The Dilemma

Another week down!

With midterms this week, all the students at school (myself included) were a little hectic and no one seemed to get out of the madness unscathed. I ended up doing well on the four tests I took (one to go), and put in a decently solid week of training.

With the training, I've had some thoughts on things that I may tweak. Typically my workout looks something like this:

• Warmup (30 minutes tops)
• Dynamic Stretching (see The Climbing Doctor)
• Warm-up Pyramid
• This is just climbing 5 x V2s, 4 x V3s, 3 x V4s, 2 x V5s, and a couple attempts on my boulder problem projects to get my "try hard" attitude on board for the day. I try to do the pyramid as quickly as possible without sacrificing technique, it kind of doubles as a volume workout because I'm putting in about 120 moves or about 180 feet of climbing (I would debate that the vertical distance is less important than the number of moves).
• Workout (between 30-50 minutes, depending on how pressed for time I feel and how guilty I feel taking up all the time I want to procrastinate studying)
• This switches between limit bouldering, 4x4s, and volume workouts
• Hangboarding (20 minutes)
• Just two grips with two sets per grip
• Climbing Workout of the Day (CWD, about 10-12 minutes)
• This is when I come up with something that is awful, hard, and makes me wonder why I picked a hobby that's physically demanding.

The things I'm debating are:

1. Throwing out volume days and focusing exclusively on limit bouldering and 4x4s. Fridays are typically volume days and I feel that it is almost "wasted mileage" on the rock wall. I know people talk about ARC training and long, low intensity workouts are good for capillarization, but I've felt like I've had stronger benefits from my warm-ups and the 4x4s I've done. Instead, I would switch off weeks between having two 4x4 days or two limit bouldering days.
2. Tossing in campusing for one day instead of the hangboard workout. I've already tried this once and... I'm not sure. I feel like I can train power and precision that relates closer to climbing by actually climbing, but maybe that means I should move to smaller rungs to increase the amount of recruitment I'm demanding of my forearms.
3. Turning the Climbing Workout of the Day into an antagonist training opportunity. This is mostly due to my weak shoulders. I recently realized that I'm setting myself up for a chronic shoulder injury if I don't get them taken care of, so I've been doing a variety of shoulder strengthening exercises each day (not unlike physical therapy exercises), but I might need to start incorporating other things such as gymnastic ring workouts or something with free weights.

Anyway, I'll put some more thought into it and see what comes out.