One of the fundamental principles of training is that it needs to be measurable.  Measuring your training lets you can gradually increase the load to ensure you are continually overloading your system.

However, with climbing, getting accurate measurements can be a little tricky.  The reason for this is that workouts like bouldering sessions aren’t as easily quantified as things like the sets, reps, and weights in traditional weight lifting.  However, by taking steps like keeping a training journal, we can start to quantify our training and ensure that we are progressing as needed.

Today, we want to highlight a new app, available for both iPhone and Android, called V-Points.  Designed by a fellow climber, Morgan May, V-Points is an easy to use and highly affordable app for logging your bouldering sessions.

“Tracking training progression for climbing is a little difficult compared to most sports, V-Points is a pretty simple solution to that problem. Every climb gets a point value assigned to it, the harder the grade, the more points it’s worth. When you head out to the gym or crag for a training session, you just log all of your climbs by tapping a plus for every problem or climb you finish. The app tallies up your score and tells you what your ‘average grade’, your ‘total points’ and your ‘total number of climbs’ has been for the session. Log those three numbers from day to day and week to week. If they’re going up, you’re probably doing something right, if they’re trending down or staying constant then you might want to think about where you’re focussing your efforts. Or, you can just log all your climbs and then flip over to the plots view and look at the bar graph. Because EVERYBODY likes bar graphs!” – Morgan May

V-Points – A Climbing Tracking App

V-Points, as it is really only designed to log bouldering sessions, is not a perfect tool for measuring all types of climbing training.  However, V-Points does do a great job of quantifying what you are actually doing during your bouldering sessions.  Combined with a training journal, V-Points is definitely a valuable tool.

Now, because it relies on calculating averages, V-Points doesn’t do a great job and differentiating between different types of bouldering sessions such as a limit bouldering session versus volume day.  However, this issue can clearly be overcome with a little extra thought and a training journal.  Additionally, at a mere $0.99, V-Points is another tool that can help give you some insight into your training.  Why not check it out?

Get a version for yourself by clicking through below!

iOS: V-Points – A Climbing Tracking App

Android: V-Points – A Climbing Tracking App

(photo courtesy of Sahxyapps)

Other Articles You Might Like:

• Climbing Meta – Training Tracker
• The Value of a Training Log for Climbing
• Keeping a Climbing Tick List
• Train Wreck: 5 Ways to Derail Your Training