The TrainingBeta Podcast: A Climbing Training Podcast Neely Quinn

Climbing Fitness Breakthrough Series Before we get started, Coach Alex Stiger is hosting a 4-part series all about how to increase your overall climbing fitness. She will do 4 weekly 90-minute zoom calls starting March 21st all about how to use efficient, quick sessions in the gym to reliably make you feel stronger and have more endurance.
The cost is $147 (2-payment option available), and you’ll get all of the recordings of the zoom calls, a group Slack channel where you can ask Alex questions for the month, plus a bonus recorded coaching session with one of the participants.
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE FITNESS BREAKTHROUGH SERIES
 
How to Stay Motivated in Your Climbing In this episode, I talk with Coach Alex Stiger about the ways she stays so motivated in her climbing almost all the time. It’s actually really amazing to me that she’s so psyched so often…
Alex is a firm believer that if we are enjoying what we’re doing, we will make the most progress in whatever we’re doing. AND we’ll have an amazing happiness-building activity for the long haul. 
These are some of the questions we pondered in this episode
Should training be torture??  Why is that concept so romanticized Why do we treat climbing and training like two separate things?  How did old school mentalities shape how we are approaching our sport today?  How can we stop believing that doing things we don’t want to do will make us better?  How did our childhood sports and gym class shape the way we think about climbing and training? One of Alex’s superpowers is staying psyched 80+ % of the time, and she thinks that partly comes down to her being homeschooled and always being able to choose what she was doing with her time. We talk about how her habits and her great success with horsemanship in her younger years really shaped how she thinks about climbing now. 
She doesn’t do what she doesn’t want to do. She gives herself freedom to choose between structures and that works really well for her. She knows exactly what is on her “love to do” and “don’t love to do list” and she checks in regularly because it changes. She recognizes that what might affect her climbing and training psych the most is life factors and she takes that really seriously. Her desire to enjoy her sport is a driving force to de-stress, optimize, create space, and in general increase her well being. Stress is a big enemy of motivation!   The Tools She Uses to Help Keep Motivation High
We talk about all of these tools in detail in the interview.
Other people Routine Timers Measuring progress Setting mini goals Having a hard session time stop Regular “want” weeks Fueling for my sessions Strategic planning to avoid feeling late or rushed Mental check ins (green, yellow, orange, red) Acknowledging “druthers” out loud Gratitude practice You’ll find a lot of common sense tactics to make our sport sustainable, but also some surprising little hacks that Alex has come up with to make it fun for herself almost all the time. I loved this talk with Alex 🙂

 
Show Links Enroll in Alex’s Climbing Fitness Breakthrough Series Work with Alex as your coach Have questions? Email alex@trainingbeta.com or neely@trainingbeta.com

This episode is a bit different in that Coach Matt Pincus is the interviewer/coach and I (Neely) am just in it to introduce Matt and his guest, Bridget Roell. Bridget is a long-time climber who was working her first 5.13b when she first reached out to Matt a few years ago to coach her.
Through the training and tactics they employed, she was able to send her first 5.13b's, her first 5.13c’s, and her first 5.14a, which was her long-term goal. In this conversation, they talk about the changes they made in her physical training and her redpointing tactics that helped her the most. They also discuss her goals going forward and help her with her training right now.
This one was super inspirational for me, and it really highlights Bridget’s commitment to putting herself out there with her climbing and Matt’s ability to figure out exactly what any level of climber needs to improve.

 
Show Links Train with Coach Matt Pincus Bridget’s Instagram @bridget.roell
 
Train with Matt Pincus If you want Matt to help you with your own goals, whether they’re with bouldering or route climbing, he’s available for month-long commitments where he’ll talk with you over zoom and create a program for you and keep in touch with you via the TrueCoach app throughout the month.
He’ll help you get stronger overall and cater to your specific goals so the timing is right for you to send when it’s time to send.
Learn More about Working with Matt

 
 

In this episode, Dr. Tyler Nelson talks about a small but very effective change to make in your finger training protocol to help you get stronger and avoid injuries.
Last year, Tyler saw over 600 patients with finger injuries, and he believes that using unlevel edges that are bigger than what we’ve been told to use could have, in part, prevented those injuries while still making the climber stronger.
This interview was really fascinating to me. I didn’t even know what an unlevel edge could possibly look like, but Tension Climbing has created a board with them and it’s called the Whetstone Board.
 

Here’s part of the description of it from Tension:
The top jug on the Whetstone is something new. The edge profile was designed to promote a more “active” grip and reduce “over-wrapping” the wrist. A series of “ergo-bumps” was included to both improve the comfort of the grip and also to act as an edge that can be draped in an open-handed grip to more evenly distribute force between each finger as an aid for rehabilitating some finger tweaks.
This is not meant to be a Whetstone advertisement and I have zero affiliation with them, just fyi. But what Tyler is talking about in the episode are those “ergo-bumps” you see in the photo above.
As always, I learned a lot from this episode and now I kinda want to get a Whetstone board…
About Tyler Tyler owns and operates Camp 4 Human Performance, a chiropractic sports medicine clinic and strength & conditioning business in Salt Lake City. While earning his doctoral degree, he completed a dual program Master’s degree in exercise science at the University Of Missouri. While in graduate school he worked with the University of Missouri athletics department and currently is employed through two colleges in Utah.
He is certified through the National Strength and Conditioning Association as a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist and spends any extra time in his life with his wife and 4 kids or trad climbing or bouldering.
You can find Tyler in Salt Lake City at his clinic or online, Camp 4 Human Performance, where he tests athletes, creates training programs, and treats all kinds of athletes for injuries.
 
Other Episodes with Tyler TBP 212: Dr. Tyler Nelson’s New Insights on the Limits of Fingerboard Training TBP 202: Dr. Tyler Nelson on Finger Injuries in Youth Climbers TBP 168: New Insights on Finger Training TBP 162: Dr. Tyler Nelson on Endurance Training for Fingers TBP 155: Dr. Tyler Nelson on High Volume Power Training TBP 149: The Different Roles of Stretching for Climbing TBP 133: The Simplest Finger Training Protocol with Dr. Tyler Nelson TBP 084: Injury Rehab and Blood Flow Restriction Training TBP 098: Isometric Movements to Prime and Test Your Body TBP 108: Bood Flow Restriction for Injury Healing and Performance TBP 118: Latest Technology for Finger Training and Performance Testing TBP 128: Surprising Methods for Healing Tendon Injuries TBP 186 :: Dr. Tyler Nelson’s New Injury Prevention and Warm-Up Protocol
 
Episode Links Personal website: camp4humanperformance.com Take an online class with Tyler: camp4humanperformance.com/store Do a consultation with Tyler Instagram: @c4hp Facebook: @camp4chiropractic

This episode is one of the most meaningful episodes I’ve ever done, and I’ll tell you why in a sec. In it, I talked with psychologist Dr. Jennifer Dragonette about DBT, which stands for Dialectical Behavior Therapy, for a whopping hour and a half!
DBT is a set of psychological tools developed by Marsha Linehan to help people truly process and deal with emotion dysregulation, interpersonal conflict, and the everyday issues of daily life. DBT is very important in my own life because it’s what lifted me out of my most recent major depressive episode in 2017 and has helped me have way lower levels of anxiety and depression than I ever have before.
It helped save my life, to be honest. So when Dr. Jen contacted me to be on the show to talk about how DBT can help climbers, it was a full-body yes from me. I’ve incorporated DBT into my own climbing, and I’ve seen the incredible results it can produce in every part of life.
Dr. Jen does an excellent job of explaining some of her favorite DBT tools and how they can be used in climbing for things like:
fear of falling knowing how you want to proceed when you’re having a bad day climbing managing the urge to grab a draw, say take, give up, or not take enough rest communicating effectively with your partners or spotters about what you want from them how to allow our emotions to flow through us and out of us so we can move on I also go into some very personal details about how some OCD tendencies played out in my life to contribute to severe anxiety and how DBT helped me stop the OCD behaviors. As well as how I’ve been using DBT tools to help overcome body image issues.
As a climber and a psychologist, Dr. Jen has such a deep understanding of how these tools apply to climbing that you’ll hopefully feel confident using them in your very next climbing session. She’s clearly very adept at teaching DBT, and I enjoyed every moment of this conversation 🙂

Show Links Dr. Jen’s website: drjenniferdragonette.com Some basics about DBT and workseets: https://dbt.tools/ The program I did in Boulder, CO was the Dialectical Behavior Therapy Intensive Outpatient Program at BCH

In the episode, I sit down with Coaches Matt Pincus and Alex Stiger to discuss how they go about training their clients to be better boulderers. They’re both pretty psyched on bouldering themselves, so we also talk about how they train for bouldering in their own lives.
When we started talking, I was assuming they were going to tell me all the ways they have boulderers get stronger in the weight room and on the fingerboard, but we really only talked about that for a little while.
What they did focus on were the things they find to be way more important for that in real life… things like how to get yourself to try harder, how to change your sessions to be more structured and less “just bouldering,” and how important mobility training is to boulderers. There’s a lot of tactical talk in this episode about what it takes to be a good boulderer overall.
More Details
How to get yourself to try harder and how to quantify it Structured flash practice drill Hardest boulder circuit drill How to approach a boulder strategically instead of just throwing yourself at it Thinking in terms of style instead of grade, and how that helps you work your weaknesses Some talk about how to fall appropriately, and when not to fall Finger training, what weight training to do, and why it’s all even more important to do for bouldering When to shelve training and just go bouldering, and for how long that’s sustainable
Show Links Try out the Bouldering Program by Coach Matt Pincus for 35% off through January Work with Matt as your coach Work with Alex as your coach
35% Off Bouldering Training Program  If you’re tired of going into the gym without a plan and you want a clearly laid-out program made by an experienced coach, our Bouldering Training Program is just that. And it doesn’t cost nearly as much as working one-on-one with a coach. Matt Pincus created this online subscription bouldering program based off of what has been super successful with his clients over the years.
There are 3 levels of training available to you, depending on how much experience you have with climbing training. You’ll go through non-linear cycles (learn more about what that means in the link below) of training power, strength, skill drills, and throughout it all you’ll be gaining all-day capacity.
Hundreds of people have felt an increase in their bouldering ability within weeks of being on this program, and you can too. It’s 35% off right now, and you get a 7-day free trial to see if it works for you. Go to the gym with a plan in your hand, trust the process, and see results.
CHECK OUT THE BOULDERING PROGRAM SALE

 

In this episode, I talk with Coach Alex Stiger about the most common mistakes amde by climbers who are trying to break into 5.12 climbing. Sending 5.12 is the most common goal among her clients, so she has quite a bit of experience with the minutiae of what it takes to do that.

She will share her personal experience of her first 5.12’s and what she learned from her trials and tribulations. She’ll then go into the mindset shifts that are required to jump into the coveted 5.12 territory, and how she helps people do that.
While you might predict that strength training is one of the main tools Alex uses with her clients in this situation, it is not, as she says it is very rare to find a person who is climbing 5.11 who can not climb 5.12 with the strength they already have.
So while we spend a few minutes talking about strength training, you’ll find compelling evidence in this episode that that may not be your issue. Here are some of the other topics we discuss:
Why technique and staying calm are so important Honing the skill of resting How to decrease intimidation of the grade How to learn from your falling experiences How to have more of a competition mindset What to climb on in the gym if you’re trying to send 5.12 A better alternative to having a perfect pyramid before entering into 5.12 territory Why repeating climbs that are sort of hard for you is an important strategy We talk about a lot in this episode, and I highly recommend it if you’re at the 5.10 or 5.11 level, or if you’re just not consistently climbing 5.12’s and you’d like to. Even if you are climbing 5.12’s consistently, I think a lot of her tactics will help you!

5.12 Breakthrough Series Coach Alex Stiger is hosting a 4-part series all about how to break into 5.12 climbing. She will do 4 90-minute zoom calls starting January 17th all about what holds people back from sending 5.12 consistently and exactly what you can do to break your 5.11 plateau.
The cost is $147 (2-payment option available), and you’ll get all of the recordings of the zoom calls plus a bonus recorded coaching session with one of the participants.
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE 5.12 BREAKTHROUGH SERIES
 


Show Links Enroll in Alex’s 5.12 Breakthrough Series Work with Alex as your coach Work on your nutrition with Neely Have questions? Email alex@trainingbeta.com or neely@trainingbeta.com