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general conditioning activities such as running, stretching, and light free-weight training as well as the more important sport-specific activities such as fingerboard, campus training, and hypergravity training. Many other activities can fall under this heading, as long as they somehow help improve your climbing performance or prevent injury. It’s surprising, however, how many things done in the name of training for climbing actually have a negative effect on climbing performance. Get ready to sort things out as we take a cutting-edge look at physical training for climbing in chapters 5, 6, and 7. Then in chapter 8, you will be guided on developing an effective and time-efficient personalized training program.
    Finally, training support activities comprise a variety of crucial, yet often overlooked (or ignored), issues outside of your actual physical practice and training for climbing. Athletes in many other sports have known the vital role that rest, nutrition, and recovery acceleration techniques play in their ultimate level of performance. Serious climbers looking to press out their ability level toward the genetic limit must act on these issues with utmost discipline. Chapters 9 and 10 cover these important topics—applying the material may be the key to succeeding on your own “personal Action Directe ”!

The Relationship Between Skill and Fitness
     
    While the various subtypes of training for climbing will be discussed separately, they clearly affect one another. This is especially true when it comes to skill practice and fitness and strength training, so let’s dig a little deeper.
    For a beginning climber in the earliest stages of learning, a low level of fitness can slow the learning of climbing skill. A certain level of strength is necessary in order to practice enough (that is, climb) to develop the basic skills of movement, hand- and footwork, and body positioning. Conversely, too much strength enables a beginner to get by on easy to moderate routes despite inefficient movement, poor footwork, and improper body position. Obviously, this will also slow (or prevent) the development of good technique—unless, that is, the strong person makes good technique the primary goal, instead of just getting up the route no matter what.
    The problem is further aggravated by the fact that people tend to develop their talents disproportionately. Strong people are most likely into strength training, flexible people probably stretch regularly, and skillful people undoubtedly climb a lot. Sure, the drudgery of working on weak points isn’t fun, and at times it can be discouraging. But if you really want to climb harder, you must train smarter. That means knowing where to best invest your time to get the most output for your training input. For the majority of climbers, the best investment is on further development of climbing skills and strategy (see figure 1.5).

     
    Figure 1.5 Relative Gains
     

    Elite climbers may have less to gain from practicing familiar forms of climbing. These expert climbers are way out on the learning curve near their ultimate skill potential, so fitness (and the mind) becomes the crucial factor in performance. Hence, we commonly see magazine articles about these rock stars that describe seemingly lethal or disastrously stressful strength-training regimes that would surely send the ordinary climber into a state of overtraining, the doctor’s office, or self-defeating over-reliance on strength training as the key to improvement.
    Focused fitness training is of greater importance for all climbers after a layoff, whether due to injury, winter, or some other reason (see figure 1.6). The rapid loss of strength that occurs when training or climbing ceases for a period of weeks or months is best counteracted by several weeks of dedicated fitness training (fortunately, you largely maintain climbing skill once the motor programs are well established). While this short-term training focus helps in