The Science of Climbing Training

This is an ambitious book, Science is a method of understanding the world by accruing evidence and fitting it around hypotheses. The evidence and in turn the hypotheses change over time and so no such book can ever be considered definitive, it will only ever be a snapshot of the current state of knowledge.

That said this is a well researched, structured and written book, it covers the basics of human physiology well through the early chapters and cites existing evidence on which the theories are based. One exception I noticed was in Chapter 5 on muscle chains where it is mentioned that there are competing models but not grounds for the one the author chose to adopt to explain training were really given. Moving on the training exercises are well described and illustrated with clear photos.

Part 2: Optimisation of Training contains only one chapter (8 What can I optimise in my training sessions?) it is well written and I like the structure taking the reader through a typical training session and the emphasis and rationale for improving "Range of Motion" over stretching for its own sake as a warm up. Many of the exercises are for experienced climbers, not however those with many years behind them, but for those with experience of training for climbing so there is quite a high starting point for readers to be able to take full advantage of this book.

There are many non-climbing exercises described in this chapter and the benefits of each to climbing activity are well demonstrated (most of it seems geared towards building and maintaining good core strength which is key to climbing well). There are detailed descriptions of finger-board routines based on the work of Eva Lopez who undertook research on the area for her PhD. If anything I feel chapter 8 could have perhaps been split into smaller chapters and broken up as Part II: Optimisation of Training covers just under half of the book.

Part 3: Planning your Training is really useful showing how to structure the previous sections exercises into planned routines to achieve specific goals and covers common themes such as macro, meso and microcycles. It rounds out the book nicely and it would have been incomplete without this key chapter.

One of the slight criticisms which I've alluded to in the opening paragraph is that whilst the evidence presented is based on scientific research, and the studies are well referenced for those with the inclination to go and read primary research material, anyone with a scientific and/or statistical background will realise very quickly that the studies cited are mostly very small in sample size and have often focused on people who are already performing at a high level. To which end the generalisability of the findings to the general population may be questioned as often effect sizes seen in early studies are extreme and diminish or disappear in replication studies. This is something that isn't acknowledged or really mentioned in the book.

However, this is a challenge for researchers in the area though and not the author who has done an excellent job at translating the current state of knowledge into a very useful a coherent document. It won't be for everyone as it is very detailed, and mostly geared towards experienced climbers, but combined with some of the other training publications that are out there (in particular those from the Vertebrate Publishing stable such as The Climbing Bible, Beastmaking, Crack Climbing and Mastermind) this book will round out the library of anyone who is keen to invest their time in training to improve their climbing.