About Matt Pincus

In this interview, I talk with Matt Pincus about how to train for bouldering and we explain our new bouldering training program. Matt is our in-house Remote Climbing Coach at TrainingBeta, and he’s an expert at training for bouldering, having sent up to V12 and helped his clients make huge gains. Matt and I recently created a new Bouldering Training Program using all of the knowledge Matt has gained through seminars, studying, and working with clients since 2017.

In this interview, we talk about the methods he uses with his clients and how the bouldering training program is structured. Whether you use our new bouldering training program or not, this interview will help you understand how to structure a training program aimed at improving bouldering strength, power, and work capacity.

Matt Pincus Interview Details

• Our new training program and why we changed it
• The tenets of a good bouldering program
• Structure of a session
• Structure of strength/power/skill blocks
• Why to train strength, power, skills, and power capacity all at once
• How to train while trying to perform well outside

Matt Pincus Interview Links 

• Bouldering Program 35% Discount
• Train with Matt: www.trainingbeta.com/matt
• Matt’s Instagram: @mpincus87

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. Something for everyone…

• Bouldering Training Program
• Finger Training Programs (code: “home” for 25% off)
• Injury Protocols
• All of our training programs

Please Review The Podcast on iTunes

Please give the podcast an honest review on iTunes here to help the show reach more curious climbers around the world.

Transcript

Neely Quinn 

Welcome to the Training Beta 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 podcast is actually an offshoot of a website, all about training for climbing, trainingbeta.com. Over there, you will find tons of resources to help you get stronger and better at climbing. We have tons of blog posts, training programs, online training with Matt Pincus and Alex Stiger. Welcome to Alex, she’s a pretty new addition to the site. And then nutrition services with me, I am a nutritionist. So you can check that all out at trainingbeta.com. And you can find us on social media @trainingbeta.

So in this episode, I’m going to be talking with Matt Pincus all about how to create a really effective bouldering training program. And on that note, I have a super exciting announcement for you. We have a new addition to our training programs. And that is our new bouldering training program, which is a subscription program, you can get it in monthly, quarterly or yearly subscriptions. It was created by Matt Pincus. And we’ve been working on this for literally years. And I talked with Pincus about creating the programs themselves, we have been talking about how to improve upon our old bouldering program, how to make it more in line with more modern bouldering training methods. And also, we worked with a designer and a team of developers to make a platform just for Training Beta, just for training for climbing. It’s really simple, really nice to work with. We’ve gotten really great feedback on it. And so in this program, you will get to see all of the sessions for the entire training program. And there are three levels that you can choose from, whether you are somebody who’s never trained before for bouldering, or somebody who’s been training for a really long time, we’ve got three levels, not depending on your climbing level, but again, on your training experience. And if you subscribe, you get access to all three levels, so that you can figure out what works for you the best.

And you also get the flexibility of going at your own pace. So we’re not going to give you a certain number of workouts per week, we’re just going to give you all of the workouts and let you decide: I’m going to train twice a week, I’m gonna train four times a week. And we don’t recommend training more than that.

But I’m going to tell you all about it with Matt Pincus on this episode. He has been a remote coach, meaning he trains people online from anywhere in the world, since 2017. He’s a really strong climber, he’s also really passionate about training, which will become evident in this interview. So he’s going to tell you all about it. I’m obviously really excited about it. You can find it at trainingbeta.com/bouldering. And it’s also all over the site. If you go to trainingbeta.com and go to programs, you’ll find it there. And hopefully, we will see you in there.

One other thing to note is that with the old programs, we realized that people needed more support than they were getting from their coach. And so Matt has made himself available every month to the members of the program. So he’s gonna do office hours. And he’s also going to do live q&a´s and once you sign up, you’ll get access to all that information. But we just wanted to make it so that you could be as successful as possible on these programs. And it’s affordable. It’s $24 a month right now. And that includes all of the levels and your access to Matt Pincus. And — but that ends on March 10th in two days, so we’re going to raise the prices after that we just wanted to give our founding members sort of a perk for joining us. And so you can find it at trainingbeta.com/bouldering.

Alright, here’s Matt Pincus. And I’ll let him do most of the talking now. Enjoy.

Okay, welcome back to the show, Matt. Thanks for talking with me today.

Matt Pincus 

No problem. Thanks for having me.

Neely Quinn 

Yeah, of course. So tell me a little bit about what you’ve been doing, where you’ve been climbing what’s been going on? 

Matt Pincus 

Well, I have been at home in Jackson, Wyoming. And it has been winter. Yeah, we just had a very snowy February. So I — my days off, didn’t really line up too well with good weather windows down in lander so I wasn’t really climbing outside, which is a change for me. I’d got some nice ski days in and kind of focused on training on my home wall and just kind of resetting before a nice spring season. We usually have a pretty good long, reliable spring up here. So —

Neely Quinn

right

Matt Pincus

— it was a good time to take a step back and kind of regroup. 

Neely Quinn 

Yeah. And it seems like that’s something that you recommend to people that they do on a regular basis anyway, right? 

Matt Pincus 

Totally. We have the sort of blessing in Wyoming of having — there’s pretty much almost always at least one area that’s in season year round. So in theory, you could just move from one, one route or one boulder to the next. But I don’t think that that’s sustainable, physically or mentally. So I’ve kind of started, as I’ve prioritized certain areas over others, I kind of let that dictate when I — when I focus on outdoor performance, and when I kind of take a step back, and like I said, regroup and focus on kind of training and even just giving myself a break. 

Neely Quinn 

Yeah, right. And have you been seeing clients through this time?

Matt Pincus 

Yep. Yeah, staying busy with one on one clients, helping them navigate the ever changing COVID-y gym scene, and adapt their training and kind of move through. For most of us in a lot of people in North America, right, winter is — can be is sort of like a training season, as we head towards spring. So it’s a time of year, I actually really like coaching, because like I said, I kind of take a step back and regroup and sort of focus on building my base and sort of fundamentals. I think I get to do that with a lot of my clients. And I enjoy that part of it. 

Neely Quinn 

Yeah. Yeah, that’s pretty cool to just focus on training sometimes. So we have a few things to talk about today. And one that I’ll start with is both of us have been really excited that we’ve finally finished this product that we’ve been working on since I hate to say it, but 2017.

Matt Pincus

Yeah. 

Neely Quinn

Do you want to tell the world a little bit about that?

Matt Pincus 

Yeah. So we have just finished and just launched our new bouldering subscription programs. And yeah, we kind of, I guess, in 2017, I came to — you were living in Boulder, and I came and stayed with you and Seth, for a little while, and we thought it was going to be a quick, we’ll just rewrite these programs and put them out there. And it’s gonna be great. And then, as we decided we wanted to make sure we did it right, instead of just getting a ton, it turned into a longer process. And we’ve kind of redone the whole platform. And, yeah, really excited to get it out there for people.

 Neely Quinn 

Right, yeah. And the reason that it took so long is because Seth was like, yeah, I’ll just create these programs, like develop them, as the you know, like behind the scenes, develop the platform for it. But having a full time job doesn’t — isn’t really conducive to building an entire platform. So I ended up having to hire some developers. Before that, I had to hire a designer to help me design it. And then in the meantime, that was creating the actual programming. And so the the thing, one of the things I want to talk about is why we did this, because in 2013, I approached Chris Peters, who was sort of a prominent figure in the training — the climbing training scene at the time. And I asked him to create some programs. And we did that. And they did help quite a few people. We created a bouldering program and a route training program, and hundreds of people have used them, maybe 1000s of people have used them over that time. But there were some issues with them. And we wanted to fix those. So Matt, do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Matt Pincus 

Yeah, I think the biggest thing there is, I mean, like you said, there’s programs, Chris wrote those program since 2013. And, well, like training for climbing isn’t a new thing. In the grand scheme like climbing in general, it’s become a lot more popular in recent years. And there’s just a bigger push to really learn. Like recently, there’s a bigger push to really learn how to effectively train for climbing. And I think our collective understanding has really changed a lot in the, you know, seven or eight years since those programs came out. So we just felt like, you know, me and my coaching and in the work that I was doing for Training Beta and you, and you know, running this podcast and talking to all these figures, within, you know, like climbing athletes and coaches and trainers, we just sort of felt like we were learning all these things that we thought were super cool and effective, and we were implementing in our own climbing and coaching. And that that those weren’t really in line with the product that was in — that we were putting out in the old subscription programs anymore. So we felt like they were really do for sort of an update to reflect our new, you know, increased understanding of how to really trained for climbing. 

Neely Quinn 

And so what are the basic tenets of that, because this is — this podcast episode is about training for bouldering. And so I think that laying out the tenets of it is good for understanding how we built these programs, but also how other people can build their own if they want to. 

Matt Pincus 

Totally. So I think that’s a, you know, really kind of big, that’s like the million dollar question. Right. But, and I am not sure that I have like the — actually, I am sure that I don’t have like the absolute answer.

But I think that some of the sort of underlying principles that I know I really focused on building these programs was that — these new subscription programs — was that climbing first and foremost is like a technical movement based sport. And we really need to account for practice and skill development, and not just try to reduce climbing to a physical set of attributes that, okay, through a training stimulus, we’re going to increase our strength, our power, our work capacity, our power endurance, our endurance, all these things, and that that is just going to no matter what across the board kind of lead to improved climbing performance. So I think that was the biggest one. When I compare sort of the new subscription programs that we put out now, to the old programs, there’s a much bigger emphasis on not only saying like: Hey, you need to become a better boulderer, not just a stronger boulderer, but trying to give people a framework to actually do that, and give some guidance there, rather than just being like: Hey, good luck, hope that you get better, not just stronger. 

Neely Quinn 

Right. And how did you incorporate that into the new programs.

 Matt Pincus 

Um, we definitely use drills. And that’s sort of I guess, the main way is sort of usually through the warmup, and then kind of immediately following the warm up. In most sessions, in almost all sessions, really, there’s some form of drill and kind of deliberate practice. And while they target sort of specific movement skills or principles there, the underlying idea is to help boulderers bring intention into their sessions, and sort of learn how to have a specific target that they’re trying to work on. And kind of the elements of skill practice, effective skill practice, that lets them actually improve it that

 Neely Quinn 

Right, so they are skills like getting on the bouldering wall, and, like, name, one of the drills that you have them do.

 Matt Pincus 

I mean, like the the most, sort of, in the level one, one of the ones that we start with, right is, I think a drill a lot of people are super familiar with, which is like the quiet feet drill, right. Like, get on the wall, and climb a boulder and try to make sure you’re placing your feet really deliberately, you’re not clunking them around that you’re being really accurate with your feet. And sort of trying to silently place them and put you know, the point of your big toe, kind of on the best part of the foot hole, even if it’s not the biggest. I think that’s a really simple drill, right that a lot of people are aware of. And we kind of pair it with kind of the the hand movement version of that kind of like a one touch drill where trying to practice not really gripping on every hold or on any holds like sort of however you catch a hold is how you have to use it.

And again, these drills they aren’t anything, you know, super new or revolutionary, but I think the the trying to apply, the ideas behind that drill is that, you know, this isn’t necessarily that it in every situation you have to place your feet super deliberately, right. There are times where you´re gonna kick your feet around. But what want to be able to have is to be able to be climbing on the wall with intention, and not just focusing on getting to the top. So we sort of start with a more simple drill like that. And so we can learn like, okay, as I’m climbing this boulder, can I be aware of what I’m doing with my feet? And that seems to — that to me is like the first step, you know, you have to at least understand what your feet are doing before you can, you know, exercise any control over that. 

Neely Quinn 

Right? And it’s not like it’s even that huge of a part of the program. Like you have people do these, these drills for, like, 20 minutes or something, right? 

Matt Pincus 

Totally. Yeah, like I said, they usually take place right after the warm up. So you know, you go in, you get moving, get warm. And then there’s this, especially, you know, if we think or, you know, we’re talking about training for bouldering here, a lot of the time, you know, you’re going in, and okay, now it’s going to it’s time to try, you know, harder boulder problems, you know, relative to you difficulty, whether that’s like a kind of like actual limit level projects, or, you know, kind of second tier stuff where, you know, we expect to send quicker, there’s this, there’s this gap, though, between like you do your initial warm up, and when you’re really recruited and ready to try hard.

And yeah, you can continue to sort of just work up through progressively harder boulders, and kind of go through the motions until you’re ready to try hard. But we can also just use that time more efficiently and accomplish some of that skill practice there. And again, like, sort of just develop that ability to bring intention into our climbing. 

Neely Quinn 

Right. I know that that’s really important to you. And is that something that you do with your personal coaching clients? 

Matt Pincus 

Yeah, I think they would pretty much all laugh if you ask them that question. Because it’s, it’s definitely something that we, that I, again, it might not be a – in terms of total time climbing -, that it’s the biggest thing we do, or that it occupies a really large percentage of what we do overall. But it’s definitely something that I really emphasize. And in our sort of correspondence back and forth, you know, people often be like, yeah, I had this great session, I, you know, I sent this this project, I, you know, I felt really strong, and I’ll kind of be like, great, I’m really happy that you feel strong, and you had a good session, you know, and had fun. Like, that’s, that’s part of what we want out of this. But I’ll then be like, but let’s look at how we did in the, you know, in the body tension drill, or that we were doing, or what’s really dig into that. And, you know, you know, we said we were trying to work on this weakness, you know, where we actually effective in doing that.

Neely Quinn

Right.

Matt Pincus

And that’s where I sort of steer a lot of my coaching feedback. 

Neely Quinn 

And is this something that you incorporated into your own training and saw results from?

Matt Pincus 

Yeah, definitely. I think, as my personal training has evolved over the years, I have, it goes through waves for sure of how much I focused on this. And these things, and how much I focus on, you know, performance or sort of certain physical attributes I´m trying to work up, but I found more and more, my sort of intentional approach to my sessions matters more than a lot of like the specifics of what I do in that session, if that makes sense. 

Neely Quinn 

Sort of what — Yeah, what do you mean by that?

Matt Pincus 

So it’s sort of, you know, I train on a home wall, right. So it’s really easy to sort of, say, okay, to assume that most of my sessions look the same. And maybe from the outside, they do, like, I go in, I warm up, and I kind of try hard boulder problems, work on strength and power, and then maybe I do a little supplemental training after and I kind of just work through setting new boulder problems for myself and working on all the projects. And, you know, session until I feel like I’m fatiguing and, and that’s sort of it.

But within that I am always looking for specific elements of my climbing skill set where I’m deficient, or relatively deficient or deficient compared to an upcoming project. And really want to tailor what I’m doing in that bouldering session as intentionally as possible to target those areas.

 Neely Quinn 

What´s the most recent one that you did?

 Matt Pincus 

So one recently, I noticed that I got on a couple hard routes earlier this winter in Sinks Canyon, and I noticed that on all these routes, and you know, we’re in Lander it’s kind of limestone pocket pulling and sort of known for small tweaky pockets. And I’ve put a lot of effort over the years into making sure my fingers are not only strong enough to pull in the pockets, but sure enough to sort of stand up to that repeated loading and isolation. And I was noticing on these, you know, 14a, 14b routes that my fingers felt — the holds felt good. I didn’t feel tweaky in them, I felt strong on them. But it was often my ability to generate power through my feet and really create tension through my feet. Basically, the footholds were really bad on the routes. So it often felt like even these small pockets felt good for my fingers. But the positions and doing the moves between them because of the feet being bad was really challenging. And so I, in making a boulder, then to session on on my home wall, tried to put more time into boulder problems that really revolved around bad feet and keeping tension through those feet. So I keeping my feet on, rather than just jumping off those bad feet, because that was what is required on these routes.

 Neely Quinn 

I think there are a couple interesting points here. One is that I feel like this is cool that you are so reflective about your climbing and your weaknesses, because I feel like sometimes when we get to a certain level in climbing, we’re like, I’m good with technique, like, I don’t really need to work on these skill drills. And even as a 5.14b 12. climber, you’re still every session like: Okay, how can I improve my skills? And so I think that’s great. And I’m wondering if you have that kind of thing in the program? And I know the answer to this, but why don’t you just tell me?

 Matt Pincus 

Well, I think first, I’ll say that I actually think it gets more important as you become a more experienced and sort of higher level climber. But I want to emphasize the more experienced part there, we sort of — our skill improvement curve levels off, right. But when you’re, when you’re brand new to climbing, in your learning, you learn new things, every session, even if you’re trying not to right. You know, you get lucky, and you drop me for the first time of something. Because the boulder problem that you happen to be climbing on, like, for Saturday saw somebody else do it. And then you know, that opens a whole new world of kind of movement to you, right, and that happens all the time.

But, you know, when you’ve been climbing 15-20 years kind of thing, those, those sort of aha moments are fewer and farther between. But I think it becomes even more important then to search them out because they’re not just going to reveal themselves without kind of deliberate effort reflection. So I think your question was basically like how that sort of reflected in the programs. And we we definitely put aside time at all three of the bouldering levels, right for I think we call the drill like a weakness practice drill. And it’s, yeah, it’s it’s built trying to help you build the habit of consciously seeking out these weaknesses, and they can really be anything, right. It can be, you know, something as simple as I struggle with slopers or I struggle on crimps, and you spend that time deliberately working on a grip type you struggle with or a wall angle, you know, are you the person who avoids the slabs and spends all your time in the bouldering cave, or, you know, are you the person who climbs several V grades harder on vertical terrain and struggles on steeper terrain, so you can kind of go as far down the rabbit hole as you’re prepared to in your, in your reflection in your skill set there. But again, having this — creating this habit of doing that, within our sessions, I think is really the the important part there. And then we tried to I tried to scale that for throughout the programs, so that, you know, level one is sort of the least complex, and we focus just on building that habit. And then increasingly, in levels two, and then definitely in level three, we kind of put more onus on the athlete to to really be reflective and to dig into: Okay, well, what about this is what’s hard for me? How can I do better in my, in my practice and trying to target that? 

Neely Quinn 

Right. So that’s sort of the skill part of well, it’s not completely the skill part of it. We can talk more about the skill blocks in each of the levels. But basically, as far as sessions are broken down, we’ve got the warm up, obviously. And then usually comes like you said, the skill drills, and then what comes after that.

 Matt Pincus 

We can kind of call it I guess I refer to it in my head always as like the main session. And so that’s where, you know, now you’ve warmed up, you’ve brought intention deliberately into your session and worked on some some skill component deliberately, whether that’s in you know, 15-20 minutes kind of thing. And then now we’ve kind of ready to try hard. And we sort of vary that through the workouts in the box. But that’s, that’s sort of like our main climbing session. And this was something that was really important to me was that in these programs that I wanted there to be — like, we’re climbers. And so in these programs, we´re training for bouldering. And so we should be bouldering a lot. And that’s it. Again, it sounds so simple that it almost isn’t worth stating. But when we get lost in the minutiae of sort of training details of: Okay, well, I, I need to be hangboarding, I need to be campussing, I need to be, you know, lifting weights, I need to be training core, I need to be doing all these other things, right?

We only have so much time, and energy, everybody. And if you get lost – too lost – in those details, it’s really easy to lose sight of that basic fact that, you know, boulderers should go boulder and try hard. And that’s going to really, that’s essential to kind of continuing to learn and develop our skill set.

 Neely Quinn 

Right? Yeah, of course. Also, it’s fun.

 Matt Pincus 

Yeah, exactly. And I mean, we, I didn’t, I don’t know about you, but I didn’t get into rock climbing because I love the hangboard.

 Neely Quinn 

No, I did not get into it from that. But anyways, so there’s this whole bouldering component in there. And a lot of times when people think about bouldering training, they’re like: Okay, well, I’m going to do my four by fours. And then I’m going to do my limit bouldering are the all of those things in the program? Like, do you program those things? 

Matt Pincus 

There’s definitely limit bouldering sessions. Because I think, sort of trying things that are hard. Like, that’s the name of the game in bouldering, right, like, you want to do hard — progressively harder boulder problems. So it obviously makes sense to again, like try hard boulder problems.

But I think trying things that are at or near a limit is where we really we get to experiment, and learn and go through that process of unlocking difficult moves and difficult sequences and sort of the minutia show of what makes movement work.

And, while, the drills are sort of a structured way to include intentional practice. And in our — in each session. You know, a hard bouldering session is really where we, we get to build and learn technique through that kind of experimentation and trial and error process of: Okay, well, how do you stand on this bad foot? Right? You know, like going back to what I’ve been working on? It’s like, sure, you might be able to — do you need to keep your foot on in the situation? Or can you jump off and go through that sort of that exploration of, you know, what works and what doesn’t work, and we’re in that way. So that’s definitely a big part of it.

As far as like four by fours and things like that, I think that’s one area where we sort of departed from kind of the older Training Beta programs, is there’s less of a sort of emphasis on kind of, I don’t know, I guess you call it like power endurance training. And more of so back to that, like underlying principles that you asked about earlier, this sort of second underlying principle that I really wanted reflected in this at the first being like that climbing is a skill based activity is that strength really is the foundational physical attribute. And so, in these bouldering programs, we definitely focus more on kind of building strength, both in the climbing portion and in the supplemental training, and less on sort of the maybe conditioning or energy system side of the coin.

 Neely Quinn 

That that is a huge departure, there was a lot of in the old program, there was a lot of like getting tired. And I think that people do have it in their heads that they need to be tired after a session, they need to work on power endurance to be a better boulderer. So what is the reasoning behind not having that in there? 

Matt Pincus 

Um, I think. I mean, we do have some of it in the sense that we work on like work capacity, and this is important to not — like if we don’t have any assemblance of work capacity, then we pretty quickly or just the climber who can go in warm up, give, like two good efforts on our bouldering project, and then we’re kind of tired and we need to go home, which if we just go back to wanting to be able to do this activity more like we’re doing it to have fun, it’s certainly better if you can, you know, sustain quality efforts over the course of, you know, a several hour gym session or a day out at the boulders, you know, that’s more time that you’re going to be able to work on your projects. So there is some of that, but I think it was just sort of over emphasized in the old programs.

And, yeah, I think you sort of said it when you said it was a lot of getting tired. And that being the marker of a good session, we’re here. To me, the marker of a good session is whether we sort of accomplished the, the intention that we went into it with. So if we went into it with the intention of, you know, getting some good deliberate skill practice on whatever our weakness was, and to work on high end strength and power through limit bouldering. Then as soon as we’re no longer effectively doing that, we’re, it’s you know, we’ve we’ve sort of, we’ve given our quality efforts for the day, and we were no longer operating at that sort of higher level, then we’re sort of better off stopping starting our recovery process and coming back to the gym fresher sooner, rather than sort of continuing to dig a deeper hole that we’re gonna have to recover out of.

 Neely Quinn 

Right? Well, and I think that’s something that I’ve learned over the course of doing these these interviews is, the more strength you have, the more strength you have to spare. And so that sort of turns into more endurance.

Matt Pincus

Totally

Neely Quinn

Like, I learned that concept in my first interview with Adam Ondra, and I was like: Oh, that makes so much sense. And I see it right now, in one of my climbing partners, who’s been just bouldering, on her home wall through COVID. And now she’s on the wall climbing, like on routes, and she’s so much stronger and has so much more endurance, it’s unbelievable. But it’s just because she’s so much stronger.

 Matt Pincus 

Right? Yeah, that’s that idea of strength being the foundational physical attribute, right. So everything sort of stems from strength. So, you know, we can talk about, you know, obviously boulderers understand the need to be powerful, right. And that’s really just strength applied with speed. And the speed component is important there. But you can’t, if you don’t have the strength, then you can’t apply it quickly, right. It’s still required, it’s still like strength´s required. And we can look at, you know, endurance is strength, like applied over time. And again, it’s if you don’t have that strength, you know, if you can’t do the move in isolation, you’re not going to be able to do it pumped, or like if you’re route climbing, or, you know, at the end of a long sustained boulder problem, or late in the session, when you’ve sort of figured out all the moves on your bouldering project, and are kind of trying to piece together that that send. 

Neely Quinn 

Right. So we’ve kind of gone through the first three aspects of a typical session. And then after the actual climbing portion of a lot of times in the programs, and especially depending on the level, you have people do supplemental exercises. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

 Matt Pincus 

Yeah, totally. Um, and yeah, that’s it’s usually sort of post, there’s almost, there’s always a climbing component to each session, how long that is, sort of varies throughout the programs and the blocks and the levels. But then there’s a supplemental training component, and that’s, you know, takes place on the hangboard takes place in the weight room. And, again, that — that’s really steered towards building a solid foundation of general strength. That’s sort of the underlying principle of — behind all the choices I made within the supplemental training that’s included in the programs. And that, yeah, same idea. We’re just talking about strength being really foundational. And sure, we can, you know, train climbing, bouldering specific strength through climbing on hard boulder problems, right. But if we’re just generally stronger, as human beings and as athletes, we’re more resilient, more resistant to injury, and we’re able to sort of tolerate more bouldering, which is more opportunities for doing what we love and for kind of learning and developing as climbers.

 Neely Quinn 

Right. And I think you said at one point, that your old way of training, which I think a lot of people can say is just like going in to the wall and bouldering and that’s it. And then once you incorporated more supplemental strength training, you started to see gains and you started to be able to do projects that weren’t typically your style even.

 Matt Pincus 

Yeah, totally. I think, again, it’s becoming more well rounded. And I try to think of strength as like a — is building a foundation upon which you can then learn and express climbing skill. So if you’re stronger overall, you know, things like extreme positions, you’re going to be more resilient to them, and they’re not going to hurt you. And you’re, you’re sort of just capable of doing more. So whether it’s in your style, and it’s just harder, or it’s outside of your style, and it’s something that you’re just you have the foundation to then learn that skill. That’s all part of I think that’s a really essential element of becoming a more well rounded boulderer.

 Neely Quinn 

So what kinds of strength exercises do you have people do?

 Matt Pincus 

So in these programs, it’s really all following — It’s trying to, I tried to simplify it from — because there’s just so many options, right? And it doesn’t, you know, take long to get overwhelmed by those. So the way I try to build strength training programs is through making sure you’re covering the major movement patterns, so that there’s a pull strength component, a pressing component, hip hinge, so something like a deadlift or kettlebell swing, a squatting component, maybe a core strengthening component, and a finger strength component. And I think if you’re covering all those bases, which is, you know, the sort of check that I put on myself in designing these programs, it’s pretty hard to miss the mark.

 Neely Quinn 

I think when people hear those, all of those exercise types, they’re like, oh, gosh, I don’t have the equipment to do all of that stuff. So what is it that we require in our programs? And like, what can people get away with if they don’t have the equipment?

 Matt Pincus 

Yep. Well, definitely, in the programs, a lot of it’s written to have sort of weights of some kind, right? So kettlebells, barbells, dumbbells, things like that. But again, like, if you look at those categories, like those movement patterns, as places on sort of a template, you can definitely get away with to a certain extent, training with no equipment, and just bodyweight, like if you’re still challenging yourself at an appropriate strength range. In those movement patterns, I think of that as a effective strength training program. And that’s what I do with my sort of one on one athletes. Like, when I’m reviewing people’s training, I’m mostly looking for holes, they’re like, well, what are what are we missing? Like — and that might be strength training in general, or that can be something like, okay, you do a lot of pull training. And, and but we don’t do any hinging, or any squatting or any pressing, things like that. So, yeah, I mean, I, you know, there’s like, for example, a lot of a lot of the programs have like a overhead press in and that can be done with, you know, a kettlebell barbell or dumbbell. But, you know, you could also work on working up to like a one arm push up, that’s a really challenging sort of high level, strength, you know, exercise that requires, you know, floor.

 Neely Quinn 

Right. One question people often have with the bodyweight stuff is, how do you do the pull, with no equipment?

 Matt Pincus 

Well, I mean, you do need something to hang from, I think, you know, it’s, it’s hard to, you need something to pull against, right. But that can be a hangboard, like a jug and a hangboard. That can be a pull up bar. And, you know, you can do some you could do anything from, you know, if a pull ups challenging for you, you can work on pull ups, you could do weighted pull ups, you could, you can do sort of isometrics, like, pulling really hard against a pull up bar without lifting your feet off the ground. Or you could do kind of like hanging from a bar or one arm, right, like holding a partial lock off, and for as long as you can that’s still pull strength training. And I think most climbers have access to either a hangboard or something to hang off of. And pull agains.

 Neely Quinn 

Right. Yeah. So it seems like in the end with our program, like the very basic things that you would need to actually do it would be a wall and a hang board, and you could potentially replace all of the weight exercises with bodyweight motions.

 Matt Pincus 

Yeah, I think I think so. I think that that’s —

Neely Quinn

Optimally?

Matt Pincus

Yeah. Yeah, sort of optimally, no. At least in the long term, but again, I think it’s easy to get lost in the details there and lose sight of the fact that more important than exactly what you’re doing in the supplemental sort of strength sessions is the fact that you’re doing them consistently over time at all. So, don’t, don’t get so caught up in well, I don’t have the right equipment, so I’m just going to skip this. And instead, you know, work with what you do have within this template of covering these movement patterns, and just sort of develop that habit of strength training over time. And that’s going to be far more effective than sort of getting stuck with not feeling like you have the perfect setup,

 Neely Quinn 

Right. So we’ve kind of gone through all of the sessions, how they’re laid out. And I’m sure that some people were like, I don’t have the time for all this. But realistically, you don’t need to go into the gym for six hours to do all this stuff. In fact, that would probably be detrimental. And you’d probably be digging yourself into a hole if you did that. Our workouts are only around two hours, sometimes two plus in the the level three, but yeah, it doesn’t take that much time, right?

 Matt Pincus 

Yeah, totally. I think I’ve noticed in my own training, and in my coaching, that sort of three hours is kind of the upper limit of where I’m able to sort of still be effective, both from a physical standpoint, but also from a mental standpoint. You know, past three hours, I’m sort of, you know, I find myself going through the motions.

Neely Quinn

Right.

Matt Pincus

And, and no longer really, you know, so maybe I’m strength training at the end of that, but I don’t really want to rest appropriately between sets, just kind of trying to get through it at that point. And so I tried really hard to make sure that this would fit in, you know, that that was sort of the upper limit for how long these any of these sessions could take and most are you know, around that two hour mark.

Neely Quinn

Right.

Matt Pincus

Yeah.

 Neely Quinn 

All right. So we’ve kind of gone over the timing, the, the structure of the sessions, but now I want to talk about the structure of the program. In our program, you have structured it so that they go through a whole block of strength, a whole block of deloading or focusing on skills, and then a power block. And then they have maintenance workouts that they can do while they’re trying to send things which we’ll talk about later. But tell me, tell me about that. Like, why that structure? And how are they training everything else? While doing — focusing on those things?

 Matt Pincus 

Yeah, so we call that a strength block, we call it a power block. And the order there is again, just going back to this idea of strength being sort of the foundational physical attributes. So if you’re going to try to train power, you better build the strength for it first. So that’s, that’s the reason for the order. But these are definitely sort of nonlinear programs from a periodization kind of technical perspective. So —

 Neely Quinn 

Let’s actually back up right there, because I think a lot of people don’t know what linear or nonlinear means. Can you just describe that real quick?

 Matt Pincus 

Yeah, so like, linear periodization would be like, okay, we’re only going to train strength for four to six weeks. And then, then we’re going to completely stop strength training, we’re gonna switch, we’re gonna train power for four to six weeks, right? Then we’re going to kind of do, you know, classically, it’s like, you would focus on like, sort of power endurance or kind of the energy system side of it, like, really topping off and then you train up to this peak and you perform, and then you’d kind of go back, and, you know, come off the back end of that performance and sort of start over again. And that’s borrowed from sort of sports, like weightlifting, where there’s a) a fixed sort of competition, right, like, if you’re a power lifter, you have a date for your powerlifting meet when you need to be your strongest. And it also comes from sports where, you know, you just need to express where it comes from — It’s also like cycling, right? Where, sure, you need to be strong, but we kind of build up to, you know, high level of fitness to race.

But in climbing, we really need all those things at once, right? Like, you need to be strong enough to hold the crimp or to hold the small hold in the position that it puts you in. You need to be powerful enough to move between these positions. And you need to have the work capacity right to sustain efforts over the course of a session. And, you know, have some power endurance to, you know, link all the moves on your bouldering project together. 

So that’s where sort of generally in the climbing training world, we’re, we’re moving away from kind of linear periodization, more to a non linear periodization, where we kind of, we want to at least be maintaining all of these attributes, at the same time. So I think, you know, the best example that people are probably most familiar here with is like Steve Bechtels, logical progression, right, where you sort of alternate between a strength session, a power session, and an energy system or like endurance session. These programs are, are roughly sort of following that idea. And but what we’re doing is emphasizing one of those areas over the others during that box, so for example, in the strength block, you’re still gonna be doing hard moves to, you know, and, and bouldering, keep your power up, we’re still doing some work capacity work to make sure that we’re not losing ground there. And we’re, you know, always kind of focused on building skill. But we really like with the supplemental training and sort of the ordering of the sessions, we’re emphasizing strength and building strength over those other attributes. So the analogy we use is like a four burner stove, where we sort of turn the strength burner up. So we can really move the needle there and turn the other ones down to simmer and kind of maintain. And then when we, we kind of deload, recover from that training, go into the power block, we turn the power burner up, turns strength down to a sort of maintenance level and focus on getting more powerful.

 Neely Quinn 

What is that? What does the power block look like? Like? How do people train power?

 Matt Pincus 

So I think we approach it two ways. Again, there’s like the, on the wall, sort of climbing portion of it. And so in the power block, we focus more on having recovered fresh sessions where we’re trying hard boulder problems, right. So there’s less of an emphasis on just doing a high volume of climbing, and more an emphasis on trying really hard when we’re, we’re ready and prepared to do so. And then in the supplemental training, right, rather than focusing on sort of strength, which classically like we traing strength, you know, high load, low rep, plenty of rest, like if we really look at somebody doing a heavy deadlift, for example, right, the movements really slow. And it you know, the bar doesn’t like fly off the ground. And so, in a in power, supplemental power training, right, we focus on sort of adding an explosive or a speed component to that. So something like rather than doing a deadlift, which is moving a heavyweight, really slowly through a hinge movement pattern, we switch to like a kettlebell swing, where now it’s a lower weight. But we’re moving really explosively through that hinge pattern.

 Neely Quinn 

So we’ve got strength, and then the deload skill training, and then the power. And then as far as the levels go, because in our program, we have three levels, and I’m sure that there are people listening who are like, well, I’ve never trained before, or I’ve already been training, how is this actually going to help me any differently than what I’ve been doing? So talk about the levels? And how they differ?

 Matt Pincus 

Yeah, well, so the first thing is, in writing these programs, there’s a challenge, right, of creating something that will be suitable for a wide variety of climbers, you know, in my personal in my like, one on one coaching, right, I work with an individual climber to help them target exactly what they need to work on, based on their skill level, their strength training, or their training history. Right, we can really customize that, obviously, you know, in this — in a subscription based program like this, we can’t be as specific to everybody. So, I think that in the past a lot of programs have tended towards delineating certain levels based on sort of climbing ability based on difficulty climbed, right.

So okay, this program is for climbers from V0 to V3. And from, you know, these are 5 to 8 or, you know, whatever, however, they end up splitting it up. We really wanted to move away from that because I think it oversimplifies what goes into good climbing performance. Right. I think we’ve all seen you know, people who come to a gym, whether it’s because of good genetics or good athletic background, from other sports, where somebody kinda gets to a reasonably high bouldering grade pretty quickly, right? Just based on, you know, the ability that they come in with, but they don’t have any kind of training history, within climbing or a really good understanding of how to move.

And conversely, you have climbers who’ve been doing this for 20 years, right? Who are climbing it like a V3/V4 level. And that doesn’t mean that they’re beginners, in the sense of understanding climbing movement, they might move really well. So in in dividing these levels, rather than focusing on difficulty climbed, we tried to focus on sort of experience with two things, and there with the supplemental training that we talked about. So have you ever followed a structured training program before and been successful doing so? Or is this your sort of first time digging into that? And then the other one was, you know, where are we at in terms of ideas of being deliberate and intentional, in our practice? Are we new to those concepts? Or are we — have we been digging into those, you know, for for a while. And that’s really, level one is sort of focused on introducing both of those things. So whether you’re climbing V0, or V12, if you’ve never trained systematically before, right, and you’ve never really explored these concepts of kind of drills and practice, that’s the place to start. Level Two, sort of increases the complexity there. So it’s putting again, more demand on the the athlete to really determine the course of the skill practice. And the supplemental training is kind of scaled up in its progressions in terms of like, how frequently it’s done, and the volume of it, and, and so on. And then that´s sort of continued in to level three. So it requires a higher level of sort of compliance, like if you’re going to be sort of missing sessions, really regularly, that’s, you know, that’s going to derail level three, much more than level one.

 Neely Quinn 

Right? Right. It’s all about like, what you can handle, like, what you have trained your body to handle, 

Matt Pincus 

body and sort of mind, I guess you’d say, both in terms of like, the practice component of it, and in terms of like, the quality of your, your habits, like, it’s really easy to be motivated in the short term, to to stick to a really restrictive training program. You know, when you’re getting started, you’re like, you know, you look at something like this, and you’re like, well, level three must be better, quote, unquote, than level one. But I don’t think that’s necessarily true. And, you know, I’ll throw it out there. I most of the time train, my, my personal training is mostly in line with like, what’s included in the level two program here. I’ll sometimes swing into level — some of the concepts in level three, for shorter periods of time, but I find it hard to be that sort of disciplined in that delivery all the time.

Neely Quinn

Yeah

Matt Pincus

So, yeah.

 Neely Quinn 

But we both have clients who we know, would be super psyched and capable of dealing with level three because they’re just been training their, their butts off for years. And sometimes we, I know, I at least get this in my nutrition clients, whether they’re training like five or six days a week, and I have to ask them to train less. And one of the things to point out is that you, you don’t ever recommend that people do more than four days of these training programs, in a week, right.

 Matt Pincus 

Yeah, totally. Um, and yeah, I think there’s, there’s obviously, outliers here, right? People who have have sort of worked up and built up systematically to being able to handle a super high volume of training. But I think yeah, I think four days a week is like, that’s a pretty safe, kind of upper end there where you’re still getting time to recover effectively. And I kind of always just go back to this idea there of like having slightly fewer really high quality sessions is almost always better than having a lot more sort of fatigued and lower quality sessions.

 Neely Quinn 

Right. But either way, in our program we have so that whenever you subscribe, you get access to every session of each of the levels. So you can always go back and forth, you know, depending on where you’re at.

 Matt Pincus 

Yeah, totally. And I think that’s, I’m glad you brought that up. Because I think that was another important point for us in designing these new programs was you really wanted people to be able to look at the whole program, and see the whole picture. At the end of the day, it’s, it’s your climbing, it’s your, your training, we want you to be able to not only plan ahead, but also evaluate the program at the whole; as a whole and how it’s suited to you before kind of having to just go through it. And and sort of find out along the way.

 Neely Quinn 

Right. Yeah, that’s been one of the major complaints with people on our old programs is they’re only allowed to see six weeks at a time, and they want to know how to plan for it and all that. So this was something we were really excited to offer people. One of the last questions I want to ask is about, I’ve gotten a lot of questions from people about how to train while they’re also trying to climb outside, which I know is something that you do a lot. And you work with clients who do that, too. So how does this program fit in with that?

 Matt Pincus 

Yeah, I think that’s a really good question. And this program sort of on the surface, puts that out there, right, by having this performance phase, after the, well all three levels, right. Following this, the power block. And I think that that’s the first thing to say there is that it’s important to have performance phases. And to give yourself a chance to, to put what you’ve been working hard to build in into practice, right, and try to send some boulders. So that’s what these programs are designed to, you know, they’re training to, or they’re, they’re written to help you climb harder boulders. So there needs to be periods of time where you focus on climbing harder boulders. So I guess the next part of that issue, right, is well, well, what do I do while I’m trying to do that? 

And so we that’s why we included sort of maintenance workouts in those performance phases. So there’s like a little bit of strength training, a little bit of bouldering, right things that can be done, it’s usually pretty sort of high intensity work done at a really low volume, to help you sort of maintain that high level of strength and power, while you put most of your focus on showing up fresh to really try hard on hard boulder problems. Now, again, it’s it’s not the perfect fit for everybody. And when I wrote out these, these sort of maintenance sessions, I really did them with the idea that of the like, the weekend warrior climber in mind, right? You get — you’re going to go try your projects on Saturday, climb, you know, climb Saturday, Sunday, right? And going to the gym, on, you know, call it Tuesday and Thursday. Right? So I think it’s people often have that question when they’re like, great, it’d be awesome if I could try my project, you know, every other day. But I have to go to work. And I only get two days a week where I can go outside or one day a week where I could go outside. And that’s really where these maintenance sessions come in. Whereas, you know, we say in the programs, like if you’re going on a trip, that’s anything less than like a month, then you should — you’ve trained, like, you should just focus on performance at that point in time, and not worry about, kind of like getting these maintenance sessions trying to fit them in.

 Neely Quinn 

Right? Well, also, it’s why we built the programs, not per week, like in the old programs, they got three workouts every week. So it was like, you know, Sunday through Saturday, you need to get those workouts done, and then the next workouts come. But with this, which doesn’t always work for people like life comes up, you get tired, you get injured, because you’re training so much. And you’re trying to climb outside, and that just it doesn’t it’s not conducive. And so with this one, it’s a little bit of a novel concept in that you said, You choose how many times a week you want to climb and for me like when I’m training, a lot of times I don’t even use a week schedule. I use like an eight or a nine day cycle. And so this works perfectly, I think for people who are trying to climb outside because they can choose how often they want to climb per week.

 Matt Pincus 

Totally Yeah, the idea is basically that you just go through the sessions, in order, right? And it’s more — again, it’s this idea of like, it doesn’t have to be perfect for it to be effective. So as soon as we attach, you know, call it three sessions a week, right, to a weekly seven day schedule, well what happens if the weather’s good, and you want to try your project, and you missed one of those sessions does that — has that derailed the whole program, and now you’re behind and feel like we’re losing ground. So here, we just say: That’s okay. Like, you can still, you can go outside on weekends, just, you know, pick up with the next session, the next day, you feel ready and prepared to train again, and trying to, again, like sort of teach good training habits here of, okay, we want to train regularly. But we also want to find that balance where we’re doing so when we’re recovered and ready to do so. And not when we’re just kind of grinding ourselves into the ground. Because it’s it says, I have to do this session on this day.

Neely Quinn 

Right? And people are, climbers are pretty good at following instructions a lot of times. So I think that that can be a problem for people, sometimes with overtraining.

Matt Pincus

Totally. 

Neely Quinn

So I think that we’ve covered everything that we wanted to cover. And I hope that that gives people an idea of a) how to create a program for yourself, but b) a description of what we’ve created for you. So that if you want to try it out, you can. And remember that also with this program, one of the things we learned from the old program is that people sometimes need more support. And so Matt has made himself available every month for people, he’s doing office hours, and he’s doing a live q&a for the members of our program so that people can get their questions answered, because everybody’s got a different situation. So that’s one of the other perks. And the last thing I’ll mention is that until Wednesday, March 10, which is in two days, we’re offering the program at the lowest price you’ll find it at. And after March 10, we’re gonna raise the price up a little bit, but we just wanted to give our founding members a little bit of a perk. So is that all that you had? Or did you have anything else, Matt?

 Matt Pincus 

Yeah, I guess I just kind of want to say that I, I really hope that, you know, everyone enjoys these programs, and that they’re a — that they help you sort of climb harder boulders. But on maybe a personal level, as a coach, I really hope that what they accomplish is helping you think about your training, and just sort of whole process of trying to be a better boulderer in a different way, and think of it more deliberately. And I think that ultimately, I’d be really happy to see if that happens for people, because I think that that’s what really will have a much longer term effect than just, you know, going through a program once. And then moving on to something else. So yeah, I really hope that they kind of help people think about their training in a different way. And and really dig into the this process of trying to get better.

 Neely Quinn 

Right. Yes, that’s something that you’re really passionate about is getting people to like, invest in their training, basically.

 Matt Pincus 

Yeah, there’s no shortcuts here. You kind of you get out what you put in. And that. So hopefully this is this, these programs help people have a framework for sort of directing that effort. So I don’t think climbers lack passion or effort. I think a lot of times, we just kind of lack some direction.

 Neely Quinn 

Right. Well, that’s why I wanted to partner with you on these programs. It’s been a pleasure working with you on them so far. Thanks for talking to me about this. I really appreciate it.

 Matt Pincus 

Not a problem. And yeah, psyched to putting out the word finally.

 Neely Quinn 

Yes, finally. Alright, cool. I’ll talk to you soon.

Matt Pincus 

All right, bye Neely. 

Neely Quinn 

I hope you enjoyed that interview with Matt Pincus, so psyched to have been working with him for so long. He’s very good at what he does. He’s had so much success with his clients. You can see by the testimonials on the page that describes the training programs. People are psyched on what he does. And I just hope that you join us this training program and if you don’t, I hope that this episode has helped you sort of formulate a plan to make your own training plan.

So again, you can find it at trainingbeta.com/bouldering. And again, it is only at this low price until March 10th, which is Wednesday and that is 2021. Sorry if that wasn’t clear. You can always find us at trainingbeta.com for articles, other training programs, nutrition help, all kinds of stuff and on social media @trainingbeta. Thanks so much for listening all the way to the end and I will talk to you very soon.