Route climbing has its own unique set of techniques, strategies, and training considerations. At times, route climbing can often feel casual. Afterall, a day at the crag doing routes well within your ability is simple enough and downright fun.

However, things get more complicated when you start pushing your limits route climbing. Ultimately, this can be on sport routes or trad climbs, redpointing longterm projects or trying to onsight challenging routes. No matter what the style, when you push your limits a refined approach becomes more and more important.

To help you fine-tune your approach to route climbing, here are the top 5 route climbing articles from the TrainingBeta Blog. They cover a wide range of topics from how to warm up properly for a route session, to how to improve your route climbing training habits, and to how more effecient climbing can improve your endurance. Give them a read yourself. They are full of helpful information that can help you take your route climbing to the next level.

• How To Warm Up for A Route Session

  • “It’s hard to make yourself properly warm up for a route climbing session. It’s just so much quicker and easier to walk up to your project, do a few jumping jacks (or not), and then start trying hard routes. Well, I can say from personal experience and from the experiences of many people I’ve trained with, that warming up is an essential part to both being able to try your hardest, and avoiding injury.” – Seth Lytton

• The Top 5 Bad Gym Habits of Route Climbers

  • “If you want to improve, you should definitely not go to the gym to just go climbing. If your goal is to treat the gym as “training” for climbing, then you’ll have to structure it differently than you do your outdoor sessions. If your normal routine is to warm up, sample a few climbs, see how the project “feels” today, and then do 3 laps on the same 5.10… STOP. Do something different. Anything. Spend the night working on a project. Spend it on vertical topropes instead of leading the roof again. Go bouldering. And whatever you’re doing, try hard. Learn something and take note of what you learned. This doesn’t have to be an endless treadmill. If you do it right, it could get you somewhere.” – Kris Hampton

• How to Rest Between Redpoint Burns

  • “How much rest?”

    “There are a lot of variables, though. For instance, how close you are to sending. If I’m really close to sending something, I’m going to give myself more rest between redpoint burns just to make sure I have as much energy as possible to send next go. Generally for me that’s about 40 minutes or longer. Sometimes I time it.” – Katy Dannenberg 

• Attack and Defend – Tips for Effective Resting

  • “There is no escaping the pump, but many climbers are too quick to blame a lack of endurance for their aching forearms. In reality, missing rests and poor mid-route recovery strategies are more likely causes. It is easy to become absorbed—by the sequence, placing protection, etc. You can forget to switch on the “separate brain” that deals with resting, and neglect to think about flushing out the pump until too late. Conversely, your aim should be to take every opportunity to prevent it setting in, rather than waiting and trying to cope.” – Chris Ketchum

Cover photo: Rob Jensen on Don’t Call Me Dude 5.13c ; courtesy of Matt Pincus | @mpincus87