Consistency’s Caveat

Click on a “How to Improve” article for any subject and you’re guaranteed to come across phrases like:

• Consistency is king.

• The most important thing is to be consistent.

• It doesn’t matter how much intensity you have if you don’t have consistency.

• You have to show up and you have to keep showing up.

I’m not here to disagree with these statements, but I am here to add a climbing-specific asterisk to them.

Rock climbing is fun. Indoor climbing is fun. Board climbing is shockingly a lot of fun. For many people, even training for these things by hangboarding and lifting weights can be fun. We want to do this sport so much that consistency and “showing up” feel effortless.

This is what gives climbing its allure. It’s so much fun that it doesn’t feel like work to keep showing up. The more you show up, the better you get, making it even more fun, which makes you want to keep coming back. Climbing starts off as this self-feeding cycle that has you wishing you could climb seven days a week. Because of this, most climbers feel like they can check off the consistency box. What happens when this cycle stops bringing improvement though?

At a certain point, showing up and only doing what is fun stops being enough to guarantee progress. This doesn’t mean that climbing has to stop being enjoyable, and this absolutely doesn’t mean that you can’t continue to see progress from mostly just climbing. What it does mean is that we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard for how we define “showing up” and “being consistent”. 

What could you change about your sessions that would allow you to get more value out of them? What if you picked one or two things that you know would help you improve, and made those your new standard for “being consistent”?

Here are some ideas that you can try out:

• Spend part of your session trying problems that will take you more than 1-2 days to send

• Be present and intentional during your warm ups

• Have a weekly bouldering session instead of always defaulting to getting on ropes (you know who you are)

• Do mobility to start your session

• Completing your strength or hangboarding work if that’s what is most important

• If you’re rope climbing, set a goal for how many times in a session you will fall going for the next move instead of letting go or saying “take”

• Have the first hard boulder of the session be your weakest style or angle

• Pause for a few minutes after every session to reflect on what went well and what you could have done better. Bonus points if you track it!

You don’t need to overhaul your climbing in order to see results. If you make one or two small changes and be consistent with them you’ll continue getting to enjoy the sport you love while also improving. Who knows, you might even learn to love these new challenging aspects of climbing. If you learn to enjoy them, you’ll keep doing them, and consistency and improvement will feel automatic again. It’s a pretty good cycle to get stuck in.