How often should I go bouldering (including a little core strength training)

Question

I recently picked up bouldering contrasting my distance running training quite nicely.

From my run training I learned that training about every other day seems to give really good results, but how about bouldering?

Let me sketch out my current bouldering training:

1. Do a little stretching and 1 or 2 easy boulders for warm up. I also ride my bike 4-8 km to the bouldering hall and count that as warm up as well.

2. Either do boulders of medium difficulty in order to improve my moves or work on the ones I can't finish yet. I do this until I notice that I loosing the strength required. This happens after 4-10 boulders.

3. Do easy boulders; until I'm really exhausted.

4. Do some core strength training (planks, situps, legups ...)

The goal of all this is in roughly this order:

1. Have fun (which requires avoiding serious injuries, since those aren't fun)

2. Improve my bouldering, ie. be able to climb more difficult boulders

3. Improve my strength.

4. I won't mind loosing some weight, but that is not the main goal of this activity.

So the question is: How often should I do training like this for optimum effect? Once a week? Every other day? Twice a day?

My actual training schedule is mostly defined by other things, but sometimes there is a lot of free time available and I want to be able to use that as well as possible.

Answer 1

Your bouldering training schedule should be dictated by your previous climbing years (that translates into how strong are your hands' tendons) and goals.

If you are a beginner I suggest to have one day of rest between hard bouldering session otherwise it's easy to go too hard on your finger (tendons are slow to strengthen).

After a couple of years (or if you haven't climbed too hard the day before) you could climb two consecutive days or boulder one day and campus the other.

If you want to progress quickly the only option is to climb a lot so you could aim at four climbing/training sessions per week. You can dedicate one day to hard bouldering problems, two to moderate-easy ones (to build endurance and consolidate technique) and the last to calisthenics.

I share you a link where you can find other short guidelines : http://www.rockandice.com/lates-news/magic-ratio

Answer 2

Without being an expert on bouldering, I'd guess your bouldering skills depend on a few things: technique, strength, mobility and flexibility.

Technique is something you develop by doing it often. Strength, mobility and flexibility is something you can develop by bouldering and also something you can train with exercises that target the muscles/tendons/joints used in bouldering.

On your question on how often you should do this, it is difficult to recommend anything without knowing your schedule but I'd say as often as you like and when you have the time for it.