5 things to keep track of in your Climbing Log.

You arrive at the climbing gym ready to get a little practise in. Your climbing partner arrives at exactly the same time you did. Fantastic the day is starting well! The gym looks fairly empty, so no lines for routes or problems. This day just gets better and better!

You grab your shoes and get situated under a route when your partner comes over. "Dude, didn't we do this route last week?" Looking up the route does look somewhat familiar but you hadn't slept much last week, and your memory of what the hell you actually climbed (or even that you climbed) last week is hazy at best. You remember flailing on a bunch of routes, and crushing one of them, but you don't remember which ones were which. You shrug at your partner and say "its just a warm up" and pull onto the wall.

By the time you and your partner finish the climb, a rain storm has rolled in and the gym has gotten crowded. The lines for routes are problems are 3 deep. You both crushed the route, and now you do remember this being the route that you totally crushed last session.

In a previous post I talked about the importance of actually keeping a log for climbing. Climbing like any training has benchmarks and milestones and ultimately, like any training, can be much improved with data. By keeping accurate measurements in your climbing log you can identify training practise, route setters, and body compositions that work, those that didn't, and areas of improvement. The key factor though is what the hell should you actually keep in the damn thing.

1. Date/Time and Duration
No brainer right? Being able to link up calendar days to your climbing allows you see when you did what, and how long you are training on any given day. All this can then roll up to weeks months and years (hopefully decades), which gives you an even better idea of your progress and maybe even plan to adjust training schedules and volume around yearly events (like holidays).

2.  Personal Measurables
Lets be honest. Performance in climbing is very much tied to power to weight ratio. Meaning body weight, body fat percentage etc all matter. The thing is though, everyone is different. Some people climb better when they're carrying extra weight in muscle. Some people don't. And some of us just need a helpful reminder not to the donuts brought into the office. Keeping a log of this can help you figure out your optimum body composition.

3. What the hell are you doing?
Did you lift weights? Do 4x4s? Campus? Fingerboard? Run? In the case of weights keep track of exercises, sets, repetitions, and load. With running, how far? how fast? What did your campus workout look like? There are a metric ton of fingerboard workouts out there, did you do one of those?

Those ones are the easy ones to document. What about routes and problems? Well lets discuss that next, because even if you aren't in training mode, and are outside you should write that down.

4. Route/Problem beta/info
Lets face it not all grading is equal. What one person feels is V3 can feel like a V6 for someone else based on the problem type and strengths of the climber. So just writing the grade of the problem is useless. Instead look at writing down the Crag/Gym, Name (if available for nothing other than a unique identifier in the gym. failing the name some other unique identifier, "the pink one in the corner"), Route Setter (if available), angle of the route, types of moves and holds, type of problem (technical, powerful, sustained etc.), did you flash it? Redpoint it? 3 tries? 10? Only got half way before slipping off that damned sloper for the 17000th time? How long did it take? Lead, or Top Rope? Any tweaks to your body during the climb?

5. How did you feel that day
This sounds all touchy feely, but it is absolutely critical. Climbing is as much mental as it is physical. There will be days when you can walk up to a wall tie into the pointy end and fly up the most sketchy looking route. Other days you're head is filled with other crap, and getting clear on the wall is an exercise in futility. Sometimes your body just doesn't feel right.

Keeping track of what you felt during and after the climb helps you figure out other things you need to work on. Did you take 4 times on a climb because you got gripped with fear above the bolt? Did your hamstrings feel super tight when you went for those heel hooks all day? Is your tendonitis flaring up? Incorporating mind and body awareness lets you uncover things that may be holding you back and possibly help you identify days where you should probably take an extra rest.

Wrap up
After reading this I'm sure you are thinking that this is a whole lot of data to keep, and your right, it is. One of these days I might get around to actually writing an app to keep all this stuff in it, the thing is usually I'd rather spend my time climbing. Fortunately there's an indiegogo campaign for a climb tracker called The Whipper that starts on May 3rd 2016. That will begin to track some of this. There are other apps like MyFitnessPal for body composition, food, water intake and exercises. Keeping all and looking back will help give you a good picture of where you are and plan how to get where you want to be.

4 Reasons to Use a Workout Log

You walk into the climbing gym or up to your local crag ready to get after it. You've got your properly broken in redpointing shoes for PR attempts, your chalk bag or bucket filled with your favorite chalk, your harness, trad rack, and or handy bouldering pad at the ready.

You and your climbing partner go through all your pre warm-up routines. Dynamic stretches, a quick traverse, maybe a quick session on a system board, and finally on to your warm up routes or problems.

Everything feels right. You are ready to go at your limit. You look around and identify problems and routes at your level.

A few hours later you leave the gym in one of three states: Elated with a phenomenal climbing session where everything just felt right, frustrated as to why you couldn't send those "easy" routes and why aren't you climbing a harder grade, or just meh it was an ok session.

The thing is, all these states can be a lie, and you have no reason of truly knowing if you actually had a good session beyond just your "feelings". If you're serious about climbing and training you need to keep a workout log.

A workout log can reveal patterns of development, weight change, mental attitude or deficiencies, overtraining and plateaus far clearer than even the best coach or climbing partner. Every climbing session, warmup, supplemental exercise, yoga class, run, route, and problem should be recorded and here's why:

1. An Accurate Record
A workout log is an actual record of what you really did. Think you can trust your memory? How many boulder problems did you do last session? How long did you spend on the campus board? Did you spend more time on the hang board in that mono than you did on the previous session? I would put money on the fact that you can't reliably answer that question and that you may have plateaued and not even realized it.

It's easy to remember the big milestones: your first 5.whatever, the first time you did the V-Next, but remembering the little things like how many moves and how long your last 4x4 session took, the log can take care of that.

2. A Roadmap to Success
If you have a time where things just seem to flow for you. Where all of a sudden you are crushing it session after session and you shoot up a grade or two in a matter of months, that there's a strong chance you've found a training regimen that works for you.

Its not a guarantee that it will work forever, and it will always need tweaking, but you can bet that it will probably work better than trying to mimic Adam Ondra's workout routine.

And what if you aren't getting anywhere. Well the good thing is you can identify that and learn something from that experience as well. Not getting anywhere in your training helps you identify things that you may not need to work on, and helps you push towards things that will help you become a better climber. While it sucks to bust your ass over and over again during training and not make any progress, at least you can identify things you are already good at an refocus your training towards your weaknesses.

It also helps identify when and how you climb best. Does a certain weight seem to lead to the best climbing for you? Do you climb better at night or in the morning.

3. Motivation
A workout log can be very motivating. It is easy and quick to look back and see where you were weeks, months and years ago and that your redpoint attempt then is your warm up route now.

This is what makes the workout log rewarding. Having the data in your back pocket about your progress is an invaluable tool to help build long term confidence and self esteem. When you can look back and see that over time you have made a huge jumps in relation to where you were, it makes the work seem worth it.

When you realize that you started off weak at something and now it is a point of strength through nothing but pure hard work, its powerful and motivating feeling.

4. Injury Prevention
Workout logs inevitably can predict and possibly even prevent injuries. When you get hurt you can go back through your log and see what the hell you've been doing. Not enough rest days? Too much volume? Pushing to far to fast? Weigh to much? Maybe you just haven't been getting enough sleep and you try stupid stuff when you're tired.

Once you can pinpoint what it is that seems to lead to your inevitable injury, you can hopefully plan to stop doing it so you don't have to deal with it in the future.


Wrap up
Athletes from other sports have been documenting their training for decades. If you are serious about training for your peak its important to maximize the use of your time. The less wasted time you spend repeating something thats not working for you the more time you have to try projects you never dreamed were possible. If you haven't been keeping track of your climbing progress, its never too late to start.

Now as far as what to track, and how to track it, look out for an upcoming blog post about what to keep in a log.

The Importance of Keeping a Log

There are times when working out can feel like a really big drag. That you aren't getting anywhere and that you have been doing this FOREVER with no results. The truth his you probably have been making progress, but you might not notice. This phenomenon happens all the time to people with kids (also pets, if you've had them since they were very young). You see your child (or pet) every day, and you don't really notice that they're getting bigger, and then all of a sudden they no longer fit where they used to, and you have the magic epiphany of: OMG he/she is getting so big! In fact this same phenomenon is often times why we don't notice that we are gaining weight until all of sudden that pair of jeans that we've had forever are "suddenly" way to snug! It's because of this phenomena that is absolutely vital that you keep track of your progress (or lack thereof).

By jotting it down, you can actually see that you are indeed making progress, and that changes to your body are actually happening! Sure they may not be as fast as you like, but progress is progress, and that's the goal. It's a motivator, it keeps you from giving up when you feel like this whole thing isn't worth it. It simultaneously gives you data to make other changes to perhaps push yourself through a plateau!

Plateau busting can be one of the most frustrating aspect of Muscle Building or Weight Loss. You get to a point where it just doesn't seem that you are getting anywhere. It can go on for days, weeks, even months! Keeping a log allows you to see things that may be causing your plateau. You can look back to when you stopped making gains or losses and see what perhaps might be causing that. Maybe you stopped doing an exercise. Maybe you started doing a little less or more time on the elliptical. Maybe you started eating a different kind of protein bar as a mid afternoon snack.

Being able to take in this data, and synthesize it into useful information to help you get to your goals is the name of the game! Big companies use this all the time, they call it analytics! But in order to analyze why things may not be working as well as you'd like you need to keep your data somewhere, and you need to keep it in a consistent manner. You don't have to use anything fancy I used a Mead Composition Book for years! You can get a 5 Pack of them here from Amazon for about $9.

So keep a log, take as many measurement as consistently as you feel doing. Using data to drive your goals is the optimum way of achieving them.