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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 today we’re on episode 57, where I talked with Joshua Rucci.

Joshua is a collegiate strength and conditioning coach at the University of Georgia at Athens, for the Southeastern Conference. He coaches women’s basketball and women’s gymnastics. He also coached, or helped coach – he interned with – the Chicago Bulls for a while. He’s done a lot of coaching for different sports.

He has his certifications as a CSCS, NISS <unclear> – I won’t even list them all off. He’s got a lot of certifications. He also completed his undergraduate degree in exercise science and completed his master’s in motor behavior. He’s done his research, he knows a lot about this stuff and honestly, talking with him felt sort of like talking with Steve Bechtel and some of these other guys who do this day in and day out. They work with athletes and they see what works and they see what doesn’t, and he’s just a smart guy.

It was really, really cool talking to him. He’s, of course, a climber as well. He’s climbed double-digit boulders, 5.13 sport, and he’s sort of sculpted his body in athletic abilities from high school/college lacrosse player, football player, soccer player, to a climber, which I also think is really interesting.

We talk a lot about his thoughts on training and the differences between training for gymnastics and training for basketball and training for climbing. If you want to learn more about what his thoughts are, he has actually written six articles for us over at TrainingBeta, so just search his name – Rucci – and you’ll find a bunch of stuff.

So anyway, that’s Joshua Rucci. Before we get into the interview I want to let you know that TrainingBeta has teamed up with Friction Labs, which is absolutely my favorite chalk company. They are giving you guys some really great discounts on their stuff over at www.frictionlabs.com/trainingbeta. If you haven’t tried it out yet, this is the time to do so in a cheaper fashion.

A little update on me: I am climbing again. My wrist feels better. I climbed on my project this weekend and it was really interesting, actually, what happened. This thing that I’m doing is hard for me. It’s really hard for me. I don’t know if I’ll ever do it, actually. I’m just sort of throwing myself at it. I’ve been sussing out beta and sussing out beta and making things as easy as possible, and I think I kind of got stuck in that mindset. Instead of actually trying to redpoint the thing, I’m just kind of still sussing and I’ve got things pretty wired.

This weekend I couldn’t get out of that mindset and I kept grabbing draws and stuff. I know now that I just have to start going for it, which is totally different. This redpointing process/this projecting process is difficult and nuanced and I’m still learning about it. So hopefully, next week I’ll be able to make bigger links and have a little bit more confidence in myself.

So that’s what’s going on with me. Now I will let you listen to Joshua Rucci. I hope you enjoy this interview!

 

Neely Quinn: Welcome to the show, Joshua. Thanks for joining me today.

 

Joshua Rucci: Hey Neely. Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah. For anybody who doesn’t know who you are, can you tell me a little bit about yourself?

 

Joshua Rucci: I am a collegiate strength coach down in the Southeastern Conference. I’ve been doing collegiate strength and conditioning for about 10 years now. Once I got down to Georgia I kind of got turned on to climbing and at that point I was 24/25 years old, so I kind of missed the boat on early climbing specialization, but I realized I really loved the sport.

I had grown up north of Chicago and I was kind of only exposed to team sports, which wasn’t a bad thing. I feel like I got a really good athletic base and background through playing a lot of different team sports but once I got down to Georgia I was really excited to be outside and just explore that whole other world.

Climbing quickly became a passion and I basically had to take my 200-pound muscular, bodybuilder frame for lacrosse and try and mold that into more of the climbing physique, which was super fun because I was kind of a nerd about training and love everything training for the most part. It’s been kind of a fun progression over the past 8-10 years.

 

Neely Quinn: Tell me a little bit more about your background. You were in lacrosse – did you do other team sports?

 

Joshua Rucci: Yeah, in high school I wrestled, I played soccer to kind of stay in shape, then we started lacrosse. I played club volleyball for years. I kind of just dabbled all around and then my senior year my high school finally got a varsity lacrosse team so I started playing lacrosse. When I went to college up in Ohio I just played club lacrosse there for four, maybe five years.

Once I came down to Georgia to start working, they had a club team here and I just/it just was too much for me and I let lacrosse just fall to the wayside and just kind of started picking up some more outdoorsy stuff, mountain biking and rock climbing.

 

Neely Quinn: I’m assuming since you’re a collegiate strength coach that you have a background in this, like you have an education in training.

 

Joshua Rucci: I do. I got my undergrad at Bowling Green State University up in Ohio, and that was for exercise – I believe the program was exercise specialist. That, basically, was an accredited program so that you could move forward and get the ACSM certification, which is a really good certification, but you really kind of end up doing more cardiovascular testing and EKG testing and things like that, which I find super interesting but usually you’re working with an older population, maybe more sedentary.

I knew I wanted to be a coach and I knew I wanted to be in athletics, so I kind of started transitioning and volunteering with the Bowling Green State strength and conditioning program while I was there. That quickly spun into me graduating undergrad and then I went and interned with the Chicago Bulls, which was actually in my hometown of Deerfield, Illinois, their training facility. I was there for about eightish months, I think, and then really randomly my bosses were like, “Hey, we just got a call from down south and they need a graduate assistant and we think you should take this position.” In a matter of about five days, I moved down to Georgia to start my grad assistantship. While I was here, I studied ‘motor behavior,’ which is a sub discipline of kinesiology but I got really, really turned onto it because, essentially, it’s the science behind learning how people learn how to move, and the subtleties in that and how to administer feedback. Different practice-type scheduling, like block versus random practice, just a bunch of different things that I felt could aide in my coaching ability.

In strength and conditioning, until recently – there are some really good strength and conditioning programs in the country that really focus on what you need to know as a strength coach, but a lot of programs are more like, you’re going to be getting your ex-phys and those types of courses, and your electives you can kind gear towards what you’re interested, whether that’s nutrition or more ex-phys or more ex-psych or whatnot. A lot of your learning just happens from experience in this position.

I knew I was already getting that programming and weight room experience, so I wanted to be able to know more about the science of how to teach people to move and how to learn technique and things like that.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah, it seems to go hand-in-hand with learning how to train to get stronger.

 

Joshua Rucci: Right. I think, and if you guys have read my blog articles then you know that each thing that you do in the weight room is a skill. I try to teach my athletes and I try to communicate this to people, that it’s not just meathead BS in here. Some places that’s the case, and I get that, and some people are going to go to their general rec gym and see grunting and whatnot. I totally get that, but the way I approach lifting is everything you’re doing is a skill. Whether that’s a deadlift or a push-up variation or some type of pulling variation, get better at the movement and try to get better at it, and learn the intricacies of it.

I think that’s a lot of the approach for climbers, is trying to learn the intricacies, but I wish more people would apply that to lifting. That’s what I try to teach my athletes a good bit of and that’s what interested me about kettlebells a whole lot. I’m pretty deep into kettlebell training and really like that mode of training and I think it’s very, very technical, which appeals to me. I love teaching that technicality to other people.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, I have a lot of questions for you. First of all, I can’t believe you interned with the Chicago Bulls. That’s awesome!

 

Joshua Rucci: Yeah, it was fun. I definitely was an intern, for sure. I did a lot of laundry and stuff like that, but it was really cool because I came from Bowling Green and it was a high intensity program where you did a lot of things like ‘reps to failure’ and ‘max repetitions’ and it was just very, very high intensity. As I transitioned to the Bulls, it was super, super science based and Olympic lifting based. It was really cool to see two sides of the spectrum there as far as training protocols go. I learned a ton there. I probably learned the most in eight months there than I have at any other point in my life.

 

Neely Quinn: And that’s honestly what I’m most interested in talking to you about. It’s not necessarily basketball itself but how that relates. People have been studying how to train for basketball and running and all these other things for so long and obviously climbing training is so new. I want to know what you’ve learned from these more traditional sports and then how you think we can apply that to climbing.

 

Joshua Rucci: Yeah, I mean that’s what I’m trying to do with writing for the site and whatnot, because I just feel there is this great divide between the two of them. Climbing is unique but you could say that about any sport, really. As strength coaches, some of us have two, three, four sports that we train and so it’s not like you just get so specialized in one sport and you don’t figure out how to transition these principles over to other sports.

For the most part, I think simple is really important. There’s so much out there, even for a strength coach. You think for, you know – you type in ‘rock climbing training articles’ on Google and you get like eight million things, so it’s really hard to kind of cut through the clutter and the BS that’s out there and know, “What should I really be doing? What’s actually going to help me get better?”

The same thing kind of applies for us. You look at – there’s so many roads that lead to Rome. One strength coach is doing one thing and his team is great. They’re athletic. The other coach is doing a completely different thing and it’s all leading to the same place of athletic development. With me, I’ve figured out that simple progression and simple programming. That doesn’t mean that easy is the best way to approach things. I think when you had, gosh – I think when you had Steve Maisch on – he’s from out of Utah, right?

 

Neely Quinn: Mmm-hmm.

 

Joshua Rucci: He mentioned Dan John a lot, which I would tell anyone who’s listening to go research Dan John. He is huge into simplicity and his book ‘Easy Strength,’ which he wrote with Pavel Tsatsouline, who is basically the comrade who brought kettlebells to America and has popularized them in America. They wrote a book together that really just clarifies things. It’s called ‘Easy Strength.’ Basically what they say, and one of their major tenants, is “Anything you do for six weeks is probably going to work, right? But after six weeks you’re going to kind of hit a plateau.”

The crazy thing with climbers is I feel like a lot of times they don’t even stick with something for six weeks, let alone two or three weeks. That’s the other thing. Be simple with your programming and your training. Pick what’s going to be efficient for you. You know, what time constraints do you have and things like that, and then go attack those things and be committed to them for at least six weeks and then reassess from there. You start hopping from program to program or you saw somebody to this heinous one-hand campus dyno and that’s what you want to start working towards. You know that’s all cool-looking and whatnot but is it actually going to translate over to climbing performance?

For not going into huge depth into every little facet of it, figuring out what your weaknesses are from a body perspective, from a climbing perspective, a technique perspective, and just attacking your weaknesses head on. I think that’s one of the best ways to improve and rapidly improve.

Dave MacLeod talks about that all the time. He is absolutely on of my favorite guys to read because I just think he gets it. He keeps it pretty simple. He attacks his weaknesses and just reassesses all the time, like, “Where can I get better? What’s lacking? What do I need to maintain? What do I need to get better at?” and just has a really good feel for his body and his climbing that enables him to do that and keep progressing.

 

Neely Quinn: Can you give me an example of – actually, first of all, what athletes do you work with right now?

 

Joshua Rucci: I currently work with women’s basketball and women’s gymnastics. Those are my two main teams. In the past year I’ve worked with baseball, men’s basketball, golf, cross country, you name it. I’ve kind of been all around. I worked with football at Bowling Green and hockey, so I’ve got a pretty good, you know, amount of sports under my belt that I’ve kind of researched and gone into depth into.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, so if you have a female gymnast – I think it’s cool that you coach gymnastics at this point because it seems like that’s kind of the most similar to climbing, right?

 

Joshua Rucci: Right, yeah.

 

Neely Quinn: So, if you have an athlete who has a specific weakness, actually – can you give me an example of somebody who has a specific weakness and how you’re training that person?

 

Joshua Rucci: Well, I think a good example is the sport of gymnastics in general. A lot of the time the ladies that I have – you know, you’re kind of over the hill as a gymnast when you’re coming to college. That’s kind of towards the end of your career, so you’re really at your prime when you’re 15, 16, 17 for elite level female gymnastics. A lot of time I’m getting them and they’ve been in club gyms, they’ve trained a ton, they’ve put in the hours and they’re really reactive, right? They’ve got a spring floor. They’re real dynamic. They know how to use their stretch-shortening cycle. They know how to be really, really dynamic, so a lot of the time you’ll bring them in and given, not a lot of them have lifted very much, like actually kind of lifted weights. A lot of it is more circuit and endurance-based for body composition reasons.

What I kind of look at is all of them are so far on the power side of the spectrum. They’re just always powerful and they’ve never kind of come over to this strength side to where you’re moving heavier weights for less reps and you’re just trying to make the muscles that you already have stronger. You’re not trying to put on any weight, right? That’s the same thing with climbers. They just want to get stronger but they don’t want to gain any weight necessarily. Keeping that power-to-body weight ratio and increasing their strength-to-body weight ratio is really good for them. They get stronger and then all of a sudden they feel more powerful in their gymnastics. That’s kind of a good example of one thing they’re kind of missing in their athletic profile, if you will.

 

Neely Quinn: You just said that they would be doing more circuit and I think you were saying body weight training in order to maintain a certain body composition. Can you elaborate on that?

 

Joshua Rucci: Right. In gymnastics, I think a lot of the time it’s an aesthetic sport, so you’re not only judged on your technical performance, you’re also judged on how you look and the aesthetics of your gymnastics. Staying lean and being very lean in gymnastics is beneficial, not only for keeping those power- and strength-to-body weight ratios up but also just the look of your gymnastics is important.

 

Neely Quinn: Are you saying that weight training would change that?

 

Joshua Rucci: No. What I’m saying is that I don’t do as much circuit stuff because as they’re getting a little bit older, one thing you’re going to start to lose quickly is strength and power. I start to prioritize those variables and not do a ton of circuits because one thing that happens is – you take any athlete. You take a 100-meter sprinter and you start having them run distance because you want to get them ‘in shape.’ I’m holding up imaginary quotations right now. They’re going to lose power and strength because now you’re training a different physiological variable, right? You’re training more on the endurance side of the spectrum.

I think the same thing goes for gymnasts. If you’re always doing circuits and always doing circuits and it’s just one of those things to burn up calories and keep you lean, you’re going to lose a little bit of power and strength. There’s always got to be this nice balance between that.

Now, we still do circuits and we still do metabolic work, but it’s more specific to gymnastics and the intervals that they’re going to encounter in, like, a floor routine and things like that. I’m trying to train the exact metabolic systems that they stress when they’re doing gymnastics but in their off season, I’m prioritizing strength development so that that can carry over into strength and power output with their actual skills.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, I mean what I was really getting at is do you think that lifting weights will really bulk a girl up?

[laughs]

 

Joshua Rucci: No. That’s such a crazy myth. Now if you go in there and you’re doing multiple sets of 8-10-12 like a bodybuilder would, you might gain some weight, right? But if you go in – let’s take pull-ups for example. That’s a good thing for climbing. A lot of females want to get to that one bodyweight pull-up, or they have that body weight pull-up and now we start adding weight to it. If you’re going in there and doing singles and doubles of pull-ups with weight, you’re not – the muscle’s going to get stronger before it starts getting bigger.

The thing with that is at some point, your muscle will, for it’s given size, it can only get so strong, right? Then after that, you have to make the muscles bigger to put more force out. Output. But if you’re going in there and you’re lifting for maximal strength, for heavy deadlifts for 1-2-3 reps, you’re not going to get bulky. You might get toned and lean and have a much more fit-looking physique, but you’re not just going to tack on pounds of muscle. It’s just not going to happen.

 

Neely Quinn: What kind of sports have you coached where that kind of thing is something that you would want? Like, doing those high reps, lower weights, where they do bulk up. Or is that good in any sport?

 

Joshua Rucci: Yeah, I mean football and any contact sport, you know?

 

Neely Quinn: Oh yeah, contact sport [laughs].

 

Joshua Rucci: Basically the thing, I call it body building, it’s essentially like armor building. You’re putting on more muscle. When you’re doing that type of work your muscles are going to get bigger, your soft tissue and different parts – you’re just going to accrue more soft tissue, muscle mass, things like that. It essentially serves as armour against getting knocked around. I think certain positions in basketball, like your fives and your fours, your big post guys, you might want them a little bit bigger so they can move people around and carve that space and things like that.

There are instances where you train that but with basketball and some of these sports where there are so many different things that you kind of need to be good at as far as physiological variables to be a good basketball player, it just reminds me a lot of climbing. Especially like high end sport climbing, because there are so many variables that you have to have at a very high level in order to climb really hard. I think it’s always kind of a juggling act, you know? Trying to train all of these different variables without letting one just fall to the floor but kind of keep them all at some point to get one better, or whatever it is. That’s why it really appeals to me.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah. I want to, obviously, talk about climbing more but I want to go back to that gymnast that we were talking about, where you see them come in and they haven’t necessarily strength trained with weights before and then you get them to do that. What kinds of results do you see with that?

 

Joshua Rucci: Typically I see a lot of improved movement patterns. Basically, any sport that we work with we pretty much know: what kind of injuries are we most prone to, what muscles are tight, what muscles are kind of long, what muscles are kind of used the most – things like that. We’ll screen them. We’ll do kind of a movement screen to figure out if there’s any discrepancies in movement and then we attack those with exercise correctives and foam rolling and soft tissue work and things like that to get them moving better.

Then, just teaching them the lifts and getting them really good at it, but teaching and using proper progressions. We don’t just walk in day one and I’m like, “Alright. Let’s deadlift this 135-pound bar off the floor,” when they’ve never done it. We progress, we use kettlebells, we learn how to keep our back flat, all of those things we just progress into it. It’s really cool to see them basically learn completely new skills to them, and then once they’ve got those movements dialed in that’s when we start being able to get stronger and add weight to it so that I feel they’ll be more safe moving in more weight down the road.

 

Neely Quinn: And then how do you see that translating into their actual performances?

 

Joshua Rucci: By power output. We can just simply measure a vertical jump, right? We’ll test them at the beginning of the fall and see where they’re at. We’ll do strength training and transition them into a little bit of power training and then we’ll retest them and boom. I’ve had girls’ vertical jump go up six inches in the course of 12-ish weeks. For gymnastics that’s obviously more power, so if they can apply that power to their gymnastics, that’s a really good thing.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah. Any other results you’ve seen? So like, they can jump higher, which obviously means their legs are stronger and everything’s more powerful. Anything else?

 

Joshua Rucci: Yeah, I think in general, to me – everybody talks about injury prevention and ‘you’ve got to do this’ and it’s all these isolations and whatnot, which we do some of that. I think there’s definitely important things that we need to do but I also think that being strong is a really good way to reduce injuries.

You know, having a strong butt, thighs, calves, everything? Protects your knee, right? With female athletes we see lots of ACLs because of <unclear> all that stuff. Having stronger legs stabilizes that joint better. Same thing goes with the shoulder. If you’ve ever watched a bars routine, some of the <unclear> things they do and some of the release moves they do puts a ton of strain on their shoulders and so, obviously, having stronger shoulders, having stronger lats, having stronger pecs, all of those muscles that serve to stabilize that joint decrease the likelihood of them having a shoulder injury.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah, so it’s not necessarily always about what gains they get but what injuries they don’t get.

 

Joshua Rucci: Exactly. That’s just kind of the way I approach it. Like, I always want you moving well and in those functional patterns I want you strong and resilient.

 

Neely Quinn: That’s cool.

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Alright, back to the interview!

 

Joshua Rucci: I was kind of that guy when I first started climbing, like most. It was like always looking for that get rich quick scheme. “I need to do this,” or “If I can do an iron cross on the rings I’m going to be sending harder,” and all that stuff. I kind of quickly figured out that yes, you need to be strong, but you need to be able to apply that strength to your climbing. That example when I said with gymnasts, you can jump higher and now you’re more powerful. Now you’ve got to be able to apply that to your gymnastics, right? If you’re a more powerful gymnast you’re having to time-out things differently, right? You’re having to make these kind of alterations and subtleties of your technique to handle that increased power.

I think with climbing, it’s like if you don’t have technique, who cares if you can do a one-arm pull-up? If you can’t drop knee, push hard with both feet, engage your butt, engage your abs and aim and make that deadpoint move to that mailbox slot crimp. You see what I’m saying? Strength is only going to get you so far but if you have the technique behind it, that’s when you’re going to really see the gains of weight room strength.

In that last blog article that I had about efficient training, a lot of that was I see a lot of questions and get a lot of questions about, “Should I lift? What should I do in the weight room to get stronger at climbing versus what should I actually be doing in the climbing gym?” A lot of the time it’s like, as you get to be a better, more experienced climber, your time is probably better spent in the climbing gym but being specific and being/having a planned program of what you’re going to do in there.

You’ve probably been in many climbing gyms, as have I, and it’s like, “Man, all these people just show up and get on boulder problems,” you know? For me, where I’m at, I just don’t see people going in there and consciously train a lot. That’s fine if you’re just going in and you just want to climb and get stronger as you see fit. That’s fine, but if you want to advance that, obviously you know it. Having a plan makes that a whole lot more efficient.

 

Neely Quinn: Are you talking about going into the climbing gym, getting on climbs, and working certain movements? Or, what are you talking about?

 

Joshua Rucci: What – for increased specificity?

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah, or in general what are you saying that we should do when we go to the climbing gym?

 

Joshua Rucci: I mean/I think it all depends on where you’re at. I think if you’re a beginner climber, you’re just new to it and you’re climbing V1-V3/V4, I think going to the gym and just bouldering around and just trying problems and trying a variety of terrains, different holds – just exposing yourself to a lot, I think, would be a really good way to just log miles and get better at climbing, right?

At some point, you’re going to get more serious and you’re going to reach a point where just doing that isn’t going to work anymore, right? So whatever range that’s at – like, for me – now I’ve had a super, super slow progression in grades and getting better at climbing, which I think is why I like it so much, because it challenges me and I have to stay with it and overcome me basically just failing all of the time. That’s why I like it, because it poses a huge challenge to me. For me, when I got to V5/V6 I was like, “Wow. I need to figure some stuff out here. I need to get systematic with some of my training,” and at this point I was primarily bouldering.

I started to integrate different things. I figured out that longer boulder problems I suck at because I just juice out. How do I get better at that? Okay, 4x4s, anaerobic capacity-type training – set longer boulder problems and things like that. I think based on your weaknesses and assessment of where you’re at climbing-wise, that’s what you need to attack. Just kind of look within and see what’s going on.

Going to the climbing gym, just have a focus for the day, right? Maybe it is your day – you’re a V6-V9 climber and you still feel like you need to increase strength and power. Well, what are some ways to do that, right? Go in there and set 3-5 move power boulder problems that are just super hard, and you’re just trying to link 3-5 super hard moves together and that’s working on your high-end strength and power. Or hit the campus board and work on your power that way.

Just being focused in on what it is you’re trying to get better at.

 

Neely Quinn: I think that’s a really good distinction here. It’s not something I’ve ever talked about, because I talk about power and strength and power endurance or strength endurance with a lot of different people, but I don’t know that people really know what that means. I mean, I don’t know if I really know what it feels like, so could you try to explain to us what, as a climber, you would need to feel on a climb to know that you need to work power? And then what to do about it.

 

Joshua Rucci: Well, I think power and strength, you’re completely getting shut down by a move or a sequence of moves, even if you’re a sport climber. In bouldering it’s pretty obvious, like, “Alright, well I can make these first three moves,” then wham. There’s a big, powerful lockoff or dynamic deadpoint, whatever that is. I just can’t do that move. That would be more, “Okay, I probably need to work on my strength and power,” which means I probably need to do some hard bouldering. Short sequences, very hard.

It’s tough to do that sometimes. You’ve got to be able to walk into a gym and be okay with standing on that mat, making up your own problem, and falling after two moves. Like, screw what everybody else thinks. Who cares? Go in there and work what you need to work, right? You can make it real specific. If you know what move you’re failing on, try and make a move like that at the gym and just get better at it. That’s a skill. That move’s hard for you. Learn how to do that move better. That’s hard to do, depending on how the gym is set and whatnot but go in there and work power. Work those couple/two, three moves or find a boulder problem that’s in the gym that maybe you can’t do the whole thing but you really like the middle hardest section that’s three or four moves and just work the crap out of them. There – now you’re training more power and strength.

 

Neely Quinn: During this session, can you give me a sample session? How many moves should you be doing? How many problems should you be doing? How much rest in between?

 

Joshua Rucci: Again, I think that all depends on where you’re at. Training status, level, stage, all of that but I would think come in, pick a couple different angles and a couple different hold types or specifically address holds that give you issues. For me, that’s open-handed gym slopers. I’m just terrible at them, so some days I’ll just come in and that’s my focus for today. Open-handed sloper hard stuff. Anywhere from 3-7 moves linked together that are really, really hard with complete rest. It’s crazy. You might be on the wall for seven seconds or something but 3-4 minutes’ rest, you know? Sometimes I’ll jump right back on and try to get the technique of a move and kind of figure out, “Okay, it’s technique. Now I just have to put this together and summon all of this at the same time,” but usually long rests, right?

When you’re doing that type of work it’s super demanding on your nervous system, right? It’s basically the equivalent of you coming in and trying to pick up your max deadlift off the ground each time, right? It’s just – when you think about it that way, if you were to try to pick up the heaviest thing you ever picked up off the ground and you didn’t get it, you would probably rest for like 10 minutes before you went back and tried to pick that thing off the ground again. You know what I mean? But people don’t think like that when it’s climibng. You need full rest.

We could get into all the metabolic, PC system and CP and phosphagen and all that crap – whatever. You need full rest for your brain to be able to summon that much energy again and tell your muscles to contract that hard, so like 4-5 minutes, you know? Hang out, think about the movement or maybe scout out some other sequences you think look cool on the wall that you’re going to move to next. I usually pick out 3-4-5 different sequences like that on varying angles, maybe different types of holds, 4-5 goes on each one with 4-5 minutes’ rest in between. It should be about/maybe two hours, maybe a little less. That’s a pretty good power day. You’re probably going to be pretty tired after that but hopefully you’ve left a little something in the tank. You don’t want to walk out of there just being absolutely crushed.

 

Neely Quinn: Why not?

 

Joshua Rucci: I don’t think you should train to failure because climbing is a very technical sport. It’s well-documented that as fatigue increases, you’re going to lose technical ability. Also, what – depending on your cycling of programming – what do you have planned tomorrow that you want to get done? You might have a power day on Monday and then on Tuesday you’re supposed to come in and do power endurance or whatever, but if you completely just crush yourself at the gym for three or four hours on Monday, your Tuesday session might not be all that good.

 

Neely Quinn: So you don’t think that you should ever just train until you’re totally fatigued? Like, you remember those days in the beginning of climbing when you would go out to your car and you could hardly drive because it was so hard?

 

Joshua Rucci: Yeah.

 

Neely Quinn: So that’s what I think of as training to complete failure. You don’t think we should ever do that?

 

Joshua Rucci: No, there’s a difference between a beginner going into the gym and after 45 minutes they’re crushed. It’s hard to grip their steering wheel. It’s just so new to them that that short duration really, really got them. It’s somewhat unavoidable, but as you build up the work capacity for climbing – I could go to the gym and I could be at the gym and climb pretty hard for like five hours if I really wanted to, but I’m just going to be toast for like three days after that. I think the quality should be the emphasis, not the quantity. More is not better. It isn’t.

If I were to stay in the gym for that four hours I’ve depleted my muscle glycogen stores to a further degree/a larger extent, my muscles are more sore, I’ve basically just put on an extra hour and a half of training that I now have to recover from that maybe was unnecessary. As soon as my technique started breaking down and I was feeling tired and I wasn’t able to pull as hard as I wanted to, I should have just packed up and left and lived to fight another day and come back the next day and have a good recovered body to attack my next training session.

That’s a lot of Dan John that comes out of me. His big thing is you should always leave something in the tank. I think it makes good sense.

 

Neely Quinn: Is this what you do with your athletes, too?

 

Joshua Rucci: Yes. There are times in the year where I will push them harder than I think I should or we’ll train hard for short durations of time, like three or four weeks, then we’ll unload and let their bodies recover. I know that, “Hey, we’re training hard for ‘x’ amount of time then I’m going to give you some time off so your body recovers.” If you’re programming like that then you can do that, but for me – like basketball season is from November to April and you’re playing twice/three times a week. There’s no real time to waive the load and beat them down so that they can come back stronger, because as I’m beating them down we’re losing games. You know what I mean? They’re just not physically ready because I’m training them too hard. Does that make sense?

 

Neely Quinn: It does. So you only do those things on the off-season, I’m assuming?

 

Joshua Rucci: Typically in the off-season, right, and then the rest of the season is more maintenance, keeping their nervous system feeling good, keeping them healthy, maintaining those strength and power outputs that we had in the off-season.

 

Neely Quinn: And when you do do that to them, though, why are you beating them down?

 

Joshua Rucci: Well, I wouldn’t say I’m beating them down. I’m systematically overloading their body.

 

Neely Quinn: Why?

 

Joshua Rucci: Because overload drives adaptation of the body. If you constantly/if you’re trying to get more power or whatever it is, more strength, and you continually go in and boulder that V5 problem that you have wired, that does not challenge you or overload you. You’re not going to get any stronger from that. As soon as you start jumping on the V8 and pulling the hard cruxes and things like that that’s super hard, you’re overloading what your body is normally used to so now your body’s adapting to that overload to get physiologically stronger.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, so it seems like, once again, it’s not black and white. It seems like most of the time it’s not good to beat yourself into/to train to failure, but sometimes there could be a three-week period on your off-season when you’re not trying to send that you could overload yourself to create adaptation.

 

Joshua Rucci: Exactly. Say you come out of a sport climbing season and through sport climbing maybe your emphasis of training was somewhat limited in the gym because you were getting out a lot. It was just kind of aerobic power, just being able to do longer circuits or circuit repeats or things like that. You come out of there and you’re like, “Wow. I lost some strength and power. Cruxes felt harder,” or whatever it is, and you know you’re not going to be getting outside a lot.

Or, maybe you are getting outside a lot but you just don’t care and you’re like, “I’m fine with not feeling great outside. I just want to go outside and have fun.” Whatever that is. You know you have that one variable of strength and power you want to get back at, so just hammer down for a couple of weeks and push yourself and train hard, but realize that you’re going to need to take a week off or unload for a week and chill out and let your body adapt to all that training you just put on it.

 

Neely Quinn: When you do that and you say ‘unload for a week,’ what do you mean by that?

 

Joshua Rucci: Well, unloading/deloading/active rest, there’s lots of different terms for that but say a normal week you’re training really hard, you’re getting to the gym 4-5 times a week for a total of 12 hours in the week. The next week, maybe you go and you don’t climb at all, or you just do some active recovery, or you just go climb and have fun and get on easy stuff or just go and enjoy yourself. You can climb a little bit but you’re trying to let your body recover, so you’re not really trying to do anything super hard. Go play frisbee golf. Go do something else. Just be active but let your body rest and recover from the stresses that you put on it.

 

Neely Quinn: I like to have trainers say that as often as possible because athletes in general, we overdo it and we need…

 

Joshua Rucci: That’s just the crazy thing. I know where it comes from. It’s like, all those sayings and all those mottos like, “Pain is weakness leaving the body,” and all those cliches that have found their way into being tough and thing like that, it’s really kind of changing. More is not necessarily better and when you start thinking about it from a central nervous standpoint, it’s really easy to feel when your muscles are tired. You can feel that but it’s a lot harder to know if you’re going to be able to – like, you feel great – it’s a lot harder to know if you’re going to be able to pull hard that day, right?

There are some days that you walk into the gym or you get out to the crag and you’re like, “Man, I feel good!” and you just aren’t able to pull as hard. That’s because of your central nervous system, because that has to recover just like your body does and sometimes that takes longer. That’s a sign of overtraining, right? You can’t pull as hard, things feel harder that normally feel easier, so your body can feel great but your central nervous system is like, “Dude, I can’t ask the muscles to contract that hard right now. I’m tired.”

 

Neely Quinn: On the topic of resting, I just took a week off. I kind of tweaked my wrist a little bit. This whole week I really haven’t done very much. I’ve gone on walks. I climbed really easy one day and by the end of this week, I’m kind of like, “Well, have I lost everything I gained?” I think that a lot of people ask themselves that, and what are your thoughts on that? How long have you seen it take for someone to just completely lose what they’ve gained?

 

Joshua Rucci: Well, again, it depends on what level you were at beforehand, right? I mean, let’s be honest. You really think that if Jonathan Siegrist takes a week off – you really think he can’t walk back out to the crag and send super hard?

 

Neely Quinn: Well, so he doesn’t think he can and that’s a conversation we have a lot of times. I know. It’s like ingrained in us.

 

Joshua Rucci: What I would say to him is, “You need to restructure your thought about rest.” Rest is when your body adapts and gets stronger. Training is the impetus for that adaptation to have, but rest is when it happens. What I would say to you is, “You know what? The first day or two when you get back out, you may not feel great.”

Don’t expect if you just took a week off that all of a sudden you’re going to walk into the gym and just feel like a superhero. It’s not going to happen. You’ve got to knock the rust off for a day or two, you’ve got to get your nervous system firing again and then towards the end of that week, you’re going to start realizing some of the benefits of the rest. If you give yourself/if you train hard enough for adaptation to occur during that week of rest, then you’re going to start to realize that.

I would say to anybody, “Hey! Rest is when you’re getting stronger. Think of it that way. You’re not getting weaker, you’re getting stronger when you’re resting.” Now, if you rest for three months, you’re going to get weaker.

 

Neely Quinn: I know. I’ve done that.

 

Joshua Rucci: Yeah, but that’s to be expected. You haven’t climbed in three months coming off of whatever, but when it’s a week – if you train for six weeks, hard, and by the end of the six weeks you’re like, “Man. I need to rest. I really need to rest. I’m tired. I’m starting to get aches and pains. Blah, blah, blah. My peformance is starting to go down…” you rest for 7-10 days and it’s active, and maybe you do go climb a little bit but it’s easy? Yeah, that first week back you might not feel like a superhero but give it time and let that training transfer over and let it build up because, again, your nervous system needs to get regoing again/kind of restarted and then you’re going to start to see the realization of your training.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay.

 

Joshua Rucci: So, you gotta be patient. I’m the same way. I’m on a long trip or whatever it is and I can’t climb and that first day it’s like, “Man, I feel like a ton of bricks,” you know? But by day two or three I actually feel pretty good and it’s like, “Oh, I sent that problem I never sent before.” You know what I mean? It starts to happen but you’ve got to be patient and you’ve got to reframe that thought process of rest as getting weak when actually you’re getting stronger while you’re resting because your body is making the adaptations.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah. I hope everybody just heard that loud and clear.

We don’t have much time left and I want to give people something practical to do. I mean, I think that we’ve talked about a lot of really good things here but I know that you’re a kettlebell guy and I know that you believe that it transfers over into climbing, or I think you do. I’m wondering if you could give us a quick, not necessarily a quick, but a good kettlebell workout to do and why we should do it.

 

Joshua Rucci: First thing I’ll say is I love kettlebells. They’re super technical and they remind me a lot of climbing in a weight lifting form, because if you’re doing them right, you’re expressing power, some of the movements are very technical and things like that.

One of the easiest ways to kind of get introduced to the kettlebell training is to look up Pavel Tsatsouline. He wrote the book ‘Simple and Sinister’ and the whole program revolves around kettlebell swings and Turkish get-ups. Basically, through the book, he teaches you some of the progressions. He shows you the movement and gives you the coaching cues for it and the program literally revolves around just swinging and doing Turkish get-ups at a pretty reasonable value. It’s not like you’re doing 500 of them. I think the first week is like 10×10 swings and five Turkish get-ups on each side, and not even with a heavy weight. It’s simple, right?

It’s not easy, and as you get better at it you can start to move up weight, you can start to increase volume and things like that but I find it really interesting that you can use two movements and you can pretty much get every single thing you need out of them.

 

Neely Quinn: And how do you feel like that translates into climbing? Those two movements?

 

Joshua Rucci: Well, I mean that’s not super climbing-specific. That’s more general strength but one thing I will say is that with kettlebells, particularly a swing, right? Hopefully, most of the listeners out there know what a swing is but you basically are swinging a kettlebell with a flat back while you’re hinging at your hip. It goes between your legs, it comes up to about chest level, and it’s swinging. Through this you’re coordinating breathing so you’re exhaling through the most forceful part of the movement, you’re inhaling when you’re relaxing, and there’s a dynamic interplay between creating tension and relaxation. Basically, the yin and yang right there.

That should sound pretty familiar to climbing, so from the body perspective – right. You’re working your hamstrings and your butt and your heart rate’s going up so it’s not super climbing-specific but dig a little bit deeper and it teaches you how to control tension, it teaches you how to relax, it teaches you how to breathe and create tension, and so those things are the things I think are super valuable about it. It teaches you to be present when you’re doing it, right?

I see so many people go into rec gyms and just huffing and puffing. There’s no intention in what they’re doing and so for me, isn’t that what we love about climbing? It narrows our focus and it brings us into the present and all we care about is what’s five inches in front of our face. Kettlebells kind of does that for me on this, just different, playing field.

And Turkish get-ups, if no one knows/if you haven’t ever seen, essentially you are laying on the ground with a kettlebell over your body, so you’re holding it, let’s just say in your right hand, and you basically come all the way to standing up tall with the kettlebell now directly over you, and now you come all the way back to the ground. It’s very technical. There’s six or seven stages of it. Each stage has it’s little quirky nuances. You can pick up the movement but essentially now what you’re doing with a Turkish get-up is you are linking your whole body together. Basically from your big toe up to your fingers that are holding that kettlebell, you’re creating a line of tension, which again should sound very familiar to rock climbing.

Learning how to create tension and hold that while still breathing, while still being calm, is very powerful. It’s a great way to build resilience in athletes and it’s just a great way to build overall core strength. By core, I don’t mean just abs. I mean butt, legs <unclear> just those two movements, for if you want to get interested in kettlebells and you want to start doing that, those are the big two I would suggest.

 

Neely Quinn: Well, that was definitely the most elegant description of kettlebell exercises I’ve ever heard.

 

Joshua Rucci: [laughs] With everything there’s just layers and layers and layers. Again, the more layers that are present in it, I guess I just seem to gravitate towards it and that’s definitely true with climbing. Once you figure one thing out you realize you’ve got to figure something out, or once you get good at one thing you figure, “Oh, I’ve got to get better at this.”

It’s a fun process and I would encourage people to enjoy the process, not the end results. I think if you can be process-driven and focused, and your focus is technical mastery over sending everything you get on, you’re actually probably going to get better a lot faster and you’re going to get more sends underneath your belt. I know that sounds a little counterintuitive, but getting better and approaching it as something that you want to master and get really good at, and the sends will come, for sure.

 

Neely Quinn: Wise words. Well thank you, very much.

 

Joshua Rucci: Yeah. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah. Hopefully we can do this again. This was a really great conversation.

 

Joshua Rucci: Yeah, I would love to. Anytime!

 

Neely Quinn: Thank you.

 

Joshua Rucci: Alrighty.

 

Neely Quinn: I hope you enjoyed that interview with Joshua Rucci. Again, you can find articles by him at www.trainingbeta.com if you just search his name, ‘Rucci.’ There’s some really great stuff and he is very thorough in his articles. They’re long. They’re rich with information.

He’s not really on social media. He doesn’t really do private coaching with climbers as of yet. He’s super busy but he’s just trying to get his voice heard about the crossover between other athletics and rock climbing and how they intersect.

Thank you again, Joshua, for that interview. Coming up on the podcast I have Joe Kinder and hopefully Sam Elias will follow him. I’ll talk to them about their BD experience with the training bootcamp. If you guys ever have any suggestions for me I’m always open to those.

If you need anymore help with your training you can go to www.trainingbeta.com and at the top there’s a tab called ‘Training Programs.’ We have something for basically everybody in there.

We have an endurance program for people who just want to improve their forearm endurance on more moderate climbs, up to about 5.12.

Then for route climbers we have our route climbing training program, which is this subscription program where you get three unique workouts every week and you go through six-week cycles of power endurance, finger strength, strength training, projecting, and you always have ample rest and the exercises are scalable to basically any level of climber. We have videos on there to show you how to do all of the exercises and how to scale them. That’s for route climbers.

We have a similar one for boulderers. There’s the bouldering strength and power program and that also gives you those three workouts every week with six-week cycles. It’s just more targeted for boulderers.

Those are just a few of our programs. Again, go to www.trainingbeta.com and when you purchase those programs you’re supporting me, you’re supporting my husband, you’re supporting our work on TrainingBeta and making this podcast possible, so thank you very much for that.

I think that’s it. I will talk to you next week. Have a great week training and climbing!

 

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