That Spanish shit works, promise.

Last training post for awhile.

I had my doubts about the volume and intensity routine, (the idea being to radically increase what I was capable of per day/session) but apparently it works. Very effectively. I only wish I had time to put it to use on some rocks *sigh. I now feel confident I can overcome periods of stagnation and continue to increase finger strength, technique and strength endurance.

After having flogged myself for 6 weeks (at least) and seeing no real progress besides a few extra moves on long strength endurance probs and being able to do more problems per session, I called a halt to it. No more 5 days on 1 day off. I shifted to one on - one off and began cycling to work to keep my new level of fitness up. Basically a massive reduction in the amount of work done by the forearms and upper body. First thing I noticed was my finger strength seemed to have nose dived, which was disheartening. I had hoped to come straight out of the heavy training all guns blazing, but I was weak on a fingerboard despite being much better at using holds whilst on the wall, and it's all about the fingerboards at the end of the day. So I started doing hangs every training session, but just the open crimp hang which is my weakest grip but also the grip my hands assumes most often when climbing (stupid hands).

So 3 weeks into it I have crushed my cellar board project, slipped off 1-4-7 on smalls with my good arm, done plastic problems easily that previously I could barely pull onto and this during the busiest period of work so far in my career. So I reckon those Spaniards and the westside barbell crew have it right, high intensity AND high volume will change your body, push through the psychological side of seeing nothing for all your efforts then back off and wait for the power to come through.

But I have not climbed a fucking thing as I have been working my tezzas off so what do I know?

I have some time off over Christmas perhaps a rock or two will be ascended.

The heat is off.

Me in my house chatting to my Dad about my radiators, boiler and how he is doing at golf (very well apparently).

I have not had central heating in my house for at least a week. Its Baltic.

Finger strength makes the climber. Its a commodity I am short of, I have improved since I started but feel like I am wanting to step into the level of problems like Rockatrocity in the cave or Mongolito out in The Forest, and that level requires strong fingers. At the moment it feels out of reach to me and I want to do something about it. I have decided that the preparatory stage of increasing my general physical preparedness and having done some specific work to increase my measly forearm endurance is over. I will now use my fitness to do mostly specific finger strength work and do only a maintenance dose of volume. I have seen some strong fingered people and at least one of them got that way by fingerboarding a shit load. So I intend to fingerboard a shit load.

My skin is split on the 1st joint of 5 fingers at present, mostly this infuriates me because climbing with tape on is really hard and where the splits are makes it extremely painful to climb on any hold bigger than a centimetre or so, and I cant climb on holds that small. However the fingerboard is relatively painless and unaffected by tape apart from the pockets (which I am reasonably strong on anyway). So until my skin grows back me and my fingerboard are gonna be bum-buddies.

I trained with fingerless possum fur gloves on this morning because the house was so cold. The Compo look is at an all time high especially when dangling from expertly carved wood.

VOLUME 2, Increasing the volume.

Being a plastic boulderiser at the moment is allowing me to get a lot of climbing done. I am trying to hit 1200 moves per week with the aim to increase that to 2000. I couldn't get this done without the plastic whilst being a ninetofiver. 1200- 2000 moves per week should be enough volume without diluting the intensity too much, most of the moves should be done between 60-85% of max. It seems like the higher volume is a good toughen the fuck up process, its tiring but I feel like my recovery is improving massively. I think the total volume I have done per week has increased from around 400 moves to around 1000, this has happened over the course of 10 weeks. This week I aim to hit the 1200 moves mark.

Another thing I have been doing for the past 3 weeks is using a 4kilo weight belt to do all my climbing, the idea is to increase my finger strength but it has the added benefit of working fuck out of my core. Especially when doing the horizontal moves on the french 8a skip problem at the works. One of the most basic statements in The Science and Practice of Strength Training is that often the fastest way to improve sports performance is to increase resistance in the main activity. So hopefully the weight belt will do just that. On basic moves and campussing I can imagine that increasing the added weight to only have positive effects.

I will have to go do some climbing outdoors soon and see if this experiment has been worthwhile, but I reckon there will be a long transmutation (throwing jargon atchya) period, as in it might take awhile for the benefits to come through.

Paxti does around 2000 moves with a weight belt on in the video Progressions, but I am guessing by the holds he is using that he is work well under 65% of his max, could it be as low as 30-40%? if so he is basically doing restoration training and working mostly aerobically. This type of training whilst not adding to his power directly will be adding to his ability to handle higher loads of intensity for longer and recover more quickly. So he can do more campus sessions and more strength endurance sessions as a result which raise his max, which in turn allows him to raise his restoration/aerobic threshold.

I reckon anyway... just trying to make sense of it all again.

Home sweet home board.

I rested yesterday and got some decent kip. I managed to watch 4 episodes of Battlestar Galactica too. Today I went to see my parents and nephew but managed a compact session on the board. I have had 3 sessions on it recently after adding some new bleaustone pockets (mint) and some pinches (impossible). I have been doing the same rough workout each time. Minimal rests of 30-90 seconds and 50 problems most of which are easy but themed around a grip position. So tonight I did around 10 undercut problems, 20 pocket problems and the rest were trying to use crimps (recovering from a slight finger niggle).

Obviously you can;t do your hardest ever boulder with just 30 seconds rest but changing grip positions and most problems being 3-4 moves allows me to recover enough to maintain a decent standard. It is wise to remember that if you fully recover between sets or blocs you will get the best out of your attempts however you are using the same muscle fibres, if you reduce your rest periods you are forcing your muscles to use those bone idle fibres that would otherwise just be dormant. Reducing rest periods is a great tool for improvement, especially on exercises that have a great potential for plateau such as campussing. Reducing the rest between sets increases the intensity whereas reaching 1-4-7 could be months away from being possible.

I did another random bore - sorry x

Wresting the rest.

The biggest problem I have with training is 'REST'. I work during the day as a concept artist and find this quite taxing mentally, I then go to the wall on the evening and try to pull hard and get something done, then it ought to be bed time. But is it fuck, after work and training I demand some time to unwind and as such push my recovery back too far. If you train hard you need 10 hours sleep approx, its 11.30 now and I am just beginning to unwind. So 10 hours from whenever I feel ready to sleep is probably half way through tomorrow. Does anyone have any coping strategies for this shit? Is there anyway to give your best to 2 things? Mebbe this will pass when I get accustomed to this new level of intensity and volume? But the sleep/rest problem is always going to be a problem. I have struggled with regular hours since school, I hate going to bed and hate getting up. When on holiday I can allow myself to go to bed, no doubt because I don't feel pressured for time? Anyways...

I trained really well on Monday, I was crushing and wore a weight belt during the crushage. Tonight I had to take the weight belt off along with any intentions of crushage and call it a day, I had nothing.

I had 2 role models for sleep as a child, my father recently slept through my dog jumping on him in the night and scrabbling around on the bed;and my mother who is a light sleeper but manages well no doubt as she has worked desk jobs and uses less energy than my tractor fixing padre. I would love to have adopted his sleeping habits. He is no doubt 2 hours in to REM sleep by now, muttering "bastards" and farting so loud that my mother can hear him from downstairs where she sits, still not ready for bed.

I think my brother is going to ask me to be his eldest sons godfather, this of course would be a great honour, but the falseness of promising to look after this child I love under the auspices of a church I don't believe in seems absurd. I would quite happily sign legally binding documents in the highest court of this land to say I would be my nephews legal guardian in the unthinkable event. Of course I will say yes but wish I could be saying yes to something I could honestly believe in.

I drew some nice shit today, I wish I could show youse guys but the BBC would probably rape me more than they do with their fucking license fee, fucking Chris Moyles gets paid out of our money, cunt.

Another plus, I am going to some wacky arse Halloween do on Saturday with burlesque, trapeze and probably some fucking clown shoe escapades. Bingo the clowno.

Beauty art, smart.

You should check these out. Top Dog is awesome.

It's been a long time.

Since I last posted I entered a spell of recurring skin problems and frustration. I wanted to train hard on the motherboard and get some Rich Simpson style power. All I managed was some huge flappers, split skin and worn tips and a high level of frustration hearing how people could manage to do double sessions regularly and I can barely manage a single session without my hands bleeding. At about the same time I was finishing researching strength training, mostly by reading Zatsiorsky and the practical applications of the Westside Barbell guys who are mostly powerlifters but they train athletes from many different sports to increase their athleticism. Also the philosophy coming out of Gym Jones, which helped James Litsz get ready for his ascent of Warpath.

What these guys have in common is General Physical Preparedness (GPP) is a priority, doing a large volume of hard work. This is done to increase the amount of hard training the body can handle so that you can do a higher volume of Special Physical Preparation. So whilst doing sprints, circuit training or weights may not make your fingers stronger it should help you to do an extra set on the fingerboard or an extra campus board session and still recover so you can do a high load the next day. Of course you could do the high volume of work the way most of our climbing legends did by spending hours climbing everyday, this would have the same effect. You increase the amount of volume you can handle thus increasing the intensity you can cope with.

So this is what I have been attempting, the thing is it depresses the quality of your workouts a little, its quite hard to see that you are not able to attain previous bests. At the moment I cant campus at my best or boulder at my best but I can do much, much more at a quite high level. The intention is that as I get more accustomed to the high level of work I can start getting past previous levels, then when I have a project I can reduce the volume of work and allow myself to recover fully which should result in super-accommodation.

Right that's enough yawn time for now, but there is more to come about weights and how I will attempt to use the conjugate method.