5. Endurance Training

Endurance is mentally the hardest thing to train. Your skin will be sore, your body will hurt, you will have to sweat and you will have to try. Fortunately endurance is one of the easiest things to improve on once you start training it, unfortunately it is also the first aspect of your climbing that you will lose if you do not train it.

Endurance can be defined as the ability of your muscles to contract at a less than maximum level for a longer period of time. This means 60+ moves and from 5-20 minutes of climbing. Some people claim that to really improve endurance you need to treat climbing like any other aerobic activity and climb for at least 45 minutes at a time (laps on 5.9s). Combined with increased strength you will be able to increase the difficulty of what you consider easy, holds that your muscles do not have to contract as much to hold on.

Endurance training can be very hard on your joints and tendons. As you start to get tired your muscles are not able to support the joints as much so make sure that you take at least two rest days between endurance workouts.

5.1 Endurance Drills

For most people their footwork and technique are the first things that fail them when they start to get tired. When doing these drills really concentrate on being as efficient as possible especially when you start getting tired. It doesn't make sense to make moves harder than they have to be especially when you are pumped.

Some good endurance drills are:

• One and Ones
  One and Ones involve climbing one route, lowering down and immediately getting on a second route. The first route should be very hard for you and you should barely be able to do it. The second route should be easier but you should have to fight to do it while tired. A variation on this is to do the easier route first and then the harder route to see if you can still make it to the top of the harder route.
  This drill is good for the transition from power endurance training to endurance training because the routes should be familiar after trying to redpoint them, and you are adding more moves onto them. Remember you want to complete approximately 60 moves.

• Circuit Training
  Circuit training is good for endurance training becuase you don't have to downclimb routes or worry about ropes. You should try and create a circuit that goes in a loop and see how many times you can do the loop. Record exactly where you get to, the number of moves and the time on the wall, and try and improve on this each time you get on the circuit. Try and complete more than 60 moves in a row and adjust the difficulty of the circuit accordingly.
  

  Try two attempts at the circuit per workout with at least 10 minutes rest between attempts.
  

• Laps on Routes
  Try and up and down climb routes for at least 10 minutes. You will have to experiment to find out which routes work best for you but the routes should be at least slightly overhanging. Vertical routes provide too many opportunities to rest. The key to this drill is the amount of time on the wall not necessarily the difficulty of the route. You want to get pumped but more importantly you want to be moving constantly.
  

  This is a good drill to do near the end of a workout when you are already tired.
  

• Fixed Time on the Wall
  Pick an area where you can boulder and set a timer for between 10 and 20 minutes. Start the timer and do not leave the wall until your time is up. Here you should play around with different moves of varying difficulty. Concentrate on what type of holds you can hold onto when pumped and body positions for rests etc. This is a good drill to practice some of the resting techniques on.