In 2014, during my second week of college, I found myself at our campus climbing gym. This first experience shaped my next four years of school, where I worked, and more greatly, my life. Eventually I would come to participate on the competitive climb team, traveling to compete against peers from different universities. Climbing competitively led to my first true training experience. We had a coach, and the team held training sessions every Tuesday and Thursday evening throughout the semester. What I had wanted at the time was to simply climb with like-minded individuals, but twice a week I showed up and plugged away at whatever was sharpied on the wall. After months of slightly regimented training I started to feel stronger, but hadn’t put much thought into why. At the time I chalked it up to climbing every day rather than something related to the training I was doing. Given that this was also the onset of my climbing career, pursuing it daily had surely helped, but after reflecting on that period further I know much of that progress was based in more strategic training sessions. The initial passion I had found for the sport persisted, but the fire for competitive climbing dwindled. It had been fun and engaging, but after a season I decided that I preferred being outside to pulling on plastic. As my climbing evolved, so did the environment I practiced it in. Indoor climbing led to sport and trad climbing at local crags, and this gave way to mountaineering in the Pacific Northwest. Eventually, this led me to alpine climbing and ski mountaineering.
In college I worked at an outdoor gear shop; in its basement an old, rundown climbing gym was musty, often untidy, and always dimly lit, but offered the opportunity to train dry-tooling. As I made the transition from rock climbing to ice and mixed climbing I started to spend more time here. I would hang from my ice tools and work on Figure-4 and Figure-9 movement techniques. Similar to my experience training with the university competitive team, I found myself climbing harder after only a few months. I considered what I was doing at the time training, but nothing about it was recorded or monitored. In 2016, I summited Tahoma (Mount Rainier) for the first time. The summer of 2017 I worked at the mountain’s base, and spent each weekend either in the mountains or rock climbing in the area. In April of 2018 I flew into the Kahiltna Glacier for my first Alaskan expedition. I spent the next couple of years simply climbing and going into the mountains. It was–and still is–something spiritual for me, but now the objectives I want to try have become bigger, steeper, and harder. Eventually it became clear to me that the training I had been doing wasn’t really training. What I had done worked up until that point, and although my experience was growing my climbing abilities would eventually reach their threshold. In February I started a partnership with the athlete-forward watch company COROS. Using their watches and data platform to track my training efforts was an organic step in transforming myself as an athlete. A mid-winter frostbite injury left me on the couch for much of that month and the majority of March, but I persisted with training what I could and integrated experience I gleaned from the past.
Much of the gym-based work I have done in the past can be categorized as general strength; workouts that lend themselves to a healthy lifestyle but not much more. Although this helped me build a foundation, it wasn’t terribly strong nor sport-specific. One day it hit me that gym strength and mountain strength are not the same thing. Bicep curls, bench press, and easy aerobic exercise don’t translate to ‘sending’ on big routes in the mountains. Often these exercises are only conducive to positively building upon themselves. That is, lifting heavy weights might translate to lifting heavier weights, but not to pulling oneself up a vertical rock wall. To practice my sports at a higher level I needed to lean more heavily into sport-specific strength and endurance training. In the mountains speed and capacity are our greatest strengths. I also wanted to begin building and utilizing training metrics as this is one of the single best ways to monitor improvement. The COROS platform and data layout makes this easy. Personally, my ideal athletic makeup consists of a combination of aerobic efficiency, speed, and muscular endurance. I needed to transition from ‘working out’ to practicing a more robust, sport-specific training regime and tracking my progressRelative to climbing, I changed my mindset from spending days ‘simply climbing’ to working specifically on endurance, efficient movement, and technique. I applied this mindset to the gym as well as climbing outside. Now living near Vail, Colorado, I have access to a great mixed climbing destination, ultimately the location of the birth of hard mixed climbing in the U.S. But just living here doesn’t make you a strong climber. I built friendships with other top athletes in the area, and with their encouragement and partnership paired with a lot of time training here, began to see steady progression.
In the gym, my training sessions now consist of muscular endurance exercises, timed ice tool hangs, Figure 4s, Figure 9s, and harder, endurance-focused climbing days. At the crag I’m hyper-focused on endurance and technique. This past season (pre-injury), the single, main factor that helped me push my climbing grades was technique. It came down to being diligent and thoughtful about feet placement, body positioning, and resting efficiency. Pairing my work outside with hard gym sessions led to a revelation in my abilities.
Obviously, mountain-specific strength is found as much–if not more–in the legs as it is from being able to pull hard. My aerobic training has transitioned from moderate miles and pace on local pavement to consistent training with continual, gradual increases in distance, elevation gain, and time. During specific phases this training includes slow, weighted hikes or ski tours, steep and fast uphill hikes or runs, easier, low-threshold runs, and recovery-specific workouts.
The time spent in between climbing and aerobic training is used for strength training and core-specific workouts. These exercises are sport-specific, meaning they mimic the movement of the sport I’m training for. These include incline pull-ups, dips, push-ups, lunges, and box step-ups, to name a few. For core, a mini-session might include variations of sit-ups, windshield wipers, hanging leg raises, planks, and Turkish get-ups.
A major shift I have worked to implement in my training has been discipline. By this, I mean both doing a workout and abiding by its parameters. For instance, in the past I would push the limits of my workouts if I was having a ‘good day’. If a training run was supposed to be an hour-long session and within a specific heart rate zone, but I felt strong, I would often push the pace and distance to something greater than what it should have been. This might have (and often did) feel good in the moment, but it would leave me tired and weak for harder workouts later in the week (or at a later point in my training cycle). Over time, the effect of losing out on the gains I should have reaped from the more challenging training sessions placed me closer to the center of my potential rather than on its peripheral. This isn’t to say I wasn’t committed, but rather that there is a difference between training appropriately and not doing so.
Along with shifting training and mindset I started using data from each session to better understand the real effects of my workouts. I use the Vertix 2 watch, which tracks distance, pace, heart rate (bpm), cadence, training effect, and a whole lot more. On the mend from an injury, it has been really nice to see the positive effects of harder, more recent training. The one metric that I’ve relied on most to monitor and organize my sessions is Training Effect, which evaluates the efficiency of your training for both aerobic and anaerobic fitness. There are a handful of different types of aerobic and anaerobic training effects ranging from recovery to maintenance to over-training. As I mentioned, I’ve worked hard to integrate discipline into my training phases. Having access to data that tells me whether I pushed too hard–or not hard enough–for any given workout helps me build long term sustainability in my training cycles. Combining sport-specific training with consistent measurement has opened new doors for my athletic potential!
Early in my career I let passion fuel my efforts in the mountains. But as my aspirations have grown I’ve come to understand the importance of the need for specific training over simply ‘working out’. This isn’t to say that someone can’t climb hard, summit peaks, or run long distances without spending a single day in the gym, only that for me this isn’t the case. I have a lot to learn (and strive for!) when it comes to training. As with most things in life, building long-lasting, impactful strength involves a lengthy journey, and one that doesn’t come easily. I’m excited to use knowledge, experience, and hard metrics to continue pushing my own threshold.
At the end of the day, the only way is up.
– Alex Joseph
