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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.