How To Improve In Your NEXT Year of Bouldering with Lattice

If you're in your first, fifth or even fifteenth year of climbing, at some point you've probably felt like you're hanging around without much improvement and asking yourself what should I do now to improve my strength and skill. Depending on how long you've been climbing, climbing coach Josh Hadley from Lattice Training thinks the answer may vary. I think that is really good advice but also really bad advice and I want to get into that little bit. Lattice Training is renowned for their research intensive approach to climbing improvement and in this video we asked Josh for a set of easy to follow guidelines that most people of each different climbing age could apply to help them progress. A lot of the advice I hear that's geared towards people in their early years of climbing, first year of climbing, is to I guess not worry too much about it, not to overthink it, to just climb. To not maybe place emphasis on like supplemental off-the-wall training and to just get lots and lots of mileage in. Just climb a lot right. I think that is really good advice but also really bad advice. Okay. I want to get into that little bit. I want you to show me how you would interpret the advice of just climb a lot, which I think is the most common advice most people get in their first year of climbing. We're going to unpack how that actually can be bad advice for new climbers. There's nuance to it but I'll explain it. The climbs that are speaking to me on this particular section of wall would maybe be these pinks. Like this pink here looks nice. Yeah. This pink here also looks nice. Yeah. I'd probably just hop on one of these two and take my session from there. Let's do a couple climbs then. Is it fair to say that you're making the session as fun as possible, which is a good thing, right? You're looking for gratification from finishing climbs. Sure. I think I'm looking for as fun as possible, but I'm also maybe looking for a bit of an ego stroke. I don't want to leave the session feeling like that was a really good session. I got uploads, I flashed loads, maybe. Yeah. If all you're here for is having fun, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I think as a coach that works on improving his performance, criticism I'll get is like, oh, what if we just want to have fun? That's fine. You don't have to have either or. I think if you come to the gym and you want to get better, and a lot of people I work with, they see getting better at climbing as a really fun endeavor. Actually, the harder you climb, sometimes the more fun you have on those boulders. There's two issues that arise with this if you just do the same thing all the time. Some people will gravitate towards always projecting and trying really hard things at the limit. That is great for developing your strength and maybe developing a bit more awareness in climbing at your limit, but also you're going to lack some of that lower level stuff, which we know is great for developing your technique because you can be more aware of what you're doing. The other side of that is if we go around and we do sessions like this, where we're doing lots of flashing stuff, instant gratification, doing lots of mileage, loads of movement, really fun, but then we don't get as much time spent doing the harder stuff as well. I'm definitely the kind of person that just gets on a route and freestyles, does what feels right. I think that's pretty typical for most people, particularly if you're just going in, especially if you have mates. You don't see many people doing this and reading and stuff. I think there's two things which is really important to that first year of climbing, and I'm going to say that's intention and mindfulness. I think if you can change that phrase we said at the beginning, which is just climb a lot, and you said just climb a lot with mindfulness and intention, that's immediately 100% better because you're learning the skills of route reading, you're learning the skills of visualization, and all of that happens before you get on the climb. Then the mindfulness aspect comes into, did you feel like you relaxed well for that move? Is there one move that felt particularly awkward or hard? Because most of the time route setters aren't trying to make the climb feel awkward, they're trying to make it flow. If something feels weird, can you make it feel better? That's immediately taking an overly simplistic view of what you should do in your first year of climbing, and I think making it way better. So what I want to do now is go over to the training area and talk about another point that gets glossed over when we use this simplistic phrase of just climb a lot. But when we say things like just climb a lot, that just insinuates there should be no strength and conditioning, and this comes into the mindset that the strength and conditioning is placing a crutch on people's performance. It's like people are using it to climb harder and skip the step of getting better technically, which should be the priority in year one, and I definitely agree with that. But if we look at other sports, like I've started doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu, I need to do some stuff because my neck is going to get destroyed. Runners will do stuff maybe to avoid shin splints. Lots of sports will do something to support them so that they can continue to do what they want to do, and it really sucks when you run into injuries. And I don't know about you, but my first years of climbing, I don't do it anymore luckily, but I always used to get fingernails, I had quite a few shoulder issues, and I had a shoulder issue that lasted like a year and a half. And I think this is pretty common with climbers that just climb loads and don't necessarily do much to supplement their training. So the only change here is you don't need to do strength training to improve your performance, but if you do something to become more athletic, and particularly if you start climbing in your 30s or 40s, the chances are if you've not done a sport before, at least to a high level, you want to do something to just become a little bit more athletic and support everything you do on the wall. And that's all it needs to be. Do you have any recommendations for what that might look like in practice in your first year of climbing? Yeah, so it's a big it depends thing. I think if you want a really simplistic training routine to do, I would always focus on like a hip hinge movement, like a squat or a deadlift, a push movement, like a bench press or press ups if you're at home, and then probably a pulling movement. And this will support lots of joints, multi-compound movements, but also just building things into a warm up. So let's go do some like shoulder shrugs. This won't improve your ability to pull, but it's going to activate all those muscles around your shoulder girdle. So we're moving away from our first year of climbing, and we're kind of like three years into the process now. This is when we start to develop a bit of an identity in our climbing. And by that, I mean like we start to gravitate towards a climbing style. So what I want you to do, Nathan, is let's go around the gym. I want you to find a boulder problem that basically demonstrates who you are as a climber, what your preferred style is, what you'd like to be climbing. Straight to the steeples for me. Are we going kind of project level here? Yeah, let's do something we can work on a bit. So it would be this yellow on this wall. There's another yellow there, but it's kind of more of a board climb style with smaller holds. And this to me looks like it might have like a, it's got a smaller hold in it, but it looks like it might be a kind of jump to a hold off of that. The stuff that I would always describe it as like you'd have a bit of a bigger margin for error on. Yeah, I do this on my board climbing, so I don't like, I didn't perceive my finger strength as being very good. And so if I do use a small hold, it's normally like big hold, small hold, generate off the big hold and feel my hips to the next hold. And this one's like hovering. I think we're probably relatively aligned. I do like things that are maybe a little bit more complex for hip position. I love my flexibility training. You're calling me basic. I love being able to like get my heel on something and like suck my hips in. Yeah, come on. That was really good. I like that kind of level though. And I like that style. Like to me, trying that was like, okay, I think I can work this. This feels like I've picked one that I could get to the top of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think sometimes tall climbers, either they feel guilty or like people try and make them feel guilty about using their height and like, it's stupid really. Like you should use everything to your advantage. If you are tall, you should climb tall. I think it makes sense. Jealousy is a disease. It's a technique you can't teach. Nice. Come on. Come on. Nice. Yeah. Sick. That looks good. I feel like we did a really similar kind of... The move felt bigger when I did it. I found, I thought I saw you struggling as well on that hold that you jumped to. Having two hands, it's fine catching it with one hand, but getting the second hand on, you suddenly regret where you've placed it. You've got to choose which one's better. Yeah. I think you want the second one better for that next move. That's what I ended up thinking and kind of thinking, oh, I need the left to be more on it to go up the sloper. I think we need a brush as well. I think we should brush that next sloper. I just got sidetracked by a different idea. Nice. Come on. Yeah. Nice. Come on. That feels big. My foot slipped there on that move. So even though I hit it, I was just kind of like... So I can tell what's going to happen here unless we check ourselves back to the tips is that I'm going to spend the rest of the video trying this climb because it's... Because it's my strength. It's fun to try what I perceive as my strength near my limit. That's probably my, one of my pitfalls, definitely. What would you say to climbers, maybe who are approaching that kind of three year point in their, three year and beyond in their climbing journey, that's probably a point at which maybe they think they've sussed out these strengths and that's where I am. You know, I think I know what I'm good at. So the temptation is to do what you're good at. Yeah. I think it happens consciously and subconsciously as well. Okay. Like we kind of keep coming back to the fun element of it. I think you're always going to do what you enjoy and you're probably going to enjoy what you succeed at more often or feel like maybe sometimes it's just because it's a harder level and like that's rewarding. If you were struggling on a really hard red slab and you're doing some big moves on it, like you can see which one you're Now I will caveat this with, it is absolutely fine to play to your strengths and there's quite a nice narrative now in the elite climbing community, like with pro climbers like Stefano and Aiden Roberts, like talking about playing to their strengths to perform at such a high level. And I think that is a really important part of it. But remember, we're talking about elite climbers here as well. And I don't think they would be as good at climbing as they are now if they didn't have a good breadth of climbing experience in their formative years of climbing. So the point here is that if you get three years in, you're still not very much in your formative years of climbing. Don't get sucked into the trap of doing 80% of your volume on what you're already good at and only 20% on maybe what you're not good at and put aside time to put work into your weaknesses as well. I think the first step of that and what we're doing here is first define what you're good at. And Hannah was saying that some people maybe don't know that very well. So as well as trying to like look inwardly and see what you're good at, what we've been doing is asking your peers maybe what they think you're good at. And that will also reveal maybe what you're not good at. And I think that's what we should go do now is spend some time trying to evaluate a weakness in the gym and putting some time into that. Sure, that sounds good. So I'll pick out a few folders around the gym now that maybe that I would think of my weaknesses and maybe you might also offer, or Hannah might be really well placed, to offer some thoughts on what she thinks my weaknesses are. You can be strict. If Nathan picks up and you're like, no, that's got a long weave in it. Yeah. I've landed on a purple climb, which Josh pointed out to me actually, probably because I was purposefully gravitating away from it. I wanted to pick a weakness that was still a weakness that I might enjoy and instead we've now just landed on pure... You want to look good on camera really, don't you? Yeah, I wanted to look good on camera. I'm not going to look good on camera. I'm not even sure kind of whether like purple in this kind of style is doable because honestly I just wouldn't normally even try it. How's your toe Nathan? I told you I wasn't going to look good. So with choosing a climb, asking a friend to choose a climb, making sure that you're kind of paying attention to things that your weakness is, is there a certain way you would then approach those climbs in your session? Would you dedicate a little bit of time in a session to going and seeking out those climbs or how would you kind of factor this in? Yeah, so I would normally suggest a nice way to fit it in is save the best to last because I think that's a nice way of doing it and also if you're warming up to try really project something, I would generally always suggest that you use the first 20 minutes of your session just being really mindful on working some weaknesses at a lower level and maybe you can build up to doing some hard climbs that adjust your weaknesses and then just save the best for last because then you're still motivated to like okay once I've done this I'm going to go try that really cool yellow one over there with the big moves. So I think that's probably just purely out of like a motivation thing. I'd put it earlier in the session and I'd maybe do that like every session, every other session really depends on like how psyched you are on it. It's got to be fun really isn't it? I've done this climbing with Jen Wood a lot, we've done a lot of videos together and like she's really like confident on like really sketchy like slab moves and she'll just pull me on to me like we're going to try this one out. Does it help watching someone who's really good at that or is it demoralizing? Does it help? I sometimes think it helps like you know if you're doing an outdoor climb and you watch someone else do a beta video of it, somehow it then clicks in my mind that it's more possible. I think it rallies a bit of psych. Yeah, yeah I'm up for it. So good, so good, so good, come on. Yeah Josh, come on, you got it. Yeah, come on. Really nice, really nice climbing. Yeah, it's not so bad actually. A lot of respect for that one. I really enjoy working climbs that like address my weaknesses. The only thing that puts me off is when I get scared of like sketchy falls. Yeah, sure. Like I've broke my ankle climbing outside before and I think that really knocked my confidence for a long time and I've never really like recovered from like those uncontrolled slips when you come off a slab. Particularly like kind of spooked me out. Yeah, but as long as I feel safe like I'm pretty happy doing really like awkward moves that I just think don't feel like suit me. Thanks for telling me that story before I go up. It wasn't in this situation. This needs to be a good go now. Come on, that's it. Come on, pull over. Yes, yes, come on. Oh, that was so close. I felt quite good. Yeah, yeah. Suddenly that actually felt a bit possible. Yeah, yeah. Wow, I think you definitely, you just like fired that hold, didn't you? Yeah, yeah and actually like a really small change like my knee being outside of my, I think if I had like my knee, it just felt like I could have just got that ever so slightly better and I could have started going. Yeah, yeah. All right, I'm pleased with that. I think when trying this climb as well, something that I've maybe only really appreciated more in the last few years of climbing and the more that we've worked with coaches and parathletes is almost the nature of progress over the long-term can fluctuate, but also even in the short-term can fluctuate. So although second go was from the outside worse than my first go in terms of I didn't get as far, actually there's things that you might figure out on that second go where you fall off, where actually you've then learned a lot that you can put into the next go. You've got more comparison I suppose at that point. You can be like that's what I did differently, that's what didn't go so well this time. Yeah. The whole concept of like developing an identity or style within climbing is dependent on two things. One is genetics. As you can tell Nathan's quite tall and that's not going to change. So Nathan's always going to have a preference and that will develop quite naturally for a lot of people. And then the other thing is like your history, your background. Have you participated in other sports? Like people which have done gymnastics have really good upper body strength. Probably you'd assume will gravitate more towards more gymnastic styles of climbing like in roof terrain and then those with dance and flexibility might be more flowy over like vertical terrain and so unlike my flexibility training has actually changed my style of climbing and my preferences because now I like to use what I've got when it comes to hip flexibility. So you will always have quite fixed styles of climbing but that was just something that you want to understand and then try and work on being more well-rounded at least if that's your thing. So I think something you can learn from this whole practice of like addressing your weaknesses is why is this a weakness for you? Is it pure preference? Is it mindset? Is it fear? Is it physical attribute? Like I do think if you had more hip flexibility getting that foot up would feel easier and it would change your whole perception of this being a hard move for you. Yeah. And so maybe there's a simple change you can make to your stretching habits. Yeah. Which might improve your ability to get up slabs more frequently. So there's lots of different things you can kind of glean from just practicing working the weaknesses aspect. So a bit of a switch of location because editing Hannah here. So working with Josh on building in good habits got me I guess reflecting on some of the things that I might have approached quite differently in my climbing where I just start my climbing again now. And one of those is this idea that respecting my overall physical health is a huge component of my climbing performance from my mindset to how strong my core is right down to the tips of my toes. You'll have seen that over the past nine months on the channel we have been working with Vivo Barefoot a minimalist shoe company. Aside from the shoes there's a whole bunch of information on the Vivo website around foot health, human health. I recommend if you're interested that you do like explore that curiosity learn a little bit more about how you could gain foot gains. We call them foot gains now. We have an ongoing partnership with Vivo so you can use the code and now back to the depot. So we're basically at like 10 years into climbing now you're 10 years into climbing and I think where we get to now is it is connected to what we had at year three plus which was strengths and weaknesses but now it's more about fixed beliefs. So we were all quite aware of where our strengths and weaknesses were but we have different ideas about what we need to do to address them and this is where fixed beliefs comes into it. I see this all the time in my coaching we do a lot of strength assessment stuff and I'll see people coming in believing they need stronger fingers to get to the next level of climbing and sometimes I'm blown away by how strong their fingers are way above their peer group and even when you tell them that sometimes their beliefs are so fixed that they don't believe that there could be other things to do to develop them as a climber whether it's technique maybe it's using their hips more maybe it's like lower body strength right becoming more of a rear wheel drive climber yes and say let's explore some of the fixed beliefs maybe that you have in your climbing and I'll give some anecdotes that I've seen within my testing and my coaching. On the channel I talk about it a lot that I have historically struggled with moving dynamically and I think what I have tried to do to address that in my own climbing is I guess identification was the first step being like okay I am bad at this and so I will seek out climbs that challenge me in that area so rather than avoiding the dynamic climbs of the set I will now do them. I have obviously had a lot of in-person coaching through dynamic movement and I think I've put a lot of emphasis on like mindset things almost like confidence and yeah trying to address that weakness by telling myself that I can do it and trying to prove myself wrong. Yeah and I think you've done amazing steps to to improve that dynamic climbing and I wouldn't I don't think you should change anything retrospectively looking back on that but I think you've probably had more professional at least you've definitely worked with some of the most amazing coaches and climbers like I've ever seen you had loads of in-person coaching the most coached climber I know personally and so I guess at this stage it's addressing the belief that you need more of that coaching or you need more I'm not saying you don't need more coaching or confidence but I suspect there could be other things we could look at and address and if you're operating at your maximum strength when you're trying to move fast you're just gonna feel really limited yeah even if your perception of that is you're limited by your technique if we just went to the gym maybe and worked on like squat strength so you could drive more through your hips like you might find that that really changes how you move dynamically yeah I'm not saying that's like exactly the fix right here but this is what I mean by challenging those fixed beliefs and often it takes talking to maybe someone else and understanding where you can challenge it so let's look at some powerful climbs then and then we will think of like how we could influence this outside of the technical and mental component this looks like a perfect example of where leg power is going to really help you on this one but I think you could potentially cheat it come on good nice nice come on that's it come on yeah come on this feels hard do you know what I was thinking as well is I could probably skip out that move skip out oh go to the top I think because the top looks like this I could either just do that or I could put a heel on the second start hole and do that maybe I might try and cheat it so interesting what I would this comes back to like maybe the very first point we made about having intention and mindfulness yes is the way you did that move which is actually when I said I think you can cheat the hamstring and use the pushing muscles in your leg you brought your other foot across you push straight towards that yeah I think if you were going to work on your power through your lower body I would be like I'll try and do it that way yes come on bleed it but I would also try and do it with the way it looks like it's set because you've completely skipped out that for a heel hook I think I absolutely reverted back to the safe feeling default whereas like it might not be the intended method but it feels safer given my perceived come on strength like what I perceive my strength to be yeah um well I always do this when I climb in a group of people if they do it a way it's different to me and I often get this with people that are shorter and like smaller holds although I normally get back on and try it their way yeah I think that's a really nice way of just like and sometimes it doesn't even feel better it feels worse but like it's just nice to explore the movement that exploration I think is really helpful for mastery of movement in general I'm gonna try and I'm gonna try and cheat the finish maybe nice yeah really nice it was actually really far away that didn't look a million miles away though so this part is all about challenging set beliefs um even if you understand where you're strong and weak potentially these can be set beliefs which are holding you back in your climbing and I think a really good example of this is when I did an assessment with Emil he's clearly very experienced very strong climber that's been climbing for a long time and it was interesting to ask him what he would perceive the results to be of that test and ultimately the two big things were he would have good contact strength because he's a boulderer he would have poor fitness because he's a boulderer and the results were pretty much mirror image to that he had relatively poor contact strength and relatively good fitness like really good fitness for a boulderer and when we unpacked it a bit and just chatting to him the first thing is he might not have amazing contact strength because when you look at his climbing style he's always preferred more compression style bouldering on larger holds and he's a taller stronger climber so he's amazing at generating to the dead point so he's not snatching holds in an aggressive way like maybe a shorter climber might need to so the contact strength doesn't necessarily come for his fingers he's just excellent timing his upper body and his amazing upper body strength so he can work around that but he didn't necessarily know that until we looked at it and the whole fitness thing well when you ask him about his climbing he would have really long climbing sessions loads of mileage and this is so typical of someone that's got a competition background experience because there's so much volume of like lots of climbing relatively little rest which is important to train for competitions so you would expect someone of that background to have good fitness whereas i've spoken climbers of a similar ability which have like just short 40 minute board sessions several times a week but that's not emil's claim that's not emil's training history so it's interesting to do that because it challenged his beliefs of what his strengths and weaknesses were and then he could go away and potentially change what he was doing in training if he wanted to change his his performance profile nice come on good come on yeah really good come on you got it come on come on good good good that's it i think if you stand up you can just reach it come on yes yes yes nice this is not i call it on such like the worst part here when you first grabbed it yeah and then like shuffled along we wanted to do one final stage of the climbing journey and this would be for people that are climbing 20 plus years so i'm going to make some assumptions if you've been climbing for 20 or 30 years you're getting a bit older unless you started really really young and by this stage i think a good thing to address is that when we're getting older we're gonna at some stage have an age-related decline in power and in flexibility so these two things we know are affected by our age and those are two physical attributes which will affect our climbing this doesn't mean that everything we've discussed right now doesn't apply still because as we've all said we've kind of all felt these things at many stages in our climbing career but this one is something where the things you're doing outside of your climbing are going to be really important to maintain your proprioception your balance your strength and just general like your well-being for the rest of your climbing career so it's going to be even more important now in this 20 plus years of climbing that you're focusing on maintaining a healthy athletic sort of base for your climbing and that includes flexibility or mobility training and also your strength training general recommendation is always quite hard to give but i think something i mentioned earlier about just doing a push pull and hinge exercise it's like a pretty good way for people to start and then everything on top of that is probably going to be quite individual and quite based on your own assessments i don't think it needs to be complicated i think especially if you're doing more flexibility exercises strength training can improve your flexibility but you're just looking to build in exercises which you can do for a large range of motion so things i do a lot of like goblet squats or cossack squats that's going to work on your lower body flexibility doesn't take much more time to do and kind of hits two boxes in one and then when it comes to your flexibility this is it really depends on like your genetics and how much you're going to need it as well because i think we'll see this play out a lot in whether you respond well and then if you do not respond well play around with different methods don't just stick to yoga because there's so much more you can try