Page 10 - 2010 AMA Autumn

uilding up to an event athletes train specifically, building up £100 B
ARTICLE
to their ultimate goal by breaking their sport down into its constituent parts and then building it back up again. Take Usain Bolt for example he’ll spend time on practicing starts, run- ning drills and doing weights to target certain muscle groups all scientifically measured. He doesn’t go to every training session to race and break records: so why do we? Why every time we go to TRAINING
the wall do we aim for that red route on the competition wall with that tricky drop knee because we’ll get it next time: that’s right I’ve been watching you!
WITH
Athletes and sportsmen train, whereas climbers just climb and climb hoping to get better. Climbing is indeed the best training for climbing; however, it needs to be more structured than just going to the wall every week and trying the same route again and again. This doesn’t mean you can’t still aim for those dream routes occasionally and keep your training interesting by mixing up the routes you train on. USAIN
So how then? I’m not advocating that all climbers must immediately swap to a strict programme overnight, that’s unrealistic. Instead I’m talking about making a few subtle changes to
Henry Crosby
your routine to make it more interesting and effective. By looking upon
your wall session as an
athlete might a training
session, you can make some big gains.
We’ll talk here about two things: the warm-up and drills. Firstly the warm-up, this is not just a couple of traverses across a wall and a couple of cursory shoulder shrugs. Think back to your last PT session: In the warm- up you were stretched a little,
8 ARMY MOUNTAINEER