In today’s Lattice Training podcast, coach Josh Hadley sits down with coach Cam Hartley to discuss three key areas;
Cam is not just one of the strongest members of the Lattice Training coaching team, but also has a BSc in Sports Science and wrote his research paper on the strength differences between the strongest and weakest hand. Since then he has begun a PhD on the impact of mental fatigue on health and performance in rock climbing athletes.
As Cam is a specialist in psychobiology and its relationship to performance, Josh and Cam start to explore the psychobiological model of endurance performance and its implications for training and performance. They also delve into the aerobic and anaerobic thresholds and the importance of training in specific zones to optimise endurance. So if you are psyched about training your endurance and improving performance, this is a great episode for you!
So whether you want to understand how to improve your endurance training, or just looking to debunk some climbing training myths, tune in to today’s show. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and more!
The Lattice jingle is brought to you by Devin Dabney, music producer of the outdoor industry who also hosts the American Climbing Project.
In today’s Lattice Training podcast, coach Josh Hadley sits down with coach Cam Hartley to discuss three key areas;
Cam is not just one of the strongest members of the Lattice Training coaching team, but also has a BSc in Sports Science and wrote his research paper on the strength differences between the strongest and weakest hand. Since then he has begun a PhD on the impact of mental fatigue on health and performance in rock climbing athletes.
As Cam is a specialist in psychobiology and its relationship to performance, Josh and Cam start to explore the psychobiological model of endurance performance and its implications for training and performance. They also delve into the aerobic and anaerobic thresholds and the importance of training in specific zones to optimise endurance. So if you are psyched about training your endurance and improving performance, this is a great episode for you!
So whether you want to understand how to improve your endurance training, or just looking to debunk some climbing training myths, tune in to today’s show. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and more!
The Lattice jingle is brought to you by Devin Dabney, music producer of the outdoor industry who also hosts the American Climbing Project.
josh (00:00)
Hello and welcome to the Lattice Training podcast. Today I'm joined by Cam, who is a coach here at Lattice Training and he's actually studying for a PhD in sports science and we're going to be digging into a lot of the stuff that he's researched recently. He's got an incredible knowledge when it comes to sports physiology and psychology. So we start this podcast by jumping into the
I can never get this right. Biopsychological. Psychobiological. Psychobiological. Thanks, Cam. Model of sports performance and endurance. And I'm also going to dive deep into energy systems. So it's a pretty heavy sports science podcast. So we'll try and keep it as relevant to climbing as possible,
Let's jump into it.
josh (00:41)
so we're kicking off the podcast and I needed to start this as soon as possible because Cam just started talking to me about the psychobiological theory of endurance, right? Psychobiological model of endurance performance. Right, okay. And you said this actually kind of replaces or supersedes the central governor theory, is that correct? Yes, yeah, it does, yeah. So let's take this right back to basics. Yeah.
First explain to me what the central governor theory is and then explain to me what the psycho -biological theory is. So the central governor theory is a theory that was designed to explain why we reach exercise cessation. So the reason why we stop and it puts it down to a point or...
a system in our brain that says that's enough, it's time to stop training or stop performing because we're going to put the body into a potential damage or harm. Yeah. Okay. Right. So I think I've heard about this in the context predominantly in long endurance races, right? So like, yeah, ultra marathons and these things like that, because essentially there was like the main limiting factor is almost certainly for a lot of people, your head's holding you back. It's like a...
It's a race of grit and determination almost. And I think if you're listening to this and you wanna learn more about that, there's a really good book called Endure. I can't - Oh, that is an amazing book. I can't remember the author. Oh, Alex Hutchinson. Yes, okay, so if you want like a brief overview of year one BSc sports science, like physiology, it's a great book. I was actually introduced to it in year three. It was quite late into my physiology. Yeah, so I listened to it post -uni.
And when I was like, oh cool, I wish I'd read this book before uni because like, I feel like it would have given me such a good base of like going into that kind of area. The psychobiological model is included in that, in like the perception of effort section. But oh, it's a fantastic book, especially the stuff I remember them talking about.
nutrition and how they were about the dehydration and that when you're running you can well they How did they word it? They? Got them to have like a pipe that went into their stomach and they put water in so that they were hydrated And then they also got them to sip water and the people that were sipping water Reported feeling quenched. Whereas the ones that were being ejected was
Yeah, sounds like a horrible state to take part in. We felt dehydrated. So there's loads of interesting stuff in there that you go, wow. So there's a psychological component. A psychological component. A behavioral experience, I guess, which is contributing to your feelings of being fat. And this is, I guess, going to carry over into fatigue as well, right? So let's jump into the biologic, psychobiological. Yeah, so I'll probably briefly touch on why I read up on the psychobiological.
model. So my part from being a lattice coach, I'm doing a PhD on the side and as part of my PhD, I use this model called the Psycho -Biological Model of Endurance Performance to understand how mental fatigue impacts our sport performance. So that's how I started getting into the Psycho -Biological Model looking at how our mental fatigue impacts us and the...
The interesting things about the psychological model is that it's the first concept that allowed for psychological constructs to be introduced into.
the model, so understanding it's an effort -based decision -making model built on other theories from psychology. So it allows for that integration of psychology into physiology. So rather than going, oh, we've spotted something interesting here, let's do loads of research and come up with our new concept. You can actually go, well, what has psychology done and how can we apply psychology to this situation? So there's a communication between disciplines.
Okay, so why is this so important to, I guess, A, our performance and B, how can it be important for our training? So I'll give a brief overview of the psychobiological model. It's made up of five different constructs. There's two main constructs and then there's three that work alongside it to regulate performance. The main two are perception of effort and potential motivation. So perception of efforts are like our rating of perceived exertion.
you'll be familiar with the Borg scale and, oh, so, yeah, I see your face go there. I'm familiar with the Borg scale, but for someone that has not followed that, or maybe, you will have heard of RPE, I guess. Yes, RPE. Most people have heard of RPE, but if not, briefly describe what this is. So it's a scale that rates how hard your effort is in performance. It's also, it can be labeled as the perception of exertion.
won't get into the differentiation between effort and exertion because it's just getting into the finicky of words, but even that's quite interesting in itself. So you've got perception of effort, so how much or how hard something is, how much energy you're putting into a task. So on a one, that's like I'm doing, I'm resting and I'm on a 10, that would be absolute maximum effort. I could not try any harder. Yes, that's correct. Yeah. And let's just say you sometimes will see this rate from a six to a...
Oh, is that right? Yeah. So that one's interesting. So a bit of a brief history on Gunnar Borg. So Gunnar Borg was a physiologist in the 1960s who developed the Borg scale and he observed in his athletes that they were...
Yes, so they rate that at 12, yeah. And the Borg RPE scale, based on that observation, with 60 being what you would typically see as the resting heart rate for a healthy 20 -year -old, which was the sample for the study, and then 200 being the theoretical maximum because of maximum heart rate calculations. So that's where the 6 to 20 scale originated from. Right, okay, yeah. And now if you're a rock climber and you're doing a board session,
This is why we use like a one to 10. Cause it's not, there's no reason now to pull across a scale, which was related to heart rate during steady state exercise. Now we're talking about just rating like a, the effort in a session or even a route climb for example, but also, um, recently I was saying, I spoke to Simon Fryer. We spoke about how you have the Metabay reflex. So your heart rate doesn't necessarily correspond to fatigue and climbing. So actually using heart rate for climbing is.
has its own issues. So the one to 10 is probably where we're going most of this. And usually our brain has a pretty good understanding of how much effort we're putting into something. So just leaning into it and trusting it rather than trying to overanalyze it can be quite useful sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I've, I've do wrote it. What was the next one after effort? So we've got potential motivation. So potential motivation is based on, um, Bream's motivational intensity theory. And the idea with this is that we put a ceiling on the mat.
amount of effort we're willing to invest in a task subconsciously. So you might, or you can do it consciously as well, but it can be subconscious. So you, let's say you're going into an endurance session, like an arching session or a very low intensity climbing session. You'll do that, that session until you reach your, your motivation, your, your ceiling, the point at which you decide this is enough for me. It's kind of how hard do you want it?
Yeah, how hard you want it. Is it worth investing this energy anymore into this task or should I invest it elsewhere? So that could be just sitting there and doing nothing. So recuperating that energy. Or there might be something more interesting, like going to try the new Boulder problem in the gym. So it's trying to manage your motivation and make sure you're investing the energy in the right areas to get the best performance for you. What you think's your best performance. Yeah, that's interesting because I think when most people think of motivation, we think of it.
on a larger scale, like a big picture scale. What are your projects for the year? How much do you wanna try those projects? And then that's maybe why you train. But we're talking about within a task, aren't we? Or within a belt of exercise. Yeah, so what I like about Bream's Motivational Intensity Theory is that it quantifies motivation rather than looks at the qualitative aspects of motivation. Obviously in itself it has limitations with looking at it in a quantitative manner, but.
It's a really interesting way of looking at motivation compared to like the self -determination theory or other motivational theories, which are very much about the quality, as you say, goal related. So it's a very different way of looking at it, which is useful when you're trying to bring it into physiology and performance. Okay. Yeah. So immediately I can already see a reason why this would be a limiter or there's areas of which this could limit performance, which are not related to your physiological.
you know, recruitment of the muscle fibers. If you're not motivated within a specific task or you perceive a high level of exertion, it's going to limit your performance, right? Yeah, that's correct. And what's good about these two areas is that you can change them. So your perception of effort, you can change it by training. So you get better and fitter. So that effort feels easier in the future. And then potential motivation. And so I...
base a lot of my coaching around this potential motivation and understanding what makes my clients tick. So once I know what makes my clients tick, I can manipulate the environment to make it more related to them so it can raise that potential motivation ceiling. Yeah, okay. I suppose that also comes maybe down just to simple things like exercise selection, like finding things out there they want to work towards. And maybe goal setting. I know we...
You're not the biggest fan of goal setting or maybe in certain situations, but I'm thinking of having goals set around training parameters. So. Yeah. So I think maybe I am a, no, I am a fan of goal setting, but I think as a whole, we look at it the wrong way. We look at goals as we fix it on the outcome rather than setting the process up first and understanding what the deep rooted motivation is behind the goal.
So for example, if you give me a goal that you want to achieve in the next six months. When Raven Tour dries out, I want to go try Revelations again. I'd like to send that route this summer. So what I'm interested in understanding from that is why Revelations? What would you achieve by getting to the top of Revelations? So actually, it's very much, you might like this, it's a process driven goal for me because my whole climbing career, and I'm about 12 years into it now.
Not all of that has been focused on performance or training, but I, yeah, I'd never tried anything for longer than three or four sessions. Some of my hardest climbs were done in two sessions. So I'm not a projector and I really wanted to experience what it was like to put the effort in. So I picked something I knew would be hard for me.
And I just went for it. Yeah. I put in like seven sessions last year. I climbed all through the summer in awful conditions, but it was nice to just keep turning up and trying to enjoy the, enjoy it for just being there and not having an outcome at the end of the day. Cause I think that's probably what I always chased was like, if I didn't send something I'd get frustrated. Okay. Yeah. And how will focusing on the process make you a better climber? If you have to get on revelations this summer. Um,
I think maybe it's related to, well, it's being able to relate to probably my clients as well and how they put in longer efforts on projects. I've always found it quite hard to understand how someone could try something for like multiple years. I just, cause that wasn't something I could relate to. I never had the motivation to do that. And I just wanted the experience, I guess. I wanted to know what it felt like to try actually finish a route after like seven, eight sessions. Does that feel better than doing it after two? So yeah.
So almost what you're getting at there is you're looking at climbing as a way to improve your coaching. So you're going, Oh, I've never tried this approach before. I want to understand this approach and take through it some new learning points that I can then put it back into my coaching. So that might be going, okay, I've done a long project now. I understand there's these steps involved and I can help my clients understand these to slimline their process.
Yeah, it's not totally selfless. Definitely, there's definitely an element of wanting the experience myself and, and then yeah, kind of also wanting to see what my, what my potential is. Like I've always felt like if I can't send something in like two or three sessions, then it's too hard for me. I need to go away and train and like that's, that's just two sides of that. There is the fact that I don't enjoy going beyond that much. I would rather just climb lots of.
the interesting bit because when people talk about their goals they just go oh I want to climb v10 and it's like well climbing v10 is actually really boring like the process to do it you've got to do a lot of training to get there and I'm assuming that this person's like v6 climber whatever and they've got to do a lot of training to get there and it's going to be hard and there'll be points where you're like this slogs hard I just want to give up and that's where understanding the person's motivation for that goal can come back in because you can start
bringing in new incentives or just reminding the person of what this means to them to get them going. So once I understand that process like yourself, it'll be then setting up small bite size outcome goals, not the big outcome goal. So an example of this is, I've recently...
This is sport climbing or boulder? Sport climbing, yeah. And I've worked for him about three years and he's a very good climber. Moves very well on the wall, very dedicated to his training, works really hard. I've always been impressed by his efforts in that area. The one side that I've always felt let him down was the psychology. So he'd get into his head and focus on, oh, I've got to climb this 8C plus so then I can go for the 9A.
And what I wanted to do this time round when we, cause we did a lot of training. I'll probably touch on his training again when we go onto energy, energy systems and endurance. So we did a lot of training and we got him into a position where I knew he was capable of climbing the route and all we needed to do was turn up with the right mindset on the day and do it. First session he turned up and went, Oh, the training's not worked. Right. And I was like, Oh no, I think the training has worked, but he believed he hadn't. So what I wanted to do there was.
to understand what was going on. I knew what was going on. He just, he was fixated on the outcome goal. I then broke it down or got him to break it down into little steps. So I asked him, when you imagine you've climbed the route, what would you tell yourself now are the steps you took to achieve that route? And he came back to me with a massive email. Brilliant email, loads of points of what he'd do. I went brilliant.
would you start implementing those into your next project in session? And step by step, we got there and he did it. Reverse engineering. Reverse engineering. But at no point did I tell him what to do in that process. I wanted him to take the accountability. And now he knows what my process was there. Yeah, but I thought it was a real... So that was me trying to understand his motivation to then build him. It will create the outcomes to then achieve the goal. Yeah, yeah, nice.
Cool, this is a good tangent. I wanna bring it back to the psychobiological model. So you said there was two which we've covered, but you said there was also three more constructs which you kind of filled into it. They're not as important, but they do regulate performance. So you've got knowledge of task. So that'd be like knowing the route, like rest points, all those areas. Like if you're on a sport climb. There's like a tactics thing. And then you've got.
So when you're on the route itself, like the knowledge of the task remaining, so what's coming up. On -site climbing, it's a bit harder because you don't know what's coming up. Yeah, okay. But I can see how that leads into on -site climbing even more almost because the level of uncertainty can actually really get into your head, I think, when you're on -site. I used to, again, it goes back to me never really project, I used to do a lot of on -siteing up until, I think I kind of on -site everything up until about 7b.
in my kind of sport climbing career. And I just remember like, there's had so many experiences where you're just like hanging out on like a rest, you know, what you think is like a rest thing about going to hard section and then you end up sitting there for two minutes, continue climbing and then like actually that you've already done all the hard climbing and vice versa. Sometimes you wish you'd rest longer. So it leaves you with this level of uncertainty, which totally changes, I guess, your, probably your perception of effort as well. It kind of very interlinked, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Cause you're going to...
As soon as you start believing something's hard, it's gonna be hard.
Yeah, I think I've found it the other way around where, um, and I think maybe Alex Migos is a good example of this. Um, so hit the famous story of he, when he did his first nine a on site or, uh, he thought it was easier. Did you think it was an eight C or eight C plus in the guidebook? And then he, and then he climbed it and he was like, Oh, that's my, that's a nine a. Nice. And I've definitely noticed that I'm climbing, you know, you think some things, uh, easier and then you just climb it.
just perceive it to be that much easier and you're climbing and then kind of surprise yourself what you can do. And you take yourself to the next level. You almost break through that potential motivation ceiling of like, oh, I'm a, in Alex Magos' case, I'm a 9A red pointer, maybe back then. I can't onsite 9A. And then as soon as that veil's lifted and you just get on it and think, oh, it's an 8C, I can probably onsite 8C. And then break and smash through that barrier. I wonder if another big example here is...
maybe this doesn't relate to so much, but the kind of famous example of breaking the four minute mile, right? Like one person does it and everyone's like, it's possible. So I guess your perception of the difficulty of that task is now, well, it's doable. If they did it, maybe I can do it. So then - Same with climbing gyms as well. Everything falls in. I think people are limited by the top end of the top climbers. So if you've only got -
V8 climbers in your gym, no one's gonna go past V8, but as soon as you get a couple of V11, V12 climbers, there's a big jump in that grade. Right, okay, right, yeah. So maybe just get some strong climbers in your gym somehow. Yeah, and downgrade everything. Yeah, yeah, okay, very cool. And then the final, just to come back to the psychobiological model, the final one is your previous experiences of perception of effort during the exercise.
So varying intensity and endurance links really well to climbing, which is very varied in intensity and also the duration of routes. But they all interlink with each other, so you can see how they cross over. Yeah, OK. I can see how you can also influence a lot of these through potentially self -talk and visualisation as well, if it's perceiving the difficulty of something that you maybe have already done or visualising.
success through a hard section of a route will bring down your perception of how difficult that task might be. Yeah. So with my PhD, I look at it the other way. It's like, how does mental fatigue affect our perception of effort? So increasing it because we're closer to what I refer to as mental reserves nearly used up. So you've got less in the mental reserve. So you have, you see things as more effortful mentally. And...
But yeah, the positive side of it is that a lot of the time you can reduce perception of effort through training and also knowing the route and getting on it and practicing it. I think that's a very overlooked factor is that just getting on something and doing it for a while, you do make it easier because you learn the subtleties of movement, like the little tweaks of your ankle just on a foothold. That makes a big difference. I remember recently watching someone climb a boulder problem. I was like...
I can't do this. This is like way below my grade, but like I'm falling off it. And then I just saw someone like twist their left foot closer to the wall. And then that allowed them to bring their hip in. And I was like.
That's why it's easy. Did it first go after that? And it's those subtleties that you can overlook very quickly if you've not done a lot of practice in the while. So yeah, that also probably comes into not, not trying to write something off too quickly, which is probably what I did in the past being like, oh, more than two sessions can't do it. Yeah. I always struggled to keep refining things after that point. Um, yeah. Okay. It was very interesting. So one thing I wanted to talk about was mental fatigue and you bring, you brought that up just then you said this will.
impact things. I think mental fatigue is a fascinating topic as well and I think it's so relevant to probably most of the climbers listening to this podcast, most of the clients we work with as well which full -time jobs, maybe the stressful jobs and then there's just everything that comes outside of the climbing which impacts your climbing. So what is mental fatigue and how does it impact our climbing? Why is it relevant to us as climbers? So mental fatigue...
is
the effect that psychological load has on our performance. So when you increase the psychological load, you'll see a decrease in performance. So that could be in a performance task, like a mental task. So if you think about it in the terms of climbing, your decision -making on the wall. So if you're feeling very tired that day and just worn out from work, then actually getting on a project and trying to think about the subtleties and the...
little tweaks of your movement, you've not really got the mental energy to do that. What you'd rather, what you might have is just the mental energy to go off and fingerboard. And then, so you can change the task based on how you're feeling in the day. Yeah. So it's caused by like a prolonged period of mental effort. And what's interesting about the mental research, fatigue research is that it tends to fixate on long periods of time. So going off and doing, so let's say,
in the context of work, I won't do it in performance tasks, in the context of work going off and doing a very long mundane project like looking for a long spiel of text and looking for spelling mistakes for all day. And we all do that email check -in. So that sort of task, that's what we tend to look at from a mental fatigue perspective. And that's what people used to say mental fatigue is caused by. The more recent research is...
looking at mental fatigue from both like an intensity and a volume perspective. So not only does volume like prolonged periods, but high intensity periods. So that could be a period of like emotional, high emotional regulation. So if you take into account, like say you have a trauma come up, so like a family member passes away or some stress at work occurs, like really high stress, and it's only a short period, that can still have an impact on performance.
I know after doing a big presentation at work, I'm usually knackered and it's only in the grand scheme of things, it might be only 20 minutes. But at that period, all I want to go do is just sit down and switch off for 20 minutes and then go back to work. Yeah. So this impacts your capabilities to perform difficult tasks mentally afterwards, but also your physical output as well. So it's affecting your mental state and your physiological state as well, right? Yes, that's it. So...
The original research for the psychobiological model comes back to a professor called Sam Makora in, it would have been around 2009 that this paper was published and he got his cyclists in this study to do a mental fatigue task. It was known as the AXCPT, which is basically a cognitive performance task where you have to look for
an A at the start of the sequence and an X at the start of a four letter sequence. And when you see that you click, when you don't, you don't click. So it's a response inhibition. So you're stopping yourself from not doing the behavior. So they did that for, I think it'd be 90 minutes off the top of my head. And then they did a cycling performance task, but they also did another condition, randomized and controlled. So they flipped it depending on across the studies.
And then the other condition was they just watched a documentary for 90 minutes, which is quite nice. And what they found was that performance, so they did a time to exhaustion performance task. What they found was the time to exhaustion decreased with the mental fatigue task. So they reached exhaustion quicker, whereas with the normal condition, it took them longer to reach exhaustion. And in that they covered more distance as well.
And the first thing that everyone goes for, what's the physiology doing? The physiology, so they measured heart rate, breathing rate, lactate, just trying to remember a couple off my head, ventilation, threshold, and none of those changed. But what did change was the perception of effort. Okay, right. Fascinating. Right. So it's just how hard they perceived effort, probably towards the end of the exercise.
and it ramped up quicker. So they probably started at higher perception of effort already, probably from a mental perspective rather than a physical perspective. And then they reached the threshold or potential motivation quicker. Okay. So it's definitely going to have impact on our sporting performance, probably have an impact on our ability to train. So it more has an impact, the research is currently swinging towards endurance, on the physical side, endurance performance, not so much max strength.
anaerobic capacity, anaerobic power, rate of force development in those sides where it's very quick high intensity bouts. But then there's some more recent research that's looked at max sprint performances over a sustained period of time. So not just one bout of how quickly can you sprint this distance, but repeated bouts and seeing how the performance decreases over that period of time. And when you look at it that way, you do see an impact of mental.
Yeah. Okay. So practical recommendations for someone that's turned up to their session, let's say training or performance session outside. What, what do you think considerations they could make to try and reduce the impact of this? Just taking 20 minutes to sit down and switch off. I think that's a big one that people forget. We live very busy lives nowadays. We're traveling to the climbing gym after a really long day of work. We've got a short window to train.
but sometimes you just need to give yourself 20 minutes, switch off. I don't mean sit down on your phone because sitting on your phone also has an impact on mental fatigue. Yeah, I actually saw a paper this morning. I think it might've been Chris Beardsley. If you don't follow Chris Beardsley on Instagram and you're interested in sports, that's definitely a recommendation. He does little infographics on research papers, mostly about strength training, but I think he shared one today, which showed spending time on social media on your phone.
generated mental fatigue and decreased your performance in. So they've done it a lot in like boxing, swimming, badminton, I think that's a, that tends to be the areas of the sports they've looked at, but yeah, just sitting on your phone can actually increase your mental fatigue and then have a negative consequence on performance. Yeah. Okay. Right. Fascinating. So sitting down for 20 minutes and do not do much. Um, there was a paper that looked at like doing mindfulness on top, but really the.
the significance of that wasn't any greater than just sitting down and doing nothing for 20 minutes. Another thing to do is leaning into that understanding that mental fatigue doesn't necessarily impact the max strength, the rate of force development is going, okay, I'm feeling pretty tired today and I'm feeling mentally worn out. I'm just gonna do a fingerboard session.
And if you get into that thing of all the session, like actually I'm just really tired and that's the time to stop going. Okay. I'll just do a finger ball of session or I've got a link boulder session today, which is a very exhaustive anaerobic capacity session. I might actually just have a boulder, a fun boulder in session with my friends instead and rejuvenate that social energy to put it back into your, your performance. And that's okay. Because what, when you're looking at training, you're not looking at what's the greatest adaptation for that.
session itself is what's the greatest adaptation I can make over a long period of time and if it means compromising the occasional session then in my opinion it's worth doing that to have greater long -term performance. Yeah totally yeah yeah I've been um I've been quite kind on myself recently got a four -month older home and definitely have turned up to the climbing wall pretty tired or like it's just my little bit of time to get back into climbing so not climbing much in the minute yeah definitely.
just having a social session, running on some fun blocks, not going on the board. That's it, yeah, and just having fun. Because at the end of the day, climbing isn't, well, it's hard to say climbing isn't our job when we're coaches, but climbing is our hobby as well. And it shouldn't be about always performing. And the way I sometimes describe it to clients is that climbing can make people, like better people, like they feel more motivated for life, they feel happier.
And if it means just having a nice, easy session for an hour, it means you can then go back into your life and be a better dad or be a better worker. So just taking that one session off is really good. Yeah. Well, in your case, the next nine months. Yeah. Yeah. I kind of want to switch it from psychology, so much psychology and go right into the antichristism. Cause I know you've read a lot into this as well. It's always very linked.
Yeah. And I think it's fair to say there's more research in running and cycling sports, which are very focused on endurance efforts being the difference between winning and losing. I think we're very strength focused in climbing. And even when we're in endurance, athlete strength plays a big role. So, and we're quite fresh in terms of research. So I wanted to understand what you've learned from these sports, I guess. And typically what we're going to talk about is.
aerobic and anaerobic thresholds? Yes. Because we were going to talk about training zones as well, but let's start with aerobic and anaerobic thresholds. And can you tell me what they are and their implications to endurance training? So I think we can pretty much start with talking about zones as well, because they seem to links with the aerobic and anaerobic thresholds. So when I got into looking into endurance training, I didn't really understand the...
too much. I understood what was good for climbers and what we needed to work on but I didn't really know why we were doing it and how it benefited climbers. So over the past couple of years I've really gone into detail about understanding.
to maximise endurance training for climbers so they get the most adaptation from the stress you're providing. And what I always struggled with was climbing's a bit different to cycling and like running where they're quite whole body exercises. So cardio, vascular, respiratory, they're all systems are quite important in that performance. Whereas with climbing, as you've mentioned with your discussion with Simon,
heart rate doesn't particularly isn't as predictable variable as like in cycling and running. So I always struggled with, well, they're the typical ways that we look at energy systems and measure performance to predict working zones and what to train at. So I went away and after actually speaking to my PhD supervisor, Joel, he mentioned this podcast, not podcast, but it's called...
GCN and they had a coach come on or he's a physiologist for a University and then also the one of the cycling teams on the Tour de France It's Indigo Summerland and it's a fantastic podcast that's worth listening to it Changed my way. I look at energy systems and training for them and he takes a Metabolic view so looking at what happens at the cellular level rather than looking at from top down. So you're looking at bottom up?
Right, okay, and by top down, we're talking about measuring maybe like oxygen exchange, the carbon dioxide oxygen taken in. We're talking about what's happening with inside the muscle fibers and they're absorbing a lot of space. Yeah, what's happening at that level. So that's the way I went about it. And from taking that perspective, it helped me really understand why we train at what we'll get onto in a minute is low intensity and how important it is. And.
I quite like now when clients come back to me and go, so I give it, if I give them arching, which is aerobic, respiratory and capillary, capillary, capillary training. Yeah, capillarization. And typically people come back and go, oh, that's easy. Why have you given me that? I'm not going to get tired. Yeah. And they're chasing that like feeling of needing to be exhausted when they're training endurance. And my favorite response is going, Oh no, give this session one go and you'll regret saying that.
Because if you get the intensity correct type two must type one muscle fiber fatigue is Really dull and you do feel it. And so if you do do the session correctly, you get a really different fatigue sensation that is very beneficial. So my first point is that Whilst you may be given arc training or this is about that's in our plans or aerobic base training It's not easy if you go in and thinking it's easy. You might be in for a surprise Okay, so
What is it supposed to feel like if it's not easy? So it does start off easy. It is like doing lots of repetitive movement. But over time you start to get like a dull ache in your arms, almost.
your funny bone. I think that's a nice way to describe it that you realise and it's like very dull ache and over the session it starts to fatigue the muscle fibres and you will get to a point where you actually wouldn't be able to sustain that performance. It just takes a very long time. Obviously we don't want to push people that far because we want them to recover so then they can adapt for the next session. But yeah, you get a very dull ache in the forearms. But it's different to pump. Okay, yeah, so it's different to pump. Let's take this from a...
time perspectives, like how long are we talking about doing this training for? Because we say you're going to start easy, but towards the end of the session, you want that kind of dull ache where you're definitely feel like your forearms are worked, but you're not pumped. So I think it's important to put a timeframe on it. Yeah. Kind of say at what point in the exercise are they expecting to do this? Cause I know arcing can be quite long, but it's, it's definitely an open -ended thing, isn't it? I think it's dependent on the person's training history. Yeah. Okay. So.
everyone's going to look, I was guilty of this in the past. You look at cycling and running and go, oh, they've got to train for four hours. Well, elite athletes do, but typically it's like an hour, two hours. They have to do this, this lower intensity training for, and when you're looking at it, you go, okay, yeah, but that's whole body. That's a big system. When we're looking at arc training for climbers, it's very localized to the forearms and.
I don't know about you, but my forearms are a lot smaller than my thighs and my legs. They're probably about the same size of my calves, but that's where you'd be wrong. So once you, once I, once I saw that I was like, right, okay, let's just try five minutes. And I did five minutes of arch training and I was knackered after doing just five minutes and over probably about 12 weeks I built to do in 30 minutes and still feeling that or chasing that dull aching sensation.
towards the end of our time. That block. Yeah. Okay. And this is on the wall or on a hangboard or something? Yeah. So I did it on a 20 degree wall on jugs. Okay. Yeah. Just climbing. At the same time, I thought it was really good to just practice techniques. So like thinking about how I twisted my hips into the wall to take weight off my arms, putting knee bars in, just lots of little micro skills that I could then apply back to my climbing in the future. Okay. So let's bring this back to thresholds. So we have an Arabic threshold.
threshold, this arc training, is it, this is at aerobic threshold?
So coming back to that physiological model.
So yeah, looking at the muscle on a cellular level, understanding what's going on metabolically. When we're training, we produce byproducts or when we increase in intensity and one of those byproducts is lactate. It can be a byproduct, it's also an energy source as well. It's one of those, it's a bit misunderstood. It can be taken back into the cell and go back into aerobic respiration, right? Yes, yes, that's correct. Yeah. In the type one muscle fibers, not type two.
Yes. Okay. Yeah. So that's typically when you think of lactate or we think of lactic acid, which is what it's commonly called, but almost this is a bit of a myth isn't it? Cause it immediately dissociates into lactate and hydrogen ions. Hydrogen ions. And that's what causes that burning sensation, the hydrogen ions. Yes. Yeah. And actually that lactate goes back into, I'm trying to remember, let's go back to pyruvate and then into ATP. Yeah. Yeah. So we create energy from that. So lactate is not a bad thing, but you need to have a well -developed aerobic system to reuse it. Otherwise it's going to.
sit there and not be taken up by the aerobic respiration, which is why it's so important even for anaerobic athletes, right? Yeah, yeah, even the boulders. Yeah, yeah, so your recovery even in those little shakes is improved if you've got better aerobic endurance in your recovery between attempts. Yeah, so this is why it's so important. Yeah, so lactate, really interesting and it's kind of what I build my framework around when I'm thinking about endurance training. So when we're...
exercising, let's say we're starting at a very low intensity, we're just on a route, just plodding along, this lactate stays the same. Okay, so it's flat line. Flat lining, yeah. And that's because we're using primarily triglycerides as our fuel source. When we start exercising, you'll see a peak in lactate and then it drops, but that's because we have to work through the energy systems to start. By triglycerides you mean fats? Fatty acids. Fat source, yeah. So we're primarily fat oxidative.
We then start to ramp up the intensity. We're getting harder. We're having to pull a bit harder on the holds and then we need to go up into the next gear to start pushing the intensity. And that's where zone two comes in. So zone two or the aerobic threshold, we'll call it the aerobic threshold for now. We'll come back to zones in a second. But aerobic threshold is the point where you're maximally expressing your type one muscle fibers and you need a new energy source to produce more force.
to start activating the fast twitch muscle fibers because they need energy more quickly. So that's where you bring in the glycogen or glucose and that's where the glycotic system comes in. And that's when lactate's first produced. So it's small but then it starts to accumulate and we start to work through those zones or so through that period and we get to another inflection point and that's known as lactate threshold two or anaerobic threshold.
And that's the point where we go from being oxidative or predominantly oxidative to then transitioning to purely anaerobic. And then that's where you're on a ticking time bomb. Yes, that's the point at which essentially you're not going to be able to stay in exercise for very long because you're producing those byproducts much faster than you can remove them. So in between aerobic and anaerobic thresholds, you are producing these byproducts.
but almost it's a sustainable level of exercise, is that correct? Sustainable for a given amount of time. For a given amount of time, yes, important to have that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Cool, so we've got an aerobic threshold and an anaerobic threshold. We can go above anaerobic threshold to be very high intensity exercise. Where does the zone's kind of lie in around that?
So you, you've got lots of zone theories. Um, you can have free zones. If you want free zones, you can have four zones, five zones, whatever. I'm not a cyclist. I run a cell. I think you've got five. Seven. Seven. I think seven's quite nice actually. So you've got, so up to aerobic threshold, there's actually two zones. Okay. The reason why they break it down into lots of zones is because at different points, metabolically, there is different stuff going on. So we need to have.
granularity between the zones. Differentiate between them. Yeah, so you differentiate between them. It's important for the first zone. So up to the aerobic threshold, you've got two zones. You've got the zone one and then zone two. Zone one is basically recovery. So plodding along. You're doing exercise, but you could re - if you're wanting to get an endurance adaptation, you really want to be pushing the intensity a bit more to maximally express.
the type one muscle fibers, work the mitochondria to get the most out of your training. If you're not getting to that point, then you'd probably be best just resting instead. So zone two is kind of the minimum we would want to train, but also it's a very efficient way of training our aerobic energy system. Yes. That is fair. Yeah. So at zone two, we are, what you'd say is maximally expressing our type one muscle fibers. We're using solely...
fatty acids, we're not breaking into using glucose yet and we're working at that aerobic threshold. I think the way I describe it to athletes to work at that area is to, when you're climbing on the wall, you want to be able to have a conversation with someone but not feel like you're having to stop, take really heavy breaths and catch your breath and carry on. You should be able to have a continuous conversation. It is gonna feel hard, but you should be able to have a continuous conversation.
with the other setups like carking, which is Johnny's favorite example. And I know you showed me your grippy thing. It's a bit harder to do that because you're not getting the full cardiovascular system involved to pump blood around the whole system. So it's a little bit harder there. And for anyone that's not heard of carking before, it's just doing arc in the car. I think Johnny did this because he used to drive like three hours to his project every week and he would like just...
his fingers against an edge on the dashboard. And I guess you could like it almost to like zone one. And in that period of time, because he's doing it for like three hours, maybe he is getting a similar adaptation. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm doing a mini experiment on myself. So watch the space. I'll tell you if it actually actually has any effect. And so coming back to zone two, so zone two, you're looking for that low intensity. It's important to not go above that.
because once you start to produce lactate, the type two muscle fibers get involved and then less fatty acids are used, you start using more glucose. So you're taking away the focus from the type one muscle fibers being the main use and the fat oxidator system being the primary source.
you're starting to take attention away from that. So it's really important to stay at that level if you're looking to bring about the zone two adaptations. Yeah. And I think the way I've thought of this as well is if you overcook it on this one and you end up into that zone three, it's unlikely there's a law of diminishing returns on most things, but it's unlikely you're going to get much greater benefit to your aerobic energy system because it was pretty much maxed out at the top of zone two and
you're now at this point, if your intention is just to build your aerobic energy system, you're now developing more fatigue and prolonging your recovery for your next session. So obviously there's context and nuance to everything, but if you were just wanting to develop your aerobic energy system away from everything else, like this is common polarized training, isn't it? Like either end of the spectrum when you do your training, then maxing out on zone two is absolutely fine for that for most people. And then we've come into zone three. So,
Go build up so between your aerobic threshold and anaerobic threshold, you've got two zones again. Okay, you've got zone three, zone four. So zone four is capped at your anaerobic threshold and zone three is that transition. So you're going from using primarily fat oxidative and moving towards using primarily glucose. Yep. It's a glycolic and in that zone three is that transition. So if your aim is to then target
next energy system, which will be glucose based, then really you should be looking at going to zone four and just again, maximally expressing the fast twitch muscle fibers. What's interesting at this point is that with the fast twitch muscle fibers producing lactate, they're not able to clear it. So what they do is they shift it to the type one muscle fibers, which then break down the lactate into ATP and then you're, you've got more energy. So they help to clear the lactate out of the system. That's typically why you don't see much of a.
up in the blood and then once you go once the type two once you get to the point where they're saturated and they're not able to keep up with the man's and they go actually I can't do this anymore then it gets expelled in the blood and that's why you see a big jump in that's why in lactate testing you see that big spike yeah that makes a lot of sense yeah okay so we am I right in saying that this zone four is kind of our like aerobic power zone I know mix of the two no I think it's hard because we've got
a range of different sessions in our aerobic power. I think of it more as our aerobic capacity, where we are getting a bit of high intensity bout into the exercise, but then we drop off. So like a one -on -one off session, we do a high intensity bout and then we rest. That's what I'd see in zone four. Aerobic power I'd see as more zone five, where it's like VO2 max, but obviously we don't do VO2 max testing in climbing.
We don't really use our cardio system as much. Test our gas exchange. Yeah, gas exchange. So similar to heart rate. It just wouldn't be, it wouldn't be very.
very effective at determining our thresholds because it could be different for a lot of people and there'd be no real gold standard for climbers. Yeah, yeah, for sure. In fact, the podcast that Simon Fryer did a study on this exact thing in cycling or treadmill and they also did a tread wall so climbing. They found it basically like it did correlate a bit with performance, but it capped out at about 40, I believe it was 40 millilitres per kilogram body weight. So I think essentially they were like,
relatively well trained, but like they were just a fit adult will be about 40. They weren't particularly trained. It's not going to predict your performance. It doesn't predict your performance to a certain level. No. Yeah. Okay. Cool. So zone five, I'd see as aerobic power zone six is then moving into anaerobic capacity. And that is when you're, you're, you're fully anaerobic. You can only really sustain an effort for 30 to it.
60 seconds and then the final zone, zone seven, which is like sprinting in cycling terms, but in climbing it'd be doing a hard boulder problem or a 10 second fingerboard where you're in your ATP. Yeah, that's phosphor creating system. And I suppose that typically, I think I've heard about this more in the context of sprinting as you say, that typically caps out about like eight to 10 seconds in well -trained people, doesn't it? It's a very short system. Yeah.
Okay, interesting. So I think one thing I wanted to come back to is you mentioned that in that zone two or three your aerobic system is essentially picking up that lactate and using it as energy. Is this what we talk about when we talk about buffering or is that more to do with the hydrogen ions? I think buffering capacity would be to with the hydrogen ions rather than the lactate itself. So this is important though, isn't it, for endurance training especially in that area if that's where you perform because we need to...
deal with those byproducts. Am I right in saying you're not going to be developing a system to deal with those byproducts if you're always spending your time in zone two? So yeah, you do need to work in every energy system to train it and actually express it. So like a boulderer who just trains purely anaerobic capacity, they're never going to get good at clearing that lactate because they're not training that system. They will in their rest periods have an effect where they're able to...
do some endurance adaptations, but if they're looking for looking at the full or fully expressing that system, then they would benefit from some aerobic or some arc style training. And the same goes for the endurance ward that does trains on zone two for the whole life, but never gets good at training the other areas. So it's having a mixture of the combination of the multiple zones that produces the best athlete.
So what I'm saying is that even if you're a boulder, it's worth doing a bit of arc training. Even if you're a long and multi -pitch climber, it's worth doing zone four training. Yeah, for sure. How does this play out? I think this is kind of going into the idea of periodization, which is moving more into prescription and less into energy systems. But I just wanted to get a quick idea from you, like how this might play out in someone's training. Cause I think there's, there's a lot to train here, right? Yeah. There's although there's maybe seven zones.
At least we can think of three zones which are important to training in like zone two, zone four, zone six or seven, right? How does that fit into someone's training over the year? Cause that's a lot and it feels like quite a mix. Do you do all three sessions? Do you use this polarized approach? And maybe this is a depends question, but. I think, yeah, as you say, it depends. But to come back to, I think training in general. So I remember when I was in my second year of uni and it was my first time doing.
training plan prescription. So that strangely was a module in sports science. And the lecturer introduced it as you're constantly spinning plates. So you might focus on one area, but then that plate starts slowing down. So you need to stop playing with that plate, go to that one, spin it up. And you're constantly moving between system, between plates and you can do it yourself. But a coach usually is a lot more effective at it because they've had a lot of practice at understanding what plates to stop spinning.
to focus on others. How much needs to be maintained and how much can just be put to the wayside for a bit. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Sure. Okay. Yeah. Spinning plates is a good analogy for that, I think. And I think where people fall over is to try and do everything all at the same time too much, but it's totally okay to step back and to admire your plate spinning. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's maybe, is it fair to say that for top end elite athletes, they need to put more time in to keep in these plates than these.
plate spinning because they've got so many elements at such a high level? I don't know necessarily. I think it depends, comes back to training history. If someone's got a really deep rooted training history, then I think their baselines are a lot higher. So they can typically get away with maybe being more directive on what they exactly focus on, so be more specific. But then...
Yeah, if they're quite new to training, again, elite climbers aren't all the same. Some of you get some really good climbers that just quickly rise through the ranks, whereas you've got others that have been climbing since they were two. Yeah. Like Adamandra. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that's another interesting point. I won't touch on it today, but performance testing. I find it interesting that we always measure the top.
but we never looked to measure the baseline. So what can someone do consistently whilst fatigued? Yep. Okay. What do you mean by consistently while fatigued? So what can someone consistently reproduce effort wise over a longer period of time? Okay. Well, they've got the day to day stresses on or that. So I don't know about you, but when, when you have your best performance, it's never when you're most fresh. Yeah.
That's fair. Sometimes they just come out of nowhere. It does come out of nowhere. You're like, oh, last go of the day, I'm just gonna, the trip's gonna finish, gonna give it all. And then all of a sudden you do it. Yeah, I mean, this is where we kind of, the understanding of psychological component is so important, isn't it? Like I've seen this in clients as well, quite a lot. And I probably try and encourage this a bit by.
taking away expectations for certain things. Like when you've got expectations for a session, it can sometimes sabotage it. And I think that's why the last go best go is such a common phenomenon because you've kind of given up for the rest of the day. Like, no, I'm going to send them my third or fourth go today. Like I'm feeling tired and stuff. I'll just have a training burn and you pull on no expectations. You've let all of that drop away. And so you kind of have like this moment.
clarity, you just there. Focus on the movement. You're focusing on the movement. You're there for the process. Uh, and then you just like, well, I'm actually climbing really well. I did all of that perfectly. Yeah. The crux and you just make it free that kind of thing. So yeah, yeah, for sure. I definitely understand that. Um, you said you weren't going to touch on testing, but I did want to talk about critical force testing. And in fact, you can, you can take this wherever you want. Actually. I just wanted to understand more about how we can get a grasp of understanding where these thresholds are. We spoke about.
energy thresholds aerobic and aerobic. We can speak about how the zones play into that, which is for exercise prescription. But how do we get a grasp of where these energy systems are, where these zones are, if we want to then operate in them in our training? So the - I might add to this also to be able to see if it's improving, right? That's what we want to see. Something maybe we've not said, but we want to see that aerobic threshold go up. The more effort you can sustain aerobically, the better you're going to perform.
So I think I'll touch on anaerobic threshold first, because it's a bit easier. So we already do that test and everyone who's watched our YouTube probably seen our critical force test. It's something that I enjoy doing and you've probably seen me in the videos testing people in that and that. So the critical force test is looking for the maximal steady state. So what force could you reproduce theoretically indefinitely? But...
You can't because there'll be psychological factors like boredom, skin factors like you eventually run through your skin. Yeah. So theoretically, yeah. And also your glycogen eventually depletes as well. But that takes 20, 30 minutes for probably most people at that level, doesn't it? Exactly. So it's the theoretical maximum. So, and that's based on that definition itself is very similar to anaerobic threshold because it's that...
transition from being oxidative to then go into anaerobic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's a sustainable because that's a sustainable energy system which can just basically keep on chugging along without causing those metabolites which build up a reduced.
basically stop you from exercising. I'll just quickly mention as well that we're talking about an effort which you can sustain indefinitely. And we use a seven free repeater cycle. So that's, that's a common like repeater cycle you might do in your hangboarding session. But we're doing that for multiple minutes, 10, 20 minutes basically is what we're talking about critical force. So that one dead easy to test. It gets a bit tricky when we get to aerobic threshold. So in cycling and other sports, they can go into really detail with it so they can...
your gas exchange. So you can do an equation with gas exchange, which is the gas exchange ratio, and it tells you...
what primary energy source you're using. So is it fat or is it glucose? And it can tell you that. So that's one way of doing it. In climbing, it's a bit hard to do that. It's not been studied yet. We're looking at such a small muscle mass, aren't we? Whereas the whole body stuff is... Has a bigger effect. Looking at gas, it's more sensitive, isn't it? To changes through the whole body because we're looking at like basically a large amount of muscle being used. But when we're just looking at failure in the forearm...
and certainly most of the time. And you start measuring that through the gas exchange in your lungs, it's just not sensitive enough. No, and then the next step you go is, okay, let's look at lactate.
researching it in climate at the moment because it's just it is at that probably beyond the cutting edge of climate at the moment in terms of studying but then you could look at lactate and they've done that in cycling and they use that as actually an intensity.
first deflection of lactate in the blood which is that aerobic pressure. 2 millimoles is typically what they say but then there is a...
Science, yeah. Science, nothing's ever right, nothing's ever wrong. More research is needed. But they're typically the two I'd go about looking to, that's where the research I could see going is looking at how do we define aerobic threshold in climbing. Because I think that would be a really useful and powerful metric to have for climbers. Yeah, particularly if you want to get more efficient at developing the aerobic energy system.
And the research we've done with Critical Force shows that at least Critical Force, which is the anaerobic threshold, that is indicative of climbing performance. That correlates with sport climbing performance. But it'd be really cool to see that.
Basically that's where we want to be training. So if we could define that on a hangboard, we could also train that on a hangboard. We'd have an intensity to work out from there. Yeah. Yeah. But sadly we can't at the moment. And whilst it's not rigorous or as objective, just actually trying to talk on the wall is a very good way of doing it. Again, it's not as sensitive as in cycling, but I've used it with a lot of athletes now and they tend to get the intensity relatively spot on and do get a return from their investment.
Okay, so by talking about being able to sustain a conversation, is kind of just a measure of that you're not trying too hard. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I get that. That's cool. So the, you'd like to see in science. Yeah. We'd be able to measure that. That would be really interesting. I think if anyone wants to think about that for climbing, if they've got an undergrad, a master's, a PhD, I think, yeah, you'd be taking climbing to the next level if you focused on that area.
Okay, how do we do that? Do we need to test intramuscular levels of lactate? That'd be painful. Yeah. I spoke to Simon Frabe about this. What's the one study you wish you could perform on climbers? And I spoke about this with Dave Giles as well. We said muscle biopsies. Muscle biopsies. Yeah. Being able to look inside the forum and climbers would be nice. But mostly all our understanding of that is done on cadavers, isn't it? I'd rather not that be done on me. For anyone that doesn't know, you get a...
big needle, pull it out and then you get a core of someone's muscle and it's painful in the thigh, let alone in the forearm. Yeah, yeah. The reason it's done in the thigh is because it's a big, big chunky muscle. I think they've dried it in forearms and people passed out. Oh God, okay, yeah, good. Okay, we're not doing that. I'm not signing up for that study. Speaking of which, I was actually in one of the research studies mentioned in that Endure book, which looked at...
changes. So this was not told to us as well, because it was changes of endurance capacity based on the training you were doing. I'm trying to remember the name of the researcher, it's called Tom. But he was a PhD when I was at uni. And it was cool to read for it in a book as part of that study. But basically, we had like two training interventions. One was doing steady state cardio exercise, and the other was doing HIIT training. So cycling is hard, like basically really, really hard for one minute.
cycling like nice and steady state for another minute and the other was doing like 40 minutes of steady state exercise. The HIIT training only lasted 20 minutes, ours lasted 40 minutes, but the HIIT training objectively was just way more brutal. It was really harsh training. We were told the research study was basically to see which is more effective doing steady state exercise or doing HIIT training. But the whole aim behind the research study was to see that. And this was controlled for endurance.
increases. So we both had endurance increases as a group as well, obviously. But it was to see which one would push themselves harder in an all out time trial test at the end of it. And it obviously showed that basically if you did harder, more gruelling training, despite increases in endurance, you would push yourself harder in a time trial because you had undergone like three, four weeks of basically hard training. It comes back to the almost like the psychobiological model where your perception of effort, you're able to...
actually knowledge of tasks, you understand in how far you can push yourself as well. Whereas if you're in a steady state, you never test the red line. You never go, Oh, Oh, that was pretty close. I might not do that again. Whereas when you're doing hit training, you might be going really close to that red line going, Oh, I can do a bit more, a bit more. And then you might take over one day and get injured. Well, yeah. Finding the limit as well. I think you sometimes when you ask like these, these pro climbers, like what they think their superpower is and stuff. Um, a lot of.
time they'll say it's I know how to try really hard yeah and I think that's really a common thing which is maybe not just related to the fact that they were brought up to learn how to try hard or told they could do that but they've probably just trained for the past 10 years and experimented with pushing themselves really hard I think that's why it's so important in the lead -up to any trips or something that you're pushing yourself and you're on -site or red -pointing indoors or wherever you can to mimic that environment where you just try flipping hard.
You can't do that all year round, but. No, no. Yeah. And to add to that, something else that always impresses me when I'm lucky enough to work with an elite athlete is their mindset. So really a lot of the training I do with my athletes is no different to what I do with most of my other athletes, like the elite and a lot of the amateur or lower grade climbers train the same. What's different with them is their ability to.
break information down and focus on the small wins each session. So they might have a horrendous session where nothing goes their way but they come out of it and go in, oh I did that really well. And it's like, that's what I think makes it on top of the try hard is what makes an elite athlete an elite athlete. Yeah, okay. Yeah, it probably also links into the task motivation. Yeah, potential motivation, yeah. Get something out of it.
Cool. This has been a heavy science based podcast, which is absolutely wicked. I'm going to go to relatively quick hits and then we'll wrap up. So first one is what's one training myth or misconception about endurance training that you wish would just die? I hate it. People trying to copy the demands of their sport route in a metabolic environment.
So being absolutely specific as possible on task. Yeah, I think it's got its place, but in general you don't need to work on it maybe till you're actually on the route itself. So when people come to me and go, why are you getting me to do zone two training when the route requires, is on a 30 degree wall and requires me to do this and that and this and change intensities here and there. And you're like, okay, yeah, but your body...
doesn't think that way necessarily. Your body doesn't know if it's on that route. What your body knows is it's got responses coming in and needs to adapt to those. So what we're doing by training the like the zone two or the zone four is improving the efficiency of those systems so they can adapt to those demands. Yeah. And improving the efficiency of training because you're looking for those specific adaptations. Yeah. So yeah, specificity is good, but sometimes being too detailed with it, maybe not.
Yeah, I think that's probably a pretty old school approach. Definitely. It's old school, but you see it all the time in climbing. Yeah. Things that are a habit of hanging around, don't they? But I think you see this a lot where like, and we mentioned this at the very beginning that people want to leave feeling tired, which is fine in some circumstances, but also I get really pumped and fail when I'm doing my project. So every session I do for endurance, I need to get really pumped and fail. And if you understand the...
the sports science behind these energy systems, then you can train way more effectively with less fatigue and recover faster, which I think is super, super powerful thing to understand. So to summarize actually then, don't always chase the pump. Don't always chase the pump. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I'll play contrarian to this though, for one thing. And I think you might, you'll probably agree with me on this, but what about...
specifically for the mental health.
Yeah, some people might have a two week trip where they want to hit the ground running. So maybe you could periodise within the year, having periods where you go practice on your replica and then when you come to performing on your route, you then get on it and you've got a bit of understanding, but a replica is never going to really get as close to getting on the route yourself and prepping mentally that way around. Yeah, for sure. Okay, and last question, and I cannot do a podcast.
If you listen to this, Cam has the strongest fingers here at Lighthouse Training. I'm always impressed, always ask, Cam, what do you do for your finger strength? So I want to know if you have any recommendations for building really strong fingers. Consistency. Okay. Yeah, boring that, innit? Yeah, it is. Really boring. No, give me something that's like a silver bullet. Well, if you do this, protocol. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I think you have experimented over the years haven't you you've done lots of things.
Told off a lot for getting a thing about it at 14. It's going to destroy your fingers. So I didn't use it.
When I started using it, I'd have been 16.
GCSEP, then A level PE, and it's like, oh, these concepts are interesting. How can I apply them to climbing? So what I did was I just played on the fingerboard and at that time, so that would be in 25 now, probably about 10 years ago, there wasn't that much research or interventions out about climbing. There wasn't a crimped app or anything. It was all based on what the pros did, wasn't it? You could get like the Chris Webb Parsons fingerboard plan. So yeah, I think. Make out an app and.
One of my mates, he told me, Oh, just try this protocol. It was a seven second on 53 second off protocol. Do not copy this. Oh, is that the Eric Horst one where it's seven on 35. So you do it one hang on the minute for seven minutes. So you do one. I, what I ended up doing was one hang on the minute. Three times. You then rest for three minutes and you do that six times. Okay. Like your max. And at that point I never did testing. I didn't know testing existed and I just, um,
hammered it and just. So it was body weight then or was it just as max? So I started, it was what I, so the first session I literally went from body weight went that's easy, I don't feel tired from that, so I'm gonna go increase the weight.
This is also.
Wow, so you're on small edges. Small edge as well. Yeah, yeah. This is just, this just shows how bad my noise was. Well I was going to say that's nice because you're just using perception of effort to increase your load, which is what I think I do, what a lot of people do. But wait a minute, 12 mil edge again. This is what I, yeah, so this, so I just played about on it. I think my first session I remember getting 20 kg and going, oh, that's all right. Yeah, that's very good. But I was like, that's, my mate's got 60, that's like more impressive. That's the number I want.
Did you realize he was on a 20mm edge? No, no he was on the... Okay, so they were very strong as well. They were like 50 -60kg and I was like well that's the standard I've got to aim for isn't it? Who is this? You probably won't know him but if anyone's from around North Wales or Warrington area, Tommy Williams. He's an absolute wad, very good climber. He's done a lot of hard stuff.
It's got strong fingers. Strong fingers. That was my benchmark when I was 16. I was like, I want to be like that. Cause he climbs V13. If I want to climb hard. Maybe that's the secret set ridiculously high benchmarks. Cause that's why like Dan Varian like, Oh, he's climbed really hard boulders. He's trying to chase Gaskins. If Gaskins ever did those routes. Yeah. Um, but so that was my goal the night over the next two years, I just incrementally built from there. So if I felt.
I just bowed off and just over the road the waves until I achieved that goal and I think I got before going to uni I was at 45 kg Wow, okay, right and then so you had you had process goals or did you say this is an outcome goal? Probably an outcome goal. Okay, you had an outcome goal at a very young age. Well, I wanted to get I wanted to get good at climbing I want to be I enjoyed climbing. I just wanted to climb I just wanted to be able to turn off at the crag. I remember watching
Dave Fitzgerald's video of like, oh, I train so when I can turn up and the weather's good, I can perform my best. That's my goal. I just want to turn up. I want to be in the best physical shape. So when I go outdoors, I'm always climbing at my best. So yeah, my outcome goal was to be as good as Tommy and have plus 50 kg finger strength. So built towards that, got plus 45, went to uni and kind of maintain that, prove that again for another year, that protocol. So this is the same protocol I've done for three years.
And always just seeing incremental progress done by perception of effort. And then 2018 was when I first met Ali Taw and he came to... Also a man of strong fingers. Yeah, this common theme here. But he came to uni at Derby and was doing an assessor training course with us. And I'd been lucky enough to be invited to attend that uni course. And...
That's the first time I got introduced to the concept of testing your finger strength. I'd never done it at that point. And I thought I saw relatively weak fingers for a climber and then did the testing and I did a one arm hang on the 20 mil edge first time round on the lightest edge. And Ollie looked impressed. Ollie looked impressed. I was like, oh, okay. I was just the first time I ever met you, I think it was at Awesome Walls. This is when we were just starting, we were doing the...
first kind of published research on critical force and we did a max hang test to establish a max to then figure out intensities. And I'm pretty sure we were all running around awesome was trying to find more weights to put on your harness and because it was, yeah, I'm pretty sure I didn't know what my max was. Back then, like we would always ask is an assessor, what would you think your max would be? So you didn't have to start so far away and end up doing like, you know, 12 hangs just to get to your max. You want to do that within like six to eight hangs maximum. And I'm probably probably started like,
cost 10, then 20, then 30, then 40, then 50, then 60, and you're like, just still trying to find more weights. Yeah. You're like 12 hangs later, you're like, I need more weight. Well, at that point, we just cut the test off and failed on the endurance part. Yeah, yeah. And did that with testing, and that was when I was introduced to the idea of testing. So I started doing that process of testing, working at a percentage of max and just increasing incrementally over periods of time. But I never really got on with that.
protocol because when I was working at prescribed loads I'd always think I had to turn up and perform at that level. It never allowed for that regulation in manipulating the intensity. Like self -regulation based on your perception of effort and stuff. And this is like putting a disclaimer out there I'm not saying that these the protocols fault is my point my perception of how I interpret numbers on a sheet.
I always train at that load and that's the period I got injured most was when I was working at prescribed loads. But again, I'm not saying it's the wrong approach. It works for some and I use it with a lot of clients. It never worked with me because I'd turn up and perform at that load. So I think I realised that around 2020 that just before we went into COVID that working at prescribed loads doesn't work for me. And I needed to go back to what I was doing in my roots, but with a better knowledge of training. So.
I just started training off perception of effort again. And I was playing with lots of different protocols. So I've done going into lockdown. That was like the greatest experiment of my life. 12 weeks of uninterrupted focusing on one area. How often were you finger boarding during that time? Are we allowed to say on here? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Probably eight to 10 times a week. Yeah. Yeah. A mixture of one arm hangs, repeaters, one arm hang repeaters, 10 mil edge.
Yeah, so a lot of volume. It was great. I really enjoyed it. It was like, I got to test my finger strength, got to train lots of new concepts into implement them into my training. And that's the point where I saw the biggest return on my investment. I think I went from being 104 % body weight and at that point went to 112.
And then we on one arm on one arm. Yeah, sorry. And had multiple lockdowns, which meant I had more experiments. So most people, yeah, well, I can't climb. And I was like, yes, forced training cycles. Basically, I got forced training cycles and experiments. Um, didn't do well for my relationship fever, but, um, experiments, the fingerboard, the fingerboard that got really strong. And so I started playing with those cycles. And the second time around, I, I, I
I just felt my knowledge was improving. I constantly was reading and I was implementing new strategies into my training. And I went from like, plus 112, so 112 % body weight, so then 130 % body weight. And then it was like, at that point I was like, right, maybe it's time to stop finger boarding and just go climbing for two years. Yeah, fair enough. So I did, and then climb for two years. And then I've just got back into training because of doing a PhD, working a full -time job.
I don't have as much time to climb anymore. So it's again, coming back to, I always remember Dave Fitzgerald saying, I want to be in the best shape possible to perform my best when the weather's good. So in my case, it's when I have free time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And as you appreciate now being a dad. Well, just even the weather thing. I get so frustrated with the weather in the UK. Like I've last three, so I didn't get many sessions outside. Last three sessions I've gone outside, the crag I've gone to is the one next to my home. It's like 10 minutes away. And.
It's just been wet the past three times. I mean, I know it's the winter, but like I have clients in America, which I'm asked, I'm like, so what's your climbing season? And they're like, I climb all year round every weekend. I've been out three times in the last three months and like 80 % of the crag has been wet. And I'm like, just trying to repeat small things that I'm not really that excited to do, but I enjoy being outside. Board climbing. That's like my new fingerboard. Yeah. I'm getting into board climbing. I've got to go easy on it.
I'm doing two sessions a week, which is traditionally I've done one a week and then if I do any more than that I just end up picking up finger tweaks, it's so intense in my fingers but now that I'm not climbing much I can do two a week. There's something very satisfying about taking a move and making it harder, conceptually harder every time and that's where I'm now taking my finger strength is I've gone from being on a fingerboard lots, I now just train on, I'm still experimenting with edge pickups so I've got new...
protocols I try with that that then get fed into my clients. So some of those are like rep based, like the Eve stuff, taking what he's doing, but then taking my understanding of sports science and applying merging the two together. And also getting really specific with grip positions, but then also board climbing. So how can I take all that hard work I've done on the fingerboard and apply it to climbing movements and just again, fall back in love with that process of just trying bloody hard.
really fixating on the outcome. I think I've not set anything harder than 7A on the substation climbing board. But the grade isn't important to me in that context. It's just for me to use as a reference to come back to. So I think I've stayed at 7A on that board for six years. Yeah, absolutely not. Yeah, the grades probably completely different.
It's all about the process and then making just moves harder. And it comes back into perception of effort. Like that move that you've done, you've done it so many times that when you make it, link it into different problems, it does feel easy. And that's why you probably don't give it the harder grades that you do. Cause you've just so familiar with it. And in that context, you're just like, it doesn't matter. It's irrelevant what number that shows. Yeah. Yeah. I think that the weird thing about repeating things so many times, like, you know, your Walmart boulders. Yeah. Like.
They get so easy after many, many, many, many sessions of doing warm up boulders on a board or something, but surely the internal load, yeah, the internal load is still quite high, even if the external load starts to drop over time. But then you've adapted to the internal load over time. Yeah. Yeah. So your perception of that drops, but you're still getting good training adaptation from that kind of stuff. Um, one thing I kind of, I think I noticed from doing, asking these questions a lot, particularly about, you know, what tips for finger strength.
some answer from Dave Mason.
distance.
Yeah, yeah. And you're probably in a really good time in your life to do that, to training. I based it on the max strength.
they did three reps, five sets. So that's what I based it on and that was my rationale back then. I knew no different. Yeah, well it worked. So that's the thing, they all work to a certain degree at certain times and then you just need to know kind of when to move on or when to try new things and that's what Dave Mason said to me. It's like, I've basically tried everything under the sun but I've always been doing something and so I think, don't, yeah, just do something.
But do it every week or like, you know, you're allowed weeks off of course, but like, yeah, just do it every week. If I do a protocol, if I choose it, I do it for a year. Yeah. Yeah. Minimum. A lot of the time. And a lot of people don't like that because it can get boring, but if you want to see it through and understand it, I think sometimes I kind of stick to a protocol for a long period of time.
Or like maybe not the exact reps and sets, but the concept or the principle. You're still applying progressive overlay, of course. Yeah, yeah. And I do mix up the reps, the intensity, the tempo, the movement. There's lots of stuff I still change, but the underlying principle stays the same for a year. So from training edge pickups, I don't necessarily change the device for a year. I play with that for a bit, understand how it works and then...
I feel that it then allows me to feed it back into my coaching and know how to quickly manipulate a client's training to suit the needs of performance. So a client's training, I don't keep the same for a year, but for my own, I do. Yeah, I like that. Just changing the variable subtly is quite good, isn't it? Yeah, you can do the same with whatever exercise as well. You stick to the same basic exercise, but you can change things subtly to try and keep it interesting.
And my new knowledge dive is probably shoulders. That's the one I've been going into really heavily at the moment. And if you're a client of mine, you'll know how much shoulder work I give you and play with. I'm say with you on this one, when it comes to shoulder strength, I think I'm especially aware. Cause I think it's a big weakness I have with expressing my finger strength, especially one arm strength. Like I know if I hop into an edge and I'm in that like lock off position, everything's super engaged. I can hold those positions. I still need a larger edge because I don't have strong fingers, but like.
As soon as I straight arm it or face forward, straight arm it, and say you've gone into sort of more external rotation on the shoulder, I just can't even, I can't hold the edge. The same edge I will hold if I'm in that lock off position, because I don't have the muscles engaged around the scapula, so my fingers are just not, they're not doing anything for me. So I might throw some controversy out here. I think shoulders are more important than fingers. Or not more important, but should be treated with the same amount of, like.
pedicure, like finger strength up here, like everyone's like, oh, it's the best thing ever. It's so important. Shoulders should be there with it because shoulders is part of that chain. Yeah. Yeah. And I think every, every climber I've tended to work with is neglected shoulders. And it's been probably one of the biggest low hanging fruit I've got. Cause it's a lot of the time people come back and go, my fingers, the strength hasn't improved, but I feel really good on the wall and I'm moving really well. Cause they're able to.
When I noticed that my shoulder strength had improved was when I was able to retract my scapula on the wall and rather than pull with my arm, I could pull with my scapula and reach the next hold. And that's the point where I went, ah, no, this stuff works. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. There you go. There's another little takeaway. Consistency and shoulder strength. Go get it. Cool. We're going to leave a podcast there, but maybe we'll come back on and we'll chat about strength training at some point because then you'll get well into that stuff as well. Cool. Thanks Cam. Thanks for having me. Thanks for joining my podcast. Yeah.
See you next time. See ya.