The TrainingBeta Podcast: A Climbing Training Podcast

I recently asked my audience to tell me about their climbing training success stories so I could present them on the podcast, and I got some good ones! This story from Lea Cleary stood out to me and I think you're going to love it.

Lea is a 40-year-old woman from Boston who's been climbing for 15 years. She felt like she'd plateaued due to fear and performance anxiety. While she'd tried our Performance Route Training Program and ma...

Madeleine Crane is a Sport Psychologist from Austria who runs www.climbingpsychology.com. In this episode we discussed the mental and emotional struggles that many people encounter while projecting climbs. Hopefully this discussion will help you bring awareness to your own mental experience and give you some tools to deal with fear of failure, negative comparison to others, and knowing when to call it quits on a project.

Madeleine ...

Alex Bridgewater is a Sport Psychologist who works with climbers and other athletes to help them be the best person they can be. That work carries over into their sport to make them perform well and have a great time doing it. He uses mindfulness, acceptance, and commitment theory as part of his practice, and in this episode we dive into what that means.

Alex is also a climbing coach at ClimbStrong.com and has been for about 7 year...

Steve Bechtel is one of the OG big daddies of climbing training. He founded and runs climbstrong.com where he has 19 coaches helping climbers all over the world get better at their sport. He’s written countless books, a ton of online climbing training programs for climbstrong, he’s hosted training seminars around the US (that I had the pleasure of teaching at), and is an accomplished 5.14 climber himself.

He was my 7th guest on the...

Meghan Walker is a very good friend of mine who is also somewhat of an expert in the FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) world. I asked her to be on the show to educate you about how you can make changes to your spending and investing/saving habits in order to have financial freedom in a lot less time than you think it’s going to take.

In a recent episode, I talked about how my husband and I started working towards an earlie...

In this episode Coach Alex Stiger and I talk openly about what we learned in 2024 about ourselves and our climbing, for better or for worse. We each chose the 5 most poignant things we learned and discussed each in depth.

Alex’s List

1. She realized she’d been protecting herself from fear and discomfort for a long time – wants to break out of that
2. Managing stress load outside of climbing and how that affects her climbing
3. Neurodiv...

In this episode I do a full mindset coaching session with Nathaniel Lamont, a Canadian climber whose performance is being affected by his fear of falling above his bolt while lead climbing. This is such a common issue among climbers, so if you or someone you know struggles with this, please listen to this one!

We go through the reasons he’s afraid, we acknowledge and validate those reasons, and I help him figure out ways he can fee...

Francis Sanzaro is a 45-year-old climber out of Carbondale, Colorado who's been climbing for about 30 years. He got his PhD in the Philosophy of Religion and has been studying the practice of Zen for decades. In recent years, he started applying Zen more directly and intentionally to his climbing and found that his performance and his enjoyment of the sport increased dramatically, so he wrote a book about it: The Zen of Climbing. I...

Coach Matt Pincus discusses some drills he uses with his clients and himself to train the different energy systems in climbing: power endurance, strength, and endurance. 

More Details:

• Overview of the energy systems
• Differences between practice sessions and performance sessions
• Sample sessions
  • Power endurance session
  • Endurance Session
  • Strength/Power Session
• When you'd want to train each of these energy systems
• How m...

Ashley Hardy is a friend of mine who lives in Boulder and just climbed her first 5.13c, a stout climb called "Choose Life" in the Flatirons. The reason I asked her to be on the show is that I find her situation to be both relatable and inspirational. The relatable part is that she has a full-time job as a software engineer and that she climbs with her husband, and she really REALLY loves climbing. 

The inspirational part is that de...

Coach Matt Pincus discusses the fundamentals of using weight lifting as a training strategy for climbing. He prescribes weight training to almost all of the athletes he coaches, and he wanted to make it more approachable and understandable to our audience.

More Details:

• Why Strength Train?
• Why consistency is more important than improving your numbers
• How (and why) to make it supplemental to your climbing and not the main focus
• ...

Stacy Sims, MSC, PHD, is a well-known exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist who has done groundbreaking research and education for women in athletics. Dr. Sims has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers and several books and is a regularly featured speaker at professional and academic conferences, including those by USOC and USA Cycling.

Stacy currently holds a Senior Research Associate position with SPRINZ- AUT University...

Coach Matt Pincus discusses some very detailed rock climbing projecting tactics to make your process more efficient. He goes over why you'd use a top-down vs ground-up approach, why you might want to use both of them, and when each is appropriate. This is for you if you want to hear from a 5.14/V12 climber about how he gets projects done and how he advises his clients to get theirs done. You can sign up to work with Matt as your co...

Charlie Schreiber is a climbing coach at ParadigmClimbing.com who was recently on the show. After that episode was done recording, we decided we should do a coaching session with him as my coach! 

So we recorded it right then and there, which was a couple months ago. In the session, he asked me a lot of clarifying questions to figure out how to create a training program for me, which he did the day after this conversation (links be...

Zoe Sayetta is a youth and adult climbing coach in New York and she has her masters in sport psychology. She loves working with youth, especially on their mindset, and she has a private practice as a sport psychology coach for youth and adults. I asked her to be on the show so we could talk about the most common things she sees in her team and her clients and how she helps them all have a healthier, more productive mindset in climb...

Ravioli Biceps is one of the best Moonboard climbers in the world, so I was pretty excited to have him on the show. In 2021 he did all 280 (and counting) benchmarks on the 2016 Moonboard set, climbing up to V13. In total, he has sent 3500 problems on the 2016 board. Just take that in for a sec…

His Instagram feed is a beta encyclopedia–for Moonboard enthusiasts and fans alike–of his latest Moonboard ascents. He’s one of the people ...

If you are a person who is maybe a little too intimately familiar with the term "wobbler," then this one is for you... 😉 This is the audio version of an article I wrote where I compare two similar climbs I did--a 5.13b in 2019 that I fully wobbled on, and a 5.13b I sent a few weeks ago that I fully enjoyed climbing on until then end.

I describe how I've evolved (slowly but surely) from wobbling through constant self-flagellation a...