About Bradley Hilbert

Bradley (“Brad”) Hilbert is the Team Head Coach for Triangle Rock Club in North Carolina and Virginia. He’s helped to develop one of the top youth teams in the country, with more than 100 climbers and 10 coaches. In fact, he’s so good at what he does that when I reached out to Steve Bechtel (all hail…) for a recommendation for a youth coach to have on the podcast, he didn’t even hesitate before exclaiming, “Brad Hilbert!” So here we are…

The reason Bechtel was so excited about Brad is that he’s doing cutting edge stuff with his kids, including testing and training them using strain gauges a la Tyler Nelson. But he’s also really good at coaching kids on a mental/emotional level, fostering a positive team spirit and mutual respect among competitors.

I talked with Brad about how his athletes get stronger while generally staying injury-free, and how he imparts strong morals and values to his teams. We go into the overarching tenets of his program, as well as the nitty-gritty details of what a typical day looks like for the kids on his teams.

Hopefully this interview will give you some ideas about what it takes to have a successful youth team, and maybe help you implement some of his tactics into your own coaching program.

Bradley Hilbert Interview Details

• His eclectic background and how he got into coaching
• The biggest challenges of coaching youth
• Why coaching kids is easier than coaching adults
• How to build culture in a team
• Specific drills he uses to assess and train his kids
• Quarterly strength assessments he does with his team
• Quantifying how hard you think you can try vs how hard you can actually try
• 8 books about coaching, health, and mindset he recommends

8 Books He Recommends

1. Wooden: A Lifetime of Observation and Reflection
2. Why We Sleep
3. How Bad Do You Want It?
4. Atomic Habits
5. Spark
6. Quiet
7. 12 Rules for Life
8. The Tao of Pooh

Bradley Hilbert Links 

• Instagram: @climbingcoachbradley
• Blog: bradleyhilbertclimbing.wordpress.com
• Book about the All Blacks: Legacy
• Blog post on focusing attention: Representational Systems in Climbing
• Triangle Rock Club

Training Programs for You

Do you want a well-laid-out, easy-to-follow training program that will get you stronger quickly? Here’s what we have to offer on TrainingBeta…

• Personal Training Online:  www.trainingbeta.com/matt
• For Boulderers: Bouldering Training Program for boulderers of all abilities
• For Route Climbers: Route Climbing Training Program for route climbers of all abilities
• Finger Strength : www.trainingbeta.com/fingers
• All of our training programs: Training Programs Page

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Transcript

Neely Quinn: Welcome to the TrainingBeta podcast where I talk with climbers and trainers about how we can get a little better at our favorite sport. I’m your host, Neely Quinn, and I want to remind you that the TrainingBeta podcast is actually an offshoot of a website I created, trainingbeta.com, which is all about training for rock climbing.

Over there we have regular blog posts, we have training programs for boulderers or route climbers or people who just want to train finger strength or power endurance. We also have online personal training with Matt Pincus as well as nutrition consulting with myself – I’m also a nutritionist. Hopefully one or more of those resources will help you become a better rock climber.

You can find us at trainingbeta.com and you can follow us on social media @trainingbeta. 

Thank you for joining me on episode 139 of the podcast. Today I have on the show Bradley Hilbert. He is the head coach of the teams at Triangle Rock Club in North Carolina. He manages about 160 kids and 10 coaches, maybe more now, and oversees a team that is very good. They’re one of the top teams in the United States and I wanted to talk to him because I asked Steve Bechtel a while back, “Who do you think is the best youth coach and who should I have on the podcast?” He did not hesitate for one second and was like, ‘Brad Hilbert for sure.’

I met Brad actually at a PCC event, one of the events that Steve puts on that I teach at, and he was there as a participant because he wanted to learn more so that he could take it back and use that with his kids. That’s exactly what he’s done. He’s doing a lot of cutting edge stuff with his youth teams like using strain gauges and he also does quarterly testing with them. He also is very big on cultivating values and culture among his teams. I wanted to talk to him all about that stuff. 

This is sort of a long interview so I’m just going to let him get right into it. Here’s Brad Hilbert. Enjoy and I’ll talk to you on the other side. 

Neely Quinn: Thanks so much for joining me, Brad. I really appreciate you being with me today.

Brad Hilbert: Thank you for having me, Neely.

Neely Quinn: For anybody who doesn’t know who you are, there is a lot to say about what you do so can you just tell us about yourself?

Brad Hilbert: Okay, well I am a rock climber, a student, an English professor, an entrepreneur that started and built and sold a business, I have a masters in English where I studied transcendental thinkers through the lense of psychoanalysis, I’m a USAC certified coach, USAC certified setter, USA Olympic Accelerated Program certified, a researcher, experimenter, a basketball player, a musician, a dog dad – so excuse me if my dogs, who are sleeping right now, get excited during the interview – and most importantly I’m the head coach of Triangle Rock Club.

Neely Quinn: Oh my gosh. 

Brad Hilbert: Lots of things to be.

Neely Quinn: Where are you from?

Brad Hilbert: That’s complicated. I’m from Kentucky. I went to high school in Missouri. I lived in Spain, Holland, Germany, Korea, and spent some time in Japan and southeast Asia. The longest place I’ve ever lived is where I live now in Durham, North Carolina, for the last six years so I’m kind of from North Carolina but I think if someone had to peg me down it’d be Kentucky. I am definitely a Kentucky boy.

Neely Quinn: A Kentucky boy but you lived in so many places. Were you a military family or something?

Brad Hilbert: No, I just had a really great mentor when I was in college and he told me to get out of this country and go see some other stuff so I did a lot of cultural exchange programs to finish out my last two and a half years of college. Then I stayed on in Korea, which was my last exchange program, and I taught kindergarten for three years there and then I was a professor there teaching English for three more years. Mostly what got me into coaching is, above all, I feel like I am a teacher at this point as I move from an athlete into my later years.

Neely Quinn: Right, so that’s what stuck with you from teaching. So onto what you do in the climbing community, because it seems like a lot. Like you said, the main thing is that you’re the head coach at Triangle Rock Club.

Brad Hilbert: Yes.

Neely Quinn: What does that mean?

Brad Hilbert: That means way more than coaching rock climbing, actually. I’m responsible for 160 climbers in our two gyms. We have a feeder program that goes into our competitive team and we have 90 competitive climbers. The rest are in a program where they get to decide whether climbing competitively is right for them but they’re still coached by both coaches that go with me to Nationals every year. There’s also this other program, our leadership program on our team, like the Juniors and A climbers. 

If you don’t know what Juniors and A climbers are, all of the competitive climbers for youth climbing are split up into categories. Junior is 17-18, A is 15-16, and it’s two-year categories all the way down to D, which is 11 and younger. 

For our oldest climbers we have a program where they become employees of Triangle Rock Club and they work with this onboarding crew program. That gives them an opportunity to have employment for the first time on a limited basis, four hours a week, so it doesn’t interfere with their climbing and their school and the million other things that youth climbers are trying to manage as they go through high school and move into college.

Neely Quinn: Is that a program that you implemented?

Brad Hilbert: Well, anything that we do is not done by myself. It’s just ideas that were kicked around and got solidified both with myself and the people that I work with at TRC and my other coaches. This program was started by myself and coach John Agens, who we may talk about later because he’s a really important part of our program.

Neely Quinn: How do your teams do? Like how good at rock climbing are your youth teams?

Brad Hilbert: [laughs] Well, we have different teams. We have what we had already talked about, the Crew program, and then the next level of team is our Intermediate program. That is about a V2 flash level, a 5.10 flash level. Then we have an Advanced program which is about a V4 flash level, 5.11 program. Then our Elite team is V6 and 5.12 flash level. 

All the different teams work together in different ways as the season progresses. At Regionals, our entire 90-climber competitive team gets to go climb together and they get to work together to try to win a regional championship. Most of the time the number of climbers gets cut in half as you progress, for some teams and for my team at least. We’ll take around 40 climbers to Divisionals and then that usually gets cut down for Nationals to about 10-15 climbers. 

Neely Quinn: So they’re competitive climbers who are traveling to climb, they’re making Nationals, all of the things.

Brad Hilbert: Oh yeah, for sure. If you want the number, we went into finals this past season #6 in the country out of I think more than 300 climbing teams.

Neely Quinn: That’s pretty good. Nice work.

Brad Hilbert: We’re doing okay.

Neely Quinn: What do you find are the biggest challenges in coaching youth?

Brad Hilbert: Well, initially the biggest challenge was for me to understand how to work with people that weren’t my climbers like the parents and the rest of the Triangle Rock Club organization. The simple understanding I had when I came in was, ‘I’m going to write all these great programs and use all my strength and conditioning knowledge and teaching knowledge and I’m going to make the climbers great.’ Having this mindset to push programming and what I think is really great because I’m so smart was how I came into it.

The biggest lesson I think I ever learned was how much more important it was to democratically work with your whole staff, and not just the coaches that I’m working with but also my climbers. If I ever make a decision and just say, “We’re doing this,” without working with my coaches or working with my climbers, especially at the highest level, it’s not that things don’t happen it’s that when the compliance is low, when people aren’t onboard and really excited about it you just don’t get as good results, from my experience. 

A really great way to get people to do the things that will make them successful is to include them in the building of the program or, ‘What are the things that you love doing? What are the things that we know are necessary to do?’ and then create this environment where people get to talk about how we’re going to build a program together instead of me just taking what may be the best program ever, that I spent weeks and weeks building over a whole season, and saying, “Hey everybody, run this.” Does that make sense?

Neely Quinn: Yeah, that makes sense. You might want to do that but it doesn’t go very well unless everybody’s got some sort of stake in it, like they’ve had part of the decision-making process.

Brad Hilbert: And even sometimes when there’s a lot of people involved in it and they’ve all agreed to it, you still get probably 70-80% compliance on something that people were like, ‘Yes. I’m going to do this,’ and you have people overseeing it, so…

Neely Quinn: It seems like in order to make this happen it probably takes time, maybe even from coaching sessions where instead of saying, “Okay, we’re going to do these drills,” blah blah blah, you’re like, ‘Everybody come here, we’re going to talk about this.’ Is that what happens? Or do you have special meeting times for that kind of thing with the kids and the parents?

Brad Hilbert: I work eight hours every day so from 1-4 are my office hours that I work with people, answer emails, put out fires, and do all the extra administrative things that head coaches do. I make sure all my head coaches are certified, make sure all the rosters are ready for the season with USAC, try to get new climbers to understand the difference between USAC competitive climbing and our gym’s membership and their team program, because these things are split. There’s a whole lot of things that have to go on administratively before you actually get to coach, as a head coach, that is fun and interesting, too, but to answer your question a lot of the stuff that I do to organize is with parents during my office hours. If we’re trying to decide on a program that we want to run for several weeks, it’s with my climbers and with my coaches. 

Once a month I have a coaches meeting where we all sit down together and just talk about whatever they need. We start the beginning of practice talking about programming with our climbers. What we’re going to run, what things they think would be important to add into it, and anything they don’t understand. 

That’s the other big thing: if you don’t give a reason for something you’re doing that directly applies to their competitive success or to their betterment as a climber, they kind of do it but if you give them the full reasoning for it, which takes a little bit of time – as a coach sometimes you’re in there and you’re like, ‘Let’s get going. Let’s get the most out of every second we have in these two and a half hours – but the extra 10-15 minutes to answer everybody’s question before you get going just saves you 40 or 50 minutes of answering each individual question throughout the practice. If you have to do that it really takes you away from the one-on-one individual work that you can do with a climber at practice for that 10-15 minutes that you get with each one of them during your session.

Neely Quinn: That makes a lot of sense. That’s how I am, definitely. I want to know why I’m spending my time doing things. Do you find that it’s different between adults and kids with their compliance if you’re just like, ‘Do this,’ and don’t give them a reason?

Brad Hilbert: I think it depends on the people because if someone already trusts you, it depends on that, really, the level of trust. If someone trusts you, like maybe after I do this podcast, people are going to trust me [laughs] and I’m going to be able to tell them what to do and they’ll do it, so thanks, Neely. 

That’s probably the first step, whether they trust you or not. Fortunately, when I work with members, they see our kids climbing and flashing V6 up to even V10. Climbers on our team have done that so usually when I get adults that come to me, they have seen that and that’s why they’re talking to me. It’s pretty easy. 

Once you get into working with adults it’s more difficult, or in my experience it has been more difficult, because they have a lot of bad habits built up that they don’t want to break because it’s hard to break an old habit. The ego is usually a bit bigger so they have a tougher time failing and just learning from the failure so you have to go through this whole process of getting them to understand that before you can start pushing them and getting them to fail and then ask the coach questions like, ‘What did you learn from this? What were you proud of during your session?’ There seems to be a couple more steps where with our youth climbers, I think all of our coaches are on the same page where we don’t coach with beta, we coach with questions. It’s just constantly letting them do something and then talking with them about how they felt about it, how they could clean up the movement.

Sorry to get off topic. Basically, it’s a little bit easier for me to work with youth climbers because they have more of an open mind when you’re working with them. They don’t have as much stuff built up that you have to get past in order to get to the real stuff.

Neely Quinn: I mean, I guess that makes sense, too. We have more shame built up over our lives and we don’t want to fail quite as readily as kids do. It seems like kids don’t really want to fail either in front of each other, or is it just less of a thing with them?

Brad Hilbert: I think it really depends on – that’s where the whole culture of the program comes in. They invited all of the regional championship coaches out to Colorado Springs to do this accelerated program with the US Olympic folks out there. There was a guy named Chris Snyder that ran it and throughout the whole process we spent a lot of time talking about values and culture and they referred me to this really great book, Legacy. If anybody is interested in team culture it’s about the All Blacks, a New Zealand rugby team that has like an 80% win rate built on culture. Their greatest players are always the ones that clean up the locker room at the end of every game so that means everybody is held to the same standard, right?

We talked about culture, we talked about values, and all these things like mission statements and values. All of these things throughout my life, I just never got. I was like, ‘Let’s just come in and rock climb,’ or ‘Let’s just come in and play ball. Why do I have to have this value system?’ I was with a bunch of other great coaches there and they were just drilling this whole value system so we came up with our own and it was probably the greatest thing that ever happened for my team because I was able to take these four values back to my team that we kind of base everything on. It breaks that ego right from the beginning and lets you understand what we’re here at practice to do, no matter what the drill.

Neely Quinn: What are the four values?

Brad Hilbert: The first value is: support your teammates. I think this is really important because if we’re going to fail a lot it’s a lot easier to fail in a supported environment, right? Having people pick you right up after you fall makes things a lot easier.

Learn from others. This was put in for two reasons. One is because when I’m working with groups of new climbers the easiest thing in the world for the group to do while someone is climbing on the wall is to not pay attention and play around with holds and look at their shoes and look out the window at the trees or whatever is going on. I always prep them and I’m like, ‘Hey. When you’re climbing is not the only time you can learn something. Watching other climbers is really important,’ so we keep this value in and also, it’s a great way to look at others. I never want my climbers to look at their competitors as people they’re competing against, I want them to always look at them as people they are competing with and to feel fortunate that they have high level competition to compete with because otherwise they’ll never get pushed to their maximum.

Neely Quinn: That’s a question I have for you, too, about competitiveness within a team. I know that for myself, even with some of my peer climbers, like people who are at a similar level as I am, sometimes it’s hard for me to not compare myself or feel shame when I don’t do as well as they do. It seems like a team is a perfect place to foster some healthy beliefs around that so how do you teach them how to temper those feelings?

Brad Hilbert: Well the coach maxim is that you’re competing with your yesterday so that’s what you’re competing with, just trying to get a little bit better than you were yesterday. We don’t have very much of that because I think my coaches understand that that’s not beneficial and they definitely understand that if we see something like that it needs to be addressed right away and not make a big deal out of it. You just don’t let it go. You say, “Hey, that’s not okay.” If you’re competing against this person and you’re making this an uncomfortable environment to learn and get better in, you’re not supporting your teammate so that’s rule one, right? There’s only four rules. We have to follow all of them. Fortunately, they cover a lot of stuff.

Neely Quinn: [laughs] They’re just rules. You just don’t get competitive with your peers. It’s as easy as that.

Brad Hilbert: Well there’s a healthy level of competition. There’s the, ‘I want to win,’ which is great. Winning feels great. You need people to compete with to win but that’s different than saying, “I want to beat you.” “I want to beat you,” is just not healthy and also it’s working with something that is out of your control. You can’t control what that other climber does so why would you be focused on them? It takes away from what you’re able to do. 

Neely Quinn: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What’s the third value? We had support teammates, learn from others…

Brad Hilbert: Oh, the next one: is welcome the challenge. That evolved from: no whining, complaining, or making excuses [laughs] because I don’t like to use negative language. Since language is so important, the message of what you say, like, “Don’t fall,” or “Stick the next move,” is the same thing but if you put negative words into a sentence, that’s what your brain is thinking of. Don’t think of a pink elephant. It doesn’t matter. That’s the old saying. It doesn’t matter when you’re telling someone not to do something, it’s just important to have positive language when you speak to somebody because they understand what you want them to do but they also take enthusiasm into what they’re doing.

So, welcome the challenge is when you see something that seems difficult, just get excited about it. Just go over there and see what’s going to happen.

Neely Quinn: Okay. That’s really good. I remember being on a team and my coach would be like, ‘You’re going to do this rock climb,’ and it would be this slopey, pinchy thing that I don’t do well on and I’d be like, ‘Mahhhh.’ He’d be like, ‘Just do it!’ It was the same kind of thing. Maybe if he had introduced the concept of welcoming this challenge, maybe switching the mindset may have helped me embrace it a little bit more so I think that’s a great one.

Brad Hilbert: Yeah, the other reason we ask a lot of questions is I think this is language that a lot of people can understand but it’s really important while we’re on the topic of language, which is a really important topic to me from my master’s in English and studying languages, that you ask questions so that you can understand your climber’s vocabulary. If you speak to them with their vocabulary then things just click really fast. This is a complicated thing to learn as a coach or just as a human being when you’re having conversations with people but it has pretty dramatic results.

Neely Quinn: Can you give me an example of how that might work, maybe with one of your members or one of your kids?

Brad Hilbert: I wrote a program that helps me get into it. It’s a representational systems program which helps people focus their attention but it also helps me understand how they learn. What you do is, and you could put this in the show notes or something. There’s a page I wrote on my blog a long time ago about this. You have someone just traverse the wall and you ask them to see what their toes are doing and then once they come off the wall they’ll say the sentence, “I saw my toes twist,” or “I saw my toes push,” or “I saw my toes turn.” 

After that you’ll have them do the same traverse and ask them, “What did you hear your toes doing?” “I heard my toes thump.” “I heard my toes silently move across the wall.” I guess that’s what we always talk about with silent footwork. Then you have them go across the wall and feel what their toes are doing. “I feel my toes push.” “I feel my toes scrape.” “I feel my toes…” whatever. 

After they’ve done those three things, as a coach you can kind of watch them and when they’re focusing in one of these representational systems – that’s just a big fancy way for your senses. We hear, see, feel, and taste things, right? I’m not going to have climbers taste or smell their toes during the session [laughs] so we just work with the kinesthetic feeling, hearing, and seeing the footwork. Throughout that process you can kind of get to know and you have them decide which one of those things is making them feel like they’re climbing better. If you ever do it sometime, you’ll notice like, ‘If I focus on feeling my footwork I feel more confident.’ ‘If I focus on seeing my toe touch the best place on this hold I’ll feel more confident.’ And hearing. Some people learn auditory, some people learn visual, some people learn by doing.

This is an example of how language works because in the same sentence I can say, “I hear what you’re saying.” “I feel you on that.” Or “I see what you mean.” Right? Those are all the same way to say the same thing but people will gravitate towards certain words so it’s important before you start coaching – well, I don’t think it’s necessary but I think it helps to get to where someone wants to be if you’re speaking their language. 

Neely Quinn: So you can tell which one of those things they’re more fluent in? Like whether they saw, felt, or heard things more when they were doing the drill and then that’s the way that you then speak to them later.

Brad Hilbert: I do my best to. It’s kind of hard to be thinking of many things at one time but the real purpose of the drill is to focus attention. How do they focus attention into their footwork? What’s more important to me is that this is a warm up drill. It can be applied to anything like clipping or heel hooking or any skill that you want to do. If you know that person’s representational system, like which way they learn best, then you can remind them, “Hey, remember to hear your footwork today in your warm-up,” or “Remember to see your toes placed on the best possible part of each foot hold while you’re warming up.” It’s a way to take all of your attention away from the many, many, many distractions, especially in isolation at a Nationals event or something, to just dial in on what you’re doing.

Neely Quinn: Yeah, that’s true. 

Brad Hilbert: The less things you have in your head the more able you are to just be the athlete that you are.

Neely Quinn: That’s a very Rock Warrior’s Way type of thing like just being present with yourself and feeling inside of your body what’s going on.

Brad Hilbert: Cool.

Neely Quinn: What is the fourth value? Or did you say it and I missed it?

Brad Hilbert: Oh yeah. The fourth value is: steel trash can. It’s actually a value that we don’t add to our parent handbook when we send it out. I don’t add that one. That’s a secret team value and it comes from every year I have different coaches come out to our facility at Triangle Rock Club and we work clinics. I do so so that my coaches can learn a lot from great coaches and so that our kids can, too. 

This story comes from Steve Bechtel. He was the first person that we brought out to Triangle Rock Club. We’ve had him and Kris Hampton and Tyler Nelson out. But Steve, one of the things me and my friend, Lawrence, always crack up about is all of the metaphors and stuff he uses for life. Actually, last time we were at the PCC conference Lawrence was writing a list of all the metaphors he was doing in his speech. It was pretty funny. [laughs]

Neely Quinn: Yeah, he’s the best at that.

Brad Hilbert: He was talking to our team and this has been something that has made a big difference. We’ve really latched onto it and taken something that may have been just a small, offhand comment and turned it into a way that we approach things. He was telling this story about the fragility of climbers. Oftentimes climbers will come into Divisionals or Nationals and they’ll come into isolation and you’ll ask them, “How’s it going?” They’ll say, “Oh, I didn’t sleep well and I kind of feel tweaky in my shoulder and the hotel didn’t have the breakfast that I usually eat and I didn’t have the music that I like to listen to and oh my gosh, I’m first in the running order. Oh my gosh, I’m last in the running order. Oh my gosh, there’s a break and someone had a technical and now I’m moved in the running order.” It seems like everything that happens – because we talk about processes so much and how to have a process in your warm-up and how to have a process in your sleep and that these things are important – we talk about them so much we forget that it’s important to take whatever you have in the moment and believe 100% that no matter what you have, just take it and run with it. Sometimes you just are last in the warm up and you couldn’t sleep because you were nervous and you have to figure out how to climb without as much sleep as you’re used to, nervous.

He was giving this talk about fragility and he talked about standing at the top of the hill and having a glass vase in one hand and then he looked around the room for something durable and all there was was this steel trash can so he said, “You can be a glass vase or you can be this steel trash can over here. I’m going to throw both of them down this hill and it’s a rocky hill. Once they get to the bottom, what do you want to be? This shattered person that can’t carry on with the job and with what’s ahead of you? Or do you want to be this steel trash can? We just sit it up, it’s got a couple dings in it but it moves on. It gets the job done.” 

This idea is really important to my team because now when we’re in iso – it’s important to me, too, for selfish reasons because I don’t have to listen to as much of the ‘oh no’s.’ I don’t mind. If they come in and they’re, ‘Oh no,’ freaking out there’s another saying that I try to think about, especially when people are having trouble. It’s: comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. If people are feeling like they’re on top of the world, those are the people you want to push a little bit outside their comfort zone but if somebody is pretty broken down, you don’t push them at all. You just check in with them and make sure they’re doing okay.

But back to the steel trash can idea. My climbers are usually coming into isolation now almost hoping sometimes there’s something that goes wrong so that they can be like, ‘Oh, guess what? Something went wrong. I’m just going to crush anyway.’

Neely Quinn: That’s awesome. 

Brad Hilbert: Maybe it affects everybody else but whatever. Let’s take it and run with it. We’ll have to thank Steve for that. Thanks, Steve.

Neely Quinn: Thanks, Steve. I don’t know where he gets all of these things. I feel like he’s an encyclopedia or he’s got a photographic memory and remembers everything he’s ever read [laughs] and he just shoots out all this.

Brad Hilbert: And he reads everything. That’s the other thing. [laughs] A thirst for knowledge and he remembers stuff.

Neely Quinn: So it sounds like you have a really great foundation for your team members to work from and really good tenets to fall back on. I’m going to ask you a few more questions about creating really good team dynamics, which I know is one of your fortes, obviously, so these will be similar questions. Then I want to get more into some of the assessment things that you’ve been doing because I think those are really interesting and all of this is super useful to our listeners. Just a few questions.

In a team, it can be hard – especially in climbing because it pretty much is an individual sport – because it is a team that you’re trying to foster. How do you get a person to do what the team needs versus what the individual might need?

Brad Hilbert: Well, it helps that we have never lost a regional championship at Triangle Rock Club. Knock on wood because things are getting so much more competitive. One of the big reasons that that has been so in the last several years is that each climber knows that they don’t have to get first place to get points for our team. I don’t know if you know how the point system works but first place gets 100 points for your team, second 90, then 80, and it just goes on down the list. I think it goes up to 18 places or something so even if you come in 10th or 11th or 12th place you still score points for the team. 

While most of what we do is just try to help kids be their best every day and that just turns into results, keeping the team dynamic also comes from them understanding they can score points for our team even if they come in 8th, 9th, 10th place. If they do, whatever place they come in, does that beat your yesterday? Beat your last Regionals? We help them keep track of it so they’re like, ‘Hey, last regionals I came in 14th place. What can we do in practice to try to get 13th place next year?’ If we get better than that, awesome. Usually everyone progresses with this less stressful ‘next best thing’ to become. Does that make sense?

That’s one of the great things about the USA Climbing point system. Everybody can feel like they contribute whether they’re on a podium – I know all of the pictures are of people on a podium but everybody all the way through almost 20th place can score points for your team. 

We have the A girls and the B boys and while everyone works together on our team and we don’t keep them separated, when we meet with climbers at the beginning and end of seasons to talk about goals, we’ll separate them into those groups but only because we want those climbers to really gel together because they understand the struggles of that category, they understand the people they’ll be competing with, they understand how to help each other get better because they’re facing all the same similar challenges, but they all know that each category adds to the total team score.

Neely Quinn: Okay, got it. So it is a team sport, honestly.

Brad Hilbert: For sure. We do a lot of team stuff in practices, too, and we like to mix up the oldest and youngest climbers, biggest and smallest climbers, and separate them into teams and give them team challenges like simply V-points. This team is going to try to score the most V-points. We’ll give constraints. The youngest climbers can only climb these boulders or these boulders are available and the older climbers should feel the responsibility of helping the younger climbers decide, like, ‘These are the boulders we need you to send,’ and then the younger climbers will be like, ‘These are the boulders we need you to send.’ Creating little team games within a practice is one way I think we’ve found to do that but there are a lot of other ways to do it.

Neely Quinn: So then one of the other things that you’ve been doing are these quarterly assessments. Do you want to talk a little bit about this?

Brad Hilbert: Well, we have been fortunate to work with some of the people from Duke’s Sports Medicine because Duke is close to us in Durham. They’ve been great. Tyler Cope and Rachel Myers. Rachel Myers is actually from Colorado. She was a climber out there for a while. They’ve been helping me out with working with our climbers. If there are any injuries they have a discussion with the climber before they go off and pay the big bucks to have the doctor look at them and stuff. They’ve been phenomenal in working with the whole Triangle Rock Club program. I think Tyler comes in a couple nights a month and just works with people who have nagging injuries, just to give them peace of mind if it’s something they shouldn’t be worrying about or, ‘Yeah, you definitely need to get this looked at.’ He’s helping people out.

The thing that we were really interested in when we built this relationship was this idea of loads on climbers. Like what can a youth climber handle, on average?

Neely Quinn: What have you guys found?

Brad Hilbert: We’re into the first year of it so what I was most interested in in the beginning was how the season affects kids in terms of their maximum in what they can do. What we measure is a 20-millimeter edge at 120, which is where your arm is almost fully extended.

Neely Quinn: So a 120° angle?

Brad Hilbert: Yeah, 120° and then we measure a 90° jug pull because one of the things I find, especially in young people, is since we spend so much time reaching up for a hold, building a foot, and then pulling to 90° and then reaching up for a hold, building a foot, and then pulling to 90°, is the ability to pull through from your waist is pretty poor. If there’s a weakness, that’s one of the ones that I’ve noticed over the years so we target that and we do a lot of pull-throughs from 90 if we’re doing any training. We don’t do a whole ton of training outside of climbing but we mix in a little bit on specific days.

Neely Quinn: How would you train that? With a lat pulldown?

Brad Hilbert: Lots of different ways. One of the ways is to stand on a box and pull down below your collarbone and do negatives to 90.

Neely Quinn: On a pull-up bar?

Brad Hilbert: Yeah, on a pull-up bar. We only do that with jugs because if you do a whole lot of work past 90° on fingers it can have a lot of stress on your elbows and we don’t want to give anybody more challenges than we already have in climbing. 

So a 20-millimeter edge, a 90° jug pull, and a deadlift. We also measure vertical jump now that that’s become so important in comp climbing, especially. Your ability to explode and then catch momentum and load with your feet on volumes by jumping, run and jumps, paddle-throughs, creating tension and exploding with low feet. If you watch competitive boulderers you’ll see a lot of the power is generated from the feet and coordinated movements.

Neely Quinn: So you test these things at regular intervals? Is that what I’m gathering?

Brad Hilbert: With our elite team we test at regular intervals but we took 20 climbers to test preseason and then we’re going to test them right before the championship season starts which will be four months later, so we’re doing quarterly tests on those four things as a baseline study of what loads climbers can handle.

Neely Quinn: And then how will you figure out what loads they can handle? Whether or not people get injured?

Brad Hilbert: Well no. We’ll have an average. We’ll have a lot of cool information. We’ll have like how strong they are preseason, how strong they are before the championship season, then we’re going to measure them after the championship season which is pre-rope season, and then we’ll measure them at the end of the year. We can see after the championship season if that took a lot out of them, we can see different climbers of different ages because we’re working with climbers nine years old all the way to 17 years old.

One of the other big things I’ve noticed are climbers going through puberty – I’d love to say that since I’m a coach now and I write programming that the program is what makes people strong but I don’t know if there’s any program that’s as powerful as hormones. When you see hundred pound jumps in the ability of a kid to pull because he’s 15 and this other kid is 13 and he’s going through puberty, it’s a really big deal for youth climbers. So also, just knowing that and having that information helps you talk to a young person, like we were talking about earlier, about competing with the people on your team. You will have your time. It will come and it’s not necessarily always about going into the gym and grinding yourself down to catch that person. Sometimes it’s just about being patient and doing the best you can until your growth spurt comes.

Neely Quinn: Right? I wish I could have a growth spurt.

Brad Hilbert: Keep your fingers crossed. I’d plan on other things, Neely. 

Neely Quinn: Spoken like a seasoned coach. [laughs]

Brad Hilbert: Let’s focus on the things we can control, Neely. [laughs]

Neely Quinn: So what kinds of things are you finding? Are you seeing any trends with your climbers with this testing? How is it helping you guys?

Brad Hilbert: Well, one of the big ways it’s helping us is initially they see how strong they are. I have some climbers that are 100 pounds and can pull almost 200 pounds on a 20-millimeter edge but all of my climbers can pull almost one and a half times their body weight, almost, on a 20-millimeter edge so just that understanding of whenever you have to pull really hard on something, knowing that you can pull so much more than your bodyweight I think is a big confidence boost.

Neely Quinn: When you say a 20-mil edge, how are you testing? Are you using a strain gauge to see how hard they can pull?

Brad Hilbert: Yeah. I use a lot of the scales that Tyler Nelson uses. I use a crane scale for the deadlift and then I used the G-Strength from Exsurgo for all the different pulling schemes that we do from 5-25 to 7-25 to all the different repeater protocols.

Neely Quinn: If you think a kid could improve, do you have kids hang for training?

Brad Hilbert: No. 

Neely Quinn: They’re never doing fingerboard training?

Brad Hilbert: They’re not doing fingerboard training but they do do max pull. We set that up in the gym on the Rogue rack, probably the same way you might have seen if you have Instagram and see all of the chains hanging from a Rogue rack and the little scale and the Tension board that’s hanging there. We do that for our elite team every Thursday. We’ll do different protocols, like whatever they want to measure. Right now we’re just doing a 10-max pull.

Neely Quinn: A 10-second max pull?

Brad Hilbert: No, 10 pulls and it’s 5-on, 55-off so it takes 10 minutes. They come over and do 10 maximum pulls, we write all those numbers down, we add those up, and they get an average for that week. We might do that for a month to watch their numbers kind of slowly creep up.

Neely Quinn: And it creeps up?

Brad Hilbert: Yeah, it slowly creeps up but the thing that’s most important about this is I can see when they’re really fatigued. We practice Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday and our Thursday practice is when we do this. It’s kind of our ‘top them off with maximum recruitment strength session’ at the end of the week but it also tells me right then at the beginning of that practice: should we be working ropes today? Should we just go home? Should we work hard boulders? You don’t know that right away but after doing that for almost 8-10 months, and some kids have been doing it for 18 months when we started doing it, they know what their average is. 

I’ll use myself for an example. If I come in and I pull 300 one day I’m bouldering really hard all day and I’m going to try to get strength and power all day. Then if I come in and I pull 240 because I only slept five hours last night I’m just going to take the day off.

Neely Quinn: So will you send certain kids home?

Brad Hilbert: If they can drive. I do have a couple of climbers that will often just go home. We send kids home every couple of weeks. 

Neely Quinn: Because it’s better for them to go home and rest than try to train through fatigue?

Brad Hilbert: 90% of the time, yeah. I think there is a time when you work on that stuff, like if you’re working power endurance and trying to get into more of the mental side of things where you’re trying to see how you’ll react to trying really hard, then maybe you can have them do that but almost 95% of the time it’s just, ‘Nope, we need to rest today. We need to work some slab stuff. We can do some light recovery climbing but really you’re just digging this big hole that’s going to take four or five days of rest to get out of.’ I could just send them home and they could come back three days later, on Monday, and just destroy boulders which is awesome. 

Neely Quinn: Cool, so it sounds like this testing is doing a lot for you guys. It’s giving you a lot of information and them good information.

Brad Hilbert: Yeah, it definitely helps to know what we should be doing that day on certain days.

Neely Quinn: If they all are pulling not heavy, like if they all are sort of fatigued but they’re not that fatigued, what kind of day will you make it be?

Brad Hilbert: Well, I’m really fortunate to have so many different kinds of coaches on my staff. I have a strength and conditioning coach. His name is Chris VanBrenk and he has been amazing. The way that our practices look is on Monday we have strength and conditioning and then I have a yoga instructor named Dakota Greene. She’s been amazing as well. If we want to work strength and conditioning or mobility or hard boulders for power, or just some climbing to work on some movement. We have all of these options. We always have Coach Greene there on Thursday because she does yoga – she’s a very strong climber as well – and she can just take climbers and do some mobility with them.

Neely Quinn: And before you had said something like, “Well then we know if we’re going to do a power endurance session or if we’re going to do an endurance session,” or something. If they did all end up climbing, like if you were like, ‘Okay, we’re all semi-fatigued’ – I’m just trying to get a sense of what information this gives you. If they’re feeling really strong are you going to have them boulder and limit boulder and if they’re not are you going to have them do endurance? Or what would be sort of the pattern there?

Brad Hilbert: Okay, so this kind of gets to one of the other things that has changed a lot since I’ve been the coach, especially on our higher level teams. Going from programming every minute of the practice to programming some technical movement in the beginning of practice – that’s really important to me – and then these strength pulls, and that takes up about the first hour of their 2.5 hour practice. Then the last 90 minutes they can do whatever. Not whatever they want, because that’s originally how we lined it up, but they wanted some personal freedom. They can work on anything that they think is important to making them a better climber than they were yesterday.

The caveat to all of this is if I come over to a climber and I’m like, ‘What are you working on?’ and they say, “I don’t know,” or if they don’t give me an answer like they’re working on this focused thing that is important to me, then I get to decide what they’re going to do for the rest of practice. Usually it’s not something they want to do. I mean, I don’t punish people but I’m like, ‘Oh, what’s your weak, weak, weakness? Pinches and a roof. Let’s go work on pinches in a roof for the next 30 minutes.’ If you send someone through pinches in a roof session then they’ll always have something that’s important for them to work on and you can give them the liberty to do so.

Neely Quinn: So it sounds like they all have sort of an individualized program in one way or another. Like they’re all doing these technique and movement-based stuff at their own level and then at the end they’re doing things that suit, first of all, their fatigue level, and something that they need to work on.

Brad Hilbert: Sometimes on Thursdays, at the end of the week, it’s just climbing with one of their teammates because it can’t always be programmed and be fun. This was probably the single most important thing I learned from my lead coach at one of our gyms, John Agens. He definitely brings the fun and the spirit to my maximizing-potential-at-all-times attitude so I’ve been lucky to be surrounded by a lot of great coaches that I work with.

Neely Quinn: Nice. The last thing I wanted to ask you about was something we talked about before we started recording which was: I can’t remember the exact term but it started with psychobiological endurance or something or other.

Brad Hilbert: Oh yeah. This is what I’m really, really excited about right now. It’s that feelings are dumb. This is something all of my coaches will say that I repeat all of the time. It’s not that I don’t appreciate feelings and how people feel, it’s that you can’t make decisions based on how you feel. We all know the climber who has been tired and it’s the last go of the day and they feel totally wrecked and they send their project, right? They didn’t feel great. 

The problem I ran into with this ‘You can do it! You can do it!’ is that I don’t know if they can do it and they don’t know if they can do it and all of the coaching ‘You can do its!’ that I can say aren’t going to prove to them that you can do it. 

This is one of the funnest ways I’ve found to use this tool, the Exsurgo. We are, in a sense, trying to prove a subjective experience. The way that for 100 years sports performance was looked at was our muscles would run out of oxygen or run out of fuel and that’s why we had to stop. Then in the 90s there was a guy named Tim Notes that proposed this central governor model which said that there is this subconscious governor in our brain that won’t let us try so hard that we’ll hurt ourselves. They’ve never really proven that one one way or the other but the important part of what he did was he changed people’s thinking from your body runs out of fuel so you have to stop to your brain is telling your body what to do.

Now there’s this guy, an Italian guy, named Samuele Marcora I think? Him and this other guy named Matt Fitzgerald wrote this book called How Bad Do You Want It? and they presented this idea of a psychobiological model of endurance performance. That is just a big long word for explaining that endurance athletes make a decision, a conscious decision, to stop or not stop. An example of this from a study that has been proven is they’ve shown that it’s not dehydration that makes people stop running or stop trying in races, it’s the feeling of being thirsty. It’s not a physical thing, it’s a mental thing. Knowing that means fortunately, and unfortunately, that we have a conscious choice of when we quit. If the choice is conscious then we have to deal with the fact that, to some degree, we’re all kind of quitters but we’re all working on the mental strength to become less of a quitter or to extend the time to when we make the decision to stop.

Neely Quinn: Right, cool.

Brad Hilbert: Does that make sense?

Neely Quinn: Yeah. 

Brad Hilbert: So the way that this cool scale comes into play is when we do these things called 5-3-25 repeaters – do you know what a 5-3-25 is?

Neely Quinn: Why don’t you tell me, briefly?

Brad Hilbert: It means 5 seconds of everything you have, 3 seconds off, for 25 repetitions. This is done on one of those scales, too, where you’re fixed in your lower body and then you’re at 120° at your elbow and you’re pulling on a 20-millimeter edge with everything you have in a rest/work cycle that is weighted to the work side. So you’re pulling as hard as you can for 5 seconds and you’re only resting for 3 seconds and this continues for 25 repetitions. It’s really grueling, actually, and by about 8 pulls most boulderers are like, ‘Oh god, I don’t want to do this anymore,’ and by 12-15 pulls the sport climbers are like, ‘Oh no! I thought I had endurance!’

The numbers continue to drop as you go from your first 4-5 pulls closer to 20. Right around 12-15 the numbers just start dropping and so noticing this I created this fun little activity for youth climbers – actually, we only do 5-3-20s with them because I just don’t like to see them suffer that much through all 25 – where for the first 15 pulls they’re on their own so the numbers are continuously dropping. Then the last 5 pulls I have the other three climbers, because we usually do this in groups of four, get inside the Rogue rack and they’re like, ‘Come on! Five more pulls! Come on! You’ve got it! One more hold! Come on! Top the route!’ They’re screaming and yelling at these people and we always see the numbers jump. Oftentimes they’ll jump within 90% of their original pulls which is crazy.

What this proves to them, objectively, because I can show them the sheet, is where they just felt the experience of, ‘I couldn’t feel my forearms, I didn’t even feel like I had anything in me and I still just pulled 40 pounds more than my body weight.’ What we’re showing them is feelings are dumb. You cannot make the decision to quit or continue on to the next hold based on the feeling of discomfort. If you really want to achieve your goal you have the ability to. Showing them numbers, like, ‘Oh my gosh! I can’t believe I pulled that much when I felt like I couldn’t,’ seems to me a much better way than saying, “You can do it.”

Neely Quinn: Have you seen this in action where they’ll be climbing and they’ll sort of use this information and conjure more try-hard and come down and say to you, “I did it because of what I learned in this drill that we do?”

Brad Hilbert: I mean we always see this. It’s what we always look for. I had several climbers from Nationals come and tell me it was really helpful. They didn’t get as specific as saying, “The thing that you just did made me a National champion,” or something like that [laughs] because I don’t think that would be an honest answer. It’s probably their whole lifetime of climbing with this little thing added, but they did say it was really helpful to understand. All of the climbers that went through it said, “This is really confidence-inspiring for me to know what to do.” 

It’s the thing that we’re always looking to see. It’s what everyone wants to see with climbing. It’s not that everyone wants to see a top, everyone wants to see someone come to that point of, ‘I don’t think I can do it,’ and then do the next move. It inspires everybody. It’s why sport climbing is just really dear to my heart. Watching someone doubt themselves and then lean into it is just beautiful.

Neely Quinn: I think that is what I’ve noticed climbing around so many professional climbers. That, in itself, is the biggest difference between them and me. They will make themselves very uncomfortable. Way more uncomfortable than I even know how to and sometimes they’ll even say that to me, “You’re not trying as hard as you can.” It’s coming from a place, I think, of them knowing that you can try harder than you think you can.

Brad Hilbert: But that doesn’t mean anything, right? “You’re not trying as hard as you can.” You’re like, ‘I think I’m trying? I don’t know what level I’m trying.’ 

That’s why I’m excited about this system. I can show you how hard you’re trying. You can’t fool this machine. It tells you exactly how hard.

Neely Quinn: Exactly. They do say that to me and subjectively I’m like, ‘I am offended by that because I was trying really hard.’ Now you’re giving them an objective way to look at it and be like, ‘No, you weren’t.’ I think it’s a really cool tool that you’re giving them. I want to get an Exsurgo. [laughs] I think we all should. 

Brad Hilbert: Well it’s a very powerful tool, at least for this application and there’s a lot of other ones.

Neely Quinn: They’re expensive. I’m wondering if your gym bought it for you guys. I mean, I’m assuming.

Brad Hilbert: No, I don’t think there is any price – I mean, there are prices that are too high for something but even though it is expensive, to be able to prove how hard someone can try and to be able to track so much is worth it. I bought it myself just because I’m a researcher and I just get excited about the numbers and showing people as much objective stuff as we can.

Neely Quinn: Well your kids are lucky that you did that. That’s really cool.

Is there anything that we missed that you really wanted to talk about?

Brad Hilbert: Well, before we get off I need to give a shout out to all my favorite coaches. You still mean something to me if you’re not on this list but this list is people that have directly, over the last three or four years, been the reason that I can do any of the stuff that I can. It’s either their direction one way or the other, or they’re saving me time to be able to get better as a coach by taking care of things that not everybody just does a great job at, or their collaboration within our region that makes it so much easier to go to Regionals and all these competitions when coaches work together. 

If I could give a shout out to some of my favorite coaches and give a list of books I read this year that have really helped me out that might be able to help other people out, I would appreciate that.

Neely Quinn: Go right ahead.

Brad Hilbert: Alright. Thank you Steve Bechtel. Thank you Tyler Nelson. Thank you Chris Snyder. Thank you Drew White. Thank you Aaron Davis. Thank you John Agens. Thank you Kerry Scott. Thank you Alex Rodriguez. Thank you Lawrence Osefoh. Thank you Tyson Schoene. Thank you Meg Coyne. And thank you Cedric Colby. 

Neely Quinn: And there was something else you wanted to do at the end here.

Brad Hilbert: Oh, my books. Yeah. My list of favorite books I read this year. 

For every coach, the book Wooden: a Lifetime of Reflections and Observations On and Off the Court. I came from basketball but this guy won seven national titles in a row in college basketball. It’s a highly competitive sport where no one else has gone back-to-back in that sport. I think he went three years without even losing a game and most of his stuff is based off of principles and taking care of others and stuff like that.

Why Do We Sleep? Don’t get me started on sleep. Oh my gosh.

Neely Quinn: Don’t get me started on sleep.

Brad Hilbert: I know. It’s more powerful than our programming and our nutrition, maybe. What would you say? You’re a nutritionist. If you could sleep nine hours? What would Tyler Nelson say? He eats donuts and does one-arms.

Neely Quinn: And doesn’t sleep [laughs] so I don’t have to listen to him.

Brad Hilbert: Oh right. I’ll use him for all the other stuff he knows.

Neely Quinn: Exactly.

Brad Hilbert: How Bad Do You Want It? The book that I talked about which has got me really excited. It’s what I’m mostly excited about: the psychology of climbing and how to help someone pass their little sticking points. 

Atomic Habits, Spark, Quiet, 12 Rules for Life, and most importantly, The Tao of Pooh. Winnie the Pooh is one of my heroes

Neely Quinn: [laughs] Cool. 

Brad Hilbert: He helps me relax whenever I’m thinking too much.

Neely Quinn: I’ll put those in the show notes. I think I got them all.

Brad Hilbert: Awesome.

Neely Quinn: This has been illuminating. It’s really cool listening to you talk about coaching such a successful team. I don’t think it’s coincidence. You have obviously put a lot of thought and a ton of heart and passion into the teams that you coach so really well done, first of all, and thank you for your dedication and teaching us what you know. Actually, do you do clinics for people? How can people learn more from you?

Brad Hilbert: Well, the thing that everybody looks at is Instagram. I’m @climbingcoachbradley on Instagram. You can reach out to me at bradley@trianglerockclub.com or bradley@integratedclimbing.com and I can get back to you as soon as I can. 

Hopefully some of this stuff that we talked about is helpful for your audience. Even if we just help a handful of people I’m excited to, so thank you very much for having me, Neely.

Neely Quinn: You’re very welcome. Thank you again.

Brad Hilbert: Have a great day.

Neely Quinn: Thanks. You too.

I hope you enjoyed that interview with Brad Hilbert. He wanted me to mention that he forgot to mention Robyn Erbesfield as one of his role models and people that he is thankful for so Robyn, if you’re listening, he didn’t forget you. He texted me right after the interview to let me know that he needed to have your name be said on this podcast. I think that a lot of people appreciate Robyn Erbesfield, just on that topic, but also the fact that he took the time to say, “Thank you,” to all of the people that have encouraged and been role models for him just speaks to his dedication and passion for his career, which I really, really appreciated.

There were a lot of really great tidbits in that interview and I tried to put a lot of them in the links in the show notes. You’ll find all eight of those books that he mentioned. He actually mentioned nine so I put nine in there and then an article that he mentioned and some other stuff. You can find that at trainingbeta.com and just search ‘Brad Hilbert’ and it will come up.

I’m not going to take up too much more of your time but just remember that if you need help with your training we have resources for you at TrainingBeta. We have training programs, we have subscription programs and ebooks, and we also have online personal training with Matt Pincus. Normally we have nutrition counseling with myself but I actually just decided that I need to take two months off of seeing any new clients so that I can work on some big, exciting projects for TrainingBeta.

You can find everything that we’ve got at trainingbeta.com. You can find us on social media @TrainingBeta and you can join our Facebook group all about training for rock climbing over at trainingbeta.com/community. That link will take you straight over to Facebook.

I think that’s it for today. Thank you so much for listening all the way to the end. I really appreciate you and I’ll talk to you next week.

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