere like the gunks for the day, I can spend 4-5 hours on the wall actually climbing which is basically my entire training volume for the whole week. So I haven’t been counting climbing time towards my training, but should I be?
You can record climbing time in hours but separate it by quality. Lots of easy pitches are going to build an aerobic base in the climbing specific muscle groups where working a project is going to be building either strength, power of anaerobic (Local Muscular Endurance) endurance and the varying intensity should be accounted for. Just as in full body aerobic conditioning, like running, where the need for a big aerobic base is essential, having that some base in the climbing muscles will allow you do more and harder specific climbing. These workouts should be periodized as well. The Rock Climbers Training Manual by the Anderson brothers is great reference for this stuff. Be consistent in how you record your training. That is the key point to consider. If you always count the climbing time the same (relative to the intensity) then it does not matter how many hours you record. You are comparing apples to apples
And slightly easier, for strength, doing the strength workout, there is a lot of down time where I’m resting should I run a timer and start and stop it in between each of the sets? So far I’ve just been saying a strength workout takes an half an hour. is this okay to do? And is this affecting my training negatively? This is a fine way to do it. Just be consistent. There are many ways of tracking strength training. The most popular is in tons lifted in a session. A bit crude but works amazingly well as an estimation of work done.
The thing to keep in mind is that you are trying to track and monitor TRAINING LOAD and thereby plan for future TRAINING LOAD. Hours are one grossly simplified method for doing this as time spent training is a proxy for the load. A crude model, admittedly, but a starting point. There are much more sophisticated models out there: The best I have ever seen is the Training Peaks Training Stress Score. But it requires a high degree of athlete involvement and moderately expensive monitoring devices. It is for the very serious or coached athlete. That is why we recommended hours for the self coached. Just be CONSISTENT in the way your count your time spent training.
The example would be this week:
Total training time: 7hrs
long zone 1: 2.1hrs
zone 1 volume: 2.5hrs
zone 2/3: 1.4hrs
strength: 1hr
Is this right or am I doing the breakdown wrong?
This is exactly they way I would do it but I would include your climb time/grades.
Scott
