hi andy just would like your advice on the best way to get fit for winter climbing this year ,I did loads of running last year up to seven miles twice a week for about seven weeks before the winter took hold.but still struggled up ben nevis moonlight gully as well as others.Being out of work means saving my cash until winter comes so I’m restricted on i can do, any advice greatly appreciated,look forward to your talk in leeds .take care shaun
Hi Shaun
It’s funny to be giving advice on fitness, seeing as I’m probably the most unfit climber you could meet, but seeing as I’ve been trying harder over the last year (I trained a lot for my attempt to solo El Cap in a day), then here’s my advice.
First off if you want to be crap, struggle and get get by (the British way) ie staggering to the car in the dark, late, and so knackered you think you’re going to die, then don’t bother training! This is the approach a lot of climbers take, and it’s all part of the fun of it (including getting pissed, staying out late, setting off up the Ben without going to Bed). The problem with this approach is unless you’re naturally fit (having a physical job is the key) then said climbing is going to be no fun, and also leave you exposed (a knackered climber can’t look after themselves or their mates).
The other option is to train hard for the winter, get super fit, climbing faster, safer and having more fun.
Now training can take a few forms:
A: You feel like you’re training - but really you’re not - and so feel let down in first contact with the real strains of mountaineering.
B: A purely climbing approach (pull ups and dead hangs from tools), that makes you feel strong, but in fact is a waste of time, as by the time you’ve postholed through a mile of deep snow you’re so knackered you can’t even lift your tools.
C: The ‘300 aka Gym Jones” approach, a near Spartan focus and discipline, thousands of pull ups and power screams, all set to some hardcore sound track (probably “Bodies”), guaranteed to make a young and untrained climber horribly fit and horribly injured (best leave this kind of stuff to thoes who know what they’re doing).
D: Lastly there is ‘Binman training’ (copyright andy Kirkpatrick 2011)
Want to find a very fit mountaineer, well look no further than you’re regular bin man (or bin person). This garbage athlete has to move fast, lifting, pushing, grabbing, grappling, climbing, bending and avoiding bin yuck every day (apart from weekends and Xmas). I doubt bin man training will ever replace Zumba, but I hope you see what I mean.
To be a bit more serous, you need to view engaging mountaineering/alpinism as a battle, something that is draining psychically and psychology, and train accordingly. Doing two runs a week is not going to do it, and ideally you need to train way beyond what you expect to meet when climbing (so 110%). You need to work on your cardio (so running is good, as long as you push yourself), but more importantly you need to focus on your strength and stamina (primarily your legs until you get on the harder routes). If you want to be a pro you need to be training twice day (by which I mean Steve House, Jon Bracey standard). If you want to be very good, then once a day. If it’s ‘just good’ then every other day. And for ‘not bad’ then twice a week.
No training session should be the same, so running the same speed on the same route twice a week is a waste of time. A hard sixty minutes of jumping, push ups and sprints will do far more than the time it takes to run seven miles.
At the same time you need to build your training up week by week to avoid injury, and avoid anything to destructive to your knees, and ideally you need a training partner, as well as knowing when to stop.
At the moment I’m doing a very fast walk uphill with 20kg of water, which takes about fifty minutes, then emptying the water and running back down again. I do this every other day so as to build strength in my legs. On every third day I do a one hour run as fast as I can, and every two weeks I’ll run 30km at a steady pace, alway ready to slow and walk if my knees feel bad. On every other day I’ll go to the gym and do a mixture of exercises (no machines) with a big focus on simple exercise that are both strength building and knackering: pull ups (which I’m crap at), push ups, jumping, and kettle bells (clean and press etc), as well as bench press and squats. I mix ladders (so 10 reps, 9 reps, 8 reps working down), trad sets (3 sets of 10reps) and timed sets (as many push ups in five minutes or one pull up every 20 sec for 20 minutes). The idea is to change it every time, flipping between a focus on arms and legs. The idea is to build overall strength and conditioning, as that’s what you need when mountaineering, not the ability to do one arm pull ups.
I guess the bottom line is to do as much as possible as you can, without getting injured.
Having worked with a lot of army guys I also think working on a semi military PT focus could also work well (I guess what I describe above is like that), as this is designed to build fitness in a controlled and safe way (I’m told this is a great book on the subject).
For some inspiration have a look at Mountain Athlete, Gym Jones, Stephen Koch and Steve House’s training blog.
4 Comments
As I understand it, Steve House’s approach is very different than the Mountain Athlete/ Gym Jones/ Crossfit approach. For one thing, it’s expedition centered and so is a year long process peaking for the month you need it in some far off place. My climbing partner used it to train for Denali and got in super shape - he just would never get tired. The Crossfit approach gets you in good general condition (I did it pretty seriously for 3 years and now do my own variation) but is not appropriate for a month long effort. In addition XFit is a good way to injure because there is no periodization in the approach. I believe Mountain Athlete and Gym Jones are trying to address this problem, but I just read their websites - so don’t really know. Whatever - you don’t have enough time to do anything other than the high intensity interval training offered by the XFit approach. It will work. But be careful. I injured on a regular basis doing it.
I think the bin man workout is very true. Some years ago, while waiting a few months between my degrees, I spent a few months working as a labourer on building sites. I went out to the Alps for a week at the end of that - I hadn’t climbed in years and had done no dedicated training, but felt surprisingly fit and strong.
On hindsight I probably used to walk several miles every day just carrying stuff around the building site. If you haven’t worked as a labourer, it often involves just carrying stuff around all day like a human fork-lift. Sometimes very heavy objects (e.g. stone slabs or sacks of gravel), but often “semi-heavy” cumbersome objects (8 by 4 plywood sheets etc) very repetitively over many hours. A typical task might be that a truck shows up with a delivery of two tons of gravel in hundred pound sacks, and you just have to run in and out of the site non stop carrying the sacks until the truck is unloaded - there is a time pressure because the truck is blocking the street and needs to leave, so you just can’t stop. If you’ve ever mixed cement by hand with a shovel you’ll know its an amazing cardio workout. By the end (the construction job was behind schedule) I was doing 12 hour shifts 6 days per week plus a half day on sunday.
I found I developed a rather different kind of practical strength than I ever got lifting weights in a gym (even years later when I was squatting 200kg with gym training I haven’t felt i had the practical awkward object strength and endurance I had when I was a skinny building site labourer). My hands also got stronger and more rugged. After a couple of months I was able carry objects up a flight of stairs under one arm, which I had been scared (of injury) and struggled to carry between two people when I started (e.g. 8 by 4 ft steel gratings). I started to enjoy it and would often carry other people’s stuff for them to get extra training by the end of it, as well as doing chin-ups from the scaffolding between tasks.
I think in one of joe brown’s books (or maybe a whillans bio) it was mentioned that the working class lads were always much stronger than the university climbers because of their daily manual labour jobs.
Anyways I’d recommend it! Unless you specifically enjoy doing heavy weightlifting as a sport in its own right (as I have done in the past), there is absolutely no need whatsoever to use a commercial gym. The idea that you need to “go to the gym” is simply a bullshit marketing scheme which relieves the middle classes of their spare cash each month.
Anyone can get as fit and strong as they want with 6ft of floor space and a pair of old gym shoes. Pushups, chinups, high rep bodyweight squats, running on the street, walking up and down stairs with a pack, can get you as super fit as any climber on the planet. Army’s don’t use gyms to turn skinny working class teenagers into tough young men as fit as professional athletes - they simply make them run up and down hills with a back pack all day and do loads of pushups.
What Andy says about progression is also absolutely essential - keep a record of what you can do and make sure you are doing a bit more every week over a period of months. If you are still running the same distance in the same time, or still lifting the same weight the same number of times as you were a month ago, then you haven’t actually made any progress with your training have you?!
Great advice - it reminded me of a story about the Army going to Everest, and some sports science guy had them all up to Leeds uni. In front of all thoes skinny army blokes the main sports Ed guy said “Well lads I’m probably the fittest man you’ll ever meet’. Anyway they all went for a run so he could check their fitness levels and they left him in the dust. Turned out they were all SAS guys (who tend look like wippets). Not sure if it’s true, but I think the new trend in ‘max pain’ training is something the military (Paras, Marines, SP etc) has been doing since the second world war (I hope I don’t sound like an army nut, but as keep meeting such soldiers and I’m always impressed with their psychical and mental toughness).
Great post Andy and some useful replies too. You suggest these kind of workouts for alpinism/mountaineering - is there anything you’d change for getting fit for an El Cap route?