Taped Tips | 3 Tips for Training for Climbing Trips

Training is training is training. You’ve done your homework, you know how to periodize a training plan, you understand set and rep schemes and RPE and autoregulation, you’ve got all the latest tech and warmup tools, and you’ve somehow figured out how to fit all 482 things into a week, including recovery time and self-care mental health days. You’ve optimized.

Congrats.

But now you have a climbing trip coming up. The rock is different. The style is different. Your pre-trip time is short and the number of days you’ll be climbing even shorter. What’s more, if you do your normal training block for this upcoming trip, it’ll overlap with the good days in your climbing season and you want to optimize for BOTH. 

Well, realistically, you probably can’t.

What you can do is learn the best way to train for a climbing trip, which is different from training for your normal climbing season.

And you’re going to do just that, because we’ve got you covered here with some useful tips.

Preparing for climbing trips, particularly those less than a month long, requires a whole different training strategy than your normal seasonal preparation. 

Why, you ask? It’s still just preparing to climb hard. Seems simple. 

Simple, sure. But we have to take into account some things that aren’t always present when preparing for your usual climbing season.

Tip #1: Train – and practice – for the area.

Caroline Wickes eyes down some Wild Iris pockets. Photo: Alex McIntyre

Most climbing areas have something specific about the style that makes it stand out. They reward climbers with a specific skill set or strength. The Red River Gorge rewards open-handed endurance and pump management. Wild Iris rewards pocket strength and big pulling power. Showing up in Ten Sleep understanding how to stand on small feet will make for a much more successful trip. Being able to spot unconventional ways to position yourself between holds that are often facing the wrong way will undoubtedly help you in an area like Rifle. 

Even if we’re talking strictly finger strength, there’s a big difference between what’s required to climb well at Wild Iris, Horsepens 40, Hueco Tanks, and the Red River Gorge. 

And it’s not always about getting stronger. If you’re going somewhere for two weeks, and you spend the whole time trying to understand some skill that you don’t have, then you won’t ever get to use that strength you’ve built to its fullest extent anyway. Sometimes simply practicing the requisite skills will go further than getting stronger. 

Be creative. Let’s use knee-barring as an example. Adam Ondra famously talked about the workouts he did to get stronger at knee-barring for his Flatanger routes, but that strength is only going to take you so far if you can’t find kneebars and don’t really understand how to use them. 

If you’re going to Rifle or Hueco Tanks or Jailhouse or Flatanger or some other kneebar intensive area, you can absolutely improve at finding kneebars before you go. In the gym, if you don’t mind the strange looks, strap on a kneepad and go searching. Did it work? Why? Why not? Can you make it better? Can you rotate around the kneebar to reach higher holds rather than just using it to rest? 

Figuring out what is required of the climber in your destination is step one. And we may have done some of that work for you in our What When How to Train podcast series, where we talk with a local or experienced climber about their favorite areas and how to prepare for it.

Tip #2: Hit the Ground Running.

Because it’s a short trip, you don’t really have much time to get used to things and build some momentum. You want to be firing on all cylinders when you get there. The conventional build in volume or intensity followed by a deload week that we see in most programs might not be the best option. For these short trips, I believe it’s far better to program a build in volume, a deload, then start a moderately high volume/high intensity block and taper the volume toward the trip. What you’re training and practicing in those blocks depends on the demands of the destination (the things we decided on in Tip #1).

The reason we build to a high volume, even for a bouldering trip, is because you’re going to want to fit as much climbing in as you can. Even if you have a main project you want to focus on, rather than doing a high volume trip, you want as many quality attempts as possible to give you the best chance of success. There’s nothing worse than figuring out the key piece of micro-beta when you’re too tired to give any more quality burns. Don’t let that be you.

Then we taper into the trip, even if it’s the Red River Gorge where you’ll want to be able to do hundreds of moves in a row, because we want you to show up fresh and ready to go rather than tired from the training. You’re not going to want to rest your first few days in a new area in order to perform better. You’re going to want to climb, and so you want to be ready.

In our new Trip Prep Plans, we’re using a 7 week program: 3 weeks of build, followed by a deload week, and then 3 weeks tapering into the departure date. In my experience, it takes about 6 weeks to really get some benefit, and anything longer than 7 or 8 weeks risks cutting deep into the performance season of the area at the time when most people are planning these short trips.

You should definitely check out our new Trip Prep Plans. We currently have programs for Wild Iris, Ten Sleep, and (coming very soon) the Red River Gorge, each with versions to fit 5.11, 5.12, and 5.13 goals. Plans for popular bouldering areas are also in the works!

Tip #3: Introduce pressure into the training.

In your normal season in your home area, the pressure you’re going to encounter is pretty minimal. Yes, there will be an end to the season, but you can always try again next season. However, on a trip, the pressure can be much more palpable. Go on enough of these trips, and you will absolutely eventually be trying to change plane tickets just to get another attempt or two on the project you’re so close to sending. Not only do you want to be able to handle that pressure mentally, but you also want to be able to give good efforts while doing so. 

We can improve this skill by adding time or attempt constraints into our training. If you know you’re doing a volume trip, trying to do lots of new climbs, then practice flashing and onsighting in the gym.

And don’t forget about second go sends. It’s a really valuable skill to have for trips. One of our most popular Board Meeting episodes is all about the Art of the Second Try Send. Go listen to it!

If it’s a trip where you’re trying to do fewer but harder things, we have a few time constrained drills we like for that. My favorite is definitely the Ten Minute Takedown.

The Ten Minute Takedown simply asks you to work out the moves and sequences of a challenging-for-you boulder over the course of ten minutes. Then you rest for two minutes and give one attempt. If you don’t send, rest two more minutes, and give one more attempt. That’s it. Walk away. This will help you not only learn to deal with that sort of time constraint, but it will also begin to shorten the projecting process, forcing you to focus only on what’s important for the send, and it will ask you to give an acute effort – a skill that is necessary to send hard things on trips.

If you want to get into the finer points of the Ten Minute Takedown, Nate has a great video on our Youtube channel.

I like to have some version of a pressurized drill throughout the entire plan, but it’s most important in that last 3 week block to make sure you’re getting comfortable in the scenario where you might not send and still have to walk away. You’ll get better at being able to apply the strength and good movement you’ve been working on, even when the pressure is on. 

If you’ve got a trip coming up in a few months, consider using some of these tips to prepare, or check out our Trip Prep Plans. Each plan is developed by a coach who has considerable experience in the area, and includes a resource library with both training and performance tips for the area, as well as route recommendations, a podcast playlist for your trip, what to pack, and more.

And of course, let us know how the trip goes! We want to hear all the spray about the successes, failures, and lessons learned. Drop a comment here or hit us up on social media!