Doing laps in the gym?

I hear people talking about doing laps in the gym, and it sounds like something I'd like to try to improve my endurance, but I'm not certain about the specifics:

-the routes....how many grades below your max? 

-top-rope, i assume?

-how many laps?

-gym etiquette-wise... is it cool to keep going up and down a route when the gym is busy?

And spare me the "f*** the gym, go outside!" replies...

Thanks!

Yeah I do this a lot, but if it's busy I'll make sure to keep any eye out for anyone looking like they wanna get on the line i'm on, and if it's really busy I usually won't do this. I've done lead or TR, if leading you can downlead (for steep routes) too, or just pull the rope quickly from the side where you don't have to untie the knot, then go again (and again). Sometimes I even stay on the wall while my partner pulls the rope.  # of laps depend on grade and how tired I am. Usually I'll do it at the end of a session, and go until I fall or get too tired or something... usually between 2 and 6 (more than 6 and I should probably pick a harder route....imho). No strict rules for doing laps though, that I know of...

Etiquette: Eh, maybe best to try to do it when it's not too busy, but you know, fuck em, do what you gotta do.

Top rope: If you can up and downlead that is the most realistic as far as pacing goes. Also it's great to do it this way if you are a nervous climber. But obviously TR will still give you endurance benefits.

As to laps and difficulty (and rest times etc) that really depends on what you're trying to improve. "Endurance" can mean many things: the endurance to climb 20 moves through a crux sequence, the endurance to not biff it on the easy climbing above the crux, ability to give multiple hard redpoint efforts in one day, ability to climb easy terrain all day, etc. So how hard are you climbing at the moment and what are your goals and what do you think is keeping you from those goals?

If you are leading, you can "leap frog". Climb to the first bolt, climb back to the ground (no resting), climb to the second bolt, downclimb to where you clipped the first bolt, climb to the third bolt, downclimb to where you clipped the second bolt and so on. If you do this, you will have climbed the route up twice and down once by the time you reach the anchor. This makes it so that you don't have to downclimb the whole route all at once and it prevents the need to unclip. 

As far as etiquette, I think it is fine to do this routine once even if folks are waiting. It is also a bit more subtle than standard laps. 

Type 2 exercise is individual for every person's physiology. Think of it as your all-day" pace. So, find a grade you can hang on indefinitely, find a route at your gym (or local crag) that isn't seeing much traffic atm, and climb up and down for as long as you can make time for (best w/ autobelay).  Alternately, pick a bouldering wall and pick out circuits you can do without leaving the wall.  You can turn this into a HIIT workout (which may give you most of the advantages of type 2 enduro exercise) by modulating your speed, or having an easy route and a moderate route next to eachother. As far as gym ettiquite, I think as long as you're not falling off, or hogging a route somebody wants to get on, you should be good. 

Short Fall Sean wrote:

So how hard are you climbing at the moment and what are your goals and what do you think is keeping you from those goals?

In the gym, I warm up on a 5.10a, then 10b, then 10c... then get into harder 11's for a bit, then project a 12a or 12b, for a while until I'm spent, then a warm-down easy route if there's time.
Goals: I feel my endurance isn't great, especially now that I'm getting into lead climbing, and especially on overhung stuff. 

Eric Metzgar wrote:

In the gym, I warm up on a 5.10a, then 10b, then 10c... then get into harder 11's for a bit, then project a 12a or 12b, for a while until I'm spent, then a warm-down easy route if there's time.
Goals: I feel my endurance isn't great, especially now that I'm getting into lead climbing, and especially on overhung stuff. 

This sounds like a lot of warmup. Have you tried shortening your warmup and getting onto harder climbs earlier in your session? 

This has been a focus of mine recently. I found that I needed much less warmup than I had thought, and that I could easily warmup on harder climbs than I had thought without risking injury. Cutting down on my previously extensive warmup gave me more time to focus on harder climbs, which really helped me build more power, which I've found helped a lot with endurance.

Eric Metzgar wrote:

In the gym, I warm up on a 5.10a, then 10b, then 10c... then get into harder 11's for a bit, then project a 12a or 12b, for a while until I'm spent, then a warm-down easy route if there's time.
Goals: I feel my endurance isn't great, especially now that I'm getting into lead climbing, and especially on overhung stuff. 

Projecting won't help your endurance as you are not spending enough time in the pump zone.  Spend more time doing routes that you can do, but still hard for you, and do more of them.  If you can climb 5.11 then try to do as many as you can in a session.  Varying the amount of rest time between routes will vary the workout.  You can also do one 5.11 multiple times, with a specific rest period between each lap.

Aerobic training (ARC) is different, but may still be helpful.  It builds capillarity, which will help you from getting  pumped on routes (in the long term).  Try to climb for 30 minutes without getting pumped.  I use the auto belays, and also climb up and down to the first (or second when noone is looking) bolt on other routes.  The routes will have to be very easy at first. This is a great way to train technique, as it is very hard to keep it easy enough.   A slight pump is fine, but better to step off the wall then to get the big pump, which defeats the purpose.  Belayed is great but hard to find willing belayers.

Third, hard bouldering increases your power which will improve your overall power endurance capability in the long run.

 Basically, there are three general types of workouts.  Many say they should be done on different days, but I find doing two in one day lets me rest up better between workouts.  For example, I'm heading to the gym today and plan on hard bouldering for an hour and a half followed by 30 minutes of ARC.  

Plenty of good training books out there to check out.  Find what works for you.

Eric Metzgar wrote:

In the gym, I warm up on a 5.10a, then 10b, then 10c... then get into harder 11's for a bit, then project a 12a or 12b, for a while until I'm spent, then a warm-down easy route if there's time.
Goals: I feel my endurance isn't great, especially now that I'm getting into lead climbing, and especially on overhung stuff. 

I know you are asking question about endurance, so answers below. But… a lot of times when people THINK they need endurance, they actually are mistaken, and they need other things.

If you are mostly rope climbing, and not bouldering much, it is much more likely that you are lacking power, and not endurance. They are connected, of course. Your power determines how much endurance you can get. Sure, within the given power level there is a range of endurance that you can improve, but but eventually you come to a hard stop, and working endurance doesn’t improve things more, bc it can’t.

Also, if you are just getting into leading, and overhanging climbing, it is very likely that your issues are more psychological than physiological. It takes time and practice to get used to the feeling of pump, and climbing pumped, and learning how much longer you CAN still hold on, while pumped, if you learn to breathe, and pace, and mentally tolerate that pumped feeling.

IMO your best path towards improvement would come from redpointing the climbs that you can do all the moves on. And from bouldering regularly.

Now, the endurance answers.

There are many types of endurance, and many way people train it. It’s a spectrum. The longer the time on the wall, the easier the climbing. You can do it on lead, on TR, on autobelay, or on a bouldering wall, traversing, or up/down climbing.

The old-school ARCing (aerobic restoration and capillarity) is the longest prescribed time in the wall, something like 30-40 min. Or two sets of 20 min each.  It is incredibly boring, and also not practical nowadays in a commercial gym. I would also argue that it is not all that useful.

Power Company training plans have endurance sessions that are 3 sets of 10min on/5 min off.

Lattice plan had 3 sets of 5min on/3 min off.

There are also shorter intervals  that people do for various reasons, e.g. up-down-up on a route, repeated several times with timed breaks in between. Or sets of doubles (climb/lower/climb).

At this point you are close to 4x4s in terms of the total number of moves, and might skip the ropes, and do it on a bouldering wall.

There’s even a way to do it on a home wall with just 4 smallish holds, positioned about shoulder width apart in two rows about 1.5-2 feet apart, a jug in the middle, and a few footholds. You climb up/down/up/down on the 4 holds for 30 seconds, then shake our on the jug for a minute, then go back to up/down climbing on thr 4 holds, then back to shaking out… some argue that this kind of training is more purely targeting your forearm endurance, bc it takes the movement skills out of equation,  you don’t have to do flagging, back-stepping, fancy gastons, and what not. You are just purely working the forearm muscles. Other people argue that the long endurance/ARCing is the perfect time to practice your footwork and movement, and it is not beneficial to remove those things out of equation. But if home wall is all you’ve got…

Obviously in all of the drills I just described, the difficulty goes up as the length of the interval goes down. And at some point the exercise crosses from purely endurance (you are not getting pumped) somewhere into the power-endurance spectrum.

The difficulty of the climbing you determine it experimentally, based on how you feel. Can you climb 5.9 for 10 minutes without getting pumped? Then push it to 10a. If not, drop it to 5.8, or whatever it happens to be for you, until you can climb for 10 min. Then slowly increase the difficulty over the course of multiple sessions.

Honestly, if you are new to it, you don’t need to stress out about which particular exercise you pick. You will see improvement with any snd all of the above. Just pick what you can conveniently do. Is up-down-up most realistic in your gym/with your partner? Do that! Just note how much time you need to rest between sets, and how many sets you do, on what grade of routes. Then up the difficulty by making the sets closer together; OR adding more sets; OR making the sets harder. Which of the variables you tweak is kinda based on what’s realistic. 

But circling back to where I started, this may not be what you need most… and there’s no reason why you can’t go these things AND also work on redpointing harder routes, or bouldering  just make sure you do the harder climbs, or harder bouldering first, while you are fresh. And do the endurance laps later in the training sessions. Or split your days to couple times a week of bouldering only, and couple times a week or ropes/endurance stuff  

To expound on what Lena said which is way more comprehensive than anything I'll write, In my experience, I've done it completely "dumb" and I've gotten smarter about it over the years.  If you do "endurance sets" on jugs, you'll get really good at not falling off jugs due to pump, but that'll do very little for smaller hold endurance.  The best way I've found to increase endurance has less to do with set or interval time vs rest time (though that does matter) and more to do with trying to mimic what you're more likely to run into on a route- which is good holds and bad holds.  I factor rest in as well.  A typical endurance workout for me consists of 3 10 minute sets with 10 minute rests in between each set.  During the climbing, I climb easy holds, launch into a sequence and go about 80-90% of my max ability until I'm about to pump off, then get back on jugs, find a rest, shake out a bit, continue climbing on "easy" holds until the pump subsides a bit, then launch back into another crux and repeat this process for the duration of your set.  That has paid off for me more than any other endurance training I've done.  

One often overlooked aspect of training for endurance is strength.  For below average strength, you'll see climbers pump off the biggest of jugs.  For "average" strength (based on, let's say, a 5.11 to 5.11+ redpoint level) you'll see people that can climb forever on jugs, but pump off of cruxes with sustained small holds, especially if it's more than vertical.  For climbers with astounding endurance, you'll see them cruise through multiple small hold cruxes with relative ease and probably with better technique that someone trying to climb smooth on jugs, because smaller holds require more precision.  So, long story short (and apologies if this is redundant to earlier posts, I didn't read them all) getting stronger is a way to increase endurance as well, and shouldn't be overlooked.

If you’re strong enough there’s nothing to endure 

I've never liked doing laps just because somewhere around lab 4 I get the route wired and climb it way more efficiently and the laps stop being work. I've had more luck with an anaerobic capacity workout I found on Crimpd. Find something a grade or two below your redpoint. Climb it once. Come down and immediately climb it again. Take a 5 min rest or so. Repeat for 4 different routes.
If you fall you're done just start your rest.

I've always thought that there's no point to doing 30 minutes on a single route if you can do it in 10 minutes. UNLESS you're training for multipitch :)

I do 30s, which is 30 consecutive climbs on autos, broken up into sections of 10 with a small break in-between each round (5 min or so).  I typically stay one full grade off normal onsight grade for 8 of the pitches, then allow myself 1 easier pitch, and then one harder pitch closer to onsight limit each round.  Failure on any means they don't count so you have to redo.  Most productive hour of my week in the gym.

word of caution, I've gotten some pretty gnarly blisters on my hands running laps on easy gym routes. The jugs on the easy routes sometimes have just enough of a different shape that they hit where I don't have thick calluses, and plastic at high volume can be pretty abrasive. But I'm soft lol, so YMMV

I did a thing for a while that I found super helpful - pick a climb that is almost at your max, maybe something hard-ish that you have pretty dialed (it helps if it is a longer climber, or at least one with more than once "crux").  Do it on TR in three parts - climb the first third and then lower and restart immediately.  Then climb the first and second thirds and lower and restart.  Then climb the whole thing.  I found this to be a great way to push me to climb more efficiently and PUSH THROUGH THE BURN!

Seriously though back when I was doing this with a partner who was equally psyched at a time when the gym wasn't busy, we found it really helped us and was also fun

If I recall correctly we would do this for 3-4 climbs each in a session

Jake and Lena posts spot on 

also i second the early post about figuring out what your goal is, and your timeline, getting someone knowledgeable / you trust for a second opinion or how realistic it is, (or just go for it and surprise yourself or learn from your failure) 

And then tailoring your training to that.

I’m someone that trained a bunch of junk mileage for endurance for a long time because I wanted to do multipitch. It probably helped a bit, since it used to take me an hour to lead a moderate trad pitch, but in hindsight I probably would have done less endurance and more technique drills, base conditioning and bouldering.

gym etiquette is a good topic. If you see another route offering a similar difficulty to what you need, doesn’t hurt to switch and let someone queued up get on what you’re on. Personally I try to follow the communication, common courtesy, common sense approach, although I’m not always successful. If there aren’t other open routes and you’re doing laps, finish your laps imo. Sometimes I want to climb the one crack of a particular size in the gym, but there are 4 people on a 5.easy on top of it, there for half an hour, when 20 other 5.easy routes are open. I may check in with them politely, but I also just try to let it go and do something else, and that always works out just fine.

good luck on the enduro training!

all of the training in the world is worthless without a base level of fitness. i'm a firm believer in periodization training. therefore, injecting ARC training at the right time, has worked for me. the tried and true “There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch (TINSTAAFL)”  mentality. I also limit the amount of down climbing as it is hard on the elbows and you will eventually pay for it if done too often. bouldering for power.

jcs

Qualifier, I’m a middle aged trad dad getting back into training, hit the gym 2-3x per week.  My #1 goal is working to build tendon strength and endurance so I look for big blocks/ easy sloper routes or overhanging jug routes.  Key is finding routes set with old holds that are smooth.  Typically I run 2-4 continuous laps of climb/down climb.   For me, a vertical 5.7 to 5.10 starts to really burn the 3rd or 4th lap.  After I climb, my partner will do the same so some time to depump.  I’ll do this on the slab wall, vertical, and overhanging.  

Gym etiquette wise my opinions is that folks will do what they will including myself.  Kinda like getting behind a slow party of 3 on a classic multi pitch. Shoulda woke earlier. If someone is on something I wanted to work on at the gym, I go to plan b or c or d. They were there first and I don’t know their needs/time constraint etc.  That being said, it is easier for all involved if you choose a non-busy time to get your laps done. 

I would do 3-4 laps depending on wall wall height.The idea was to get 150’ of climbing per set (150’ up, 150’ down).  I’d do 4-5 sets of this with 15 min beaks between sets.