Many climbers assume better climbing comes from doing more—more exercises, more structure and more complexity. I've come to believe the opposite.
One of the more experienced climbers I work with said something to me recently that's really stuck with me.
She said, "One of the reasons I love your approach to training is because I can hold it in my head. I don't need to write it down. I don't need to pull out my phone. I just go into the gym and do the training."
This comment has been bouncing around my head ever since.
I noticed something quite early with my coaching.
Whenever I started layering more than two or three different elements into someone's training at the same time, I lost track of what was going on.
I started to wonder whether good coaching might actually be about designing better experiments rather than more complicated plans.
If I, as the coach, couldn't keep track of four or five different variables at once, how on earth could the climber?
And if neither of us could keep track of what was happening, how could we possibly know what was actually producing the progress we were hoping to see?
I started to become skeptical of complicated programs built around eight or ten different exercises that somehow combined to create some magical outcome.
The more climbers I coached, the more this idea kept being reinforced.
Over the years, I've realized that the art of coaching is really the art of running thoughtful experiments. We change one meaningful thing, let it play out, and learn from the result.
If we change too many things at once, we lose track of cause and effect and stop learning what's actually working.
And if we identify the one bottleneck getting in our way and meaningfully change it, remarkable things often happen.
My job isn't to give someone a complicated training plan. My job is to do the opposite—to help them run simple, intelligent experiments.
So when it comes to your own training, I'd really encourage you to keep everything as simple as possible. Don't try to do multiple experiments at once.
Just change one thing and let it play out long enough to see what happens.
For climbers, an experiment can be as simple as:
Climbing on the training board once a week for a season.
Running one endurance intervention before a trip.
Adding one hangboard session each week for four months.
Controlling your number of bouldering attempts for a season.
I also notice something else with this approach that makes it super powerful, and it's related to motivation.
Think about the classic approach to physical therapy. The PT gives the client 10 different exercises.
And what happens with 90% of people?
They do the exercises for a few days and then give up.
Why?
Because the client has no sense of how things are progressing.
There are too many things happening at once.
And that kills motivation.
When you focus on one thing, it's so much easier to keep doing it. You can clearly see the progress from session to session. And you understand the experiment. You know you'll learn something, even if the result isn't what you hoped for so you keep turning up and doing the training.
So when I think back to the comment my climber made, I don't think it's just about the program being easy to remember. I think it's also because the program is simple enough to learn from, and therefore simple enough to trust.
If you can't hold it in your mind, it's probably too complicated.
If you really want to improve your climbing, keep your training as simple as possible. Run easy-to-track experiments, stick with them until you get clear feedback, then make an educated decision about what to adjust next.
If you get the basics right, the details don't matter. If you get the basics wrong, the details don't matter.
Thanks for reading,
Simon
Enjoyed this article?
Join How We Learn To Climb for one new essay each week on training, movement and the philosophy of becoming a better climber.