[laughs] Yeah.

 

Neely Quinn: Who would’ve thought?

 

Steve Maisch: Who would’ve thunk? Exactly.

 

Neely Quinn: So tell me about some of the climbing drills you would do in your six-foot basement.

 

Steve Maisch: Okay. Climbing drills I would do in my six-foot basement: a big one is the hangboard. If you’ve got a six-foot basement you can usually fit a hangboard in there. What I’ve done over the course of time with hangboarding is I’ve kind of developed a couple of different protocols. When we look, going back to the research, there’s very little research as far as what’s effective for the hangboard but I what I found over the years is sort of a 10-second max hang.

What I like to do is determine a one-rep max, which is how much weight you can hang including your body weight off of an edge or middle two fingers or whatever grip you’re using. You determine your one-rep max and then you use that weight in subsequent workouts, so one good protocol, I think, that I’ve seen pretty good results myself and other people is you then take that one-rep max weight and you hang for 10 seconds with that weight, rest for five minutes, hang for 10 seconds, rest for five minutes, hang for 10 seconds, rest for five minutes, hang for 10 seconds, and you do five sets of that. You pretty much narrow down the grips.

That’s the other thing that I think people tend to sort of do inappropriately, is they do too many grips. You want to use a basic, I think, half crimp grip four fingers, your middle two, and then pinch. That pretty much covers all of the bases and it keeps your workout short and it keeps your workout focused, which then reduces the amount of recovery time from that workout.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, so you just said half crimp four fingers, middle two – so your ring finger and your middle finger – so you don’t train first team, which is index and middle?

 

Steve Maisch: No, not really. I think maybe if you’re training specifically for something that’s going to involve those then that would be a good idea but my basic focus on the half crimp grip is when you train isometrically, you train roughly 20° in either direction so if you’re training at a 90° angle, which is about what your half crimp is, you’re also training 70 and you’re also training 110. 110 is like holding a sloper, 70 is basically a full crimp, so when you train the half crimp you’re essentially training your sloper training and your half crimp training and you get it all in one grip.

If you were to hang, say, front two, unless you are hanging in half crimp, which is really hard to do, you’re hanging open. Basically what you’re training in those front two is your front two open strength, which is somewhat useful, like I said, if you need to be specific but usually I grab pockets with my middle two if I can fit two fingers in there so then I just train those two specifically.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. Did you say that there were four grips?

 

Steve Maisch: Three grips primarily.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, just three. So, half crimp four fingers – and that’s in an open hand grip – then second team – the two middle fingers – then pinch. What kind of fingerboard do you use?

 

Steve Maisch: Well I usually use the Beastmaker but what I found with the four fingers is that an edge, basically an 18-20mm edge, is really the way to go. The other thing is there’s a few things we know about fingerboarding and one of them is that – this is the Eva Lopez study that she did a few years back – it’s better to hang more weight from a larger edge than less weight from a smaller edge. It’s better for strength gains and strength endurance gains.

What I try to do is go for larger edges. An 18-20mm edge is about a pad edge.

 

Neely Quinn: So it’s even better to do more weight on a bigger edge than less weight on a smaller edge, even if you’re training for really small edges?

 

Steve Maisch: Yeah. The study – it’s basically the only fingerboard study we have out there – they split two groups and one group trained more weight from a larger edge and the other one less weight from a smaller edge and then they brought them back to test them on the smaller edge. The group that trained more weight from a larger edge performed better on the small edge than the group that trained less weight on the small edge.

 

Neely Quinn: Huh. That’s interesting.

 

Steve Maisch: So that’s the one thing we basically know about hangboarding. That’s sort of the only thing. Outside of that it’s all anecdotal evidence.

 

Neely Quinn: So what is a ‘bigger edge?’ I think you just mentioned it but does this mean you’re not a fan of the Moon Board? Those edges are so tiny.

 

Steve Maisch: No, well I’m a fan of part of the Moon Board. Well, the Moon hangboard. I’m a super huge fan of the Moon Board.

 

Neely Quinn: Sorry – I should have clarified.

 

Steve Maisch: Yeah, I’m a monster fan. I think that’s the best training device ever designed but the Moon hangboard, if you think about the hangboard the two outside edges – kind of pockety things on the outside – that’s about the size edge you want to be hanging from. The Beastmaker, both the 1000 and the 2000, have a really good edge on them and then what I usually use is just an old S7 campus rung, which is kind of like the small – Metolius makes them still – campus rung.

 

Neely Quinn: So I mean really, all you would need – well, that’s not true. It’s not all you would need because you need the pinches. What board do you think has the biggest pinches? I’m trying to train pinch strength right now and I’m having a hard time finding a fingerboard that really works.

 

Steve Maisch: The Anderson brothers’ board. I think that’s a really good pinch. One of the problems with pinches is that you tend to use compression on a lot of them, so if you have something that is sort of opposing/pinches that are opposing, you end up compressing on them so you’re not really incorporating your thumb as much.

What I like to do – the Anderson brothers’ board is really good. It’s the best hangboard for pinches, but I use what are called Pinch Blocks and this is just two 2x6s screwed together and then you basically pinch it and you deadlift the weight, so you can be really precise about how much weight you’re hanging from the block and you get no compression effect, so you’re incorporating your thumb heavily. Then you can adjust those and make them smaller or bigger or whatever.

 

Neely Quinn: So you attach it to weight and you just lift it up off of the ground?

 

Steve Maisch: Yeah, you basically do a deadlift with it. You one-arm hang weight from it, whatever – 20 or 30 pounds – and then you just pick it up and hold it for 10 seconds.

 

Neely Quinn: It’s so simple. [laughs]

 

Steve Maisch: That’s the thing. It just gets too complicated and really, you’ve got a couple of basic grips that will train all of your fingers and the way you’re going to be using them climbing. You’ve got a couple of basic pull movements that you can do and there you go.

 

Neely Quinn: So just to recap here, you said you do five sets of one-rep max on three grips, right?

 

Steve Maisch: Yep.

 

Neely Quinn: As far as one-rep max goes, that can be sort of a tricky thing to figure out.

 

Steve Maisch: Exactly.

 

Neely Quinn: Do you have a resource for that that you like to share with people about how to do that?

 

Steve Maisch: What I do is sort of – that’s, again, one of the big questions with training. What you’re doing is you’re taking weightlifting-style exercises, concentric/eccentric movements, and turning them into isometric times. That’s always a bit dubious.

There’s a guy, Stephen Chu. He trains gymnasts and he has a great book. I forget the name. If you Google ‘Stephen Chu’ and ‘gymnastic training,’ he works with transposing one-rep maxes into a time component. He comes up with a time of four seconds, so it takes roughly four seconds to do one lift. Like, say you do a bench press or whatever, so then he calls the four-second rep here the one-rep max.

I am a little bit different there. What I like to do is, I’ve watched some videos and depending on where you’re climbing, I’ve watched videos of bouldering in Little Cottonwood because that’s what I do a lot, but you’re basically hanging on a hold for about six seconds. Then I started thinking, ‘Well maybe that should be your one-rep max.’

That’s sort of one of the training protocols is that six-second max. Then, what I noticed with my own training myself, is that something happens in those subsequent 4-5 seconds, after the six seconds, which I think is really where you get a lot of your strength gains. I think most of that happens as a recruitment effect so my theory, or my hypothesis I should say – this hasn’t been researched and verified yet, but my hypothesis is that when we’re climbing all the time we’re recruiting ‘x’ number of muscle fibers and those muscle fibers are always going to be recruited if we’re hanging onto a hold for roughly six seconds.

When we hang onto a fingerboard for slightly longer than six seconds, those particular muscle fibers will be tired out and then you’ll have an extra four seconds to try to hang on, which is going to start recruiting new muscle fibers. When we make gains on a fingerboard we’re not really building muscle. We don’t do any hypertrophy hanging from a fingerboard. Essentially what we’re doing is we’re recruiting muscle and I think that extra four seconds really enhances the recruitment.

Long story short, my one-rep max is how much you can hang from a particular grip from between 10 and 13 seconds.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, so I think I misheard you earlier. I was thinking that your five sets of one-rep max were just five seconds, but you’re saying that they’re 10 seconds?

 

Steve Maisch: 10 seconds, yeah.

 

Neely Quinn: So 10 seconds and you said how much time off after that?

 

Steve Maisch: In between sets is roughly 4-5 minutes.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. I was so confused there for a second while you were talking. I was like, ‘He’s only hanging for five seconds,’ but that makes more sense. That’s much different, or it’s pretty different, from what the Anderson brothers are saying to do, the seven seconds on, three seconds off.

 

Steve Maisch: Yes. The Anderson brothers – that’s a repeater style workout, which I think is also effective. This is one of the areas of research that I think we need to do, if there are any budding sports scientists out there, is to compare repeaters with, say, a 10-second max hang and see which one of those is better.

I tend to lean more towards the 10-second max hang, just because I have seen a lot of results myself and with people that I’ve been training. The repeater style I just haven’t seen quite the same results. That’s basically at the end of the day, so it’s anecdotal but I think that 10 seconds is better for strength gains.

 

Neely Quinn: So you’ve tried repeaters on yourself and some of your friends that you’ve trained?

 

Steve Maisch: Oh yeah. Sometimes, again, one of the things with hangboarding is that you hit a plateau so I think it’s really good to mix up your hangboard workouts but not mix them up so often that you never get a chance to progress at any one workout.

 

Neely Quinn: So then what do you mean, ‘Mix them up?’

 

Steve Maisch: For example, what I would do is if you’re setting out a training block for, say, six weeks, and you’re going to do two hangboard workouts every week, for the first three weeks I would do 10-second max hangs for those two workouts, then maybe the next three weeks I would switch it up to where you would do a set of repeaters. I like to go five reps instead of seven, but go five reps of repeaters then three reps of repeaters and then do a couple of max hangs at the end of that, for the next three weeks.

The idea being that you might – you hit a plateau after roughly about six hangboard workouts and then you mix it up a little bit, so that’s where the repeaters come into play.

 

Neely Quinn: Have you done this for yourself? That exact six week program?

 

Steve Maisch: Yeah, I’ve done that and I think that works well. You can sometimes go longer than six weeks with the 10-second hangs. It’s sort of specific. If you’re new to hangboarding you’re going to get huge gains after just a couple of workouts. If you’ve been doing it forever – and I’ve been doing it for a long time – you definitely, I mean, I’m quickly back up to my max and then I kind of get stuck there.

 

Neely Quinn: You get stuck there? Have you figured out how to not be stuck anymore?

 

Steve Maisch: That’s the 5-3-1, what I was just talking about. You mix it up with the repeaters and then you still do the one-rep max hang, so you’re kind of mixing the two workouts.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. I didn’t know if you were beyond the whole ‘ever getting better’ at this point.

 

Steve Maisch: Oh no. No.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, cool. I think that we’ve talked enough about fingerboarding. I talk about this with so many people. I mean, I wonder sometimes if people just get so bored listening to fingerboarding stuff but I don’t know, people keep coming back for more but I do want to move on.

You said in your six-foot basement that you had a climbing wall. What kinds of things would you actually do on the wall?

 

Steve Maisch: That’s – I would do hard bouldering. It’s basically max bouldering and the moves, if you’ve only got six feet, you’re on a steep wall and you’re only doing a few moves – you’re doing three or four moves – that’s where you really see the strength gains when it comes to bouldering or route climbing. You always need more strength.

The beauty of having only a six-foot ceiling is you have a really short wall and you have really hard boulder problems. That’s where I see the mistake – you know, that’s the beauty of the Mood Board. When you climb on a Moon Board you’re really focused in on just a couple of moves. You’re doing, like, six moves max and you can’t really cheat through them. You’re not doing a lot of drop knees, you’re not doing a lot of heel hooks and stuff like that, so you’re really forced to utilize/to maximize your strength.

 

Neely Quinn: How does that translate for a route climber? You were mostly training for bouldering, right?

 

Steve Maisch: Mostly. Again, when I was in graduate school that’s when I started bouldering a lot more. Time constraints. It works for route climbing as well. One of the things that happen when you route climb, you get two – Steve Bechtel actually talked about this in one of your podcasts a little while, and he used a great word: metorically. I don’t know if he invented it but I’ll give him credit for it. It’s a great word.

So, you’ve got your two things that you’re going to be training. You’re going to be training your motor system, which is your movement, and you’re going to be training metabolically. What happens when you’re route climbing is as you’re getting more fit, endurance-wise, strength endurance wise, is you’re training your metabolic system, but that metabolic system is going to hit a roof sooner or later where you can only perform so many moves at a certain percentage of your maximum strength.

If you break this down – say you’re doing a long route, like a 60-move route, and it’s separated into three sections of 20 moves each. You climb up the route, you get pumped, you fall off, you hang on the rope, and you go through, do a couple of hard moves and you get pumped again and you fall off, you go through, do a couple hard moves, you get pumped again and you fall off.

That’s your situation and you say to yourself, “Well, I keep getting pumped and fall off so I need more strength endurance. I need more stamina to be able to get through these.”

That could be the case but it could also be the case that your max strength isn’t high enough so that those moves are such a large percentage of your maximum strength that there’s no way you’re ever going to be able to link all of these moves together because they’re roughly 90% of your max strength and there’s no way you can perform at 90% of your max strength for, say, 20 moves in a row.

 

Neely Quinn: Right.

 

Steve Maisch: You can only do it for roughly 2-3 moves so if you bump that max strength up, those moves become a lower percentage of your maximum and that enables you to use a different energy system which enables you to climb through those moves better.

Route climbers need to take a page out of the boulderer’s book and start increasing their strength instead of just getting more and more fit because you’re going to hit a plateau and I don’t care how fit you get, if you’re not strong enough you can’t operate at 90% of your maximum for 60 moves.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah, and that’s kind of what – well, it’s not kind of – it’s exactly what Adam Ondra was saying in my interview with him where I asked him how he had trained to win both bouldering and route climbing World Championships. He was like, ‘I just got so strong that the routes felt easier to me.’

 

Steve Maisch: Yeah, and what he’s saying there is that those moves were, say, down to 40%. If you can get moves down to that or even less, I mean, theoretically, if you can get moves down to around 10-15% of your maximum strength you can basically climb a route aerobically for the most part. Then you’re just using air and fat to climb up it and you can go forever at that rate.

As the moves get to be a larger percentage of your maximum strength then you just metabolically can’t do it.

 

Neely Quinn: So you could feasibly, you’re saying, train on your small but overhanging woody or home wall and go out that summer – you know, like train in the spring and go out that summer – and do long routes.

 

Steve Maisch: Well, you’d have to train – I mean, we’re talking just strength training there. You still have to train strength endurance which would be, on the small wall, you’d be doing intervals so you still have to train that metabolic system. If you’re just training three or four moves, you’re going to get really strong at doing three or four moves in a row but that’s basically all you’re going to be able to do.

That’s the boulderers’ conundrum when they go out and climb routes. They’re like, ‘Oh, I just climb up and I don’t even feel pumped. I just fall off.’ The reason is they’re using their creatine phosphate system so they’re burning the creatine phosphate which doesn’t last for longer than max, like, 12-15 seconds so they’re not even getting pumped. They’re just running out of that fuel and falling off.

You’ve got to train the systems as well. You can’t just train strength but you need to train strength as well if you want to improve your endurance.

 

Neely Quinn: Wait. I’m confused. Why are they falling off? If they’re not getting pumped, what is making them fall off? I mean, I understand the creatine but do they just get exhausted or what happens? Do their muscles just stop working?

 

Steve Maisch: Kind of. You’re exhausting – if your body is trained to only burn creatine phosphate, say, theoretically, you go to the 100% – two ends of the spectrum. One person just burns creatine phosphate in their muscles like an alligator and another person is totally aerobic.

The person who burns creatine phosphate is going to be able to perform a much higher maximum level of strength or power but after 12-15 seconds their muscles aren’t going to have any fuel to keep working.

The person who is burning aerobically, they’re going to be able to go forever at a much lower intensity but they’re never even going to feel pumped either because they’re operating totally aerobically. When the boulderer falls off the route it’s not so much a feeling of pumped like your forearms are burning, it’s just suddenly you run out of creatine phosphate and that’s what your body is trained to utilize for fuel so you just fall off. You can’t hold on to the biggest jug in the world. That’s why if you’re just training on your small, little wall in your six-foot basement, you’ve got to also do something like intervals or something like that that’s going to train your system metabolically.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, so how did you train intervals in your basement?

 

Steve Maisch: Well, if you’re really limited to that six-foot basement you can do tabatas. They’re pretty good. 20 seconds on the wall, 10 seconds off. I think you can still – I’ve done it on the Moon Board which is a little bit taller. That’s about 10 feet. You do intervals, roughly 45 seconds to one minute on and then about a minute rest.

Depending on how fit you are you can reduce the rest time from say a 1:2, work:rest interval down to 1:1.

 

Neely Quinn: I’ve always been confused by this because I’ve always had the luxury of having climbing gyms, bouldering and route gyms, so that’s awesome but I know a lot of people that don’t and I just had that conversation with Alex Barrows. He trained for Ara Vella by doing exactly what you’re talking about, those intervals, on boulders.

When you have such a small wall do you just – how are you on the wall for a minute? What are you doing? I just don’t get it.

 

Steve Maisch: If you have such a small wall, a minute – you’re maybe going to be down to about 45 seconds but yeah, you climb and do an up-down-up so you can go up the wall, down, and back up. That will get you roughly – you know, 45 seconds is about 15 moves. If you can get five moves up on your wall and five moves down and five moves up, you’re going to be on the wall for about 45 seconds.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. So that’s not bad.

 

Steve Maisch: If you can’t manage to do that sort of thing then you can also reduce the rest time in between, so that will also start to generate and engage you in a different metabolic system.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, what was the rest time that you said? You said a minute or 45 seconds on and then did you say a minute off?

 

Steve Maisch: Well, it depends. You can start out at roughly 1:2 work to rest, which means you would climb for a minute, rest for two minutes. What that’s going to do is that’s going to work more of the strength aspect of the strength endurance when you’re getting a little bit more rest so you’ll be able to do more hard boulder problems and then, as you get more fit, you can start shrinking that rest down so you can shrink the rest down to a 1:1 ratio. That’s going to switch you over into a different metabolic system. You’ll be a little bit more anaerobic.

 

Neely Quinn: How hard should the problems be? Obviously, it depends on the person but…

 

Steve Maisch: It depends on the person for sure but generally, say about  – I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I think you’re definitely at about onsight level I would say, depending on how good you onsight. If you’re not a great onsighter then maybe a little bit harder but yeah, if you can normally go to the gym and first try a V5 and that V5 is, say, at a gym it will probably be 8-10 moves long. What you want to do is maybe do a little bit of a traverse into those 8-10 moves and that’s your boulder problem that you’ll do intervals on.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay.

 

Steve Maisch: You want to be able to get to – it’s not so bad if you fall off the last one. That’s right about where you want to be if you’re doing, say, four because you want them to be really hard. That’s the thing. You want them to be hard enough that you’re not shaking out on any of the moves. I guess that’s a good way to sort of define the difficulty of the problem. You can’t shake out on any move.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. You’re doing four sets?

 

Steve Maisch: Four reps.

 

Neely Quinn: Four reps.

 

Steve Maisch: You do a 15-move boulder problem, let’s call it the ‘pink problem.’ You do the pink problem, you rest for 1-2 minutes, you do the pink problem again, you rest for 1-2 minutes, do the pink problem again, rest for 1-2 minutes, do the pink problem again, rest for 1-2 minutes, then take about five minutes or so off and do another problem.

You move over to the blue problem and you do that one four times and then you can do anywhere – for myself, I kind of max out at about three rounds of that. If you’re a little bit younger than myself you can probably do maybe 4-5 rounds of it.

 

Neely Quinn: How/what’s the difference between this and, say, 4x4s?

 

Steve Maisch: Well, a 4×4, the moves are going to be a little bit easier. You think about 4x4s you’re going back-to-back so you’re going to get more pumped. What that’s going to do is generate – you can thing about strength endurance as sort of a spectrum. At one end you’ve got the real strength aspect.

 

Neely Quinn: Actually, I’m going to stop you. When you say ‘strength endurance,’ because you’ve said it a few times, do you mean what we call/what other people might call power endurance?

 

Steve Maisch: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I can use power endurance as well.

 

Neely Quinn: No, that’s fine.

 

Steve Maisch: It’s sort of just a bit of a misnomer, power endurance. Say at one end is the strength aspect of it. You’re talking 1-3 moves. As you increase the number of moves, you’re moving over to the endurance aspect of the spectrum. A 4×4 is going to be further along in the endurance direction of the spectrum because you’re doing more moves and you’re doing them back-to-back so you’re going to have to reduce the difficulty of the move.

The interval is going to be more on the strength side because you’re going to be doing harder moves and you’re going to be getting more rest in between each 15-move problem, so you’ll be able to do harder moves.

A 4×4 is a good one to put in if you’re shifting into more endurance climbing.

 

Neely Quinn: Can you give me an example of – would you ever use 4x4s and interval training for the same person in the same six-week cycle, say?

 

Steve Maisch: Oh yeah, yeah. Another thing I’m a big fan of – I’m not a huge fan of linear periodization where you separate out the cycles into, ‘We’re going to do strength now, then we’re going to do strength endurance, then we’re going to do endurance.’ That sort of thing. ‘We’re going to do power.’

I like to train everything all at once. Not on the same day, mind you, but you train them all in the same period so the way I like to do it is, say you’re climbing four days that week. Do a strength day and then follow that with what I call a ‘capacity’ day, which is kind of high volume, easier climbing. Take a rest day, do another strength day, and follow that with either a strength endurance or a more endurance-y workout and then take two rest days.

So what would happen in that schedule is your strength day is going to be hangboarding, maybe pull-ups, weighted bouldering, campus boarding, something like that. The following day is a capacity day so something like that might be a boulder pyramid where you work your way up in V-grades to sort of your onsight level and then work your way back down. You set a time limit on it so you do it in an hour. Then you take a rest day then you do another strength day, which might be hangboarding or campusing or weighted bouldering, whatever, then you would do your strength endurance day.

Depending on where you are, how you feel, after that strength day, you would either do a 4×4 which would be a little bit easier. Your fingers might be a little bit tired from the strength day so you could do a 4×4 that day. If you’re feeling pretty good you could do an interval that time.

How I like to design programs is that you shift focus from a percentage strength to a larger percentage strength and endurance as you move through your cycle, getting ready for a peak.

 

Neely Quinn: Hmm. Okay. I would love to go through that week again if you would, because I feel like – were you saying that you do fingerboarding, campusing, whatever and you would do climbing on the same day? Is that what you ended up saying?

 

Steve Maisch: So, yes. Let’s go through a three-week program. Let’s do it.

 

Neely Quinn: This program would be for – give me an example person.

 

Steve Maisch: This would be for a person who’s generally well-rounded as far as their strength is pretty high relative to their strength endurance. This would be your – and this isn’t your average person because most people are either really strong or have really good endurance so it’s on the other end. This is a person who wants to train everything and build it up and then the person who is worse at endurance would focus more on endurance workouts and the person who is worse at strength would have more strength workouts.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, so this program that we’re about to go through would be for, generally, a boulderer or a route climber?

 

Steve Maisch: It would be for a person who does both. A person who is relatively good for themselves at route climbing and relatively good for themselves at bouldering. It’s a person who boulders and route climbs competently for themselves within any grade range.

 

Neely Quinn: And they’re trying to improve both of those things?

 

Steve Maisch: They’re trying to improve. You’re just trying to become a better boulderer and/or route climber.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay.

 

Steve Maisch: So, let’s say week one you would start out and do a strength day. Let’s say we’re going to focus on our fingers. On that day, the first day, the strength day, you would warm up bouldering for about 30 minutes, 45 minutes, depending on how long it takes you to warm up, then go straight to your hangboard workout and then do your hangboard workout.

Then, you would take a rest day.

Then you would do a sort of capacity day, which would be something like a boulder pyramid.

Then you would take another rest day and do a strength endurance day. That would be your intervals.

Then you would take two rest days and then start back over. Now we’re on week two. You’re going to do a strength day, so you’re going to do a fingerboard day.

Then, on week two, instead of taking a rest day the next day you’re going to do a capacity day.

Take another rest day.

Do a strength day then a strength endurance day.

Then two rest days.

Then you go to week three.

 

Neely Quinn: Hang on one sec. Sorry. I’m writing this down for people. So day three of that – sorry. It was day one, day two, then rest, then day three was which one?

 

Steve Maisch: Hold on a sec here. In week two, day one is strength, day two is capacity, day three is rest, day four is strength…

 

Neely Quinn: Meaning?

 

Steve Maisch: Meaning fingerboarding again.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay.

 

Steve Maisch: Day five is strength endurance. Day six and day seven are rest, so that’s week two.

Then, week three I would go strength on day one, strength endurance on day two, take a rest day, strength on day three, strength endurance – oh wait, sorry – rest day on day three, strength on day four, strength endurance on day five, and then a capacity day on day six, and then take two rest days.

Then you start back over at week one.

 

Neely Quinn: So you’re climbing more on week three, basically.

 

Steve Maisch: Yeah. So basically, what you would do is you start out with an easy week, moderate week, hard week, then you go back down to an easy week.

 

Neely Quinn: It seems like you think that fingerboarding two times a week is a good idea.

 

Steve Maisch: Yeah, I think if you can. It depends on your recovery ability. Some people can do it. Other people can’t. Again, I’m a bit older so I kind of struggle with that.

 

Neely Quinn: How old are you?

 

Steve Maisch: I’m 43.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay.

 

Steve Maisch: So yeah, my recovery time is a little bit longer.

 

Neely Quinn: Well, if you’re following this program it doesn’t seem like it’s that much longer than Daniel Woods. You’re still doing a lot.

 

Steve Maisch: Yeah.

 

Neely Quinn: Thank you for that. I really appreciate it. I’m going to write that out for people just so they know what kind of your philosophy is, if you don’t mind.

 

Steve Maisch: Yeah. Oh no, not all.

So I mean, if you think about the underlying philosophy there it’s more of a nonlinear periodized program so your percentage in these first three weeks, you’re doing – let’s see: one, two, three, four, five strength workouts. What you want to do maybe in the next three weeks is shift to more strength endurance workouts than strength.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay.

 

Steve Maisch: See what I’m saying? You’re kind of always incorporating the strength in there.

 

Neely Quinn: How much stronger do you think somebody could get in three weeks? I mean, what could this do for somebody?

 

Steve Maisch: In three weeks you’re going to be pushing it. This would be more of a top off. I would say you’d want to do six weeks, but you could do these three weeks back-to-back, you know? You could just kind of repeat it.

Roughly, it takes about six workouts to really see some gains and then in the next – so that’ll basically put you in for the next three weeks. After the first three weeks, you’ll be in a good zone to really be making the gains. That’s where you’ll see/that’s where the magic is going to happen.

 

Neely Quinn: [laughs] Yeah, but not in the first three weeks. So people shouldn’t expect to do three weeks of a program and then take a week off and be like – or not a week off but have a lower week and then try to perform and make huge gains.

 

Steve Maisch: No. You’re probably, actually, going to be pretty worked after those three weeks. Yeah, you’re not going to see those gains happening until week four, week five, week six, which is sort of the idea of the progression. You want to keep progressing through that.

 

Neely Quinn: Because your body is still adapting. Does it take a certain number of workouts for your body to adapt? Why would you say that we would be exhausted or be pretty worked after those three weeks but after six weeks it wouldn’t be like that?

 

Steve Maisch: Because your body is going to adapt. Your body is going to start to adapt, depending on how used to training you are. If you’re totally new to fingerboarding, like you’ve never done it, you’re going to go and you’re going to test your one-rep max and be like, ‘Oh, you know, I can hang 50 pounds from me on this half-crimp edge,’ and then you’re going to go back and try to repeat that workout a couple of days later and you’re not going to be able to do it. It’s going to zap you for a week or two.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay.

 

Steve Maisch: If you’re more used to training like this, really specifically and focused, you’ll adapt much more quickly. The idea is those first three weeks are going to get your body to adapt and then the next three weeks is when you’re going to see the progression. You’re going to see the increase in your strength levels.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. Don’t mind my dog lapping up water behind me. [laughs]

What about weight room? What things do you suggest for people to do with weights, if any?

 

Steve Maisch: I’m a fan, sort of, of weights. I really enjoy lifting weights myself but as far as benefitting one’s climbing? You want to keep the weight room pretty low volume. You’ve got a couple of basic lifts, so the deadlift is really good. I think a pushing motion so sort of a push-press, something along those lines, is a good one, then front squats are also really good in the weight room.

In the weight room I tend to focus more on rings than lifting weights. I think rings with body weight or a weight vest are much more applicable to climbing and if you combine them with a deadlift then you get a lot of the same hormonal benefits that you see with weight training.

 

Neely Quinn: How so?

 

Steve Maisch: So, when you do a heavy deadlift you’re basically recruiting basically every muscle in your body and that releases a lot of growth hormones. I don’t know if you’ve ever deadlifted at all but you can go out and deadlift heavy that day, you’re going to have a great night’s sleep that night because you’re releasing all of these growth hormones and serotonin and stuff.

You get the benefit of that maximum recruitment with that deadlift and then the ring training is a bit more specific.

 

Neely Quinn: When you’re doing ring training – actually, let’s talk more about the deadlift. I know that Steve Bechtel talked about this and pretty much everyone – Eric Horst talks about it – can you just talk, one more time, about how it will benefit a climber?

 

Steve Maisch: Okay, so it will benefit a climber because what it does, with the deadlift if you go heavy, it’s going to recruit a large amount of muscle fibers. What this will help with climbers is when you’re doing a move like a compression move or bouldering or something like that, you’re really recruiting a lot more than just your forearms and your biceps. You’re recruiting your glutes, you’re recruiting your hamstrings, your spinal erectors, all of these muscles all over your body are recruited and compressing that move, doing that compression move.

The deadlift, what it does is it forces all of those muscles to fire at once. They all recruit at the same time and it’s a great exercise for your core. We like to think of core as being your abs but it’s, I don’t know what the percentage is, but a much larger percentage of it is your back, your glutes, your lower lats, things like that are what really drive your ability to keep your feet on the wall and squeeze with your heels and your feet so a deadlift is going to improve that recruitment. It’s going to improve your core tension, your contact strength, all of that stuff.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. I get it.

 

Steve Maisch: So climbers should deadlift. You don’t do a lot of reps so you don’t get all swole. You just do maximum five reps. When I do deadlifts I usually don’t even go to five. I usually stick to three or under.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. So for anybody who doesn’t know what a deadlift is can you just describe it really quickly?

 

Steve Maisch: Yeah, you basically – well, this is in kind of poor form but you’re bending over and picking something up. When you do it correctly you’re kind of squatting down and picking something up.

 

Neely Quinn: It seems like you could do it very easily with poor form.

 

Steve Maisch: Oh yeah. You can do it real easy with poor form. If you are, just go on out there and if you’re going to the weight room right now and just load up a bunch of weight and try to deadlift, I would say start out with what’s called a ‘Sumo deadlift’ and you might have to Google this one. A Sumo deadlift, you’re basically grabbing the bar in between your legs and your legs are kind of spread apart and what that does is it puts a lot more of the weight/it puts a lot more of the burden of the lift on the initial couple of inches, getting it off the ground, as opposed to a standard deadlift which puts a lot more burden of the lift when you get it above your knees.

What that does is you go out and you’re going to have poor form and you try to Sumo deadlift you’re not going to be able to get the weight off the ground so you’re not going to hurt yourself.

 

Neely Quinn: Oh, okay. Alright. I was going to ask how do people do this without – should they go to a Gold’s Gym and get a trainer to show them how to do this correctly? I mean, I…

 

Steve Maisch: They probably wouldn’t know how to do it at a Gold’s Gym. [laughs]

 

Neely Quinn: That was a bad example. Should they go to some/I meant something other than a climbing gym, where you can find a regular trainer? I mean, some climbing gyms have trainers who know what they’re doing in the weight room but a lot don’t and a lot don’t even have a weight room so what can we – can we watch videos on Youtube?

 

Steve Maisch: You can watch videos. If you are going to watch videos you’ve got to be careful there as well because you can get some schmuck who’s just going to do poor form as well, but I would say as far as climbing gyms, they should have weight rooms and I think the trainers in those climbing gyms should know how to do some of these moves so I would put the burden on your climbing gym to find somebody who knows how to do a deadlift correctly.

If not, you can Google it. Dan John is great. He has, I think, a couple of websites that sort of go through it and any of the Olympic – if you look at some of the Olympic coaches, they’ve got some stuff out there that train on Olympic lifts.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah, that’s true. So you would put deadlifts and maybe all of these things for the weight room in on a strength day? Or when would you do that and how many times a week?

 

Steve Maisch: Okay, so deadlifts, I would only go with about one time a week because I like to go really heavy and it just destroys your core tension. What you’re going to want to do is you can incorporate deadlifts with something like a fingerboard workout because then you’re training two sort of disparate parts of your body but you don’t want to train a deadlift and then the next day try to do a hard bouldering workout. Your core will be shot.

 

Neely Quinn: So it will be a day before a rest day.

 

Steve Maisch: At least. I would do it at the end, so say we’re in week two where we’re doing two strength workouts and the second one is followed by strength endurance and then two rest days, I would do my deadlifting on that second strength day and follow it with a 4×4 or some sort of more longer duration strength endurance then take two rest days and then come back and do a hangboard workout.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, so you do it at the end of the week, basically.

 

Steve Maisch: Yeah, yeah.

 

Neely Quinn: Before your two days off.

 

Steve Maisch: I mean again, with weights, I think they’re great, some of the lifts are great, but they shouldn’t take precedent over the more climbing-specific stuff.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, and you said push-press and front squats. How are front squats going to help us? Is it similar to the deadlift?

 

Steve Maisch: Exactly like the deadlift, yeah. It’s the same thing. The beauty of doing a front squat is that the weight’s in front of you. You end up recruiting a lot more of your glutes and your hamstrings and your erectors and all of these muscles, your obliques – all of that stuff to kind of hold the weight up there and then also, as you’re squatting down, if you’re front squatting and you’re using poor form the weight is just going to fall in front of you whereas if you put that weight on your back and you squat down and you’re using poor form, you’re going to probably push it back up and you’re going to be all hunched over and you can hurt your back and things. The front squat is a much safer alternative and I think it’s a better lift. You can’t do as much weight with it but I think it’s a better lift for a climber.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. So, who do you think should be doing these things in terms of ability, of climber, when they started climbing? Like, should a 5.9/5.10 climber, V-whatever, V2 climber be doing these kinds of things?

 

Steve Maisch: No. I think, you know, if you’re a 5.9 climber, go climbing. Then, that’s going to help you a lot more than any of these strength-specific stuff. You really need to – if you’re a reasonably athletic individual and you just go climbing, you’ll be climbing 5.12, with all of these gyms all over the place, you’ll be climbing 5.12 reasonably quickly. Then, once you’re in the middle 5.12 range, that’s when you might start thinking about climbing-specific training.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay.

 

Steve Maisch: The bouldering end of that, it depends. Bouldering is a bit different. I would say maybe more of a – I don’t like to put grades on it but like V7, V8 probably?

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah. I mean, that’s pretty strong. You wouldn’t think anything below that?

 

Steve Maisch: It depends. Again, if you’re climbing routes, like you’re climbing 5.13 routes then bouldering V4 then yeah, it’s time to really start doing some strength training because that’s a big discrepancy between your route climbing ability and your bouldering ability, so you need to increase your strength. In that case, I would say yeah, you should do some strength training but if you’re just bouldering and you’re out there bouldering V5, just keep going bouldering and you’re going to get up to V7 or V8.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah. Okay, so we’ve been talking for an hour. That went really fast. I always ask people at the end about diet. Do you have any quick suggestions for people about – or, not necessarily suggestions but even guidelines about diet and body weight?

 

Steve Maisch: I think – yeah, I’m not a nutritionist but I’ve found that, basically, equal parts fat, protein, and carbs is a pretty good climber’s diet. Roughly a third of each one of those. Good fats, not bad fats, you know things like fish oil, but I actually put saturated fats in the good fats zone as well.

 

Neely Quinn: Good. Me too.

 

Steve Maisch: So saturated fats are in there and the other classic, good fats. Then as far as body weight goes, I think that depends on the individual. I think a lot of climbers I see out there, a lot of elite climbers, don’t need to really lose any weight. They might cut down a little bit when competition season comes on or something like that and then you just want to sort of reduce your calories. You want to try to – that’s when it’s really important to have your training be focused if you’re reducing your calories because you don’t want to do any extraneous activity that’s going to be burning calories and burning your recovery ability.

 

Neely Quinn: Right. Yeah, it’s pretty hard to lose weight when you’re climbing six hours a day.

 

Steve Maisch: You know, if you’re training just eat a bunch but eat good proportions and I think that would be the way to sort of – that would be my advice for diet. I think most people out there are probably/you’re better off, as far as I’m concerned, getting stronger than losing weight. The more weight you lose, you’re going to hit a plateau. You can only lose so much weight and if you’re not doing the right things to get stronger, you’re just going to be stuck wherever you’re climbing when you’re light weight.

 

Neely Quinn: Yep. Alright, those seem practical.

Where can people find you? And, if somebody contacted you asking for a training program, are you able and willing to do that or are you pretty busy?

 

Steve Maisch: Right now I’m pretty busy. So, right now what I’m kind of working on, so, my site, stevemaischtraining.com (link no longer in service). I’m working on putting up sort of a do-it-yourself training program design so someone can go to the site – the site’s up but not this part. It isn’t on there yet. Someone should be able to go to the site, do a strength assessment on themselves, and then sort of design their program from there.

 

Neely Quinn: Are you having somebody program that for you or are you/is it going to be simpler than that?

 

Steve Maisch: What, on the website?

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah, on the site.

 

Steve Maisch: Oh no. I just use Weebly. It’s easy.

 

Neely Quinn: Oh, cool.

 

Steve Maisch: I mean, I know with our Skype troubles earlier I may seem a little computer illiterate but I know how to do some of it.

 

Neely Quinn: [laughs] I mean, Skype is a beast of it’s own.

Okay, that’s cool. When do you think that will be available for people?

 

Steve Maisch: Hopefully pretty soon, here in the next couple of weeks maybe.

 

Neely Quinn: Oh wow. And you’re…

 

Steve Maisch: I’ve got a lot of it written, I just haven’t finalized it.

 

Neely Quinn: That’s really cool. I would love to check that out when it’s ready. We can let people know about it on TrainingBeta. Well, we just did on TrainingBeta. [laughs]

Okay, and do you have a Facebook page or anywhere else where people can follow you as a trainer?

 

Steve Maisch: No, that’s it. Just that website.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay. So, you’re about to go, possibly, to Rifle if it’s not flooded.

 

Steve Maisch: Yeah, we’ll see.

 

Neely Quinn: And Noah’s Ark isn’t running through it.

 

Steve Maisch: Exactly. I’ll probably be in Maple or something.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah. So you’re route climbing? You’re focusing on route climbing right now?

 

Steve Maisch: Yeah, yeah. I decided I was going to try to get some fitness going.

 

Neely Quinn: Nice. So you trained a little bit differently this season?

 

Steve Maisch: Yeah, so I did a similar program but I emphasized more of the strength endurance stuff. I’ve been working on it all winter.

 

Neely Quinn: What are your goals out there?

 

Steve Maisch: I don’t know. I’ve climbed so little at Rifle that – you know, over the years I’ve gone for a weekend or a week and by the end of the week I finally get to the point where I can warm-up without getting totally pumped.

 

Neely Quinn: Yeah.

 

Steve Maisch: So I’ve never really managed to do anything difficult so I basically have the whole park to try to do stuff.

 

Neely Quinn: Well, I’ll see you out there sometime soon.

 

Steve Maisch: Nice.

 

Neely Quinn: Okay, well thank you so much. You’re obviously a really smart guy. I appreciate all this.

 

Steve Maisch: Thanks for having me on.

 

Neely Quinn: Yep. See ya.

Thanks so much for listening to that interview with Steve Maisch. Again, I’m your host, Neely Quinn and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. It’s super interesting for me to see how so many of these trainers – Bechtel, the Anderson brothers, Eric Horst, and everybody – have come to the same conclusions about a lot of things. I really like how Steve has done so much with such little resources at times so I hope that you guys get something out of that. If you’re one of those people who doesn’t really have a climbing gym or doesn’t really have the time to get into a climbing gym, maybe that will give you a little hope that you can do what you want on a six-foot wall.

Let’s see. Next week I’m going to be talking with Lisa Erickson. She’s ‘the climbing doctor’ and she’s a chiropractor. I’ve actually seen her in Boulder and she works on athletes of all kinds. She’s an athlete herself but she focuses on climbers and treats them with chiropractic and physical therapy and massage and dry-needling and gives them exercises to do to try to rehab and prevent injuries. She has a new book out that we’ll talk about that helps you with all of those things, too. So that’s next week.

I’m super excited. I think I’ve got interviews with Alex Megos and Nathaniel Coleman so hopefully those will be out soon. It will be really cool to hear about how those guys train to get so strong. Nathaniel Coleman, in case you don’t know, he just won – or not won. Actually, he did win one of the World Cups and then got second in another one so he’s kind of coming out of nowhere.

Let’s see. Other than that, I would like to mention that if you have any interest in nutrition for climbing, I haven’t written any books about that specifically for climbers however we do have a book on our site by Acacia Young and she’s a registered dietician and a climber. She’s a super psyched climber and she wrote this eBook all about how to eat properly on different diets, so she kind of goes through a bunch of ways of eating. She talks about being vegan, vegetarian, omnivore, paleo, and talks about how to optimize those diets for climbing. She talks about recovery, fueling for climbing, staying away from injury, and stuff like that so if you’re interested in that or you want more information just go to www.trainingbeta.com and under the ‘training programs’ tab is where you’ll find that nutrition guide.

We always have all kinds of training programs on the site for route climbers and boulderers and if you just want to learn about strength training and injury prevention, so yeah – www.trainingbeta.com and we love your support. As always, if you’d like to give me a review on iTunes for this show I would love that.

Other than that, I guess I will talk to you next week. Have a great week! Have fun climbing this weekend. I hope you get out and I’ll talk to you soon.

 

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