Increase your performance in dangerous situations, the smart way. Recently I shared how my early climbing experiences in Slovenia helped shape my ability to stay focused while climbing, and all that means in complex alpine environments. I call it Fuzzy Awareness*. But, as I’ve said before, this ability to think—and act—clearly and smartly in demanding and dangerous situations is critically important to us as mountain athletes. And it is virtually impossible to train in the way we know how to train our physical capacities. Or is that really the case? If you want to improve your capacity to climb or…
Author: Steve House
Mental strength, the ability to think—and act—clearly and smartly in demanding and dangerous situations, is the single most difficult capacity to improve as a mountain athlete. The building blocks of mental strength may contain concrete knowledge of weather, snowpack, and navigation. But most of what makes a mentally strong climber, skier, or runner is not readily understandable. As concentration, calmness, confidence, and clarity of judgment are the hallmarks of the greats, it’s worth a closer study. My Time in Slovenia It was a fortunate accident that I studied in Slovenia, then a state of Yugoslavia, in 1988 and 1989. There…
Recently I attended the annual Guide’s Festival in Courmayeur, Italy, which is home to the second-oldest guide office in the world (founded in 1850!). As part of the celebrations I was invited by the Guide’s Office to participate in a discussion about the future of alpinism with my Italian friend and alpinist Herve Barmasse. Renowned Italian sports journalist Luca Castaldini, of Sportweek, did an excellent job moderating. The conversation made me think, and so I’d like to share some of my thoughts with our readers here. What follows are a selection of Luca’s questions and edited (by me) versions of…
We recommend you visit the Uphill Athlete strength training landing page—Strength Training for the Mountain Athlete—for a full rundown of how to develop both general and specific strength for your chosen mountain sport. The Uphill Athlete KIS Strength Series -by Steve House, Uphill Athlete co-founder and Master Coach Endurance athletes and climbers do not tend to come from strength and conditioning backgrounds. They don’t hang out in globo-gyms and few know an Olympic bar from an Airdyne. However, as soon as you start reading a word about strength training, the terms and protocols come rapid-fire: reps, sets, 1RM, OHS, and…
Core strength plays a supportive, albeit critical, role in locomotive sports like skimo racing. That role is to provide a stable platform from which the arms and legs can perform their locomotive functions. While core exercises are basic and not necessarily sport specific, they can provide a needed base of support for sport-specific training. To develop core strength is often challenging because you first need to learn how to engage some very deep muscles that are primarily used to stabilize the spine, hips, and shoulders and not for locomotion. This makes them hard to access and notice. These guys aren’t…
In keeping with Steve’s recent article about wearing through your gear to become a better climber, runner, or skier, here is another tip that you may find useful: The magnitude of your commitment must be equal to the size of your goal. Let’s start by looking behind the curtain at what three very successful Uphill Athletes’ training looks like. Luke Nelson First up: Luke Nelson. Luke is a mountain runner and skimo racer par excellence. Most recently, he and Jared Campbell knocked over 3 hours off the FKT for all 19 of the 13,000 foot peaks in Utah’s Uinta Mountains,…
Work hard? Rest hard! If your idea of post-workout recovery is flopping onto the couch with a beer and chips or a quick dash through the shower as you race off to work, you might want to reconsider your approach. Chances are you take the improvement of your performance in your chosen sport pretty seriously and want to maximize the gains from your training. The Toll of Training Training requires many hundreds and even thousands of repetitive movements. Lack of recovery, rather than too much training, is often the cause of poor or no adaptation. If you are pushing your…
We are fortunate to live and train in a time when physiology testing is becoming more available and accessible. Either at home or through local labs offering testing services, athletes can better orient themselves and their training by knowing their biomarkers. In endurance training, understanding your metabolism is the key to increased performance, and the test is called the blood lactate test. While the Gas Exchange Test offered by many physiology labs, if administered correctly, can be held up as the gold standard for determining your metabolic response to exercise, a simpler and cheaper alternative exists. Many labs offer blood…
Ultimately, climbing in all forms combines fitness, skill, and judgment in varying ways dependent on the climb and conditions on that climb. Fitness alone can take you far on a route like the North Col on Everest, which requires few technical climbing skills. But fitness by itself is less impactful on a technical route that requires a high skill component. We spend a lot of time, ink, and pixels talking about improving fitness. But how does one best improve technical skill? Everyone involved at Uphill Athlete has spent most of their life dedicated to a technique-intensive sport, whether that be…
One of the most difficult things for an athlete using a training plan or self-coaching is to know when to say stop. If you’re weeks into your training plan, and you get started on your workout for the day, what are some signs that you might need to call it off and convert to recovery mode? Here are the three most common signs that you didn’t recover that we see in the athletes we coach. 1. Slow to Warm Up The comment in TrainingPeaks on a 1-hour run will be something like: "It took me 30 minutes to get warmed…