Author Archives: coachjfire

The last year of my climbing has been, by any objective standard, excellent. My now-wife and I had the chance to have a bit of a “mid-30s gap year” and we took it with relish. I got to… Move somewhere with more challenging projects Spend 7 weeks in Hueco Tanks Have a spring climbing seasonContinue reading “Summer training and eating three crows”

“I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” In the last few years I’ve fostered a strange obsession with looking for four-leaf clovers. It’s said that finding such a clover is a good omen. But this is a bizarre conclusion to reach, sinceContinue reading “Getting what we deserve: counterfactuals, four-leaf clovers and V10 flashes”

Convenience is essential to being good at training. If you want to train hard, you need to make training easy. Living near a decent gym is huge. Most climbers have a hangboard or at least a portable finger training device at home, because it removes a barrier to getting their finger training done. And climbersContinue reading “The Siren Song of the Board”

Lots of climbers can’t afford the time/cost/energy investment of structured training. And lots of climbers make plenty of progress without those things. This doesn’t mean those things aren’t useful. But in many cases, progress is made not because of the structured training, but because of the focus that structured training requires to pursue effectively. AContinue reading “KISS Training: Intro & April”

If you haven’t heard or seen it yet, I did a 6 episode series on the Nugget. In this series, Steven and I talk about some of the most basic topics in climbing. We bring our top tips and most common pitfalls for each subject. The aim is to create an “evergreen” resource which weContinue reading “Nugget Fundamentals series”

It’s expected on a long trip that certain performance aspects will change over time. Maximum strength will usually go down due to a lack of focused training. Coordination and speed may improve or plateau depending on the demands of the problems being climbed. Endurance on the wall is one physical factor that can be expectedContinue reading “Managing the beatdown: the long trip performance curve”

Where’s the joy in climbing? I ask this question in consultations a lot. It catches people off-guard, and the answers are often illuminating. My least favorite thing about this question is it makes me feel like a life coach. It’s a kneejerk presumption in the climbing community that everyone is in it for higher numbers.Continue reading “The Joy Question”

Intuition is an essential tool for the climbing athlete. As climbing gets more popular, training and coaching inevitably follows that growth. The pressure to organize and record and meticulously obsess over every trackable detail gains momentum each day. But you are not these numbers; and if you let them, they’ll start making your decisions forContinue reading “You are not your max hang”

“Is it really summer if you don’t get granite rash scrapes on top of your poison oak rash?” my friend Sean joked, while we tried to stuff our things back into our packs without dropping anything essential down the abyssal holes between talus. I had just given up trying our “warmup project.” After thrashing myContinue reading “Why bother?”

Henry George said, “Man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal who is never satisfied.” Now, obviously Mr. George didn’t own a dog… if my partner and I get home at different times, our dog will try to convince the later arrival that the earlier one didn’t alreadyContinue reading “Improving work capacity, the mileage paradox, and the Progression Zone”