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In Collaboration with Robin O'Leary and Alex Puccio from ROAP Coaching.
Warming up for a workout is the foundation to getting the most out of your training. While coaches often start a coach/athlete relationship with an assessment of the athletes ability, these benchmarks will only improve if the athlete is able to progress through their daily training. For coaches like Robin O'Leary and Alex Puccio of ROAP Coaching, they believe that any strong workout starts with a solid warm-up.
Working with COROS to elevate this message, Robin and Alex have prepared structured warm-ups for the beginner, intermediate, and advanced climber. These warm-ups are designed to push the athlete's body, but more importantly prepare them for the demands of their climbing session. To download these workouts and gain insights from Robin and Alex, continue reading below.
A Proper Warm-Up For Climbing
According to Robin and Alex, the first element for training that they focus on with new clients is the warm-up. As many climbers live busy lives outside of the gym, it's important to dedicate time to preparing the body and mind.
If we generalize here, many spend their days at desks and when it comes to their time to “workout”, they drive in their car (or public transport) to the venue and start. Their bodies and brains are shut down, not primed for any sort of physical exertion, so those sessions are going to be sub-par. As we age, the risk of injury increases too.
When Robin and Alex are coaching a client through the warm-up, they go through the steps of "releasing the fascia, warming-up the rotator cuff muscles and then focusing on strengthening the shoulder and concentrating on the fingers."
Lastly, when it comes to being a beginner or advanced climber, warm-ups are intended to prepare your body for movement which can be difficult.
If you are new to training, and perhaps new to climbing, we must be progressive with this warm-up, but even for those with a fair amount of climbing experience, the warm-up can still be taxing.
COROS Insights Through the Warm-Up
As climbers aim to track their training and progress, COROS offers products built for climbers in both the COROS APEX 2 PRO and COROS VERTIX 2. For more advanced heart rate tracking, the COROS Heart Rate Monitor is recommended for comfort and accuracy (wrist movements in climbing can affect wrist based heart rate). Once the products are tracking your activity, both climbers and coaches can gain insights into their session through heart rate, routes, grade, style, training load, along with other metrics.
A few key metrics that Robin and Alex look at through the data to support their athletes are:
Time
How long are our clients spending on the warm-up, on each exercise, on the transitions. How is their body responding to it? We know that during the warm-up (off the wall exercises), we don’t expect their heart rate (HR) to go so high, so if it does, we need to ask why.
Heart Rate
We can see when and where it spikes, so we can then delve into that data with a little more meaning. We also can see the impact it has on their session. Are they fatigued? If so, one of a few things could occur:
Firstly, they could say “I’m going to drop the intensity, but increase the volume”, perhaps causing for a longer and higher average heart rate. Good if it was a volume day, less good if it was a high intensity session.
They could increase their resting times between attempts at harder climbs. This would lead to a more obvious peak and trough graph.
Finally, they could just end their session early.
Either way, we have that valuable HR data.
Training Load
We expect their training load to go up and their bodies will adapt to it, but then have specific weeks we can dedicate to de-loading and recovery. As they get used to warm-ups, their response will be less dramatic too. Their peak and average HR will be lower, and this is a good thing. It serves the purpose of warming-up the body and brain to prepare them for the task they are about to perform.
Warm-Up Details
Robin and Alex have continued to build strong results for their athletes following their initial warm-up education.
If you are a climber, we’d love for you to start using these warm-ups and collecting that valuable data – see how your body responds to it and remember to “listen to your body” too. Over time, you will adapt and it will be the perfect tool to prepare you to climb harder!
Beginner Warm-Up: V0-3 (up to 5.10)
Intermediate Warm-Up: V4-7 (up to 5.12)
Advanced Warm-Up: V8+ (5.12+ and above)
Robin and Alex designed these warm-ups to prepare the entire body. They include "a movement pattern or myofascial release – to help increase range of motion, but also, more importantly, help reduce the temperature build-up of your muscles during exercise. It looks at rotator cuff exercises, isolating the scapular for more advanced control, the arms and upper body for locking-off and then progressively warming-up and building more robust fingers. We also look at contact strength and power development too, so it is a conclusive warm-up and each ability level have a warm-up unique to those grades."
COROS would like to thank Robin and Alex from ROAP Coaching for building these workouts. Be sure to download the warm-up today to your COROS account, and sync directly to your watch so you too can get the most out of each climbing session.