Intro and climbing conditioning

I decided to start capturing some of my thoughts and observations about outdoor related activities such as hiking, snowshoeing, and climbing. The catalyst for this is that I have spent some time reflecting on having a more focused routine for climbing. In thinking about this I realized that it would be valuable to myself to reflect on these things more, and writing seems a very good way to gather my thoughts. I have been climbing for less than two years, with the first year being one marked by rapid progress and the last at somewhat a plateau. This has lead to a self limiting routine where I tend to mostly climb problems that I think I can finish and not push myself in a way that I was when I was new. One limiting factor I was starting to notice on some problems and routes was that even if I could figure out what to do I wasn't always able to actually perform some moves. This was a combination of grip strength as well as climbing endurance. While just climbing more probably would help I also know that a lot is known about climbing training. While there is a ton of good information online about specific things it is fairly confusing when it comes to developing an actual plan. t In light of that I ended up picking up "Conditioning for climbers" by Eric Horst. There is a lot of good information in there, as well as some general conditioning stuff that I am very familiar with already. But this isn't a book review, but instead my thoughts on a specific technique from the book. One of the training cycles that is mentioned is the 4-3-2-1 where you spend 4 weeks training endurance and general climbing technique, 3 weeks on power, 2 weeks for power endurance, and then the toughest week of all... rest. I used this framework to help structure my climbing. Before I would pick one of the many drills from the internet, or just project at random without any real big picture plan. This made picking drills or deciding what to do at the gym much easier. One big thing I got out of it right away was taking a step back from constantly bouldering hard and spending some time on toprope or doing repeats on easy boulder problems. I think this helped my hands recover more from all those hard bouldering sessions in a way that would not have happened otherwise. This last week has really helped me realize what difference following a training regiment has had. In general I am climbing harder for longer, with better technique throughout the climbing session. THis has allowed me to work harder boulder problems again, and learn new things. I am not sure how many cycles to do in a year. It seems that this is best reserved for times when I want to be at peak performance for a bit to overcome some barrier in my climbing. I doubt it will be useful to repeatedly perform this sort of training throughout the year.