Warming Up

Photo credit Edgar Chaparro

After the last podcast, I was asked a question about warming up and I would like to address it this week. First and foremost, let me begin with this... you should consider yourself a lab rat or monkey if you prefer. Each human person is different in their genetic make up and history. Even identical twins have been demonstrated to have their own individual preferences and responses. This means that there is no one size fits all or even most. If you come across any recommendations, you should try it out for yourself and consider how YOU respond. It make work for many and may not work for you. Conversely, it may work for you and not many. You may have been doing a particular exercise for many years and now suddenly find it is no longer helping you to relieve that discomfort in your low back or knee. Why? Because your body is also always changing. 

So how do you know what to do? What is working and what won't work with the least amount of trial and error? Pay attention and record your experience both in a quantitative way and a qualitative way. Let's use the example of a training session where your plan is to do the following:

• Warm up - 15 min with routes and few stretching exercises, finger hangs and pull-ups.
• Then you are going to focus on working projects. You are going to start with a little easier route/boulder problem that will take you a few tries to get.
• The second problem/route will be much harder now that you have warmed up your power.
• Then you may try a third - depending on skin and how you feel.
• Cool down for about 10 min and call it a day.

As a coach, I already have some questions for you. 

1. What exercises are you doing for stretching and how are you doing them?
2. What is the level of the routes you are warming up on and how much are you resting between the routes?
3. How many finger hangs and pull-ups and on what types/size of grips is this? What time does this take and how long are you resting between hangs/pulls?
4. How do you know you feel warmed up?
   
5. On a scale of -2 to 2, where -2 is feeling really low energy and the warm up feels tweaky or awful and 2 is feeling psyched and ready to go, body warm and energy high, are you

​And these are just the questions for the warm up. 

There are many variables that will impact how we feel on any given day ranging from what we ate and how we slept the night before, whether we had a busy day the day before, or how stressful the past week, month, year has been. Add in environmental factors, training history, etc and you get the picture... lots of things influence your starting point. 

Dedicated Practice

Photo Credit Fionn Claydon

As noted in Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, excellence in performance is the result of 10,000 of dedicated practice. What is this dedicated practice? It is practice where you can answer all the questions I asked above about the warm up and few additional questions to boot. 

If you want to get better at something, you need to start by figuring out what your baseline is.
Quantify what your:

• grip strength
• back and shoulder strength
• hang times on various hand holds
• understand what your core strength is like

What is your fatigue like after you execute these activities?
How long does it take you to recover? What is heart rate up to?
How much do you like doing these types of exercises? 
**Remember, we climb because we enjoy it, therefore it is really important to be able to keep enjoying it. If you notice your motivation going down, try to determine if it is because you don't like all these numbers. Or it could be a particular type of music that influences the way you are enjoying the gym. 

How does your energy fluctuate on a given day? For me, anything early in the morning and until about 2 pm and I am ready to go. After 2 pm, I prefer to nap and do more restorative activities. It doesn't mean I never climb late in the day, it means I adjust my training expectations and potentially even my training approach.

THE BOTTOM LINE
So what do I recommend for a warm up?

• First, I recommend moving the body, usually climbing. If you want to use a quantifiable measurement, I recommend warming up to the extent the your heart rate goes up by about 30-50%. If my resting is 60 beats/min and I notice it is 80-90 beats/min, then I am still in my warm up level. I wait for my heart rate to go back down to 60-65 beats/min before jumping on my next warm up route. As I warm up, I want that number of beats/min to be increasing.
• If I plan on projecting routes, that will be where I take my warm up to that level and the beats/ minute may be 100% of resting. 
• I warm up on all the wall angles - especially the wall angle I will be working on during my session.
• If I do hangs, I am only hanging on no more than 8-10 sec. And only doing a few pull-ups to get the shoulders warm. I may even use a resistance band to help with the pulls because I really want to focus on good form and moving slowly and intentionally.
• I am then going to rest - maybe as much as 10 minutes, using the time to record my warm-up and prepare mentally for the main focus of my workout or training session. 
• Then I move to main focus - if projecting - I start on an easier project (something that will take maybe 3 -6 tries. I am going to work X number of attempts, with a few minutes between each try and a longer rest of 5-10 min between sets of attempts. What is X? Depends on you. Typically I suggest as many as 8 if the route is something you can do in 6 tries. If it is harder, then I would do fewer tries and increase rest. 
• If the main focus is more volume oriented, then I am going to be climbing with my heart rate a little higher and for more continuous time. 

The key is TRACK IT and get a baseline of what you can do and how much fatigue that creates. Get a sense of whether you get too fatigued too quickly if the heart rate goes up too high too quick, or if you just can't get going if you feel like keeping the heart rate at 50% of max is too low for you. Just like those lab reports you had to do for science, you will record your observations this will inform you how to adapt once you have collected enough information. 

What I have offered is very vague and it is meant to help you get a sense of what works for you and what doesn't. Now you have to go and do the experiments. Pay attention to whether there is a time of day that you seem to have more energy.
I have coachees track at the start and during our session what is happening to their energy levels.
- Use that scale -2 to +2 -- high fatigue to high energy.
-   Track your level of enjoyment -2 to +2;
your performance -2 to +2.
- This helps you start to correlate the relationships between the specific activities you are doing and the more qualitative aspects of your climbing sessions. 

Alright... that's it for now. Let me know how figuring out your best warm up works for you. If you have a specific question, comment or send me an email - climbyourbest@gmail.com - and I will do my best to help you out. ​