By Mark Anderson

You may recall from this post that I had an abnormally long and successful Fall 2016 climbing season. Typically after I send a hard project I take along break from climbing, but I sent my season goal-route (Shadowboxing) so early in the Fall 2016 season that I was still stoked to continue working (and hopefully sending) hard routes. In the past I’ve had great success sustaining high levels of power and fitness through regular Maintenance Training (discussed extensively here). That approach works well when you can count on many, regularly-spaced indoor training days, in which you are able to train long and hard. However, my outdoor days on Shadowboxing were too intense to permit quality maintenance training during my rare and sporadic indoor training days.

The other problem was that Shadowboxing was basically a long enduro climb, whereas most of my remaining projects were short power-fests. I had trained my body for endurance climbing and deliberately neglected power. I felt like I needed to top-off my power to have a chance at these projects, and widen my fitness base if I wanted to extend the effective length of my season into November.

After 8 weeks of training for Rifle endurance, I used a Micro Cycle to re-tune my power for short burly routes like 7 Minute Abs.

In order to accomplish those two training goals, I designed a “Micro-Cycle”—in this case a 17-day cycle (including rest days) that included Strength, Power, and PE sessions. My Micro-Cycle is illustrated below in the yellow box of Weeks 9-11 (Note, for detailed explanations of Weeks 1-8, see this post):

I started with a mini-Strength Phase, which included two full, “normal” 6-grip Hangboard workouts.  My third workout was a hybrid between Strength and Power Endurance (PE), comprised of a 4-grip Hangboard workout (including the four grips I felt were most relevant to my upcoming goals), then a 45-minute rest, followed by 3-sets of Route Intervals (for tedious details on my Route Interval, see this post).

Next I transitioned into a mini, hybrid Power and PE Phase. The “LB/C + PE” days consisted of ~45 minutes of bouldering (including Warmup Boulder Ladder, Hard Bouldering, and Limit Bouldering), then ~30-40 minutes of Campusing, followed by 3 or 4-sets of Route Intervals. The “LB/C” day included longer durations of bouldering and Campusing, without any PE training.  Note that I wrapped up every training session with 2-3 sets of my typical assortment of Supplemental Exercises.

The Micro-Cycle worked pretty well. On paper I was just as strong on October 3^rd as I was on September 4^th, and just as fit on October 11^th as I was on September 20^th. On the rock, I continued to climb well through mid-November, FA-ing the powerful 5.14b Double-O Ninja on November 4th, a full two months after the end of my initial, full Strength Phase. Normally I would be well past my peak (especially my power peak) at that point. Ultimately the limiting factor in my season seemed to be motivation—at times I struggled to stick to the training plan and continue going to the crag, especially in the wake of so much success (I realize that may sound counter-intuitive, or at least pompous, but in my case I tend to want to relax after sends, and often find failure more inspiring).

After two months of training for long pump-fests, a short and sweet “Micro-Cycle” helped re-tune my fitness for short, powerful routes like Double-O Ninja.

The next time you find yourself motivated to extend a Performance Peak, give your power a quick boost, or fine-tune your fitness to suit a particular goal route, consider a Micro-Cycle such as this. Keep in mind the workouts, frequencies, and scheduling described here are just one example. These variables can be manipulated in many ways to accommodate different goals.