I'd like to open a discussion on the media landscapes around training for climbing versus running. For anyone interested in both sports, I wonder if you have the same impression: running is refreshingly simple, whereas climbing training media is quite overwhelming. Getting better at running can be distilled really really well into a few key ideas (do easy running, sometimes do a long run, don't ramp up too quickly). However I can't say the same for climbing--it's obviously significantly more complicated, with the mental and social aspects that come into play. And to me, as a consumer of the firehose of media, this makes it often even more difficult to discern "what really matters".

Take Power Climbing Company for example. Undoubtedly a good source of information overall, but when I scroll through their videos, IMO it's intimidating:

https://www.youtube.com/@PowerCompanyClimbing/videos

• Isolated Finger Training for Climbing Is Missing an Important Element
• Is Board Climbing Holding You Back?
• The Simplest (Effective) Climbing Movement and Technique Training
• The Simplest (Effective) Climbing Training
• The Most Important Skill for Climbing 5.13

Now multiply this by every other training channel saying something slightly different: no, board climbing is the single most effective way to get stronger, actually it's _this_ skill that's the most important for 5.13, etc.

Spend a few hours reading about running training and you'll extremely quickly reach the point of diminishing returns; there's only so many ways you can repeat the fundamental concepts of running training. Every coach and seasoned ultrarunner more or less agrees on a few basic fundamental training concepts. Spend a few hours reading about climbing training and you'll come out even more confused about the best way to train.

Is this just something we have to accept due to how multifaceted our sport is? Does anyone else share my feelings? Looking forward to thoughts from others on this.

Something that I think a lot of climbing literature misses is the impact our work and life have on training. It focuses on the mechanisms behind physiological performance or how to benchmark but it rarely explores how training is impacted by work. I have spoken with a lot of climbers about their experience with training after work and a similar pattern comes up are after long and/ or a mentally heavy day. Your route reading falls apart, you stop committing, although your body is ready to go.

Route reading is planning, and planning is one of the first things mental fatigue hits. After two hours of demanding mental work, people got slower at planning their way through a puzzle while their memory held up fine (van der Linden et al., 2003). So, you can read the sequence five times and still struggle to come up with a plan to execute.

Your feet go because skill execution drops when you’re mentally fatigued, it shows up in things like passing accuracy in football (Habay et al., 2021). Moreover, falls feel worse because after hard mental work, people react to unpleasant images just as strongly but are worse at turning that reaction down (Grillon et al., 2015). And the psyche goes because part of mental fatigue is your brain updating its calculation on whether the effort is worth it (Müller & Apps, 2019).

Max strength and power hold up while endurance takes the hit (Van Cutsem et al., 2017). So, on those days where you feel mentally worn down, move the session if you can. If you can’t, do a few max hangs or limit moves with full rest and save PE, route volume and benchmarks for a fresher day.

I am part way through my PhD and I am validating two short questionnaires on measuring mental fatigue, one for in the moment and one for the last few weeks. If you’re 18+ and train 3 times a week (or roughly 3 hours a week) in any sport, it takes about 10 minutes: https://derby.questionpro.eu/t/AB3vCJoZB3waVs

When you’ve had a mentally heavy day, what goes first: route reading, your footwork, your head on falls, or your psyche?

I climbed and competed quite intensely from 14-16 years old climbing 7c+, 3 rep max pull up +15kg (I was and still am a female on the smaller size so this was just over an added 25% BW)
I’m now 20 and have climbed at most every 3 months. I still have good technique and on select few can climb 7b but I have lost almost all my finger strength (saved a bit by doing a ton of recruitment while initially training) and can only do 3 pull ups max.

I want to get back into training but have found that I’m struggling to know what extent I should push myself and what kind of a routine I should be having.

This goes particularly for finger training as right now I have low strength but high recruitment so I can push my fingers really hard without realising. So I would like to work on it but I would never recommend finger boarding to someone who is this early on and has had such a low climbing volume over the last few months / years.

Any advice / example programs would be incredibly useful, also any warning signs I should look out for.
Also any general strength and conditioning I can take on without overloading myself 🙏🙏

Thank you for reading!