Overtraining, undertraining, and training paradigms

I've always had problems with overtraining - it just seems easier to do a bit more and push a bit harder on the assumption that this has to be better than risking doing too little. I saw a quote from Muhammad Ali the other day that pretty much summed up by idea of how training works - when asked how many sit-ups he did, he apparently said, "I only start counting when it starts hurting, because that's when it really counts." I saw that the Cafe Kraft hangboard has a sign above it that says "Einer geht noch". It's that extra set you do that makes the difference; one more lap is what'll make you stronger.

But in the past week I've read a bunch of posts on climbstrong.com that totally disagree with this paradigm: "A great rule of thumb is to end any session after a great send – no need to push the system when it's clearly performed a new best level. Beyond that, the session always should end immediately when we see a visible decrease in performance or a degradation of technique. Adding volume will not improve strength. Adding volume will not improve power. It will only slow recovery." Or how about: "To really progress your pull strength, you need to focus on two things: perfect form and high volume. Work on avoiding failure, rather stop at about half the reps of which you think you’re capable. This way you can get twice as many fresh reps per session or per day."

Wait a minute. Is it just me or is this the exact opposite of what I've been told for years?

Clearly there'll be differences between individuals and what works best for them, but is it possible to say that one of these approaches is straight up better / wrong? Can any sports physiologists or trainers out there offer any thoughts?

I'm planning on trying out the latter approach for a few months, and seeing if I do better when I end my day at the crag / evening at the climbing gym when I start to flag rather than trying to crank out a few more routes. I'm really curious to know whether this is daft or actually just smart.

Thanks for any help ya'll can offer.

Stephen

If you're climbing less than V8/5.12 and "training", you're likely wasting your time. It's the current fad though, so feel free to participate.

You can view it in terms of diminishing marginal utility, or as a curve approaching an asymptote. Every extra set in a workout gives less return than the prior set. In strength focused training, you get about 75-80% (or more) of possible returns in the first few sets. There have been several studies looking at what is the optimal number of sets. They tend to land around 3-5 sets. It varies depending on what specifically you are doing, but it's a good rule of thumb. So the return on that 7th set is next to nothing, but the injury risk and negative training effects/recovery hole go way up. So the risk/reward profile is terrible. Leave a little in the tank...when training strength or power anyway.

The idea of ending a workout after hitting a PR is not an unusual one, and sure didn't come from climbing training. Aussie national cycling team coaches have used this guideline for a long time. Since we know muscular/neural adaptations occur faster than things like connective tissue, it makes sense from several perspectives.

If returns are "utility" and effort/sets is "x", your return on sets would look like this:

Over training syndrome is an actual entity that has been described in many other sports. rice.edu/~jenky/sports/over…

Tico wrote:If you're climbing less than V8/5.12 and "training", you're likely wasting your time. It's the current fad though, so feel free to participate.

Meh. Don't call it training, then - call it having a day at the crag. The same question applies about whether you are sensible to keep cranking until you can't do any more.

Your original post had various sayings/anecdotes thrown in and you made no statement about what specifically you are trying to train. Do you want more power, more strength, more endurance? Are you trying to win bouldering comps or put up committing alpine routes? Sports physiology is a pretty complex subject and you're not likely to get a sufficient answer in a single MP post.

A few things that came to mind as I read your post:
-You seem to be defining overtraining as doing too much in a single session. While this is a concern I feel like most of the experts I've known (researchers, coaches, etc) are more concerned about inadequate rest and recovery than overdoing a single workout.
-"A great rule of thumb is to end any session after a great send" -in activities that can be very technique sensitive (such as climbing) your technique suffers later in a workout and you can begin to develop bad muscle memory. While running laps on a climb may help you train endurance specific to your forearm muscles it could at the same time hurt your climbing technique.
-"Adding volume will not improve strength. Adding volume will not improve power."-this is true, athletes get strong by doing short, but very intense activity. If you were trying to train for a 400 meter race running for multiple miles at a slow pace is not going to help, but running repeated intervals shorter than 400m at a very fast pace will help you get your time down. On the other hand if you're focusing on an endurance activity then volume may be the primary focus of your training.
-"when asked how many sit-ups he did, he apparently said, "I only start counting when it starts hurting, because that's when it really counts." - your muscles adapt after being overloaded and then getting adequate nutrients and recovery time. The important question to ask here is should you be doing more situps or do the same number with a heavy weight on your chest? The answer depends on what you want to improve and if you should be focusing on quality (or more accurately intensity) or quantity.

None of the anecdotes in your post are "wrong." The problem is that they all apply to different aspects of training. In the future when you read something on training try to figure out the "why" of the recommendation. If you know why a regimen or exercise is being recommended you can decide if it is right for you at that point in your training.

Good points - and yeah, definitely not the most coherent or well thought out thing I've ever written.

I'm asking this primarily with regard to strength and power (on the assumption that training for endurance is quite a different kettle of fish), so I'm wondering when you'd be best off stopping your session of bouldering, campusing, or other hard work.

I've conflated a couple of things when I said "overtraining", which was stupid. I did mean that I've always been terrible at getting suckered into overtraining - any sport I've done I have a hard time resting enough. I brainfarted here as I was kinda thinking about recovery times following a workout, and something else I'd read about those last few attempts adding little training benefit but having a significant impact on recovery, so your training is less efficient because you have to wait far longer before you can train again. What I really meant to ask about was whether the training benefits of a super hard sessions asymptote out while recovery times go through the roof.

So. My question is pretty much:

If a short and intense workout will make you stronger, is it better to stop sooner (i.e. not do as much as you feel you could), or should you err more towards doing more (i.e. keep going till your performance declines and you have to stop)?

Stephen Minchin wrote:So. My question is pretty much: If a short and intense workout will make you stronger, is it better to stop sooner (i.e. not do as much as you feel you could), or should you err more towards doing more (i.e. keep going till your performance declines and you have to stop)?

For me personally it depends a lot on the type of training I'm doing. A hangboard workout? Sure, throw on some extra sets until you feel wrecked. Doing 4x4s or projecting a hard route? Stop early.

Tico wrote:If you're climbing less than V8/5.12 and "training", you're likely wasting your time. It's the current fad though, so feel free to participate.

I have a sneaking suspicion this guy would disagree (see his discussion in the intro to the making of a rock prodigy, maybe the most read piece of climbing training literature written...)

will ar wrote: For me personally it depends a lot on the type of training I'm doing. A hangboard workout? Sure, throw on some extra sets until you feel wrecked. Doing 4x4s or projecting a hard route? Stop early.

why would you want to do extra HB sets until you feel wrecked?

willS nailed it pretty dead on with his graph.

Tico wrote:If you're climbing less than V8/5.12 and "training", you're likely wasting your time. It's the current fad though, so feel free to participate.

why V8/5.12? these aren't even remotely equivalent(??)

slim wrote: why V8/5.12? these aren't even remotely equivalent(??)

I heard Steve Maisch mentioning these numbers in the recent podcast on trainingbeta.com, I'm sure he isn't the first to throw the 2 numbers out. I don't think there's much disagreement that V8!=5.12 & I guess to make sense of this statement (not saying I completely agree), you can think of it like this: if you can't climb 5.12, you should climb more & if you can't boulder V8, you should boulder more. If you can climb 5.12 but can't boulder V8, you should boulder more (& do route specific training, if you care to improve your route climbing).

What this is essentially saying is bouldering is more specific than route climbing, and I'd tend to agree. After all, bouldering did start out as fun rest day activity/specific training for hard moves on routes. Whether the magic grade is V8 I think it's as arbitrary as 5.12. Personally, I can attribute some of my recent route climbing gain to bouldering more (that you can't gain from just hangboarding or even campusing), and my baseline route climbing ability was already quite over 5.12.

Tico wrote:If you're climbing less than V8/5.12 and "training", you're likely wasting your time. It's the current fad though, so feel free to participate.

Baloney. Training bumped me up into the 5.12 range.

By training, I mean following at cook-book training program with hangboarding 2x a week, 4x4's 2x week, and some timed climbing (2 min on 1 min off for 8 rounds). Some might call this just more climbing, but having the program was just what I needed.

As to the OP - in previous attempts to train, I found it so easy to get injured by climbing till it hurts. So the aforementioned cook-book program was really good for me. Many times I finished with lots of gas still in the tank, many times I was bushed.

I think consistency rules. So getting on it several times a week is far better than climbing to exhaustion every time. And much better than getting injured.

Stephen Minchin wrote:So. My question is pretty much: If a short and intense workout will make you stronger, is it better to stop sooner (i.e. not do as much as you feel you could), or should you err more towards doing more (i.e. keep going till your performance declines and you have to stop)?

I'm probably just reiterating here, but generally speaking, it is better to stop before you think you should when training strength and power in particular, especially if the exercise is a skilled one. If there is little to no required technique, this rule can be a little fuzzier.

Keep in mind that proper work:rest ratios are also important during the workout.

will ar wrote: For me personally it depends a lot on the type of training I'm doing. A hangboard workout? Sure, throw on some extra sets until you feel wrecked. Doing 4x4s or projecting a hard route? Stop early.

Huh, that's strange -- I would have said the opposite. Hangboarding when I'm wrecked feels totally counterproductive because I can't summon nearly enough strength/effort on any given grip to complete a set (talking about repeaters, in this case). For 4x4s, LBCs, or redpointing-as-training (i.e. in the gym or an outdoor route I have no intention of sending), it feels like the whole point is to climb through a debilitating pump, so I'm much more likely to continue past the point of feeling cooked.

Usually by my last set in a LBC workout it actually takes a not-insignificant amount of mental effort to even pull onto the wall, as my body and forearms are trying to tell my brain to "rest, you idiot!" This happens even without throwing on extra sets vs. what I planned, and even when I feel this way it doesn't mean that I won't complete the last set successfully -- it's just that I expect a different physical reaction to PE training vs. strength (or power).

Tico wrote: If you're climbing less than V8/5.12 and "training", you're likely wasting your time. It's the current fad though, so feel free to participate.

Yeah, going to have to disagree with this for a number of reasons. First and foremost, I don't think training necessitates replacing climbing (in the gym or outdoors) with using training apparatus like hangboards or campus boards. These apparatus may be able to deliver more effective returns on effort, which does get increasingly important as a climber gets stronger. Still, I think that people often mistakenly equivocate training with hangboarding/campusing.

Instead, training should be contrasted with "just climbing", i.e., using your time at the gym or crag with no real purpose, plan or intent. For a total newbie, training might not encompass anything other than bouldering and TRing, but I'd say that the newbie could still be training if they're bouldering and TRing in a systematic and planned manner with the intent of producing specific results. In this sense, it's almost an oxymoron to say that training is a waste of time; training is really about getting the most ROI on your time/effort, and in that sense, it should be the most effective use of time regardless of level.

Of course, if you're training ineffectively (e.g. just doing a shitload of pullups and crunches, with a delicate slab as your goal route), that could still be a waste of time. Or if you don't care about the ROI and just want to hang out at the gym for the social scene, then training would certainly be a misguided use of time. But that's a factor of individual motivation, independent of experience/level.

edit: that's not to say that there aren't training fads, and I'd agree that training in general (not just for climbing) has become much more popular in recent years -- which I think ultimately results in a lot of newbies training ineffectively

Training is also relevant at any level if you are limited in how often you can climb. My gym is two hours away, and while I have a small wall in my garage, I'd rather have a hangboard and weights than nothing at all.

climbing friend,

the v4 crushing rocks requires about as much power as a 12a crux, yes myah, and if you pull the v8 moves you may pull the solid 5.13 crux, yes myah

Others have alluded to this, but I would say this: the most common, and effective, thing to train specifically is maximum finger strength. This is often the limiting factor for 5.12+/V5 climbers. The gold standard for maximum strength training is high intensity, low volume. If you push too hard at high intensity, you will get hurt. If you don't allow sufficient rest and recovery, you will get hurt/overtrained.

Interesting discussion. I also would add that V8 is NOT equivalent to 5.12.

climbing friend,

Perhaps it is biggest secret in all climbing rocks that hangboarding is magic bullet to crushing strength and unbelievable high performance and elite gradings, but we must sandbag others by telling them to just climb a lot and develop their technique floating lotus style and worry about the crushing strength later? This way we can delay their growth and keep them off our projects for years to come?

Ha ha
ho ho
ha ha
ho ho ho
ha ha hhmmmmmmyyyaaahh myah!

Stephen Minchin wrote:Good points - and yeah, definitely not the most coherent or well thought out thing I've ever written. I'm asking this primarily with regard to strength and power (on the assumption that training for endurance is quite a different kettle of fish), so I'm wondering when you'd be best off stopping your session of bouldering, campusing, or other hard work. I've conflated a couple of things when I said "overtraining", which was stupid. I did mean that I've always been terrible at getting suckered into overtraining - any sport I've done I have a hard time resting enough. I brainfarted here as I was kinda thinking about recovery times following a workout, and something else I'd read about those last few attempts adding little training benefit but having a significant impact on recovery, so your training is less efficient because you have to wait far longer before you can train again. What I really meant to ask about was whether the training benefits of a super hard sessions asymptote out while recovery times go through the roof. So. My question is pretty much: If a short and intense workout will make you stronger, is it better to stop sooner (i.e. not do as much as you feel you could), or should you err more towards doing more (i.e. keep going till your performance declines and you have to stop)?

both are useful.

for a beginner, i think its important to increase overall work capacity. a beginner has poor technique and low strength, so they can't generate enough intensity for a training effect. therefore, increase volume. build a big base of work capacity so you can train harder and climb more.

for the elite, focused, super high intensity training and stop before your technique goes out the window.

everyone else, somewhere in between.