When the weather gets good and conditions are perfect, it becomes really difficult to spend your time training instead of getting outside to climb on your project.  While you obviously should capitalize on the sending conditions, maintaining strength during the climbing season is extremely important if you want to both stay strong throughout the whole climbing season and be able to continue building on your strength gains once the season ends and you are back to training indoors.

To help you better understand how maintaining strength levels fits into a climbing season, here’s an article by climber and trainer Alli Rainey about why this is so important and how she manipulates her own training to ensure she doesn’t loose her strength gains, but still maximizes her performance on rock.

“The question changes from ‘How much of this type training can I get away with and still make gains?’ to ‘How little of this type of training can I get away with without losing my gains?'”

“You shift the focus of your lens to performance climbing, but strength work has to stay in the periphery, as does opposition muscle work, for best results in terms of strength maintenance and overall body balance.” – Alli Rainey

Why Maintaining Strength is Important

As Alli points out, the main issue is that to really be at your strongest climbing outside you need to decrease your training volume so that your body has time to recover and be at its strongest.  However, if you completely stop training and only focus on climbing outside you run the risk of loosing your hard won gains and ending your season weaker than you entered it.

Ultimately, maintaining strength levels while trying to climb your hardest outside is a balancing act between allowing for enough recovery while still giving your body enough training stimuli to not lose ground.  Doing this effectively, as Alli describes, requires a shift in focus: instead of trying to fit in as much training as possible in an effort to produce the biggest possible gains to aiming for the bare minimum required to stay at the same level.

Alli Rainey’s Tips for Maintaining Strength During a Performance Phase

1. Whittle down the number of exercises
2. Create short workouts from the remaining exercises
3. Do fewer sets, but maintian weight
4. Lift to fatigue not failure
5. Dramatically decrease volume (Alli aims for 1 lifting session a month)
6. Schedule training to minimize impact on outdoor performance
7. Focus on the longterm

Check out the full article by clicking through below.  All of the above points are discussed in more detail and it will definitely help you stay strong throughout your climbing season and maybe even pull off that one last send.

Full Article: Maintaining Strength During the Climbing Season

(photo courtesy of allirainey.com)

Other Articles You Might Like:

• Maintaining Performance: Staying Strong to Perform Your Best All Season
• Seasonal Transitioning with Alli Rainey
• Periodized Training for Climbing: Different Types and Pros & Cons
• Alli Rainey on Being Disciplined