Thursday, April 10, 2008

adding extra weight to the climbing training session

Sometimes training stimulus in climbing should be more intense than the normal, especially in high level athletes with a huge training record (several years, several hours per day).

The training intensity can be increased by increasing the wall angle and/or diminishing the holds size. But if the wall angle overcomes 50-60 degrades the technique gets complicated (it’s more like a roof), and when diminishing excessively the holds size it can be dangerous for the hand joints and tendons and inclusive a bit painful.

To get adaptations, the intensity of each stimulus should be bigger than the previous ones; and when the possibilities of the two previous variables are drained it is necessary to use another strategy.

At this point you can add extra weight to our body to increase intensity.

That has many purposes:

- To increase the intensity of the training of the flexors of the hand, and all the involved muscles

- To diminish the time of total training

- To generate more intense stimulus to provoke adaptations when plateaus take place

- Well planned gets extraordinary results in high level athletes, but in intermediate and low level climbers, it can interfere in the attainment of effective technical expressions and mainly provoke injuries when adding too much stress in the joints, muscles and tendons.

The weight that should be added should not be in any moment superior to 5% of the body weight. The best way to make it is through a weighted belt, so that the added weight is located near the body center of gravity. The vests ankle belts are dissuaded, the first to interfere in the movements of the shoulder, and the seconds because they generate an excessive load in the knee when making foot movement, and both methods change too much the body center of gravity.

Each time you finish your weighted workout you must do several climbing movements without the extra weight, means the last set of your session or at least a couple of boulder problems. This way you can rearrange the corporal scheme to the normal position of the center of gravity.

Some recommendations:

- This method is exclusive for climbers with a wide record of training

- It should be used in climbers with great consolidated movement repertoire

- Immediately after a weighted session it’s advisable to transfer the training to an unweighted climbing

- This method is great to increase strength, and also it can be used to add intensity in the different types of endurance training.

- This method should be located in specific periods of training (concentrated loads or shock microcycles)

- The recovery time among sessions should not be smaller than 48 hours, due to the excessive load provoked in the joints, muscles and tendons.

- The use of regenerative measures is recommended to increase the recovery in the weighted climbing periods.

Pof. Juan Martin Miranda

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

BAD LUCK FOR THE CAMPUS

Contrarily to what many training for climbing gurus think, campus training would not have the capacity to be a plyometric.


In a recent study of Francoise-Regis M. Thevenet (Master in Investigation Thesis, France), he analyze the inter-joints coordination, angles, angular speeds and times of force development of three sport expressions: a Squat Jump (jumping from squat position), a campus jump with both arms and a dyno (common movement in climbing where arms and legs are used in a coordinated way).
Inside the conclusions of this study we can see that the times of force development until the arms take off in the campus jump are 691 + - 10,5 ms; keeping in mind that after 450 ms the nervous system can regulate the movement by the intervention of the antagonistic muscles, and the myotatic reflex, impeding the development of the increased power involved in plyometric activities. Due to that duration of the force expression, the campus jump cannot be considered a dynamic expression as a jump.
Comparing the campus jump with the squat jump and the climbing dyno, the movement speed and the reached height is lower (0,11 mts against 0,27 mts and 0,48 mts respectively). The problem resides in that the upper muscles should displace 90% of the corporal mass, with much smaller muscular volume that when the legs are used in the jump, or the legs and the arms in the dyno.
Also the take off in the campus jumps takes place when the joints almost arrives to its most favorable angle to produce force (90°) where the back muscles (latissimus dorsi) will be the main motors and arriving almost to the maximum flexion (52°).

On the other hand during the dyno, the coordination between legs and arms outlines an use of different musculature. The legs are the main motors, while the arms maintain the body near the wall, completing a hinge function.
Plyometrics implies an eccentric (stretching) contraction immediately followed by a concentric contraction, in other words stretch the muscle before contracting so that the accumulated energy during the eccentric contraction is released during the concentric contraction producing a more powerful movement. But the main characteristic is the duration of the impulse phase (concentric contraction). This is denominated Stretch Shortening Cycle.
Actions that overcome 350 ms lose that whole accumulated energy, so they are not plyometric exercises.
By the way not everything is lost in campus training. It is an indispensable tool for training for climbing in high level athletes. If we use both arms from complete extension as it outlines the previous study without a doubt the times of force development will be excessive, but if we limit joint range, the action have the capacity to be plyometric. At the moment I am developing a device to measure the hands contact time in the campus in repetitive campus jumps, that which will be able to clarify a little more on this topic.
As always there is a lot to investigate, but campus has many utilities, not only arm jumps. To know more about the training with campus you can check www.marvinclimbing.com