What is Over-Training?
Perhaps the single most common risk to athletes during the season is overtraining. In this article, we’ll examine its causes and effects in detail and discuss how best to avoid it.
Overtraining occurs when a climber works out a particular system or goal without giving it enough time to recover between workouts, or cycles. This leads to a cycle of declining performance, or a plateau, while you continue to stress your strength and energy systems before they have healed enough to make gains.
Rules for Rest
The simple solution to all of this is to ensure that you take enough rest in between workouts (and during sets). While simple enough to state, in practice determining what is enough rest can become tricky.
Using a well-crafted schedule is a great way to minimize the risk of taking too little rest (and the resulting overtraining), as proper rest times should be built into such schedules. Even so, there are a few rules of thumb that can help guide you “in season.”
Power Training
Take an average of 3 days rest in between power-oriented workouts.
Power is one of the areas that can easily lead to overtraining, because it is the system that requires the highest level of difficulty. Add too much volume, or too little rest, and things can quickly go wrong.
As a result, it is critical that climbers rest enough between workouts to see gains. As a rule of thumb, you should rest, on average, 72 hours between workouts that have power sets. This would, for simple math, suggest that training power twice per week is more than enough for most of us.
It is possible for highly trained climbers, however, to train power two days in a row. If you do so, however, we recommend that you add 24-48 hours to your rest phase (i.e. total rest of 4-5 days).
You cannot take too much rest during a power set.
Rest during sets is equally important to get right. Too little rest and you actually stop training the goal you are after!
For power this is particularly simple—you cannot rest too much during these sets. In power, volume and difficulty modulate intensity; rest requires a minimum to prevent negative impacts, but no maximum.
In practical terms this means that whenever resting, it is better to rest longer than may be necessary to avoid climbing too soon. We recommend a minimum of 2 minutes rest between attempts at power reps, and 5 minutes between “sends”.
Strength Training
Take an average of 2-3 days rest between strength-oriented workouts.
Strength training is nearly as impactful as power training, given the high level of difficulty and increased volume. As a result, while well-trained climbers can generally handle training them every other day (e.g. 48 hours rest), less experienced climbers should take 72 hours of rest in between strength-based sessions. Like power, highly trained athletes can do two strength days in a row, but they should add 24 hours to this rest interval (i.e. 3-4 days) after such workouts.
During workouts, Rest:Rep ratios should be at least 2:1.
Strength training, like power, is relatively insensitive to rest, depending primarily on difficulty and moderate volume for gains. However, the higher volume of these sets leads to a longer duration of each set. Given the time constraints of most workouts (e.g. <2 hours) it is important to choose rest intervals that give climbers both enough recovery between reps and enough time to complete their sets.
For this reason, we recommend that you rest at least twice as long as you climb for strength sets. In bouldering, the average amount of time it takes to complete a problem is about 60 seconds, implying that rest should be at least 2 minutes for each rep. For practical purposes going as high as 4 or 5 minutes is more than acceptable. Beyond 5 minutes you will still see robust gains, but you may wind up with excessively long workouts.
Hypertrophy and Stamina Training
Take an average of 1-2 days rest between hypertrophy or stamina-oriented workouts.
This guideline is fairly self-explanatory. However, we should note that stamina is, on average, less impactful than hypertrophy, and so needs less recovery between workouts. At the high end, hypertrophy sets benefit more from longer rest (e.g. 48 hours), while stamina can be trained multiple days in a row (e.g. 24 hours of rest) without overtraining. In both cases, though, care should be taken to avoid the risk of repetitive stress injuries.
Both experienced and inexperienced climbers alike can training either goal two days in a row, as long as the weekly volume is kept in moderate bounds.
During hypertrophy workouts, Rest:Rep ratios should be at least 1:1.
A 4×4 is a good example of this. On average, most climbers take approximately 4 minutes to complete one rep of a 4×4, and then rest 4 minutes. hypertrophy sets are more sensitive to rest; therefore, we recommend a maximum Rest:Rep ratio of 2:1, or 2 minutes of rest for every minute you are on the wall.
During stamina workouts, Rest:Rep ratios should be at least 1:2.
A 4×4 is also a good example here. On average, most climbers take approximately 4 minutes to complete one rep of a 4×4, but for a stamina set, with lower difficulty, we would rest 2 minutes. Stamina is highly sensitive to rest; therefore, we recommend a maximum Rest:Rep ratio of 1:1, or 1 minute of rest for every minute you are on the wall.
All material is reprinted with the permission of the author. Copyright 2022 David H. Rowland. All rights reserved.
