About Mercedes Pollmeier

Mercedes Pollmeier is a climbing coach/trainer known for her focus on intentional movement training. She used to be a trainer for TrainingBeta, and she was the head coach at the Seattle Bouldering Project until recently. She now does remote personal coaching and training through her website www.modusathletica.com. She’s an instructor at the Performance Climbing Coach (PCC) seminars that I teach at, and she recently created a program that will teach you a lot of the concepts we talk about in this interview, called “Midnight Lightning: Foundational Strength and Technique Program.” She’s offering a 10% discount to you using code MATB2020 at checkout.

I wanted to talk to Mercedes because I’ve gotten a lot of requests recently for interviews about movement and technique. I did an interview recently with Kris Hampton, and I thought I’d add to that with another amazing trainer in the community.

In this interview, we discuss what she teaches at the PCC events, her success with teaching spinal awareness & mobility to routesetters, why we lack mobility so much as climbers, and how often we should be doing mobility work to keep ourselves healthy.

We also go into detail about some technique drills she uses with her clients and how you can incoroporate them into your routine.

Mercedes Pollmeier Interview Details

• What she teaches at PCC events
• How she helped route setters with spinal awareness & mobility
• How often we should do mobility work
• Mobility drills
• 5 technique drills she uses with her clients
• Footwork, breathing, tension, flow, and balance work

Videos by Mercedes for this Interview

Mercedes was kind enough to include some videos to go along with this interview to help us see what she’s talking about – these things are hard to visualize from an audio conversation, so thanks Mercedes!

Over the Bench Lat Stretch

 

Precision Feet Vid #1

 

Jefferson Curl

 

Mercedes Pollmeier Links 

• New Program: Midnight Lightning: Foundational Strength and Technique Program
  • Use code MATB2020 for 10% discount
• Instagram: @modusathletica
• Website: modusathletica.com
• Simple Strength Book on Amazon by Mercedes
• YouTube account

Training Programs for You

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

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

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 TrainingBeta podcast where I talk with climbers and trainers about how we can get a little better at our favorite sport. I’m your host, Neely Quinn, and I want to remind you that the TrainingBeta podcast is actually an offshoot of a website I created, trainingbeta.com, which is all about training for rock climbing. Over there we have regular blog posts, we have training programs for boulderers or route climbers or people who just want to train finger strength or power endurance. We also have online personal training with Matt Pincus as well as nutrition consulting with myself – I am also a nutritionist.

Hopefully one or more of those resources will help you become a better rock climber. You can find us at trainingbeta.com and you can follow us on social media @trainingbeta.

Welcome to episode 140 of the podcast. Today I have Mercedes Pollmeier. She’s been on the podcast a few times before. She actually used to be a trainer for us here at TrainingBeta. She’s since moved on and she’s doing full time online training on her website, modusathletica.com. 

I really wanted to talk to Mercedes because we both teach at the Performance Climbing Coach seminars and she talks about some stuff that not many people do. She talks about intentional movement, quality of movement, mobility skills and drills to help keep us healthy, but also she’s a master at technique and teaching technique to her clients.

A few episodes ago I had Kris Hampton on talking about drills and technique and movement because I’ve had a lot of requests for that kind of interview. It’s just sort of hard to talk about movement and technique so I didn’t know how it would go, but Kris did such a good job I figured I could round out his advice with some great advice from Mercedes as well, so here we are.

Some of the things we talked about in this episode were, like I said, quality of movement. She’ll discuss what that means but it’s just paying attention more to how we move and how efficiently we move. We also discussed five technique drill types that she uses and she goes into more detailed drills. We talk about footwork and breathing and intention. We talk a little about screaming and the usefulness of it. We talk about reading and assessing and visualizing climbs. We talk about getting into the flow state, and we talk about balance work, so we covered a lot. 

In this episode we also talk about mobility drills that you can use and thankfully she made some videos for us. If you go to trainingbeta.com and you search for this episode – you can just search ‘Mercedes’ in the search bar to find it – I’ll have three videos that she created just for this interview. Thank you very much for that, Mercedes. Everybody really appreciates it. 

You can find her on Instagram @modusathletica. I think that’s it for right now. I’ll talk to you on the other side. Enjoy this interview with Mercedes.

Neely Quinn: Welcome to the show again, Mercedes. Thanks very much for talking with me today.

Mercedes Pollmeier: Hey Neely. Thank you for having me.

Neely Quinn: Yeah. So, for anybody who doesn’t know who you are – you’ve been on the show three times now and you used to be a trainer for TrainingBeta but for anybody who didn’t hear you before, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Mercedes Pollmeier: Yeah. Right now I have a business called Modus Athletica. I’m training climbers online and in person here in Seattle. I have just put together an online training program called ‘Midnight Lightning’ and that will be ready to go here pretty soon. 

I’ve been working with Neely here and there and it’s been really, really awesome. I love working with you. We were just together at the Performance Climbing Coach in Tennessee recently.

Neely Quinn: Yeah. That was your first time joining the PCC. It was so much fun working with you.

Mercedes Pollmeier: Yeah, it’s a great crew and I’m psyched for more of our get togethers in the future.

Neely Quinn: Yeah. So this is kind of a new thing for you, too, to just be doing personal training and online programs for people because before – do you want to tell us a little about your life before this?

Mercedes Pollmeier: Yeah. Oh man, so much to tell. The last eight years I have been working in climbing gyms and being a manager of fitness and climbing programs and basically pouring my whole life into that because this is how I thought that I could best impact the climbing community. 

Recently I did figure out that okay, I want to make a bigger difference in the climbing community and how can I best do that? I really wasn’t finding the happiness that I wanted in my job. I was working a ton and not climbing enough, not training people enough, I wasn’t getting that interaction, and I finally realized that I want to be training people more often. This is how I’m going to learn and I also want to climb. I’m a practitioner first and foremost and that’s how I best serve my clients, as I am practicing. 

Since then it’s only been about a month or so that I haven’t been working full time and I’ve been climbing so much more outside and actually training. I haven’t trained consistently in a very, very long time and it feels wonderful and I feel like it’s already made a difference in how I’m programming for my clients. 

I was working at the Seattle Bouldering Project for the last six years and I was at Vertical World before that doing a lot of strength and conditioning for folks in Denver as well, before moving to Seattle, and before that I was actually an amateur professional tennis player before becoming a climber. I have a lot of backstory with athletics and coaching.

Neely Quinn: And you’ve been doing this for a long time. It’s so ironic for me to hear like, ‘I haven’t been on a training program in years.’ It’s just really cool to see you set yourself free in that way and let yourself do what you preach and what you love to do.

Mercedes Pollmeier: It’s like what you said, setting yourself free. I absolutely feel that. I feel like I have taken a helmet off or something and my brain is expanding now. [laughs]

Neely Quinn: Nice. Well congratulations.

Mercedes Pollmeier: Thank you. I’m super, super stoked.

Neely Quinn: I feel like a lot of the people who do know who you are, which is a big handful of people out there, know you as the movement person, like the movement coach, right? Why is that?

Mercedes Pollmeier: I think for a couple different reasons. I’m not really just a climber who climbs and lifts. I feel like for my brain and for my climbing to function the best, I have to come at it in a lot of different facets. About eight years ago I found what’s called ‘the movement culture’ and once I started working and training in that way I realized my climbing and my understanding of climbing movement increased.

Movement training for me – I think my first podcast or first article for you was ‘Quadrupedal Movement’ which is working on all fours. By working in that way you’re actually developing more brain cells in your connections in your body for climbing because climbing is a quadrupedal sport. That was kind of my first introduction into movement and then I just went from there. There’s a lot of balancing, a lot of coordination, a lot of body awareness, but that also helps you with your mindset as well like how do you deal with failure?

Movement really gave me a better foundation for understanding climbing overall.

Neely Quinn: I want to take a short aside here. You look at climbing from a very holistic view. In fact, so holistic that you’re also involved in the nutrition side of things and you wrote a book on that, right?

Mercedes Pollmeier: Oh my god, yes.

Neely Quinn: Can you tell us briefly about that so that other people know your scope?

Mercedes Pollmeier: This book that I wrote is actually coming out in May 2020 and I co-authored it with Maria Hines, who is a James Beard Award chef here in Seattle. She is incredible and she asked me to write this book with her. It’s been in the making for the last two years. 

For me, nutrition has always been an important facet of being an athlete and being active and being the best version of me but I never really thought about coaching nutrition. I wasn’t really comfortable giving advice because nutrition is not factual. We’re still trying to figure all these things out and everyone is so individual, as you know. Neely, I’m sure you have these conversations with everyone.

This was a really good opportunity for me to dive into something that I was very uncomfortable with and now there’s this book that I’ve spent a lot of time on. It’s still something that while it’s there, I still believe that the information in there will change over time. I fully understand that nutrition will continue to evolve and there’s really no solid, factual information for nutrition.

Neely Quinn: Well, there’s some.

Mercedes Pollmeier: There are some, like dosing. Or if you drink too much alcohol you’re probably going to have really bad side effects. There’s definitely those things but there’s not one thing that works for everyone.

Neely Quinn: So that book comes out in 2020 so people can look for it. It’s for all kinds of mountain athletes, right?

Mercedes Pollmeier: Yeah, outdoor athletes. We’ve broken down the nutrition into the different types of athletes so if you’re an endurance athlete we have protocols for that. If you’re a strength and power athlete we have protocols for that. Hopefully we have really dialed each facet or sport in as much as we can.

Neely Quinn: Cool. Thank you for creating that resource for us.

Now we can return to the topic of this conversation. We do want to focus on movement and technique because it is really where you shine and what you’re really passionate about. It’s also what you taught at the Performance Climbing Coach seminar that we did. Maybe we could start there. What did you teach everybody at that clinic?

Mercedes Pollmeier: I had two topics that I dove into. One was mobility for climbers and the other one was movement quality. The mobility was really interesting for me to teach because it’s such a huge topic that I think not a lot of people are really focusing on right now. It seems like mobility training isn’t really thought of as important as strength training but in my mind, mobility training has a huge component in strength. You can actually increase your mobility while you’re strength training. That’s been how I’ve been able to tie increasing your range of motion as selecting the right exercises so that you can increase your range of motion and be strong at those end ranges. 

For climbers, it’s very apparent that we don’t always have great overhead ability. We can pull really hard but anything pressing can be really hard, or even gastoning. Anytime the shoulder changes position overhead it feels tweaky for a lot of climbers so working on end ranges is really important to me. That’s how we can develop mobility. We talked a lot about that.

I always start with the spine. The spine is the central part of our whole body. Without our spine we wouldn’t be able to function so we focused a lot on spinal segmentation, so being able to bring awareness to each segment of the spine, and then increasing mobility or flexibility. 

Some of the stuff that we were doing was more flexibility focused. From there the idea of what I’m trying to do is target the spine so the rest of your core joints – your shoulders and your hips – will actually increase range because you’re actually working on your spine. That’s the basic premise of some of my mobility training.

Neely Quinn: Everybody loves anecdotes and I really loved the anecdote that you gave us about the route setters that you worked with. Do you want to talk a little about that?

Mercedes Pollmeier: Yeah. I’ve been doing  – we call it ‘Wellness Wednesdays.’ I go to SBP and work with the route setters. What we’ve noticed, and we’ve only been doing it a couple months now and we’ve taken a lot of before and after photos, is you just see how much they have gained in range of motion. The thing with route setting is they’re lifting a lot of things, the volumes are really heavy, they’re on ladders, it’s a lot of awkward movement. We don’t train awkward movement. The best way to feel safe in your body is if you are training these awkward end ranges so we’ve been working a lot on the spine, for the most part, and seeing a huge difference in how the spine curves. 

The setters are now noticing increased capacity to do their work so they’re able to last longer when they’re setting and they’re not really in as much pain. A lot of them say, “I can stand up straight, Mercedes. Oh my god! I didn’t even think I could stand up straight,” so that’s been a really cool experiment. The first six weeks was basically just spinal work and now we’re going into more shoulder-focused the last few weeks.

Neely Quinn: And the crazy thing is they’re not even doing it very often, right?

Mercedes Pollmeier: No. It’s like once a week. I give them some homework the one session, once a week, of very focused work has helped them improve tremendously.

Neely Quinn: What kinds of things are you having them do?

Mercedes Pollmeier: The core exercise that I love and that I think everyone should do is called the Jefferson Curl. You can look this up. There’s a ton of videos on it. With the Jefferson Curl the intention is to move each spinal segment very slowly and intentionally so you’re curving your spine. You are holding a weight as you’re doing this exercise. You don’t want to start with a lot of weight, just very light, like even five pounds, and then you’re curving down and reaching down towards your toes. It is somewhat of an active exercise. You’re engaging your core as you roll down towards your toes and then you come back up. 

Even for me, I’ve had several tweaks in my lower back over the years, and since doing the Jefferson Curl I just have not had that problem. I don’t even know why it is just this exercise that has helped but it has. I haven’t quite figured that out yet but I think it’s because of the hinge, the ability to hinge at the hip more, and you’re increasing ligament strength between each vertebrae. If you have that really good spinal foundation you’ll be able to move the rest of your body better. 

Neely Quinn: Do you think that this kind of thing could help with shoulder health?

Mercedes Pollmeier: Absolutely, yeah. A lot of shoulder problems can stem from the stiffness in the thorax. If your thorax isn’t moving well then now, all of a sudden, the shoulder has to do a lot more work to compensate for the lack of mobility in the thorax, or even the lower back. If you can teach the spine to move well and be strong in certain ranges then the shoulder won’t have to do as much.

Neely Quinn: Do you think that this kind of stuff will help with the immobility that we have? Why do we have that?

Mercedes Pollmeier: Ooh, yeah. As climbers I think we currently are putting ourselves in a box of: ‘I am only going to climb to train and I’m only going to do bench press and whatever strength exercises that are popular right now.’ I think we haven’t, as climbers, really been given the tools to say, “You can experiment with all of these different things like mobility, or movement, or locomotion.” That hasn’t really been presented in a way that allows people to experiment, but I also think it’s lifestyle. 

I think just humans in general are very tight because we sit most of the day and maybe we’ll go for a walk, maybe, but climbing we have these very specific patterns that we repeat over and over and over again and at some point that’s going to break us. Being general, having a kind of generalist approach to climbing training, can actually help with longevity of your climbing.

Neely Quinn: So we have all these factors that are sort of against us, like some of the ways that we train and then sitting all day and having pretty sedentary jobs and then sitting in front of the TV on uncomfortable couches. All of those things. For me, at least, they definitely lead to me feeling stiff and injured, but also as people and climbers we only have limited time for training and climbing and all the things we need to do to feel strong and climb well. Now you’re saying, for good reason, that we also should be focusing on mobility for longevity. How much time do people need to put into this and when and where can they do it?

Mercedes Pollmeier: It is overwhelming. I love when we were at PCC, Steve Bechtel was talking about how the best programming is the minimal amount you can do, like what can you take away? The less you can do is actually better for you for climbing training. In my mind I’m like, ‘Oh man! I am the complete opposite. I need you to do all of these things!’ I know in the beginning of my online training and adding in this movement component I asked people to do a lot in their training. It’s because I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what certain exercises help increase mobility and strength most efficiently. 

Now, with just training the setters and a lot of my clients in the last couple of years I figured out that there are some specific exercises that give you the most bang for your buck. I think Jefferson Curl is one of those. You could do that every day if you wanted to and you only have to spend maybe 5-10 minutes doing this and you’ll probably see some pretty significant differences in how your spine moves and how your hips and shoulders will move after that. I think for the Jefferson Curl I would say 1-2 times a week. You could do 10 reps and at the end it’s really important you actually hold the end position for like 30 seconds. You can do that for 3-4 sets, once or twice a week. If you don’t have that kind of time you could do it every day and just do one set every day of 10-12 reps. That’s where I would say everyone should try this and let us know how it goes. That’s a really great place to start for mobility training for climbing.

Neely Quinn: Are there any other, like two, exercises that you would recommend?

Mercedes Pollmeier: Yeah, for the shoulders my one favorite right now, and there’s not a lot of videos online for this as this is kind of a made-up exercise, is called Over the Bench Pullover. We generally know this as a lat pullover. You’re on a bench and your back is on the bench and you’re bringing a weight back behind your head and you bring it back over kind of your face. Basically that is one. That will increase lat strength and mobility and that one, again, you don’t have to do very much.

One thing about mobility training: if you’re a strong person or a tight person, you don’t want to use a lot of weight. If you’re tight, go light. If you’re flexible then you can add weight a little faster than folks who are tighter because you already have that range but maybe you lack the strength so that’s why you want to increase the weight in some of those end ranges. If you’re tight, you don’t have the range. If you use heavy weight you might actually be counterproductive and you might actually make yourself more tight in the process. With any of these make sure you’re using the weight that is appropriate for your body type. Tight you’re light, if you’re flexible you can go heavier.

Neely Quinn: Okay.

Mercedes Pollmeier: The Jefferson Curl, the Over the Bench Pullover for the lats, and I have this whole wrist routine that I give to all my clients and it takes like 10 minutes and they do it before every climbing session. Basically it is to increase wrist extension and flexion and also deviation from side-to-side. If you have healthy wrists you’re going to have healthy fingers so increasing that range, I think, is super important. Again, it doesn’t take very long. The exercises don’t take very long and if you do it consistently, at least a couple times a week, you’re going to see some pretty big improvements within a month

Neely Quinn: Do you have any videos of that or anything?

Mercedes Pollmeier: Yeah, I have a video of all three. I can give those to you.

Neely Quinn: I can put them in the show notes for people. Cool. That’s really helpful and I think it’s relieving, too, to hear that you don’t have to do this for an hour everyday. It’s overwhelming and we only can do what we can do, so…

Mercedes Pollmeier: Yeah, and I think with a lot of my online training now there’s definitely a progression that I give people to do because one-on-one training, for me, is more of a long term endeavor with my clients. Eventually they’ll be able to see every facet that I want them to get. Before it was like, ‘Here’s everything! I want you to do everything!’ but really it’s the long term. It’s all about longevity. We love climbing and we’re going to want to do it as long as we can so now there’s a better progression in my one-on-one training for this sort of thing.

Neely Quinn: Great. That’s a lot of what you were teaching at the PCC about mobility. 

Is there anything else you want to mention here? I do want to get into technique stuff, too. 

Mercedes Pollmeier: I guess a good segue would be a second topic that I was teaching at the PCC: quality of movement. For me right now, this is kind of the thing that I’m dabbling in and researching more. I think if you can understand your body awareness and your own movement and your thought patterns it’s going to change how well you’re moving on the wall. The quality of movement would be different depending on the type of terrain that you’re on or the type of boulder problem or sport route that you’re on, even trad. Each of those things will ask for a different quality of movement and so this is what I’m really interested in right now. 

When you are asked to be on an overhanging route and you’re on very small crimpy holds, what kind of quality are you asked to do to make that move as efficient as possible? It is kind of nebulous. There could be a lot of things to think about and talk about but this is what I’m really interested in right now.

Neely Quinn: So how do we talk about it? What are the take home points for people right now?

Mercedes Pollmeier: The topic I talked about at PCC was tension. I think tension is somewhat easy to understand. Not everyone really understands their own tension, though, so how much tension they themselves can generate in certain movements or even when you’re standing.

We did an exercise where we were standing and I asked people to increase their tension over time. It would be a count from 1-5 and I asked people to create as much tension in their body just by standing there and then we applied that to movement on the ground, so we were doing locomotion and asking them to give me a tension of 2. If we did 1-5, 5 would be the highest tension they could create, 1 would be very relaxed. What would a 3 tension feel like in the body while you’re moving? What would a 2 feel like? 

We were working through those numbers as we were moving around and then I asked them to do it on the wall when they got home and people actually emailed me after the PCC and told me that they were able to feel a lot more of what their body was doing in the moment and it was easier to explain to their own clients what tension should feel like in the body. 

So on an overhanging route maybe it is a bit of 5 tension and 1 because overhanging we’re mostly dynamic trying to go for holds. It’s pairing those two together most efficiently. That’s when we talk about flow. Movement flow. Going from a 1 to a 5 when you latch the hold. That’s basically some self awareness that you could do when you’re climbing, like, ‘How much tension am I giving this movement right now? How much is required?’ I think some of it is self exploratory.

Neely Quinn: Yeah, like quantifying these things that are, like you said, nebulous. What did you mean when you said, “You could be on an overhanging route and it could be a 5 and a 1?” What do you mean?

Mercedes Pollmeier: I guess for me when I’m doing an overhanging route there’s this continuous tension in my body. If you have to make a big move you have to be dynamic. To be dynamic, if you’ve got too much tension you can’t be explosive. There has to be some sort of release somewhere in your body to create this elastic quality in your tendons so it’s dialing your tension just enough, like bringing it down just enough. Maybe it’s in your hips or your elbows or your shoulders to be able to elicit that explosiveness. Once you hit that hold now you have to generate all of the tension again to be able to maintain that hold. It’s constantly just going back and forth with this tension.

Neely Quinn: It seems like you could make a drill out of that, even in your warm-ups, where you’re like, ‘Okay, I’m going to do a 1 tension on this. I’m going to do mostly 3,’ or whatever. Is that something you do with people?

Mercedes Pollmeier: Yeah, I think that’s actually a really great way of doing it, Neely. I think that’s awesome. The way that I normally do it and I know Kris Hampton loves this drill – I think he calls it Sloth Monkey or something. I have a very similar drill where you move really fast and try to be as relaxed as you can and then you move as slow as you can and try to be as in control as you can with a lot of tension. I really like your idea. I think it’s awesome. I’m going to use it. [laughs]

Neely Quinn: Good. Let me know how it goes.

So then maybe that’s a good segue, like you said, into the technique drills that you have with people or that you do with people and what you think are the most important techniques that we need to know and practice as climbers. 

Mercedes Pollmeier: There are so many components in climbing technique and I think the more you can isolate these little components, one at a time, then you can start to weave them together and that’s how you’re going to create a flow in your technique. When you isolate techniques it really depends on what grade you’re climbing and how long you’ve been climbing. 

I think for everyone your big toe awareness is something that everyone could use on a daily basis. Even I still do my warm up drills and focus so hard on my big toe and where it’s going and how hard it’s hitting the foothold or how soft it’s hitting it or if I’m making any noise. Having that kind of awareness and attention on your feet. A lot of the time climbers are so upper body dominant. If it’s a hard move we kind of forget everything below our chest level and we’re like, ‘Oh, I have to hit that hold,’ so we tend to forget to use our feet or our legs. If you can do this in your warm-up and think about focusing on, ‘How well am I using my feet in the warm-up?’ hopefully that will just transfer into the rest of your climbing. 

Neely Quinn: Is this like The Big Toe Drill?

Mercedes Pollmeier: [laughs] The Big Toe Drill? I call it Ninja Feet. There are a couple different facets in there so there’s Precision, Quiet Feet, Bug Squishers – what else did we talk about? Penny Flickers. This is kind of a new one for me. There’s a bunch of different footwork drills that kind of culminate into what I call Ninja Feet. These Ninja Feet are stealthy. You never know what they’re going to do. [laughs] They’ll come out of nowhere and just kick your butt.

No, basically it’s the foundation of a lot of my climbing drills, this Ninja Feet concept. 

Neely Quinn: The Quiet Feet, Bug Squishers, Penny Flickers – do you have any videos about how to do those?

Mercedes Pollmeier: Yeah, and I’ll be releasing a video once a week for each climbing technique. I can give those all to you.

Neely Quinn: Do you want to just describe those briefly?

Mercedes Pollmeier: Bug Squishers I love because you can see this when professionals climb, especially in outside or competitions. When they place their foot, in order to make sure they’ve placed it well and that they have good traction they shimmy their heel back and forth. I feel like for me this was actually game-changer a couple of years ago. I never even knew about this and I saw professionals doing it and I was like, ‘Wow. That’s really, really interesting that you do that. I wonder what benefits we get from this?’ It basically creates stickiness from your toe to the foot hold. That Bug Squisher moving side-to-side will just integrate this movement pattern into the brain so your foot gets stuck on that and you’re able to generate a lot more.

Neely Quinn: Right, and you trust it a lot more, probably.

Mercedes Pollmeier: Yeah. I think this is great for outside climbing like on crystals or tiny, tiny feet. You can test the foot by doing a little Bug Squisher and the reason why it’s called a Bug Squisher is we did this with kids and you can imagine a little bug. Unfortunately it’s a little violent but you’re basically squishing the bug. [laughs]

Neely Quinn: But don’t squish bugs.

Mercedes Pollmeier: Don’t squish bugs. You shouldn’t. It’s bad karma. [laughs]

Neely Quinn: So that’s very visual. That’s very easy to imagine. Then Penny Flickers? What is that?

Mercedes Pollmeier: This is a drill to increase hamstring tension and awareness. I started this on the ground so you stand on a little plank or something and you actually put pennies on this piece of wood. You put your big toe on the penny and you flick it back as hard as you can. You’re trying to flick it back and see how far you can flick that penny behind you so you’re actually flicking back. By doing that you’re actually increasing that hamstring engagement and that hamstring engagement is really what keeps our hips into the wall. 

When we’re moving up, especially on overhangs again, the hamstrings and the glutes do a lot of work. A lot of us just don’t know how, like how do we engage those areas when we’re climbing? This is a great drill to just start thinking about the hamstring. When you’re climbing you just visualize a penny on each foot hold but instead of kicking back you’re creating tension like you were about to kick back and then you use that foothold in that way.

Neely Quinn: That makes a lot of sense. It’s just something that you do but you don’t ever think of the motion that your toe and hamstring are sort of creating. Again, that’s a really quantifiable way of showing somebody something. That’s cool. Then Quiet Feet?

Mercedes Pollmeier: This one I love to do with partners. You can have a person on the wall and they’re climbing and the partner is on the ground and they have their eyes closed. The person on the ground with their eyes closed is actually giving the person who is climbing some feedback. For the person climbing, the goal is to be as quiet as possible. What it teaches is actually movement control of your feet. If you can really control every millimeter of your movement you’re going to be able to gain a lot more strength in your foot and your leg. If you can do that you’re expressing control and you’re able to use your feet a lot better. 

The person on the ground is then telling that person, “Oh, I heard your foot there. Oh, I heard your foot there,” so that person is giving that climber feedback on whether they can hear their feet or not. The goal is to not hear any footwork at all.

Neely Quinn: Nice. Was there another one? You said, “Precision.” Was that another drill? 

Mercedes Pollmeier: Yeah, that would be more awareness of the big toe. Instead of using the inside or outside edge too much we’re using big toe precision. The big toe is where all of – because of the way the climbing shoe is designed it’s going to put all of the pressure on the big toe. Especially for beginner climbers, I would say this is one of the better techniques to work on because you’re going to strengthen the big toe and you’re going to practice using the shoe the way it’s designed so that you can eventually do the Bug Squisher motion which is the heel side-to-side. If you can be precise with your big toe, your hips are going to be able to move a lot more freely because the edge of your shoe isn’t up against the wall.

Neely Quinn: Okay. This is a nice arsenal of footwork drills.

Mercedes Pollmeier: Yeah, and it’s taken some time to figure out how to communicate this. I think working with kids has helped a lot to create some of these visuals.

Neely Quinn: You have to get real basic and cartoon-y almost with it.

Mercedes Pollmeier: Yep. [laughs]

Neely Quinn: What other drills are there? What other kinds of categories of things do you work on with people?

Mercedes Pollmeier: Kind of going off of the footwork is breathing, actually. Being able to take note of your breathing. Breathing and tension go well together. If you can generate a lot of tension in your torso you’re probably not breathing as much as maybe you should be so you actually learn how to breathe while you’re generating a lot of tension, or on the opposite side when the climb is really easy you should be able to be relaxed with not a lot of tension and be able to breathe and use your feet more. 

Breathing, I think, would be the second thing I tend to work on with folks. Breathing and coordination of breathing while you’re moving as well.

Neely Quinn: How do you work on that?

Mercedes Pollmeier: [laughs] Being able to put words to it is difficult. This is good for me. 

Neely Quinn: [laughs] You got this.

Mercedes Pollmeier: Depending on how you breathe, so if you’re breathing more from your chest or from your diaphragm low in your belly, those two different ways of breathing will elicit different responses in your nervous system. If you’re breathing more from your diaphragm or your lower belly then your parasympathetic nervous system goes up. That means we’re going to be a lot more relaxed which will affect our grip on the wall. If we can try to relax and breathe from more of our abdomen we’re going to be able to relax our grip. Strength and grip capacity is normally the one thing that brings us off the wall, like we get pumped or, ‘I wasn’t strong enough,’ or whatever, whatever. 

If you can practice more of the parasympathetic nervous system breathing, so breathing more from the diaphragm, naturally you’re not going to over grip as much while you’re climbing. But there are moments when we have to generate a lot of tension in the torso and that’s not going to allow for our diaphragm to really engage when we’re breathing so the breathing will come more from the chest and the neck. This is going to going to increase the sympathetic nervous system which means the fight or flight system. You’re probably going to over grip which is great, especially in times of high tension. We need everything to engage. That kind of does work to your advantage. 

I think a lot of this has been researched in powerlifting and Olympic lifting. The Valsalva maneuver, when we hold our breath and push really hard for a long time, people thought that was bad for us because it does increase some blood pressure. Ideally you’re not always doing that. Ideally you’re always trying to breathe more from your diaphragm than your chest.

Neely Quinn: But you’re saying there are times when you have to have more tension.

Mercedes Pollmeier: Yes. More of that especially on your projects. You’re probably going to have to generate so much tension and hold your breath a little longer and push through it to make those moves.

Neely Quinn: Which seems like it would be even more important after you’re done making those moves to breathe intentionally so that you can get the oxygen back in there.

Mercedes Pollmeier: Yeah, absolutely. I think that is an awareness. I love it when my climbing partner or when I see climbing partners remind their climber, ‘Don’t forget to breathe,’ or just, ‘Breathe.’ It actually is a good reminder because when you’re on the wall you’re like, ‘Oh yeah. I just made that hard move and now I can relax.’ Especially topping out on boulders. That is when people stop breathing. Or clipping. I know people tend to hold their breath and that’s when we really need to relax and be confident in ourselves.

Neely Quinn: Unless it’s a really hard clip in which case we should hold tension and not breathe? It’s a variable, dynamic thing when you should be breathing and when you should be holding tension.

Mercedes Pollmeier: Yeah, and I think for each person it might be slightly different. What works for one person might not work for someone else.

Neely Quinn: Like screaming? If you have a few words to say about screaming I would love to hear about that.

Mercedes Pollmeier: Like the Adam Ondra scream? For him it works 100%. When he screams you know he is gaining so much tension in his body that it is forcing all this air out of his lungs and that’s how he is able to – it probably helps him know, ‘I’ve got a lot of tension right now because I’m doing this verbal scream.’ For other people, like I’m not really a screamer, but there is a feeling I kind of get in my neck. If I have enough tension I can feel it.

I think it was Justen Sjong I heard talk about this breathing dial where if you’re relaxed you’re breathing really naturally and easy and then as movements get harder you’re probably starting to grunt or scream and then there’s no breath. I don’t think that everyone has that screaming dial, you know? I don’t think they have that in their arsenal because there might be some judgement around it and that might hold some people back from experimenting with that breathing technique, but I would say that it does help. It is kind of a cue, like, ‘Okay, I’m trying really hard. My body’s in tension.’

Neely Quinn: It also seems like a very subjective thing because it seems like sometimes screaming might be counterproductive and it’s hard to know when it’s productive and when it’s not. I don’t know. I just hear people screaming all the time and I’m not a screamer so it’s confusing to me. I’m like, ‘What is that doing for them?’ because I do the thing that you do. Nobody can really hear it.

Mercedes Pollmeier: But you know it works. I think it comes down to what’s called, in sports science, your arousal, If you’re screaming and if it’s counterproductive then that’s a good indicator that that’s too much arousal in your body to be able to do the things that you need to do. A lot of us, I feel like, are on the other end where we’re not aroused enough to get to the point where we can try really, really hard. 

That’s also an experiment that you have to choose to do, like psyching yourself up before you get on the climb or drinking a ton of caffeine. Things like the caffeine can push you over, like that’s too much arousal, so I think that would be really interesting to look more into with climbing and arousal techniques. How do you fall into the perfect arousal?

Neely Quinn: Right? So breathing and tension and screaming are some things that people can do to sort of hone those skills. What else? What other skill techniques are you working on with people?

Mercedes Pollmeier: This isn’t really a physical technique, it’s more of a mental strategy, but I came up with this little acronym when I first started coaching the competitive climbing team at the Seattle Bouldering Project and it’s called RAVE. Now all of my clients know what RAVE means. Basically, it’s to help folks have a routine every time they walk up to a climb. RAVE stands for read, assess, visualize, and execute. Those are the four stages of getting ready for a climb. 

I think this mental technique has improved people’s ability to onsight climbs faster, like their onsight grade will increase just by doing this small little routine. I think especially for beginner climbers the reading aspect is really important to hone in on, and then for folks who have been climbing for a while the visualization and execution component is more important. Each one of those facets you can go really deep into and again, it depends on the person but you can develop a really nice routine before every attempt on a climb. I feel like this has been a huge game changer for a lot of folks, just doing this little routine.

Neely Quinn: And that’s mostly for flash and onsight climbing?

Mercedes Pollmeier: It’s to increase the chance of onsighting then if you don’t onsight then there’s a second acronym, CRAVE, so it’s the second round and thereafter. The C stands for critique. So once you come off you critique immediately. ‘What did I do? Where can I get better? What went wrong?’ Taking video is really nice and then you can critique in real-time and then you do the process again. Whatever critique you made then you go through the reading aspect again to make sure, like, ‘Okay, is my sequence correct for the thing that I need to execute?’ Then you can do the rest of it, assessing, visualizing, and executing.

Neely Quinn: That’s good. That’s really good. 

Mercedes Pollmeier: Yeah. It’s my little thing and the kids love it and now my adults are going to love it, too. [laughs]

Neely Quinn: So before we started recording we talked a little bit about flow. This is also one of those really nebulous topics that I think if you have some way of making it less nebulous, that would be amazing.

Mercedes Pollmeier: I think flow is a state of mind and you can definitely train yourself to get into flow. For me, when I look at people climbing and I can see when they’re in flow it’s when things look really graceful. I think if you’re dabbling in this idea of flow, if you want to try it, see how graceful you can make your movement. Flow doesn’t mean gracefulness. It’s more of a state of mind, but when I see people who are in flow, things just connect really well and it looks like nothing is holding them back. 

If you’re trying it, basically it’s like poetry in motion. How well can you connect one move to the next? That also includes your breathing, your footwork, and it’s like you’re trying to be a dancer on the wall. For me, if I am feeling in flow it’s because I’m trying to make my movement as graceful and efficient as possible. This could be a good way to dabble in figuring out what your flow state could be.

Neely Quinn: Simply by focusing on your footwork and trying to do things as correctly as possible.

Mercedes Pollmeier: Yeah, or if it doesn’t feel correct then be like, ‘Well, this is my movement so I’m going to make it as good as possible.’

Neely Quinn: Like commit to it?

Mercedes Pollmeier: Yep.

Neely Quinn: I mean, I feel like flow is a part of any endeavor we undertake. Last night I was playing piano. I’ve been playing piano since I was five and I studied it in college and went to conservatory. I was really into it. Last night I was practicing. I was reading music and thinking about how well I was reading the music and that completely interrupted my flow in playing. I was more concerned with how well I was doing it and what an onlooker would think about what I was doing. I feel like that happens in climbing all the time, too, where you’re not focusing on what you’re doing or just letting your body feel what you’re doing. You’re thinking about something else. I don’t know. Maybe those distractions, like learning how to not have as many of them would be helpful? I’m not sure.

Mercedes Pollmeier: I think that’s where isolation of techniques really comes in. If you can isolate and execute these techniques as well as you can and once it’s time to go climb a climb then all of those will just naturally come together. Your job when you’re now doing the climb is to just be confident in yourself and try to connect those movements as best you can, like thinking about your footwork is probably going to screw you up somewhere, but if you can just trust and be like, ‘I know myself. I’ve done all these drills. I’ve done all this work to lead up to this. I’m just going to commit and try to link everything up,’ as smoothly as you can. It’s really hard not to think.

Neely Quinn: Yeah, it is.

Mercedes Pollmeier: We just don’t trust ourselves.

Neely Quinn: I think trusting yourself has a lot to do with it, like you’ve been saying. Just letting yourself do what your body tells you to do. 

So there’s not many drills you can do. Flow is more like: ‘How well have I prepared for this moment and how much confidence do I have?’

Mercedes Pollmeier: Yeah.

Neely Quinn: Are there any other quality of movement or technique drills you want to talk about that you use with people? We’ve gone through a whole lot and this is a lot to give to people, but is there anything we’ve missed?

Mercedes Pollmeier: Something that I have recently been giving folks – the reason I didn’t really do it much before is because of this time constraint that we have – is for some of my clients who have quite a bit more time to dedicate to their physicality. It’s more like balance work, so things like balancing a dowel on your hand and try to do that for a minute and you can make that harder by going up higher on your arm and trying to balance that. 

What happens is when you’re balancing an object on your body you’ve just created all this awareness in that spot in your body. For climbing we know that body awareness is so important, especially if we want to be graceful and if we want to find that flow. Having that full-on body awareness is going to help us. 

Object manipulation is really what it’s called, these balancing techniques. They’ll increase body awareness and the harder it gets the more your brain will light up from the activity. Right now I’m dabbling in it. I don’t know if it’s really working for my folks yet. I know it works for me but I love skill development so much because it just helps my brain.

Neely Quinn: You feel like doing that, like with a dowel on your hand, it somehow transfers into your climbing?

Mercedes Pollmeier: Yeah, by the means of increased body awareness.

Neely Quinn: Interesting.

Mercedes Pollmeier: That’s my new thing that I’m going to go try.

Neely Quinn: Cool. Well, we have covered a lot and I think that this is good for people to even incorporate a few of the things that we’ve talked about. I’ll try to put as many videos up of these things on the episode page and then you have a really good Youtube, or is it Vimeo?

Mercedes Pollmeier: Youtube.

Neely Quinn: What’s your Youtube channel?

Mercedes Pollmeier: It’s my name: Mercedes Pollmeier.

Neely Quinn: Okay. I’ll direct people to that as well. You have a really great repertoire of videos and techniques and all the things that you teach. What else do people need to know about you?

Mercedes Pollmeier: Check me out on my website, modusathletica.com. I want to make the best impact on the climbing community as I can so if there’s ever any questions I can answer for folks or things you are interested in or experimenting with I’m super down to try new things and experiment. 

Neely Quinn: Cool. As always, I appreciate you being on the show and sharing with us your wisdom. Thank you very much and hopefully I’ll see you soon.

Mercedes Pollmeier: Thank you, Neely. I’ll see you soon.

Neely Quinn: I hope you enjoyed that interview with Mercedes Pollmeier. Again, you can find her on Instagram @modusathletica, you can find her on her website at modusathletica.com, and that discount code that she gave you is 10% off of her new program called ‘Midnight Lightning.’ That discount code is MATB2020. 

Thanks to her for this awesome interview but also for the fact that she provided a bunch of videos for us to show exactly what she was talking about. 

If you want to see those videos she created just for this episode you can go to trainingbeta.com and find this episode page. You can just search ‘Mercedes’ if you don’t know how to find it and I’ll have three videos up and a bunch of other links to her stuff, like her Youtube page and her website and all that stuff, so you’ll find it all there.

I think that’s it about Mercedes. Thanks for listening to that. I hope you enjoyed it.

Coming up on the podcast I’m actually going to take a little break. Not too long but I’m going to Florida on December 27, in about a week. I always have good intentions of publishing things and working a bunch while I’m in Florida but I always end up just hanging out at the pool and the beach with my family and enjoying my time down there. I’ll be back on January 12 and I’ll start publishing again after that.

I hope that you have a great holiday however you celebrate, or not, and a great New Year. I’ll be blowing off firecrackers with my family. 

I’ll talk to you when I get back but if you decide on New Years that you want to start doing a training program, like I did last year – basically last year I started training pretty seriously like January fifth and I didn’t stop. I had probably the best year of my life climbing. I know that a lot of people decide that they want to start training on January first. It’s just the way it goes. We have tons of training programs to help you do that. 

If you want to train fingers you can go to trainingbeta.com/programs and you’ll find a bunch of finger training programs. If you want to do power endurance we have a power endurance ebook that is super easy to follow. You get three or four days, depending on how much you want to train, worth of training every week for five weeks and it’s really helped a lot of people. If you want a full program for either bouldering or route climbing we have a training program for both of those that are subscription programs and you get three workouts every week laid out for you. You don’t have to think about anything. 

All of that can be found at trainingbeta.com/programs and if you do start training I wish you luck and I hope that these training programs really help you reach your goals like they did mine.

Thanks so much for listening all the way to the end. I’ll talk to you in 2020.

[music]