I’ve always tried to be an all round climber in terms of performance. But just because you spread yourself thinly across disciplines in performance doesn’t mean you should do the same in training. In this video about a lovely and hard project, I explore the results of an adventure in specialising to try and improve my skills as a generalist. It was a rough ride!

My course on climbing technique is out now on Altitude. As part of the launch week, I’m doing a live Q&A tomorrow night (August 5th). Please do join us!

Social media is geared up to distort the realities of training, detraining and breaking through plateaus. Sure, skills and milestones can be acheived quickly and it's important to see demonstrations of how effective a singular goal and plan to achieve it can be. However, some plateaus (not those caused by lack of training) are not generally broken in this way. I just posted up a new YouTube video exploring my own efforts to break a plateau, with a few very simple ideas that I try to keep in mind, which in my view are underrepresented on social. All told through the story of a winter of serial new routing in various lovely corners of the Scottish Highlands.

It's been a long time since I bought some new holds for the board. It was time for some fresh circuits and I go through my process for setting and designing the layout of the board.

A few weeks ago I picked up a mild A2 pulley injury in my finger. As many of you know, I wrote a whole chapter in Make or Break about finger injuries, but I thought I would make an episode showing you how I work around it to keep training despite the finger injury. Obviously, copying exactly what I do here is not the objective - every injury is different. It's about the general principle of working around injuries and how you might go about that. I hope it comes across in the episode that finding workarounds allows you to stay in better shape and remove a lot of the psychological pain of getting injured. I’ll make another video further down the recovery process, and if you have questions, do leave a comment and I’ll try and address them.

The 'quality' of recovery from training will determine the size of your gains. But this is a tricky thing to pin down. In this video I explain what makes a good rest day activity and why rest quantity is always a moving target.

Planning endurance training, like any other aspect of physical training demands that you consider basic physiology, individual characteristics, resources available and the demands of the task you are training for. With all this considered, precise prescriptions are not always possible. In the main, I try to err on the side of identifying key priorities and arranging things to make sure those are well covered. My routine when I was training for Rhapsody was one of the simplest plans I’ve ever followed and was also a time in my climbing when I made some of the most sustained progress (excluding ‘noob gains’ as a beginner). In this video I describe what I did and possible reasons why it worked so well.

In the spring, we have to get our leading head back on. Depending on how you choose your routes, mileage can either train or detrain your confidence. In this video, I take you through how I choose climbs that get me ready for bigger leads as the season progresses.

Many climbers are unaware just how much their ability to swap feet efficiently is holding them back. Poor technique tends to make climbers search for alternatives, which usually make climbs a lot harder. In this video I go through the handful of things you need to know to swap feet accurately and extremely consistently.

Doing this exercise really accelerated my confidence in judging whether my trad placements would be likely to hold a fall.

I made a follow along hang board workout, 30 minutes long and pitched for beginner/intermediate climbers (two handed hangs). In the rests in between the hangs I discuss various aspects of adjusting the hang board loading depending on your level and climbing goals. Enjoy the workout!

This is very similar to the basic workout I used when I started fingerboarding and went from 8b+ to 9a in a couple of years.

A guide to how to actually learn climbing technique, from hard practicalities to underlying principles.

Coaches and sport scientists are often trying to quantify aspects of sport and there’s good reasons for this. But climbing technique is hopelessly complex with endless variation in movement. How could we go about quantifying it, or even thinking about it in any kind of structured manner? With difficulty. In this video I introduce some simple ideas for the way I think about technique that helps me to learn it and monitor my learning.

Maddy and Ollie at Lattice Training recently invited me to their HQ in Chesterfield for their finger strength and endurance testing protocol. It was fun and interesting to see how I compare to their ever growing database of high level climbers for these basic measures of strength and endurance. As you can see in the video, it yielded a couple of surprising results for me and a little food for thought for my general approach to climbing goals in the future.

My annoying tennis elbow improved enough to start bouldering regularly again a month ago. Since then I feel like its stronger every session. A good feeling. In this session I keep on with working through the established problems on my board, building up to starting on the projects. At the end I’m getting close to my Pjs on the fingerboard, which is kind of surprising to me, but great! I also go through some of your questions about training from my last full session vlog episode. If you have more, leave a comment here on my YouTube.

BTW Did you subscribe to my YouTube channel yet? Lots more videos sharing climbing, training, nutrition and nice routes and mountains coming in 2022.

The first in a series on how to climb trad, from the absolute basics right through to E11. Its a huge subject and not one where taking shortcuts tends to work out well in the long term. In this video, we start easy, and fun!

My research questionnaire: https://glasgow-research.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/dietary-patterns-of-rock-climbers THANK YOU so much for your time to participate. Note that the questionnaire will only be live for a short time in July 2020.

In the video I above I discuss some thoughts on my own study of nutrition over the past few years and the research I’m currently doing. To complete the research I need your help and I’m asking climbers over 16 who climb regularly to complete a questionnaire about their diet.

The speech by Austin Bradford Hill I mentioned in the post is here:

HILL, A. B. 1965. THE ENVIRONMENT AND DISEASE: ASSOCIATION OR CAUSATION? Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 58, 295-300. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14283879/

More information about how to participate in the brief video below:

A decent discussion of the principles I apply to structure my bouldering sessions, both during lockdown and at any other time.

Many of you are getting to grips with the hangboard for the first time right now. Here is a deep dive on most of the priorities to think about to get the most out of the tool and stay uninjured. My Hangboard: The Edge.

In this video I reference a review of studies comparing high and low loads for strength training. If you would like to read the study, it is here.

In an age of lots of information about training for climbing, so many either get injured or fail to make progress because of the basics. Right now, as I come back from an injury, I am building a foundation of physical capability. A foundation of sleep, recovery, gradually increasing load and consistency.

A core principle of doing well in sport (or other things) is to find ways to turn bad circumstances large and small to your advantage as much as possible. So many training decision pathways start from this principle, or at least should do.