How Can I Best Mix EDT
With Rock Climbing?

Home Questions & Answers Sports-Specific EDT and Rock Climbing

ANSWER:

Thanks for writing! First, EDT is a great way to improve muscular endurance for climbing, or any other sport which requires muscle endurance.

The trick is to develop a schedule that allows you to lift and climb in a way that helps your performance. After all, if you can't recover from your workouts, your fitness levels will decline instead of improve.

In this case, you have two choices: Either perform EDT on "non-climbing" days, or perform EDT on climbing days. In the latter case, you have the additional choice between lifting and climbing in the same workout, or in different workouts (in the same day).

There are a few different ways to arrive at the best decision:

1) If climbing is your primary training concern, and you wish to use EDT mostly to help your climbing, I'd suggest positioning your workouts in such a way that you're most recovered prior to climbing sessions, as opposed to lifting sessions. This can be accomplished by placing your EDT workouts soon after your climbing sessions, to allow for maximum rest until your next climbing session. This arrangement poses an obvious problem however— EDT is difficult enough, without having to do it right after a climbing workout!

2) If you wish to give equal importance to climbing and lifting, I would simply alternate between climbing workouts and EDT workouts, separating each workout by at least one, but perhaps as many as three days— whatever is required to facilitate adequate recovery.

There are a few other "tricks" that you might also consider:

1) Climbing is stressful to the hands and fingers — try to choose resistance-training exercises that are gentle on your hands, and/or use lifting straps to reduce the load on these tissues.

2) Skilled climbers rely mostly on lower body strength, whereas novice climbers tend to over-rely on their upper body to scale their climbs (many years ago I did some climbing for a short while, and I was in the latter category!). In either case, leg training should be emphasized in EDT workouts. For climbers, I like pistols, step-ups, and lunges.

3) Since climbing is an endurance-oriented event, target maximal strength in your EDT workouts: Instead of 10RM weights, use 6RM loads and start your PR Zones with sets of 3, working down to doubles and singles as you begin to fatigue.

I hope that helped!

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