Have you ever noticed that when you’ve taken on new forms of training or new methods of training over the years, that you follow a similar pattern of performance? I certainly know I have, and it’s been a long and painful process to try and push myself out of the following bad pathway. My training method for a particular exercise used to take 4 steps:
1. Start with being utterly rubbish (very hard on the ego, but you push on)
2. Get quite good (reward the dented ego)
3. Get even better, but then suffer from ever decreasing returns
4. Get frustrated and obsesses with this certain manner of training and hit your head against the proverbial brick wall until you either give up or get injured.
The core can be trained harder than almost any other muscle group.
There is one (amongst others) fairly sound method of staying away from this pathway decreased performance potential, and I’ll call it “Riding the Wave.” The wave principal in training is used to ensure that there is a continuous improvement in bodily conditioning. As we all know, it’s amazing to get the initial gains, but we can stagnate after just a couple of months. Common sports science literature suggests that we change the training load after just 6 weeks of training effort, and importantly, supplement it with periods of regeneration training to promote super-compensation.
So, in essence:
1. Alter your training load (factor of intensity or volume) after approx 6 weeks
2. Don’t forget periods of regeneration training to allow your body to realise its gains. Most people love to forget this part!!
When you’ve done your 6 weeks of a new regime and you’ve passed through the lows of being totally rubbish and moved onto the highs of burning off your mates at said exercise (or your own PB) then reassess and ramp it up! Don’t go too mad for too long though; make sure you drop the load right down at regular intervals during the season, so that if you were to graph the “line of load” then it’d look like a slowly growing wave.
Crack training is no different from any other. Change it up, or lose out.
Tom Randall Climbing 
tom i have some questions about training as im wanting to train for trench warfare and dont overly know how to train for it as there is not much other climbing like it in the area. is there any way to contact you by email?