By Tom O’Halloran
I was never one for recording my training. I don’t know why, I just never bothered. Actually that’s a lie, I just never really considered what I did was training, so what was the point of tracking ‘not training.’ I fingerboarded sporadically, had random boulder sessions and a couple days at the cliff.
My training pad
At some point a couple of years ago I decided to track it. Nothing too detailed. Just a few notes on how each session felt and a general overview of the session. Surprisingly I gained a lot out of this process and it has evolved over the years. The crux of it has been a better self-awareness and analytical approach. My climbing has become far better for this.
A simple example may be as follows.
Gym - Warm up, progressive boulders up to V6, tried orange and black boulders for 60min, couple of moderates to finish. Session was about 2.5hrs.
Cliff days - Warm up on Route A x2, 1x bolt to bolt on proj, 3x redpoint burns, fell on upper crux drive-by twice. Go two felt grea and not nearly as pumped, 3rd attempt fell at crux two. Best consistency so far. Warm down two laps on Route A.
Fingerboard. Repeaters half crimp, 3 sets, plus 10kg, 9/10 effort. Slopers, 3 sets at body weight 8.5/10 effort. Three finger drag, 2 sets at body weight 9/10 effort, tweak in right hand ring finger. Didn't do set 3.
They are easy notes to sketch down and actually show a little but more info than I would have noticed otherwise. While blowing through random sessions you don't really take a moment to assess what’s happening. By being forced to even write down the most surface level points of your session or day at the cliff you can reveal patterns, success and points to work on or be aware of.
Perhaps you’ve been climbing on oranges and blacks at the gym for the last 12 months. Your notes may show you are now able to sustain a longer portion of your session at this level. That’s progress and probably something you wouldn’t have been aware of otherwise. It could be time you added in a few attempts on the next colour level.
The same goes for our outdoor example. Rather than tracking just a single high point, we can look at the consistency of the day as a whole. Equaling a highpoint twice in a day followed by another solid burn on attempt three may be great progress compared to previous days. Writing down the quantity of quality climbing also gives clues to how fit we are in a whole day sense. In three years time this could be fantastic information to have. We may be trying to dig ourselves out of a slump and having these notes as well as ones from recent training sessions gives us a clear pathway of what we are working towards. Rather than a vague, ‘I want to get back to Route D shape,’ statement. You can follow the path you know worked to get you there again!
In the third example, tracking strength and fingerboard numbers works much the same as what I’ve written above. A measure of perceived effort at ‘X’ work load being slowly built up over a number of sessions. The self-reflection in the session will also give you space to be aware of any tweaks or strains in your body during the exercises. Previously you may have felt the tweak in your ring finger, thought nothing of it and decided to end the exercise. Looking back through notes however, the tweak may be the result of too much fingerboarding and hard climbing in the past months with minimal rest, pushing and pushing because the redpoint is right there. With this information, we can see how long it’s been since we’ve taken a good rest or even just switched our training stimulus. The trick is to recognise these injuries and overtraining patterns before they turn into an issue. If you can do this, your climbing will be exponentially better off.
I take an analog approach to my recording. My training notepad and pen are always in my training bag getting chalked and sweated on in the moment. But some folk prefer the digital method of spreadsheets. I find spreadsheets to be frustrating to use and becomes another job to do after I’ve finished my session. Admittedly I have seen some rather enviable graphs and data spat out of the spreadsheets which make me sometimes consider jumping into the new age. If you’re clever enough you can create a spreadsheet which will track just about anything from moves climbed, to liters of water consumed and work out all the correlations you can dream of. For now though, I’m sticking with pen and paper.
A few easy things to track may be the following:
some old notes
Length of session: How long are you at the gym/crag for. And how long were you ACTUALLY climbing?
Moves/reps: How many moves or reps (easy and hard) did you do?
If you want to get more technical you could start adding in some of these:
Perceived exertion: How did you feel after the session/rep/redpoint burn etc? Is the weight now feeling easy? Still working hard? This will help inform what your next session will look like.
Injury/body tweaks: Did anything feel off or tweaky? Perhaps adjusting your session or overall plan may be necessary.
nothing flash but it gives me an idea of what I was doing. what was working and how things felt. priceless resource
How you feel going into the session: Tracking this may give clues to over training and general life fatigue and will help you moderate the difficulty of your session and overall training load on a larger scale.
Food you’ve consumed: Fuelling your sessions properly is critical to good performance and injury prevention. Post training food is also critical for recovery. Don’t forget to hydrate as well. A pattern may reveal itself between performance and proper or improper fuelling.
Weather conditions: Conditions, especially outdoors, play a huge role in performance. A hot, sweaty day is going to look different to a crisp day regardless of your physical condition. A poor performance day may look disheartening on paper if you haven't made note of the 35 degree heat and lack of wind.
There are literally limitless possible metrics to track. Choose whatever you think is worthwhile for you and your performance and training goals. Perhaps how long you were distracted by social media during the session or how aware of your breathing you were or how many times you placed your feet properly.
If you are new to this, start simple, with pen and paper and come up with a few simple metrics. When you have the flow with the basics, you may want to get more in depth. Tracking my training and climbing days, even in a very surface level way has been extremely beneficial to my progress, psyche and injury prevention. Why not give it a go and let us know what you’re tracking.
Have fun!