An adaptive training platform for climbers that adjusts your targets as you log, monitors finger load to lower injury risk, and forecasts when you'll peak.
Start from a ready-made training plan or build your own. The engine writes weekly duration targets, adjusting as you log.
Get immediate feedback on your progression and stay within productive boundaries. See your finger and systemic ACWR, and a trend-line for the upcoming week based on your plan.
Crescive shows you when you'll be fatigued and when your form will peak throughout a cycle.
Understand what's improving and what's lacking. Explore time under tension across intensity bands, chronic load, test results and more.
What is Crescive
Crescive is a training tool that gives you a structure for your training that is grounded in sports science, and an engine that adjusts your volume every week to keep the overload productive and safe.
Why Crescive
Progression in climbing is built on progressive overload, sustained injury-free over years. Many climbers who begin structured training spike their weekly load and get injured. Knowing how to progress in a safe way is key to climbing harder.
Who this is for
Crescive is built for self-coached climbers who train with structure, or who want to. Maybe you've tried training plans that were too rigid, logbooks that don't prescribe or coaching that cost more than it gave. If you know what you're training for, Crescive gives you the structure and insight you need to get there.
High/Mod/Low time-under-tension tracked against MEV/MAV/MRV, so you know if you're progressing, maintaining or stalling in each zone.
Finger load tracked separately from systemic load, weighted by intensity band. Made to flag overuse before it becomes an injury.
Duration and intensity of your upcoming training week are based on last week's logged efforts, your ACWR state and recovery.
Import your training to start with a real baseline.
All numbers are rough estimates based on the duration and intensity of a session. A long low-intensity ARC session puts low stress on the fingers; a limit bouldering session of the same duration places high stress on them. We estimate time under tension from the exercise type. An ARC session is continuous, so its whole duration counts, while limit bouldering is mostly rest between attempts, so the actual TUT is much lower. You know how your fingers feel best. Crescive gives you additional guardrails.
ACWR stands for Acute:Chronic Workload Ratio. In plain terms, it compares how much you've trained recently (your acute load, roughly the last week) against what you're used to over the longer term (your chronic baseline). A ratio around 1.0 means this week looks like your normal. Climb well above it and you're ramping up faster than your body has adapted to; well below and you're resting or detraining. It started in team sports as a way to flag when athletes were loading too much, too soon.
No, not really. It's also in recent years been contested. What the chart gives you, however, is the too-much-too-soon signal. Finger load is tracked as its own stream so it isn't buried in a systemic number: increase finger load too fast and it'll show, and the same goes for heavy full-body workouts. Tendons also adapt far slower than muscle. Measurable changes take months, even years. Finding the right window length for finger chronic load is still being tuned, and no one has a validated answer for climbers. Use the ACWR tracker as a load gauge, not a guarantee against injury.
A minute's effort at 90% intensity is not the same tissue event as one minute of easy mileage. To not conflate different efforts we track finger load across three intensity bands: low, moderate and high. This is not an exact science, but it gives you a visual anchor for what you're training and where you might be leaving gains on the table.
Injuries can happen at any time. You might be doing everything right and still slip off a foothold and pop a pulley on a pocket. Crescive is not medical advice. You know your body best, so listen to it first. If your ACWR trend looks good but you feel wrecked, do an easy session instead of the planned hard one. Or none at all.
Neither a coach nor a PT. My background is building digital products, close to ten years of it professionally. The climbing side comes from fifteen years of climbing, training and working with coaches. The plan itself is built on published research and established coaching methods.
The default plan is a block program; cycles and blocks are standard training methodology. Its main inspirations are Bechtel's block programming, Power Company and Norwegian trainer and PhD physio Gudmund Grønhaug, and it draws on literature and insight from Hörst, Lattice, Strength Climbing and more. The load-monitoring math is built on established sport-science metrics: EWMA for your chronic baseline, ACWR for load ratio and sRPE for session intensity. Standard methods applied to climbing. The ready-made plan isn't the main point of Crescive though. You can build your own plan or bring one from a coach, and Crescive gives you the guardrails, tracking and insight on top of it.
Crescive doesn't know more than your body does. It makes your training plan and overall load easier to see, you're the one who has to decide if you will go hard or easy on the day. Your body always knows best; listen to it first.
Ready-made programs are available in many places and they're great. We've tried most of them. If you haven't tried coaching, you probably should. Working directly with a good coach helps immensely, both for training but also technique and tactics. If you've exhausted those options, or formed strong opinions of your own and want a platform that helps you build and tweak your plan (with guardrails, analytics and progressive overload handled) Crescive is for you.
The forecast is a classic fitness-fatigue model based on your logged and planned load. It gets recalculated every time you log, so the closer you get the more accurate it'll be. It's a forecast, not a verdict.
There are already great tools for logging your proud ascents, and Crescive is not that. If you manage to climb outside most of the year, we're mostly jealous and don't offer much to track. If you ever want an off-season plan, we're here.
You own your data. We'll delete your data on request, per GDPR.