Highlight: Training Like an Olympian with Coach Ollie Torr

Ever wondered how hard Olympic level athlete train? In this episode highlight, which is a thirty-minute snippet of the full episode, host Josh Hadley talks to renowned coach, Ollie Torr, about the high-level physical and mental training that goes into preparing Olympic athletes.

Key topics include:

• Training volume – Ollie explains how elite climbers train between 30-40 hours a week during their base season, including long hours on the wall and skill development.
• Execution and super compensation – Ollie describes the process of pushing athletes into “training holes,” where they continually push beyond their limits before tapering to recover and reach peak performance.
• Staying in the game: The importance of mental toughness and consistency, with athletes needing to prioritise training and withstand immense physical and emotional pressure to stay at the top level.
• Lower body strength & grip training: With dynamic movements and evolving setting styles, climbers need to focus more on leg strength, opposition, and less traditional components of grip training as the holds are getting larger, such as wrist strength, open drag grip positions, and wide pinches.

For more insights into the world of Olympic-level training and the challenges faced by athletes, listen to the full episode on all major podcast platforms.

As a thank you for tuning into this episode, enjoy 15% off Lattice Training Plans with the code PODCAST15.

The Lattice jingle is brought to you by Devin Dabney, music producer of the outdoor industry who also hosts the American Climbing Project.

Transcript

Josh (00:00)
Let's go back to this whole idea of execution and physical training. So we were talking about the actual training, maybe let's say like the training plan or the routines, they don't look too different. What's, what do mean by execution then? So, I guess the, I'll say the end point of the training, the style of training I've done. this is again, biased opinion.

had an insight into what other athletes do in the Olympics and from winners of world cups and stuff over the years and then the athletes I've worked with but I would generally say from my experience what I've been taught through in a base season in the winter you'll see athletes training somewhere between 30 and 40 hours a week everything included but a lot of that on the wall yeah I have heard different to that in terms of

I know some of the heavier male athletes will train less. I think one of the US athletes, think Nathaniel Coleman it might be, was looking at around 12 to 15 hours a week plus some extra conditioning. But the athletes that I have worked with that are really good combined athletes tend to look at doing 30 to 40 hours a week. And a lot of that is hard. Look at the Japanese athletes, they are at the wall.

at the gym and they're bouldering for really long periods of time, so eight hour sessions. And you can say what you want about that being play, it's still training. At the end of the day, it's still training. know Shauna had a bit of an insight into her training in the past, but also speaking to her, like play is a huge element of her training, but it's still training. She's aware of that. She's at the wall. tries and climbs. It's still deliberate practices in it when you're playing. There's still like a lot of cognitive stuff going into

practice and designing what you're actually playing on. Absolutely, yeah. It's all mental, tactical, technical training. that, you can do those things for a long period of time. But it'd be silly to underestimate the training load on that. They've built up to being able to do this. So when I was talking about the motivation before, that's kind of your end point in the base season for me. And I've pushed people pretty hard into that and done.

And that's the formula that I think I've now repeated several times and supported others doing. the motivation drop off and the people that haven't made it. Obviously I don't go, okay, November starts 35, 40 hours. is, you build it. Yeah, you build up, you build the hours up, then you build the intensity within those hours up. And I've been there in person for seasons, multiple seasons with athletes. And then I've also supported coaches working with athletes

doing more of the in -person work and I do the physical programming and overview of the entire training plan and then I've also supported teams doing that. I've also supported teams doing that as well and the ones who, athletes I've worked with even directly and we'll get, I don't know, quarter of the way through, they do one training cycle of feeling good, they go into another training cycle

or this felt niggly or I've not been able to get to the wall this week or something's come up. I'm feeling a bit busy, a bit stressed.

It's not that I ever look down on that at all. Everyone's an individual. I'm exactly the same. There's other things going on in lives, but those athletes that make it, they make that work. They will prioritize everything else. Absolutely. And they will, they will turn up day in, out. They will feel like tired to the point of crying. Like some of the training holes that I've put some athletes in, and we do call it a training hole where you're digging yourself down.

You're chucking mud out of the hole, but you don't climb out of that until we're ready. And sometimes we'll allow a little bit of a climb out to get your head above the hole, just to see where you're at. Delay of land. It's super compensation, I suppose. it following that principle or is it more of a long -term thing? It's super compensation, but really, it's not just getting back to baseline after every two days. It's not strength training on day one, two days rest, leave the adaptations. You can't do that. Yeah.

you need to build the work capacity for this format and be the best. So it's kind of like super compensation, but it's kind of multiple days and cycles of down and down and down. We might add in a week of recovery, deload to let themselves get their head up. Okay, I can see what it would be like when I'm fully recovered. Okay, let's carry on, get back to the bottom of the hole, keep digging. And then by the time you're ready to perform and you taper, you can climb out the hole.

and then climb up the pyramid that you made with the excess. And I think you get to a new height and that's the visual I always have every time. But it takes a real dedicated, high grit, determined athlete to stay in it and trust the process. And I've had athletes come into me and say, I can't believe I've just been training with all these other people that I compete with nationally. Do you think Tomoa feels like this? Do you

this athlete feels like this, I feel awful, they're better than me now, we're doing it wrong. And I've had to say, just stay with it, this is the right path, you're on the right track. And the athletes who bail on that process or can't see it through tend to perform pretty well. But the ones that see it through tend to perform really well. And that's my experience of it. And I think that gets missed. And it takes years and years

building that trust with athletes and building up over time to get there. Is it fair to say that if you want to be the best of the best, you need to able to tolerate a huge amount of training volume? I personally believe so, even from a mental standpoint of, you know, you're into climbing gym every day and you've got to be, that's where that intrinsic side of you, you want to make the enjoyment of that process.

the more people you can be around in training, like the Japanese have such a good laugh together. know like Shona had Leah with her a lot of the time where she enjoyed being around her, but fundamentally you're still turning up, you have to turn up every day. So you have to have a lot of robustness to that, but then also physically, yeah you do. And again, I think that, I think a lot of people can have that. I don't think there is as much of a genetic ceiling as some people think. I think there's a lifestyle ceiling.

Okay, yeah. If we're trying to learn from this is again, it's that whole sacrifice and what we said earlier of having one foot out the door is I've trained with some of these athletes in the winter periods and tried to keep up with them and I've done the same training days and I've done the same workouts as them and pretty much on the climbing obviously an easier level but on the weightlifting I've done exactly the same and the weeks where I'm not working as much.

It's not too bad. And I do about 50 % of their training week and then 50 % of my own working week. The weeks where I'm back to like a normal full -time job. And then I train with them on top of that for two, three days at the same level as them, all the same hours and stuff. I completely break. I think I could train like an Olympic athlete. And I'm not saying that is like a bragging term. I'm saying most people could do that, but I wouldn't be able to work. I think I would.

struggle to maintain a good relationship for me personally because I think I give a lot of energy to my wife. I think I would struggle to do any, I wouldn't do any socials. I wouldn't go to the pub, I wouldn't drink, I wouldn't travel. How many Olympic athletes have partners? I wouldn't be able to say actually. think, and that's the thing, I think the ones who do and they're climbers and stuff, I think they make it work. It's like having a parent, isn't it? Yeah. But I think they will have a, I'm pretty sure.

pretty sure I'm happy saying this is their partners are aware of the sacrifice and they have to make up to them and there's an agreement and I'm hoping they're having open conversations because that is that support network. But to be a great athlete you have to sacrifice something. yeah for me it's that the ones who can get into that training hole and stay in it are the ones who are willing to put all their eggs in that basket and they focus on themselves and they are.

focus only on themselves and during that time and they see it through and then they come out the other end really good and then throughout the season obviously throughout the season after the base season the best thing to do in my eyes is making sure you're feeling recovered for the comps but you maintain enough training for the whole season because it's such a long season and then you add one or two mini holes training holes within the season just to make sure you top up that work capacity.

and high performance. Yeah, yeah. What does a what's the week of an Olympic athlete look like for training? Depending on the week and where you are in the season, but say let's go for a really hard week. Yeah, let's go base season when we've got really high volume and we're digging a hole. What does it look like? For a current athlete, so this combined format, an example of what I've done in the past is you'll spend

I'm trying to think about the numbers. So I might be off here on the numbers, but you'll spend maybe three sessions a week for several hours on slabs and movement practice where it's not too intense, but it's, you you're practicing skills. Yeah, high skill practice. Yeah. So it's all, the rest of the training will be skill -based, but that's like really particular skill -based. So you've got that, that can be added onto training at the end or the start. You've got some high intensity.

climbing to build strength power that could be board climbing, could be max effort boulders, could be doing strength repetitions on boulders, like maybe several sessions of that. In a base season, I'd have them doing some form of power endurance still to keep that fight. Whether it's anaerobic capacity. at the beginning about constantly being able to like fight because you need to maintain that. Yeah, so if they're great lead climbers, they can do it on the circuit board boulder wall a lot easier.

If they're in Innsbruck, obviously they'll be on a lead wall. If they're not as good a lead climber, I think they need to be on a lead wall as often as they can to maintain the skills and the fight on lead. So they'll do a session of that, maybe two sessions of power endurance, three sessions of high intensity bouldering, three sessions of skill bice bouldering. They do some endurance around their training, so arcing to warm up, interval style training. So in a base season,

Like say for Erin, for example, we did a lot of endurance training. so that's like again, several hours actually climbing. they'll work on their grip strength in certain ways. So pinch training, edge training, and then two to three, usually three S and C sessions a week, weightlifting plus auxiliary conditioning. So shoulders maintaining health, maybe doing some particular pulling sessions.

So what the week would normally look like is six days training. Friday is usually off because you can train with other people on the weekend. You're looking at kind of zigzagging, like doing mini pyramids of the highest load within the week to try and add recovery. So you might have a really long training day from 10 till six one day. Then the following day you might go from 12 till four. And then the next day you'd probably go for like.

one till eight. So you move it around to increase recovery and then you might have the rest day. Okay, yeah. Yeah, so you're constantly trying to manipulate that. So you're not just playing with days, you're playing with the 24 hour window within a day too. Ideally, yeah. And this is where I've either worked with other coaches to do it or tried to program that. But sometimes like the athlete just prefers to do what they want to do. Might have a certain time of day where they feel best and they perform best in that.

Yeah. then, so that would be...

an average week and then within that you would look at, okay, what type of movements do I think is gonna come up in the future sets? A lot of people don't like doing this, they just focus on all around movement. You see patterns in setting, why wouldn't you use that? okay, I want you to focus on this type of movement during your play session. I want you to focus on which could be... Can you give me an example of this? So an example would be standing on volumes

really shiny dual tex nubbins. I actually wouldn't like I used to put in for people spending 10 minutes on the slab on the wall. Yeah. So they build toe strength. Okay. Or I want you just to focus, find any terrible foothold and when you just go over and over and over it. And you might be on the same sequence just time and time again until your toes hurt. One of the moves that we've seen a lot is doing like a dyno from a big slopey hold into

upside down, gassed on, so you're pressing above your head, and you're pressing downwards as well, so palm to palm, vertically, and your body goes out like a flag, is that, okay, this is your power session, I want you to find anything like that, and I want you to work on it, then your SNC session, you're going to make sure that you're doing some kettlebell overhead squats with one arm, Cossack squats or something, so you get that shoulder stability. We'll chase these movement patterns because you get buy -in for it, it feels really...

attributable to your performance. Same with a lashing swing, swinging movement into a position which if anyone watched the Comp at Budapest, absolutely destroyed that in the final. You were like fist bumping in the air at that point, you were like, yes. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's something I've been asking her to try loads. And again, Rachel's been the coach kind of executing on this with her in person.

But we've just seen them come up time and time again. If you are not good at swinging, you need to be swinging as often as possible at the start of every session and as many play sessions as possible. Swing, catch, swing, catch. Okay. What happens if I do this with my feet? What happens if I do this with my arms? So a training plan looks really simple, but the thought that goes into it is execution. Yeah. There's loads of variability within the movement. Yeah. Loads of intention. So imagine that focus again, coming back to our original points

That is really hard to do. It's like super tiring to focus that much. The more that everyone else can take stuff away from you around that, like the parents, whatever, the better, because then you can just focus on this. And also the less you have to focus outside of training and performance, the better in terms of social engagements, all of that kind of stuff. And then also the people that don't make it, the ones that tend to struggle to focus on this loads.

I know I spoke to Cam yesterday about latest research on internalizing thoughts during a training session. So the most elite athletes will think about what they're doing and internally process every rest attempt. So a good example, two people on a board, one person who's really elite will try and move and then they'll be looking at the holes, brushing holes, thinking about the movement, thinking about what they could do better.

and they're like really into it, they're like really present and the other person who might be elite or but won't be as good often will sit down and scroll through their phone or be chatting and then they'll chat to the point of then getting back on the wall and it's not that both won't be social but the people that are internalised and focused and present are often better and I think that does require a lot of mental energy which you can't spend elsewhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah for sure.

I want to come back to the grip strength training bit as well. Something that's, it's just so varied, but also more complex. Is there anything different you do when it comes to grip strength training for these athletes? Because you have like, I just have so many more big macro holds these days. You're doing more wrist training with these kinds of athletes because they're on bigger holds. you, do you need to prepare for everything? Cause you just don't know what they're going to set. Like even like, I guess we had

a flurray of hand jams and stuff, don't we, but pockets, what are you doing with these athletes which is maybe slightly different? Well, what I've done recently, say with Erin and then others in the past, I look at their weakness in particular and I try and target that. So it could just be something basic like a pinch strength is something to work on a lot, but you are right, working on the wrist is massively important these days.

working on really basic pinches, like wide shallow pinches is really important. I actually think front three drag is really, important because particularly on lead, because you often see small nubbins on volumes where it's only got enough space for three fingers, because if there's space for four, they can usually type right. Yeah. So you end up dragging loads. So I'll do way more dragging with competition athletes and outdoor athletes. Okay. And

I still think you need to work on high angle in front of your face because you often see good comp athletes are great on these other things where they're compressing between holds. But when it comes to like basic basic, they struggle a bit more. And I think that's where the outdoor athletes suddenly get a step ahead. So I do look at the whole picture, but compared to other climbers, more wrist, more front three drag and more pinching.

Yeah, that makes sense when you look at the setting. Yeah, I think if like to the point, you said Sean Bailey had said about Japanese walls and gyms is the better the holds are in the gym and more variety they have, the less they need to train off the wall for grip strength. I think we do a lot more grip training here in the UK because we don't have access to as many good holds and like boards and stuff are great, but the type of pinches on boards and the type of

wristy holds in particular we don't get as much. Yeah I think definitely seen this on Instagram that there's a lot of good Olympic qualified athletes that train on like really big spray walls with loads of macros on and like we have most of our gyms have really good like woodies or moonboard or kilp or something but we don't really have many like massive high volume spray walls which seems to be the way to go. So a good good example of where the strengths differ.

Say you're on a kilter board or a moon board, you've got a couple of different options for your legs really. You put your toe on, you push down on a hold and you maintain tension through the push and your heel's relatively dropped. You could toe in, you put your big toe in, you torque it and then you pull outwards away from the board. You have your foot high and you put your toe on and you torque it where you like rock over, you dig your toe in, heel's being raised through the calf.

And again, you're pulling away from the board. And there's obviously a few variations on that. It's all either push or pull away from the board. On macros and on splat boards, what you often do is you see athletes using the sides of their feet a lot more. So you put your foot on a big, slopey hold that's facing away from you. Like the inside edge, kind of like a Copenhagen plank sort of thing. Yeah, exactly. And that's why that's an exercise they use all the time is.

you constantly compress against whatever other hold you've got available. So say you've got just a left hand hold up and left, your right foot's out to the side, you're pulling downwards, slightly outwards and inwards all at the same time. it's that, or if you've got something facing away from you, two away from you, you're pushing them against each other. There's all this kind of hip adductor strength being used with heel hooks and so on. It's all about opposition because if you've got opposition,

it's going to fatigue the athletes, it's more likely they're going to slip off and it means you can use worse holds because as soon as you have a positive edge these athletes are really strong and they can use it. So you have to create opposition and that's what competition climbing is all about. So I think the spray walls teach them about opposition and movement. Right, okay. Does this also mean that a physical quality which is probably even more important

Maybe not just Olympic athletes, but in general competition climbers, as lower body strength is now so much more important after the last five years of change of setting. I think so, yeah, massively, and particularly with like the dynamic movements and bouldering. Like you saw some of the shorter athletes in the recent comps where they couldn't even reach the next holds. some of the female athletes and it is just requires so much dynamic strength in the legs, but also like you say, that compression

Like you watch, soon as Adam's got hold of something with his, cause he's got such strong calves, Adam Andra, like he totally looks chill compared to other athletes cause he's so strong there. And there was a couple of boulders I've seen him do recently in comps where he's compressing with his lower body and his toes so much because he's used to climbing on granite and he's renowned for that. I would say the lead climbing, what we're seeing is there's more waiting on lead right now in combined format.

I still think there's a preference or it's easier for athletes to have really light legs and not strong in lead because they can get away with being lighter. So it's not needed there as much, but the bouldering kind of neutralizes that at least. Okay, so while it's still combined between lead and boulder, leg strength is still going to be really important. But you think if there's, and actually you might know this or maybe I've just heard rumors that in LA,

the next Olympics, they're thinking of separating it again. So we'll just have Boulder and just have lead. Do you that's going to specialise the training even more? Yeah. Yeah. Which I, think is a good idea and I'm really psyched to see that, but I actually really like the current format. And I do worry that right now, bouldering, how do I put this? think bouldering create, cause of the movement styles creates healthier athletes and more all round robust athletes.

I think the lead climbing is amazing to watch. And I love the fact that they've gone more to this resistant climbing end where you can watch people fight. But there is obviously a preference again for a lighter and lighter climber. They have strong legs, but they're definitely not as strong as the boulders usually. So I think we'll see more specialization in terms of body type as the lead becomes separate