Tomily ma wrote:If a week or two off kills your performance you probably need a good rest anyways. The obsession with training is great for elite athletes, but regular people just get overtraining injuries. If you're that strapped for time, maybe you'd be better off in the long term by taking a climbing should be fun rather than a must meet training goals approach. I have a 3 year old and a 6 month old so I get the time thing. Just don't drive yourself crazy.
I strongly disagree with this (not the rest thing, rest is great, people need to rest more!), you get overtraining injuries from overtraining, not from training.... I severely broke my ankle in December, and have been exclusively working through strength and power training exercises (including bodyweight cross training) since January. Prior to that I was stuck in the mid-upper 5.12 sport climbing range and maxed out around V6 for bouldering due to weak fingers/lack of strength/lack of power, I could barely hang bodyweight on 25 mm edge and could not even touch the campus board even with the typical large normal campus rungs. Over the last 5-6 months, working with 6-8 week training periods with deload weeks between I have safely worked up to hanging 40 lbs on a 23-25 mm edge, 20 lbs on a 18 mm edge, and bodyweight on 14-16 mm edges (10s on 5 minutes off 5 reps per edge size), and have been able to do up/down ladders on the normal campus rungs. I have begun including limit interval workouts on our systems board and have comparable or better endurance on harder moves than I did before the injury (even with almost no real climbing in 6 months), and I can feel a huge difference in my form from developing all the upper body muscles from these training cycles. My fingers, elbows, and shoulders haven't felt this good in years, and prior to this ankle injury I had years of finger and shoulder overuse injuries, and some elbow issues.
You can accomplish a lot to build or maintain strength through even small amounts of focused training, likely a lot more efficiently than a hour at the gym. Most "average" climbers that get overtraining injuries when "training" is because they decide to jump into a hard training program while still trying to climb in the gym the same amount that they had been, and do not know how to program a decent routine with the required amount of rest.