Climbing training load: how much is too much?
By Max Berg
Max is a self-coached climber who's building Crescive based on 15 years of trial and error.
As climbers, the load we place on our fingers often matters more than what we place on the whole body. The usual advice of 2-3 sessions a week for beginners and 3-4 for advanced climbers is a fine start, but it can't tell you when you've crossed the line. Injuries tend to follow sudden jumps in load more than total volume. So how can we know if we're increasing our training load adequately, and not doing too much too soon?
What is training load?
Training load is a number for how much work you've done. It's roughly how long you trained times how hard it felt. Sports science uses it to compare the work done in one week with the weeks before it. Athletes who build high workloads gradually tend to cope with them. The risk increases when load rises faster than the body is used to (Gabbett, 2016). Hard training for years adapts your tissue, whereas a sudden increase of volume or intensity from one week to the next is linked to increased injury risk. Runners know the simple version as the 10% rule: don't add more than ten percent to your weekly distance. This rule is contested, but sports science keeps the general idea of increasing load gradually.
Climbing is harder to quantify than running or cycling. You may do easy climbing like ARC, medium intensity work on the rope or boulders or high intensity work like limit bouldering or max hangs. Additionally tendons take a much longer time than muscles to adapt. In a review of training studies, muscle strength rose one to two months before tendon stiffness changed, though those studies measured leg tendons (Mersmann et al., 2017). So how can we as climbers measure load from week to week so we can continue to progress but not get injured?
How to track training load for climbing
Any attempt at tracking climbing load will be an estimation because of all the variables involved. This is how Crescive, the training app I'm building for self-coached climbers, handles it. The first step is to divide climbing exercises into groups based on intensity.
Some examples:
- Low is typically work like ARC, 1 on 1 off and high-volume easy bouldering circuits. A seasoned athlete can do hours on end of this type of exercise because the stress it puts on the tendons is so low.
- Moderate can be things like boulder pyramids, wall crawls and route capacity. Exercises that put moderate stress on the fingers without being all-out efforts. This is the stuff you can usually do quite a lot of.
- High is limit bouldering, max hangs, heavy micro edge lifts etc. Very high intensity work where just a rep too much can be too much.
One hour of easy routes and one hour of limit bouldering have very different time under tension and put very different stress on your fingers. A limit session is mostly rest between attempts, whereas ARCing is mostly continuous. Crescive estimates the time under tension automatically based on the session type.
Tracking intensities allows us to see if we're doing too much or too little at each level. However, this is only half the equation.
Fingers and body must be tracked separately
Most training research measures the load on the whole body. For climbers, the most important factor is usually the overall stress we put on our fingers. So in addition to tracking overall training load on the body we need a separate tracker for the fingers.
For each of the two loads, Crescive compares this week's daily average with a weighted average of roughly the last four weeks, this week included and recent days counting the most. The result is the acute:chronic workload ratio (ACWR). Above 1, you are doing more than you are used to. Below 1, less.
The thresholds that say when "more" becomes "too much" are where the evidence gets thin:
- They come from team sports and were never re-derived for climbing. I could not find a published threshold validated for climbing or for finger tendons.
- Where researchers draw the zones is largely arbitrary. In one simulation study, three ways of drawing them produced 16 to 21 false findings per 100 runs, on data with no real link to injury at all (Impellizzeri et al., 2020, citing Carey et al., 2018).
- The popular 0.8 to 1.3 "sweet spot" was tested directly in elite soccer players and pentathletes, including with the weighted-average (EWMA) method, and the study found no evidence that it lowers injury risk (Sedeaud et al., 2020).
So the ACWR number does not predict injury. It describes change. It can show that your finger load jumped this week while your body load barely moved. It cannot tell if you are about to get hurt. Any tool that claims that is overselling.
What this does give you though is a snapshot of your current workload instead of a guess: where you are against your own normal, which direction you are moving, and how fast.
What to do with this
The chart gives you a too-much-too-soon signal for your fingers. You still know your body better than any model does. If the chart looks fine but your fingers ache, always trust your own judgment.
This is general information, not medical advice. If something hurts, see a physio or doctor who works with climbers.
Sources
- Gabbett TJ (2016). The training-injury prevention paradox: should athletes be training smarter and harder? Br J Sports Med 50(5):273-280.
- Mersmann F, Bohm S, Arampatzis A (2017). Imbalances in the development of muscle and tendon as risk factor for tendinopathies in youth athletes. Front Physiol 8:987.
- Impellizzeri FM, McCall A, Ward P, Bornn L, Coutts AJ (2020). Training load and its role in injury prevention, Part 2: conceptual and methodologic pitfalls. J Athl Train 55(9):893-901.
- Carey DL, et al. (2018). Modeling training loads and injuries: the dangers of discretization. Med Sci Sports Exerc 50(11):2267-2276.
- Sedeaud A, et al. (2020). Does an optimal relationship between injury risk and workload represented by the "sweet spot" really exist? An example from elite French soccer players and pentathletes. Front Physiol 11:1034.