High Intensity - High Volume
Level: Intermediate
Focus: Power Endurance and Mental Toughness
Style: Bouldering
This session is designed to push both physical and mental boundaries, enhancing your ability to sustain high levels of effort. It requires careful monitoring of fatigue levels to prevent overtraining and injury. The balance between rest and exertion is key to developing power endurance without compromising safety.
High Intensity - High Volume (Power Endurance and Mental Toughness Focus)
Structure: A series of 8-10 boulder problems that combine power, precision, and endurance, simulating a competition round or a peak performance day.
Holds: A diverse array of holds, including small crimps, dynamic volumes, and technical foot chips, requiring a high level of precision and control.
Volume: Climbers should aim to complete each problem 2-4 times, focusing on maintaining intensity across the session.
Rest: 3-5 minutes between attempts to partially recover, with a longer 5-10 minute rest between problems to mentally reset.
Grading: Problems are 1-2 grades below the climber's max, ensuring that the challenge is sustained across the session.
Session Duration: 2 to 2.5 hours, including a comprehensive warm-up focusing on activating all muscle groups and a cool-down aimed at promoting recovery and reducing muscle soreness.
Overview
This session targets the development of power endurance—the ability to exert powerful moves repeatedly without significant decrease in performance—and mental toughness, crucial for overcoming challenging sections on longer climbs or during competitions where fatigue sets in.
Structure
Total Problems: 8-10 boulder problems.
Attempts per Problem: 2-4 attempts.
Sets: In this context, each problem can be seen as a set that's part of the larger session. The entire session acts as a comprehensive set of sets, with each one designed to test and improve power endurance.
Balancing Attempts and Sets
Attempt Definition: Each attempt should be a high-effort try to either complete or make significant progress on a problem. The aim is to maintain as high an intensity as possible across all attempts.
Rest Between Attempts: Shorter rest periods of 3-5 minutes are essential here. They allow for partial recovery, simulating the demands of real climbing scenarios where full recovery isn't always possible.
Rest Between Problems (Sets): After completing all attempts on a problem, a longer rest period of 5-10 minutes is advisable before moving to the next set. This ensures you can maintain a high level of performance throughout the session, allowing for mental and physical recuperation.
Focus on Power Endurance and Mental Toughness
Power Endurance Development: The selected problems should require a sustained effort of powerful moves, challenging your ability to maintain power output over the course of the session.
Mental Toughness Training: The structure of the session—requiring you to push through fatigue and maintain focus across multiple high-effort attempts—builds mental resilience. You learn to manage your psychological and physical resources, maintaining motivation and concentration under stress.
Why This Balance?
The balance between attempts and sets in a High Intensity - High Volume session is carefully calibrated to:
- Enhance your power endurance by challenging your ability to perform powerful moves repeatedly over a session. This improves your capacity to handle longer climbs or sequences of difficult moves without significant performance drop-off.
- Build mental toughness by forcing you to face and overcome the psychological challenges of fatigue and frustration. Managing effort across multiple high-intensity attempts teaches you to stay focused and determined, even when tired or faced with difficult problems.
- Mitigate injury risk by ensuring rest periods are sufficient to allow for partial recovery, thus maintaining the intensity of the session without pushing into the danger zone of overtraining or acute injury.
This session format is particularly valuable for preparing you for the physical and mental demands of competition or project climbing. By simulating the conditions of intense, prolonged climbing efforts, you can develop the power endurance and mental fortitude necessary to succeed in your climbing endeavors. Integrating this session into a your training plan, alongside proper recovery and nutrition, can lead to significant improvements in performance and resilience on the wall.
As volume increases so does stress on your tendons and ligaments. Introduce de-load weeks to minimize risk of injury. A common used structure is 3 weeks of climbing, 1 week of de-load.
