I’ve always tried to be an all round climber in terms of performance. But just because you spread yourself thinly across disciplines in performance doesn’t mean you should do the same in training. In this video about a lovely and hard project, I explore the results of an adventure in specialising to try and improve my skills as a generalist. It was a rough ride!

My course on climbing technique is out now on Altitude. As part of the launch week, I’m doing a live Q&A tomorrow night (August 5th). Please do join us!

Some climbers don't believe me when I say I don't get nervous before attempts on hard routes. Here I explain how I do it.

If you are interested in some more coaching content from me, my course on climbing movement technique on Magnus Midtbø’s platform Altitude is about to open: https://altitudeclimbing.com/davemacleod

Should you drink the green supplement drink AG1? Or is the obvious alternative actually far superior? In this episode, I discuss several papers linked below:

https://doi.org/10.1016/S2352-3026(23)00160-6

10.1016/S2214-109X(22)00367-9

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00421-019-04157-y

https://doi.org/10.3390/life13102007

10.1016/j.jsams.2019.12.027

https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminD-HealthProfessional/

10.1113/JP270654

PMC6413849

https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2022.806566

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tjnut.2022.10.016

Social media is geared up to distort the realities of training, detraining and breaking through plateaus. Sure, skills and milestones can be acheived quickly and it's important to see demonstrations of how effective a singular goal and plan to achieve it can be. However, some plateaus (not those caused by lack of training) are not generally broken in this way. I just posted up a new YouTube video exploring my own efforts to break a plateau, with a few very simple ideas that I try to keep in mind, which in my view are underrepresented on social. All told through the story of a winter of serial new routing in various lovely corners of the Scottish Highlands.

It has been a while since I’ve made a how to climb trad video. I think what the series really needed next was a collaboration with someone learning to lead. Mike Boyd had done a short lead on gritstone before, but is still very much in the early stages of his climbing. We met up at Polney Crag and had a great day climbing and the video was a good opportunity to highlight the key aspect that holds most new trad leaders back: solid and consistent movement technique.

It's been a long time since I bought some new holds for the board. It was time for some fresh circuits and I go through my process for setting and designing the layout of the board.

A few weeks ago I picked up a mild A2 pulley injury in my finger. As many of you know, I wrote a whole chapter in Make or Break about finger injuries, but I thought I would make an episode showing you how I work around it to keep training despite the finger injury. Obviously, copying exactly what I do here is not the objective - every injury is different. It's about the general principle of working around injuries and how you might go about that. I hope it comes across in the episode that finding workarounds allows you to stay in better shape and remove a lot of the psychological pain of getting injured. I’ll make another video further down the recovery process, and if you have questions, do leave a comment and I’ll try and address them.

A film I made over on the Fort William Mountain Festival channel about Caitlin Connor - an ice comp and dry tooling specialist. It was pretty tough to film this and not join in with the training! Caitlin received the Youth Award for Excellence in Mountain Culture this year. If you would like to nominate a young person making an important contribution in the mountains for this award, you can do so here.

The 'quality' of recovery from training will determine the size of your gains. But this is a tricky thing to pin down. In this video I explain what makes a good rest day activity and why rest quantity is always a moving target.

I thought it was about time I made some videos related to your questions about climbing/training. I asked my supporters on Patreon for their questions and picked a few related ones to tackle first:

What would I change or revise in my book 9 out of 10 climbers make the same mistakes?

How I organise and keep track of research?

How I deal with moderation and fuelling on high and low carb diets and the highs and lows of diet experiments?

Some controversial territory as expected. I’ve tried my best to tackle it head on in this episode. There were more questions of course, and I’ll put together some more episodes on them shortly. Thanks everyone for the support and happy new year.

Back when you started climbing, finding motivation wasn’t really a big deal for a lot of folk. Yet for some, it becomes a real issue later on. In this episode I explore this and offer a simple (not not always easy) solution.

Planning endurance training, like any other aspect of physical training demands that you consider basic physiology, individual characteristics, resources available and the demands of the task you are training for. With all this considered, precise prescriptions are not always possible. In the main, I try to err on the side of identifying key priorities and arranging things to make sure those are well covered. My routine when I was training for Rhapsody was one of the simplest plans I’ve ever followed and was also a time in my climbing when I made some of the most sustained progress (excluding ‘noob gains’ as a beginner). In this video I describe what I did and possible reasons why it worked so well.

In the spring, we have to get our leading head back on. Depending on how you choose your routes, mileage can either train or detrain your confidence. In this video, I take you through how I choose climbs that get me ready for bigger leads as the season progresses.

Many climbers are unaware just how much their ability to swap feet efficiently is holding them back. Poor technique tends to make climbers search for alternatives, which usually make climbs a lot harder. In this video I go through the handful of things you need to know to swap feet accurately and extremely consistently.

Failure on projects has been the most important training tool I’ve had. But as with any tool. It’s all about how you wield it.

I thought this for many years.

Doing this exercise really accelerated my confidence in judging whether my trad placements would be likely to hold a fall.

I made a follow along hang board workout, 30 minutes long and pitched for beginner/intermediate climbers (two handed hangs). In the rests in between the hangs I discuss various aspects of adjusting the hang board loading depending on your level and climbing goals. Enjoy the workout!

This is very similar to the basic workout I used when I started fingerboarding and went from 8b+ to 9a in a couple of years.

A guide to how to actually learn climbing technique, from hard practicalities to underlying principles.

Coaches and sport scientists are often trying to quantify aspects of sport and there’s good reasons for this. But climbing technique is hopelessly complex with endless variation in movement. How could we go about quantifying it, or even thinking about it in any kind of structured manner? With difficulty. In this video I introduce some simple ideas for the way I think about technique that helps me to learn it and monitor my learning.