TBP 012 :: Alli Rainey on Training, Cardio, and Body Weight

Project Description

About Alli Rainey

Alli Rainey is a long-time climber and route developer, having put up a ton of routes in Ten Sleep Wyoming and boulder problems in Cody, Wyoming. She’s redpointed several 14a’s in Ten Sleep and done more than 90 5.13s up to 5.13d all over the world. She got into training for climbing a while back when she realized that she wasn’t the greatest at steep powerful climbing (not much of that in Ten Sleep) and needed to train to improve.

Since then, she’s studied the art and science of training for climbing (rather than climbing to train for climbing) for herself and her clients, and she’s successfully expanded her climbing horizons to steeper stuff. I know – I’ve seen her at the Motherlode in the Red 😉

What We Talked About

The most important things climbers should do to get stronger

How to train your personal weaknesses

Diet and body weight’s roles in sending ha rd

How she’s sent hard routes after only training on her home wall

A lot more

Related Links

Alli’s site at www.allirainey.com

Alli on Facebook: www.facebook.com/allirainey2

Alli working the 14a at Ten Sleep, Galactic Emperor (VIDEO)

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Music

Intro and outro song: Yesterday by Build Buildings

Transcript

Neely Quinn: Welcome to the TrainingBeta podcast, where I talk to trainers and climbers about how we can get a little better at our favorite sport. I’m your host, Neely Quinn, and today we’re on episode 12 with Alli Rainey, who is a climbing trainer and a fantastic climber herself.

I don’t know if you’ve ever climbed with her in the Red or Wyoming. She’s done a lot of development up in Ten Sleep and other places. She’s climbed 5.14; done a lot of 5.13s. I used to do competitions with her in Wyoming, of all places, a long time ago. All I knew about her is she was this cool chick with an awesome haircut and really big muscles, so that hasn’t changed much.

She actually was talking to me from Scotland for this podcast, where she’s climbing, finding nice little climbing gems over there. I had no idea there was climbing.

Before we get into the interview, some people have been expressing concern and wanting updates on my shoulder. So many people have torn labrums in their shoulders it seems like it happens to one out of every three of us as climbers. It’s been five months. I’m still not climbing but yesterday I got to do my first bicep curls and shoulder presses without too much pain, which was the greatest thing of all. Tomorrow I find out if I’m getting surgery but my unsolicited advice to you guys is: do your shoulder exercises as often as you can. I think if I had been doing them all this time I would probably be fine. Anyway, that’s my unsolicited advice.

Also, before we get into this interview I wanted to tell you about our programs, our training programs, which make this podcast possible. If you buy our programs it allows us to have more freedom away from our other jobs to do all of this, to get this training information out to you guys.

We have our power endurance program by Kris Peters, our endurance program by Kris Hampton, our nutrition program by Acacia Young, and of course, Steve Bechtel’s strength program, or his strength book. We are also, as I’ve said a couple times, I know it’s been a long time coming, but we have a bouldering strength and power program that’s going to be a subscription-type thing coming out very soon, as soon as we can. Check those out at www.trainingbeta.com on the ‘Training Programs’ tab. We would love that.

What else? I think that’s it. We’re just going to jump right into this interview with Alli Rainey. You can always find Alli Rainey at www.allirainey.com. Enjoy the interview.

Neely Quinn: Why don’t you tell anybody who doesn’t know who you are a little bit about you and where we’re talking from, or where you’re talking from?

Alli Rainey: Sure. I’m Alli Rainey. I’ve been climbing forever, it seems like. Since the dark ages of 1992. I am talking from Scotland where I’m currently on a two-month climbing trip, starting in Scotland and then going to Spain to climb. In Scotland I’m just climbing the great adventure of the unfamiliar, going wherever my Scottish friends go climbing. In Spain we’re heading to climb in Rodellar.

I’m also a writer, I’m a climbing coach and personal trainer, and most recently, a yoga instructor. I have a real passion for learning about climbing training and trying to help other people train better and train smarter.

Neely Quinn: Yeah, I feel like you’re one of the only female trainers out there who’s really – I mean, there are a few others but you’re definitely one of the most well-known.

Alli Rainey: Thanks. That’s flattering. I don’t really know why that would be. I think that there’s still, and I have no numbers to back this up, it’s just a feeling, but probably, like many sports, there’s probably still more men that climb than women so it would proportionally be more men training people than women. I could be totally off on that.

My whole thing with the idea of climbing training is, and I think that any athletic training is, that the more I’ve gotten into learning about it and the more I’ve researched, I still consider myself a beginner. This might sound really strange but often times I find the more deeply you delve into something, the more you realize how much conflicting information there is on the subject and how hard it is to tease out what does and doesn’t work and how fast the information changes and how hard it is to stay on top of it.

I feel like I’m constantly in motion with my training knowledge and struggling to keep up with what the latest training information says, both in climbing and more just in general athletic training, because I was pretty surprised when I started to delve into learning about training more, how – I mean, there’s a big volume of training out there but it’s not as big as you might think it is. There’s a lot of things that are still fairly unknown or unproven and it’s a lot to wade through and try to figure out what does and doesn’t make sense. To try and change your ideas as different information comes out as well.

Neely Quinn: You mean there’s a lot of information on climbing training or just athletic training in general.

Alli Rainey: Athletic training in general but it’s less precise or proven as I once would have expected it to be. I think one of the reasons for that, and my brain is just a whirlwind of training stuff so I can’t cite everything off hand where I learned it, but I recall reading, or actually I heard, an interview with somebody about why that was. They made a good point, and this makes sense to me, that investing money in athletic training research doesn’t have as much money put into it because there’s less profit to be made off of it and because when you’re looking at investing money in trying to cure terrible diseases or things like that, people are more likely to want to put money into that.

Selfishly, as a climber you think, ‘Oh, well I’d like to learn more about athletic training,’ but in the big picture, it makes sense that more money in the scientific community is getting invested in trying to find cures for terrible diseases and that kind of thing. That was one explanation that I either read or heard somebody talking about as to why there isn’t as much information on athletic training as you might think there would be, although there is quite a lot out there and it’s very accessible compared to how it used to be, just because of the internet and PubMed, the database where you can go look through all the scientific studies. You can find something to support almost anything there.

I do do a lot of wading through stuff there and trying to read training books and there’s a lot of stuff out there that I don’t consider as good training resources. I’m trying to not just believe everything I read but always backing up for the research. It’s a lot of stuff to process and get through.

I’m sure that even what I think and say right now, maybe 20 years from now I’ll have revised my opinion. I’ve certainly changed what I think of as good training from the time that I started looking more deeply into training. The more I’ve learned and applied and tried to figure out what makes sense, the more it changes. It’s always in flux and it’s always fluid, you know? It’s just fascinating.

I never get tired of reading about new ideas, starting with the oh-so-scientific experiment of myself [laughs] and branching out.

Neely Quinn: Let’s talk about that. Are you/did you start doing this because you wanted to get stronger and then did you teach yourself? Or did you end up going to school for this?

Alli Rainey: For my training, actually, I thought I trained like most climbers think they train. I trained to a certain extent but I really fell into the category of thinking climbing is the best training for climbing for, oh, a good 15 years of climbing. Climbing is not bad training for climbing, and climbing is definitely an imperative part of training for climbing. It would be like just saying, “Let’s go get better at football by just training and never playing football.” It would be ridiculous. But, I didn’t really understand that there were things I could do to train for climbing beyond climbing that would help me in particular.

What happened with me is I was very resistant to any training outside of climbing. I thought bouldering was training for power but it never really got me stronger. Then I got hurt in 2007, before I went on a trip to Europe. About six weeks before I was going on a trip to Europe I fell in a bouldering competition and twisted my ankle on the side of mat really badly. I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t put a climbing shoe on, and Kevin, my husband at that point, he said, “Now is a perfect time for you to start doing pull-ups,” and I said, “I hate doing pull-ups.” He said, “Exactly.”

So, Kevin is really good at pull-ups and this is not how I recommend anybody else start training, by the way, but this is my story. I started doing pull-ups. He told me to do 100 because he thought that was a good, easy number. By probably around 60 I was down to sets of one. I’m really stubborn and I’m lucky I didn’t get tendonitis. I carried on and did 100 pull-ups. I kind of finished them in tears, realized I really sucked at pulling, which he had been telling me all along, which is actually an integral part of most rock climbing but I had just never sort of faced that and had never had anybody tell me that there was a means to – like, really sat down and tell me a way to train that besides just climbing and bouldering and all of that.

The pull-up thing was a real eye opener of how much I really did suck at pulling. I really didn’t know anything about training and Kevin had done a lot of weight training and stuff like that in high school for other sports he was involved in. I kind of just did pull-ups for six weeks. I tried to build up what I could do and by the time I went to Europe, without having climbed at all, I hadn’t really lost any fitness and I actually could feel that I felt stronger. That kind of made me start thinking, ‘Maybe there is something to this training outside of climbing. Maybe I should look into this a little bit more. Maybe there’s something to be done beyond just climbing for training for climbing.’

Long story short, I started out with doing just body weight stuff and then started doing more research about athletic training and I know, even by 2010, I still hadn’t really delved so much into the training the way that I do it now, so it took me a while. It was a gradual evolution of me learning and assimilating the information that was out there and reading how other athletes train in other sports.

Then, at some point, somebody asked me if I would try coaching them over the internet for climbing and I said, “Oh sure. I’ll give it a shot. Let’s see if that works,” and it grew into me having a small coaching business. I keep it really small because I really like to give individual attention.

One of the things I realized after a little while – my first response was, ‘Wow. This is so great. Everybody should do this. Everyone should train just like how I’m training because it’s working for me and this is so easy.’ I mean, it’s not easy to train but it was easy to see results if I started training my real weaknesses. I thought, ‘Everybody should do this. This is great. It’s so easy. What a great way to improve at rock climbing,’ until I realized that every body doesn’t work exactly the same. In fact, all our bodies work quite differently.

My weaknesses might be somebody else’s strength. Kevin being the perfect example of that because we’re complete opposites in climbing. What he’s best at, I’m worst at, and vice versa. For him to take on my climbing training program would just be a waste of time. It probably wouldn’t help him much, if any, and me training how he trains would be a waste of time for me because I’m really genetically gifted and I’ve also trained to my strength a ridiculous amount over the years. To train that more would be a waste of time for me and what I really needed to do was work on the areas that I hadn’t trained that needed big growth in my world.

That’s one of the big things with training that I had to realize is that prescribing one big training program, especially the more time someone has under their belt in training, the same training program will not work the same for every person. The other amazing thing to me, through coaching, that I’ve observed is that you can take in two people who look like they have the same strengths and weaknesses and the same room for growth and put them on the same program and they can work just as hard. They will not necessarily see the same results. That’s the genetic potential thing coming through, where there’s no guarantee with training that you’re going to get the same results, even if you feel like you’ve put together the idea program for a particular person, given their strengths and weaknesses. Then, you have to really try and work to find a way to make that person see gains. It’s quite a challenge.

I feel like, kind of, the less you’ve trained and the less you’ve climbed, the easier it is to get better, which probably everybody knows. The more you’ve trained and the more you’ve trained correctly for your body, the less gains you stand to make. It sort of sucks but it’s the reality of training.

Neely Quinn: What kinds of gains have you made with your training?

Alli Rainey: Well, I was awful at big moves and steep, powerful climbing. I had really specialized into super technical, fingery, vertical, grabbing crap intermediates, balancey, not upper body style of climbing.

Neely Quinn: Like Ten Sleep.

Alli Rainey: Yeah, exactly. I had specialized to that to a ridiculous amount. The reason was, I loved it. I mean, it was my favorite style of climbing from the start. I try to not be too hard on myself but I’m like, ‘Stupid! Stupid!’ You know? I did love it. I really loved it and that was the kind of climbing I really learned to climb on so it was really what appealed to me to start with.

But, because I climbed on that so long and climbed in kind of a void and never climbed any steep stuff, I just sucked at steep stuff. I just could not climb anything steep and powerful. I had no upper body, I didn’t have the body tension, I didn’t have the lower back strength, I couldn’t do dynos, all sorts of just glaring gaps in my climbing. It was really hard to start to tackle those weaknesses but because the reality is you make the most gains out of the biggest areas of weakness, once I got over the initial hump and sort of the beatdown of realizing how much – I didn’t have any technique, either, so I didn’t have the technical background in how to move my body over steep terrain – it got really fun after a while.

It’s been like learning to climb all over again. Once I got over the hump of it, feeling just awkward and crappy to climb the steep stuff, I discovered that I really love it. Now, it’s my favorite kind of climbing and I feel like I still have so much room to grow and I learned so much.

I’ve gone from being someone who could pretty much only climb on vertical, technical stuff, you know, at any sort of level of proficiency. I’m not the world’s best climber at all but I couldn’t climb anywhere close to the same level on steep stuff. It wasn’t very fun for me because I just felt like I didn’t know what I was doing and I wasn’t very strong. I couldn’t do the moves and I felt like a kid in a candy shop, where I’d go out and watch all these people climb all these amazingly fun looking climbs and I’d be looking around for the one vertical, technical thing on the obscure area off to the side. I would be knowing full well, ‘Oh, if I could only be strong enough to climb those routes it would be so fun. I would love to do that, I just can’t.’ You know?

As I’ve trained more and more, I have grown to just absolutely love dynamic, steep climbing. Anything that has jumpy moves on it. Yesterday, we were out at this sport crag and they were talking about this route that had this jump and then you have to campus. I’m like, ‘I want to do it!’ That’s so different. I still have this weird echo in my brain that’s like, ‘That’s so weird that I want to do that.’ I had written myself off as ever wanting to climb things like that because I didn’t think I could. I had pretty much resigned myself to: I’m not a powerful climber, I have no power, I’ll never have any power, these kind of routes are impossible for me so that’s never going to be a part of my climbing world.

The big gain that I’ve seen in my climbing is I’ve pretty much done a 180. Now, because the steep stuff is accessible to me, because I can get on big, huge, 120-foot long 5.13s or whatever, that, to me, has become my favorite style of climbing. I feel like I still have so much room to grow and it’s exciting and I’m learning new techniques and I just find it to be – I feel like I’ve learned to climb all over again and I’m still in that learning curve and it’s renewed my excitement for climbing. I could see myself maybe not being as excited about climbing in general if I hadn’t had that sort of push, so I’m so thankful for that injury. I really don’t know what else would have pushed me over into looking into training so much if that hadn’t happened.

Neely Quinn: So it wasn’t necessarily for you that you were like, ‘I want to be – I’m a 5.13 climber on these slabs and really vertical things and now I want to be a 5.14 climber.’ It was like you were, and I don’t actually know how hard you’ve climbed, but it was more like, ‘I want to be able to do these things, this kind of climbing,’ which was a totally different kind of climbing.

Alli Rainey: Yes.

Neely Quinn: But even within that, I’m assuming you’ve continued to train. Have you seen your training increase your ability even on the steeper stuff then?

Alli Rainey: Oh yeah. Well, to put it into perspective, I’ve climbed supposedly .14a in Ten Sleep Canyon and when I started climbing on the steep stuff I literally could not climb 5.12- on really steep cave-type climbing. It was a shock, because I’d just avoided it and I went out and was like, ‘Wow. Can’t we laugh about it now?’ Kevin put me on some route in the Glory Hole in the New that was .12a or .b and I not only – I’m sure when I was younger I got on a few climbs like that, but I avoided it. I never tried to get better at it. When I climbed in Rifle I climbed not the steep stuff. I’m just trying to remember.

I didn’t ever develop the technique for that stuff so when I got on this route after 10 years of climbing in Ten Sleep and Shelf Road and that style of stuff, I was like, ‘What do you do?’ He was like, ‘What do you mean what do you do?’ It was like I not only didn’t have the strength, but I also had no – it didn’t compute in my brain because I hadn’t been on an angle with three-dimensional climbing. I don’t know if I’d ever been on anything that steep but it had either been so long or I hadn’t been on something that steep before that I had no software for the movement in my body, either. It was just this confusing upside down world of, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m not strong enough.’

It was just so crazy and it was kind of like, ‘Well, do you want to try?’ You’re kind of jumping into the deep end because you don’t know if you’re going to get strong enough to be able to enjoy it when you make that leap. I also didn’t know what my potential was. I guess I didn’t know as much about potential at that point either, about training potential, so I didn’t have that fear of not making gains in that way, but I think I had already written myself off as ever being powerful.

Then, the pull-up experiment showed me that I could make some strength gains but it wasn’t like a conscious decision to get better at steep climbing until we started going to the Red. That was where the kid in the candy store feeling started really happening, where I was like, ‘Wow. I so want to try one of those routes in the Madness Cave and I’m so not there. What do I do to be able to do one of those routes? That looks like the most fun stuff here and I feel totally – there’s no way that’s ever going to happen and how do I get from point A to point B, where I feel like I can go up something that steep and be comfortable?’

I also have a fear of heights, which may sound so stupid. I’ve written about it before but I really think that kept me from climbing the steep stuff, which makes no sense because it’s way safer, logically, but fear of heights is an emotional thing. It’s not logical at all. When you fall off on steep stuff you’re hanging out in space and you feel way more exposed and it’s really scary when you’re afraid of heights. I think that kept me away from getting into steep climbing to start with because I felt a lot more secure when I fell and had the wall in front of me on vertical stuff which, again, I know logically makes no sense.

When I look back I did have an incident I’ve written about where I was a beginner climber, where I fell off a steep route in the Gunks and I was hanging in midair and I just started screaming in terror because I just couldn’t handle it. I mean the whole thing, looking back, is so ridiculous and I think it’s funny. I mean, I was embarrassed at the time but now I just think it’s funny. [laughs] It must have been so funny to watch this little girl hanging in the air, screaming. Totally safe, right? Just like, ‘Lower me down! I’m going to die!’

Somehow, I don’t know – I realized I was getting better at the steep stuff and then it became like, ‘Let’s see how hard I can climb on this stuff,’ and that’s become kind of more of the goal. I’m not a grade chaser anymore, per se, so I don’t really care what number I climb on the steep stuff but what I really enjoyed was being able to get on the routes that I dreamed of getting on.

It’s always such a milestone for me when I get on a route that I know I watched somebody on a year ago or two years ago and at that point was thinking, ‘Oh, I’ll never be able to climb on that route.’ You know? To be able to go and get to the anchors and then maybe eventually do the route is – that to me is so inspiring, personally, to me. It inspires me to continue training. It inspires me to continue trying, continue learning new techniques, and every step up I take in the steep climbing requires a new rewiring of technique.

Every time you get stronger in your muscles from training – because I do a lot of weight training now – the cool thing with that, and I didn’t understand this at first, too, so Kevin’s been a really good guide for a lot of this stuff because of his experience with weight training for the other sports he’s involved in. He really understands that aspect of stuff so I don’t have a coach. Coaching yourself is really hard so I always kind of make Kevin my coach, to help me do the stuff that I help my clients through.

One of the big things is that when you make raw strength gains, even if they’re targeted towards your climbing weaknesses – so my strength training program is always targeted towards things I notice that I’m struggling with on the rock, like I’m weak in this angle or this position or with this muscle movement, or whatever – it’s very raw when you’re training in strength training. It’s very efficient because you can work it in a really targeted way but then when you take it out on real rock, your brain doesn’t automatically adjust. The neuromuscular connection isn’t automatically there for you to know how to use that strength. Your brain is wired to work like the old, weak brain. Your body is wired with that technical messaging and that map, that neural map, is that this is how I do this kind of move and I cannot do it this way.

For me, it’s just this cool thing where I make the strength gains – I know I’m stronger because I can see the numbers in the weight room – and then I go out and my brain still doesn’t think that I’m strong enough. I have to manually override so I have to take everything back into conscious processing that’s unconscious once you’ve wired it in because we all get really automatic. That’s something that I really noticed on steep climbing. Everything is way slower because I don’t have the maps that I have for the more vertical, technical climbing. It comes back into the realm of conscious processing.

Any time you unlearn an old technique and try to relearn a new technique, it’s the same process. It’s actually even harder to unlearn an old technique because you already have an engrained map, but if you don’t have a map for doing the move you’re just up there and your brain goes, ‘I can’t do this move that way. I’m not strong enough.’ You have to manually override it and try to rewrite that movement for your body.

Neely Quinn: That’s what you mean by that, is you just do the move and that’s how you rewrite it?

Alli Rainey: Until you rewrite it, yeah, and that’s a really hard thing to do because your brain is like, ‘No! No, I can’t do it. No, I can’t do it.’ This happens to me all the time but the more I’ve done it, the faster the process is. That’s one thing I’ve really noticed this last, I’d say in this last year. Kevin’s even noticed it, too. It’s sort of like I can take the new beta and the brain – it still stops me but not as much as it used to because I’m more used to working with the strength gains, I guess. That was something I had to learn because I started coming out, ‘I’m stronger. Why can’t I do this move immediately? Right away?’ It’s like: no, you have to rewrite that whole connection. For your brain, it’s like you get a whole new body every year or every time you make a training gain. You have this new body but you need to rewrite the program for the new body because the brain doesn’t automatically just get it, you know? It doesn’t know that it has that newfound strength to use. That’s why climbing is a real integral part of training.

You can’t just train all the time. You have to have that time on the rock where you learn how to integrate any raw strength gains you made through weight training into climbing. It’s like a balance. You have to have both. At least I have to have both because, for me, the weight training that I’ve done has done way more change in my ability to do moves than anything else I’ve ever done for climbing training but that’s not to say that that’s going to work for everybody because it depends on your strengths and weaknesses, like I was saying.

Neely Quinn: So let’s get into some of those details. Sorry, I’m having some feedback so I’m listening to myself talk.

Alli Rainey: No worries.

Neely Quinn: So, how do you train? Like, what do you do in the weight room and otherwise in order to get stronger on steep terrain?

Alli Rainey: Okay, for me, because I was so weak in my big muscles, we’ll call them, rather than – I don’t get pumped in my forearms and my fingers are really strong. Like, this is all comparative within my body. My fingers are not the strongest fingers in the world but within me, my fingers are my strongest thing and not getting pumped in my forearms is one of my biggest advantages in climbing. I’m very endurancy. I can hang on forever, as long as the moves aren’t big, and I’m quite comfortable on small holds. That kind of thing.

For me, I really needed to get better and get stronger in my big muscle groups. My weight training started out being pretty basic, like I said, with pull-ups and bodyweight stuff. I was pretty weak. Now it’s sort of evolved into, when I do weight training in the winter, I do a segment and I usually do a bigger one, then I’ll usually try to fit in one or two cycles of weight training during the climbing year. I sort of do that by feel, so this is why when I’ve had people ask, “What’s your training program? I want to follow it,” I’m like, “You can’t. It’s not appropriate for you.” That’s one thing. Nobody’s training program is appropriate for anybody else, necessarily, right down to the specifics. Especially not somebody like me who’s been climbing for a really long time and has really specific weaknesses that I’m training. It’d just be the wrong program for a lot of people because of the way my body works and because of how pronounced my weaknesses are.

Anyway, for me, I’ll make up a weight training program that’s very strength-based. I’m not trying to get huge muscle mass, I’m trying to develop strength and better recruitment with my muscles, like neuromuscular recruitments or recruiting more muscle fibers for the movement in question, and just trying to build strength versus muscle mass. Obviously, sometimes you’re going to get a little more mass gain with some strength gain but we’re talking about the statistic that I, again, pulled from my head but it’s that you can make a 10% muscle gain and see a 30% gain in strength, so obviously the weight gain from the muscle is overwritten by the amount of strength you gain relevant for your sport, and you actually feel lighter and stronger and quite often look smaller because you’ve optimized your strength-to-weight ratio for your sport. I’ve experienced that tremendously from my weight training and I’m actually a nerd and I measured my biceps and stuff and they really haven’t gotten any bigger, which is crazy, but I’ve always looked like I had a lot of muscle but I always would laugh and I still kind of laugh because I’m like, ‘I look like I’m just for show,’ you know? [laughs] It just looks nice.

Neely Quinn: They’re vanity muscles.

Alli Rainey: [laughs] I’m not really that strong. I don’t know why my physique is this way. It just looks that way but I haven’t gotten massively huge from when I started weight training and that’s because of the way I train. I don’t/I’m not training to body build, I’m training in a way that athletic training books say to train for strength and I’d say it’s worked quite well for me and the people that I coach who need to get strength gains, too.

I’ll do a strength cycle and my big one will maybe be two or three or four months in the winter, depending on how much time I have and how much I can stand being away from climbing because what I found is, when I do the strength training, what works best for me is to put all my energy into the strength training and to really focus on that and the climbing comes second. That is so hard to do. I overtrain a lot with my unwillingness to do that [laughs] because I love climbing like everyone else and to decide consciously to take time away from climbing to work on building strength is a very hard decision to make.

I still climb while I’m strength training but, like this last winter, it was the first winter that I successfully did that without overtraining. I’ve had a lot of overtraining bouts because I’m very zealous and I can push myself very hard in the moment and that’s a very bad quality to have because it leads to overtraining. I quite prefer the people who want to rest more as far as clients because it’s a better way. To not have the feedback in the moment that you’re overdoing it is a bad – you might think that it sounds good but it’s a bad quality in the end because it really does lead to overtraining and overuse injuries. I’m a champion at that.

I’ve learned, for me, doing a really hard/putting the focus on strength and letting my body have the time to recover from that yields the biggest gains, for me.

Neely Quinn: Can you take us through a week of your strength training? I know that this doesn’t apply to everybody. I just want a look.

Alli Rainey: Sure. In the winter/my training program this last winter was, I had one day that was my most recovered day of the week or my most recovered day of the cycle, let’s say. On that day I would warm-up and then I would do, I think I had maybe – I can’t remember. I don’t have my training stuff with me here, otherwise I could really be a nerd and look it up, but I think I had 8-10 exercises I would do that were targeted strength lifts.

Usually I would do a warm-up set and then two sets of low reps, which is 2-6 reps, depending on the week. I’m always experimenting with this. I already have a slightly different program that I’m going to try this winter. I would have lifts and usually you work from big to small, big muscle groups to small muscle groups, and then from areas of weakness to areas of strength, which works quite well for me because my fingers are my strength and they’re also a small muscle group so I always do them last. If your fingers are your weakness, you might not train it that way or you might train them on a separate day, but that works out quite well for me.

I would work – I do deadlifts. I think they’re an incredible core exercise. They made a huge difference in my climbing, in my ability to maintain body tension on steep rock. If I was going to do just one lift for the rest of my life that would be the lift because it’s also a very functional lift that’s applicable to lots of real life motions. Lifting any heavy object, moving, twisting, all sorts of things that you do in real life, you’re moving and twisting with carrying heavy objects and stuff. Having the structural support from deadlifting is huge for that and on steep terrain, to just maintain body tension, it’s incredible. It changed me a lot.

I had always worked my abs because I thought that was my core and that was one thing that I had always done, but I didn’t realize that the whole backside of my body was neglected, hence my inability, really, to maintain body tension on steep rock. Deadlifts are a huge part of me getting better at steep climbing, I feel like.

Then I do a variety of pulling exercises. Some basic pull-ups or pulldowns, wide grip, I do a rowing motion, I do one with my hand up – it’s hard to describe but sort of pulling out and back, which is a motion that I’ve realized I was weak in – some tricep pressing stuff because I’m quite – and this has come out this year, too – I’m quite weak when I have to press down below my waist, especially with a straight arm, kind of like a lever position. That’s coming out on the harder steep climbs I’m getting on now.

I kind of view, just as an aside, that kind of thing/the specific exercises that I developed, Kevin and I will take video and watch photos or videos of me, watching every move that I fall on or that I think is hard, and you can really figure out, if you want to figure out, what movement is causing you problems in climbing. That’s a great way to do it because if you watch every move that feels hard or every move that you fall on, they all involve a very similar movement or same muscle group. Kevin will help me distill out a motion that I can work in the weight room.

We have a Bowflex and all the free weights and everything at home, so we really have a lot of materials to play with to find that motion. I’ll have some exercises that are specific to climbing motions that I’ve found that I have a really hard time with during the climbing season. Those will be in that program.

I’ll go through all of those lifts. I might have some opposing muscles on that day, you know, some bench press or some military press, stuff like that. I might do those on a different day, too, just depending on how much time I have and how I feel, and then that will be my workout for that day. I made that a priority for this winter, this past winter training season, to have no conflicts with climbing. To just go in and work on strengths when I was completely recovered and fresh, because I felt like strength is still what holds me back on everything that I climb. It’s not the pump, it’s not my fingers, it’s that I get handcuffed and can’t pull the next move. I can’t pull through it and Kevin is always my check-in. ‘Am I seeing this correctly or am I wrong?’ You know?

I’ve probably asked him, “What does it look like to you?” I don’t know, like, 500,000 times [laughs] in the time that we’ve been together. “What does it look like to you that I’m doing wrong?” and he’s like, ‘It just looks like you’re not strong enough.’ Oh, weird. Great. [laughs] There’s something new and different.

I did that workout and that’s actually quite – if you do that recovered, you can dig real deep in that. Then, I would let my muscles fully recover because it can take muscles a really long time to recover from a deep strength workout. A lot longer than a lot of people realize. I think you can read anywhere from 7-10 days to recover from a workout like that but it doesn’t mean that you can’t train again in that time, necessarily, but you can definitely start accumulating fatigue and that’s why I encourage all of my clients and myself to take a light week and sometimes even a lighter two weeks ever so often to dissipate some of that build-up of fatigue. Obviously, we’re not all going to train once and then rest for 10 days. We’d go crazy and probably lose fitness as well, but it can take quite a while to recover from a big workout like that. I think that’s been a downfall for me in a lot of my training, just zealous overtraining and thinking I could do more.

This last winter I really tried to let that fatigue dissipate a lot before I would do my next session. I would say I would take two or three or four days off, just depending on how I felt. Because of my lifestyle, I work from home. All my writing and everything I do is from home, except for when I’m traveling or doing events, and I teach yoga classes so it’s quite a fluid lifestyle. I can really plan my training just for whenever it fits. I can be like, ‘I’ll just wait until I’m recovered,’ and that’s hard because I don’t like sitting on my butt, and I’m a volume trainer by nature which means I like to do huge amounts of training. That’s not what’s best for me because strength training doesn’t involve a huge amount of training. It involves a really intense short amount of training so sitting around on my butt is really hard for me. The yoga helps with some of that because I can move around, at least, and not feel like I’m draining myself.

Then my next workout would be a really high intensity, power endurance workout, trying to push my pace because I have a tendency to move really slow. I have a gym at my house so trying to make problems that really targeted my weaknesses, not letting myself rest, but trying to move with really solid technique, kind of on a 4×4 style or theme but a little bit harder and a little bit more intense than that. Instead of going to the point where I can’t hang on anymore, going to the point where I’m starting to really lose my snap and my power and starting to feel sloppy, and then I would just stop there. I find that that helps with recovery, too, and helps me keep from training poor climbing technique and I don’t really think that I benefit a lot from just tearing my skin apart and just climbing a huge volume of climbing, even though I really enjoy doing that. [laughs]

This has all been breaking my habits too, right? Because the stuff I like to do is to go climb 20 pitches. That’s fun for me but it wasn’t really helping me get better because I’m good at that. What I’m not good at is that high intensity effort, you know? Pushing my pace, not shaking out on every hold, doing a lot of dynamic movements when I’m tired or trying to do a lot of pitches, so for each of my sort of 4×4 power endurance-style of training problems, I try to make them have a theme of something that I’m uncomfortable with, you know? Climbing into and out of movement that I’m uncomfortable with.

Then, some days or some weeks I might only have two days of training. It just totally depends on my recovery and training is as much an art as a science, and bodies are really unpredictable. One week you might feel fantastic. I watch this pattern in my clients, too, so actually coaching is really helpful in seeing the patterns in other people. But, you have some weeks where you just feel amazing or maybe you’ll have two or three weeks where you’re recovering and you feel amazing, and then blah. You feel like crap. That’s when you need to rest. You have to just be ready and understanding that bodies work in cycles and even the best training plan, you’re just going to have some times where it’s not going to work out for you and you have to take that back up and take that rest.

If I had another day or two of training in the week last winter, I would do some campusing one day to work on power and dynamic movement and timing. I really like campusing so it’s kind of a treat. I don’t know, I just think it’s fun. Then, I would do some lighter movement training or try to get a day outside on real rock if I could, just trying to keep that alive but not really pushing for sending routes but more just for movement. Tactical, easier, more like walking, recovery climbing.

That’s a really long answer to that question. [laughs]

Neely Quinn: No, that was great. So you just totally vary the amount of rest in between your workouts. Is there a minimum amount of rest that you would say?

Alli Rainey: After a hard day of weight training, two days for me, for sure. Again, I would say that’s probably true for most people. What I found is it really depends on the person, you know? It’s hard to give/that’s why I shy away from giving out, ‘This is a training plan that will work for everybody,’ kind of recommendations because it really depends on the person and people’s recovery times. It really depends on the person and even with climbing days, it really depends on the climbing style, like, if you’re on a climbing trip, how much time you need between days off to optimize your performance is really dependent on the climbing style and how it plays to your strength and weaknesses and that kind of stuff. It all plays into it so I do think most climbers climb too much and don’t rest enough to optimize their performance, myself included. It’s because climbing is so fun. That’s why we all do it.

I think it’s really hard to rest enough, especially when you’re on a trip or traveling or climbing somewhere where the season is short or you feel the pressure to perform and you really want to get in as many pitches as possible. It’s just really, really hard to moderate. Climbing is a lot more high intensity than a lot of other sports, especially when you’re trying really hard on a hard sport climb for you, for example. It’s so high intensity and so hard on your body. That’s where you see people making negative progress on their climbs or getting angry, saying, “I could do this move yesterday. Why can’t I do it today?” It’s like, ‘It’s because you’re not rested enough,’ you know? Then people start making more and more negative progress a lot of times and they interpret that as, ‘I need to train even harder,’ but what they really need, probably, is more rest.

A good friend of mine, David Gill, who runs Total Coaching which is the coaching software I use, he has done an experiment. He has a grip strength measurer – I think that’s what it is – something that measures his ability, anyway, climbing-related grip strength, and he’s done experiments where he has taken them on climbing trips and measured how much has fallen off on his grip strength throughout the trip. It’s amazing. I can’t remember his numbers but it’s unreal, and how long it took for it to get back to where he was was way longer than you might expect. I think it was maybe a month or something after a climbing trip where he was trying to maximize his climbing time.

We don’t really realize how intense climbing is. Kevin, again, I hate to give him so much credit but he deserves it [laughs] because he really saw all this stuff in me and he kept telling me I needed to rest more. Again, I’m a volume climber. I like to climb a lot. I didn’t feel good if I didn’t go out and climb 10 pitches a day. He just kept saying, “Gosh Alli, if you just rested you could climb so much better.” As I started to learn and then rest more and with multiple bouts of overtraining, he’s so right. Once I got intuned with what it was like to climb when I was fully recovered, it’s actually gotten harder and harder for me to climb not rested because I can really feel the difference. It was a learning curve. It was a lesson because I think I spent so much of my climbing – and I still climb tired a lot of the time, but I’m much more well aware of it now, you know, that I’m not at full performance and if I really want to be, I’m going to need to rest this much.

I think our minds get in the way and tell us that we’re losing fitness and that we need to train more and that everything is going to go by the wayside if we don’t do more, you know? A lot of that is really mental, I think. I’ve had a lot of examples with that with myself where I’ve had forced rest because of needing to go do an event or travel or whatever. I remember one last year. I had just such a clear one where I ended up taking nine days off because of traveling and doing an event and I climbed four pitches of 5.10 during those nine days and came back to this route that I’d been one-hanging, that had one kind of low percentage, big move on it and the day after I got back from this trip I went up, did my warm-up, and my warm-up felt easier than it ever felt. I did the route my first try and it was, like, easy. It was like, ‘Hello! Nine days of rest and I had climbed four pitches of 5.10,’ you know? It was just so clear. It’s like you don’t want to take nine days off all the time but if you read about how other athletes peak for performance, that’s pretty realistic to have. Not to have quite so much but to have a much lighter week before you go into your competition, you know, and if you’re not competing you’re just competing with yourself and just trying to climb a hard sport route, it might do you real well before you’re going for your big send to have three or four days off, you know? Just see what that does for you because that could make a huge difference.

You might take three or four days off and then be able to climb one day on, one day off, one day on, and have some peak efforts during that time, but have that big period of rest where your body integrates and assimilates all of the work you’ve put into it. Then you come out fresh and raring to go and you don’t have this fatigue wearing on you. You could actually have a peak and experience the peak whereas I feel, as climbers, we all expect our bodies to be peaking all the time. That’s not realistic, you know? You just can’t be at 100% athletic performance all of the time. Every other sport practically out there has an off-season in which you’re resting and then you’re building back in your training and then you’re moving towards your peak competitions.

Climbers shouldn’t expect their bodies to be any different from that. That’s why I say you can see the patterns. I can watch it in the people that I coach and watch it in myself. It’s like I’m on this amazing performance high and everything is easy and suddenly, everything is coming together and I’m doing amazing and everything’s great, and then, you know, two weeks later I feel terrible and everything’s/I don’t feel as good and it’s just a cycle.

If you look into training or stare at athletic training books, my favorite one is Tudor Bompa’s Periodization. I can’t remember the subtitle but he has a great graph that shows the undulating training curve. You can find it in other athletic training books, too. Training and performance are all ups and downs so the idea is you train and then you go up and your performance is high and you drop down and you feel like you’re not doing as well, but then your next high should be higher if you’re training correctly. Then you’ll, again, go down because your body is recovering. Then you’ll go up again and hopefully be higher.

You’ll know you’re overtraining if every subsequent high, let’s say you just continuously make negative progress on a route and you’re getting worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. Then, you’re probably overtraining. That’s sort of the way that it works.

Best case scenario, training is never this steady and performance is never this steady, linear progress that we all expect ourselves to make. I think we all also live in the moment when we’re climbing so much, and that’s one thing we all love about climbing. It gives us this incredible living in the moment experience. Right now, everything is happening right now. Because we’re so in the moment it’s really hard to have that big picture when you have a bad day. You’re like, ‘Why can’t I do this move that I could do yesterday?’ That’s that living in the moment coming to bite you in the butt because maybe your body is having a bad day. We all get so caught up in it because we want that living in the moment, high experience of performance, every day that we climb but it’s just not going to happen. For me, learning to take that in stride, too, has been a great lesson. Just learning when that happens, my solution is to go train harder but maybe I need another rest day or I need to skip that next climbing day that everyone’s going out and bank on that the next day I’m going to feel way better. It usually works out that way.

Neely Quinn: I have a couple more questions for you before we wrap up.

Alli Rainey: Sure.

Neely Quinn: One is about cardio. What do you think about cardio?

Alli Rainey: Well, I think climbing is way more of a cardio activity than most people realize. I agree with Steve Bechtel, who I know. We’ve talked about this. I think running and climbing have as much to do with each other as training for a marathon, as climbing to train for a marathon has as much to do with running to train with climbing does. This comes from me, who loves running. I’ve written about it in my blog, about how I used to run for climbing training and how I love to run. I do love to run but I don’t run anymore. I don’t feel there are benefits for my climbing. I actually feel that – you can find this in the periodization book, and it has a great write-up about using low intensity endurance exercises to train for high intensity endurance exercise, which for sport climbing is more like intervals. If you’re running in a cyclic, aerobic sport, you’re actually training your body incorrectly. It’s detrimental to your climbing performance to include something like jogging in your training program.

People argue, “But so-and-so runs,” and it’s like, ‘Yes, but what would happen if they didn’t run and devoted that time to training specifically for climbing?’ The cardio you get from running is not going to carry over for intense sport climbing or to bouldering. You would be far better off spending your time in sport specific training activities like conditioning your body for the kind of cardio that you need for a hard sport climb, which would require you to train climbing, which is where the climbing is good training for climbing comes in.

You can throw on a heart rate monitor and see how hard you’re breathing when you’re trying a really hard sport climb. I’m a nerd and I’ve worn a heart rate monitor climbing to see what happens and it elevates your heart rate incredibly and keeps your heart rate elevated even once you get down from a climb quite substantially.

There’s a lot of research coming out now, too, about high intensity endurance training, with circuit training being possibly a solution to people who say they don’t have time to exercise because a lot of similar fitness results are seen. There’s a seven minute New York Times workout. You can look that up on the Internet. There’s a new study out about doing four-minute sprints uphill giving these overweight men the kind of same metabolic and fitness benefits as much longer, low intensity aerobic exercise sessions.

There’s a lot of argument, fitness-wise, that you don’t necessarily need to be doing a 90-minute cardio workout but as far as for specific climbing training, I’m against it. I don’t think it’s a productive use of time. I think if you love running and you don’t care about being the best climber you can be, by all means you should run. There’s nothing wrong with running. I love running and I have clients who run. I just lay it out and give them the evidence and give them the supporting background and say, “It’s your choice. I just feel obligated to give you what the research says right now about doing this kind of training for a sport like climbing.”

I’m talking about, like, sport climbing and bouldering, which is primarily what my focus is, right? That would not be the kind of training I would recommend, or swimming, or rowing, or any cyclic, low intensity exercise.

Neely Quinn: Okay, well that’s really definitive.

Alli Rainey: Yeah. [laughs]

Neely Quinn: Okay, one last question which I ask everybody. What about body weight and diet and climbing at your peak? What can you say about that?

Alli Rainey: I touched on that earlier and actually, my blog right now has a series in it where I interviewed one of the nation’s leading sports nutritionists, Doctor Dan Benardot. He wrote Advanced Sports Nutrition. The chapter on that should be recommended, no, required reading for every climber and boulderer, the chapter on body composition and climbing.

I’ve struggled with body composition and body image concerns the entire time I’ve been a climber. We are in such a weight-obsessed sport but after reading his book and then I interviewed him over the phone, kind of like how you’re interviewing me, but for my blog. I really tried to be smart about the whole eating and strength-to-weight ratio thing and understanding that starving yourself or limiting your calories actually/usually ends up backfiring and can make you lighter but it can skew your body composition away from ideal for your sport. You can actually end up with a higher body fat percentage and less sports-specific muscle and render you weaker in the long term, so maybe you’ll get a short term bounce by dropping some weight but you’ll get a long term detriment to your performance by lowering your metabolism and by skewing your body composition so you’re actually less muscular and more fat.

I think in this book there’s a study that he talks about that they did with gymnasts where the lighter gymnasts actually had worse strength-to-weight ratios than the heavier gymnasts, the more muscular gymnasts. They were actually less powerful and less able to execute movements for their sport, which is one of the most body image obsessed sports and body composition obsessed sports, I think, like climbing is. I think it’s a really difficult thing because we all want the easy fix of, ‘Oh, if I only weighed five pounds less,’ but I think, just like Benardot says, the weight is not the right metric, body composition is. If you have five more pounds of muscle and it’s sports-specific muscle, you will feel lighter.

I do weigh more than I did when I started strength training and I am stronger and I am able to climb things that I could not climb at a lighter body weight, so that’s my personal experience. It’s really hard, as a female, to be like, ‘I’m going to gain weight for climbing! This is going to be great!’ You know? It’s really hard. It’s really a challenging thing to do and I even got body fat calipers so I could make sure I wasn’t gaining body fat with the weight gain. It was a struggle to wrap a brain around, you know, and to be okay with and to believe that that’s actually okay. Then, the results for me speak for themselves. I come out every year and, like this spring, I came out and could do moves on a route that I could not do the moves on last year.

It’s like Kevin said to me in his blunt way of putting it, at a certain point you get as skinny as you can get and you’re still not strong enough to climb as hard as you want to, so then what? What are you going to do? How are you going to get stronger without adding some muscle to your body? It’s like, ‘Okay. What else am I going to do? There’s nothing I can do. If I’m going to be at the lowest body fat that I can be and still be healthy and I still can’t climb as hard as I want to, then what?’ Then you only have one way to go as far as I can see, and that’s adding some sports-specific muscle to your body or at least some sports-specific strength, which is probably going to add some muscle weight.

There’s a point that you can go overboard, obviously, and we all do don’t want to end up looking like giant, 200-pound – on my frame, 200 pounds of muscle would be too much, obviously. I’m 5’6”. That would be ridiculous, but most people don’t realize how hard it is for most people to gain muscle. It’s actually quite hard. The body doesn’t put on muscle that easily so it’s generally a lot harder to put on a lot of un-sports-specific muscle weight if you’re training sports-specific exercises. You’d have to try pretty hard to put on dysfunctional muscle weight and you’d probably start to notice when that was happening pretty quickly as you’d feel heavy climbing as opposed to stronger.

For me, gaining some muscle weight has made me be able to do moves that I couldn’t do so that’s just awesome. I think people tend to be overly obsessed with that. That’s not to say that there aren’t people who are carrying extra fat. Fat is different. If you really are carrying extra fat, that’s not functional weight and even trading that fat for muscle would be ideal for improving your climbing and having a better body composition. I do think people obsess too much about the numbers on the scale. Not just in climbing but in any sport where strength-to-weight ratio is a consideration. It’s just hard not to get attached to seeing your magical numbers and thinking that that’s going to make all the difference in the world.

Neely Quinn: So, how can people find you or hire you as their coach?

Alli Rainey: My website is www.allirainey.com. I do have a waiting list to take on new clients because I keep my client list really small. I like to do an in-person consultation if it is at all possible with people before I start coaching them just to make sure that we’re kind of on the same page and just to evaluate their goals. If we can climb together I can see them climb. It’s just so much more helpful because there are severe limitations to distance training, obviously. Even with all of the help of video and stuff like that, it’s not the same as having a trainer in person so having that in-person is actually really helpful. Then, being able to touch back on that.

That’s something that has changed. I still do distance train people where I haven’t met sometimes, it just sort of depends on the case-by-case scenario. I like to be able to make that in-person connection and touch base again if we can. I do do some in-person training as well for that.

If anyone is interested they can contact me and get more details about it and discuss. It works great for some people. It doesn’t work so well for other people. It really depends person to person, you know? Some people step in and sort of get ideas about training for a month or two and then they go their own way. Other people find that it works well for them to have the feedback ongoing. I’m really flexible with that because I realize different training for different people.

My whole goal with all of the training stuff that I’ve done has only been to help other people on a less frustrating, more productive, and quicker path to getting better at climbing than I took because mine was not the recommended path. [laughs] That was my whole idea with putting any training information out there. It’s like, ‘Hey, this is what I’ve learned.’ I’m constantly growing and changing in what I’m learning but every time I learn something, I want to pass it on to everybody that I can or anyone who is interested, basically, because it’s been such a great thing for me to experience getting better at climbing after thinking that I couldn’t. I would rather save other people as much trouble as possible in their journey and help them find a quicker path towards optimizing their training potential and climbing what they want to climb. That’s what makes it fun, right? Seeing improvement and meeting your goals and watching yourself grow and get better as a climber. If I can help other people do that, that’s fantastic. That’s the whole idea with offering any training advice.

Neely Quinn: Yeah, and if they can’t get in with you as a coach/trainer, then you have tons of stuff on your blog that they can check out.

Alli Rainey: And I’m really good about answering emails and questions and all of that, so if anybody has any questions or anything they want I am always open. I’m traveling right now but I really try to give good answers if people have questions about stuff. I really just enjoy helping other people get better at climbing. It really is fun to see other people improve from the training knowledge that’s going out there.

I actually think what you’re doing is awesome, too, just to give you a plug. I think it’s great. I’ve heard a lot of good feedback about it and I think it’s awesome that there seem to be more and more trainers out there who are looking at the research and getting behind good, solid sports training for climbing. I think it’s really just going to grow the sport and push us all to a new level. The next generation of climbers are going to be the best climbers that we’ve ever seen and it’s just a really exciting time in climbing, I think, with the knowledge of training and the training base growing. I think it’s a pretty amazing evolution that the sport is going through right now. It will be exciting to watch in the next couple of decades to see where the next generations of climbers take us.

Neely Quinn: Yeah, and it’s really cool to have you out there as a person giving people advice because you are obviously so psyched on climbing still. It’s probably really encouraging for your clients, too. It’s great.

Alli Rainey: Thanks. No, it’s crazy. I never planned to be a climber when I was a kid and I also never planned to be climbing, doing what I’m doing. I mean, I just love it. I still love climbing. Everyday I go out and climb, except for the days where I feel really, really tired, it’s really fun. I’m just always game to try new stuff and I think, like I said, it’s been observing on this trip that one of the great things that training has given me is even more willingness to just jump on anything and give it a shot, no matter how weird it looks. I’ve climbed some weird looking stuff here. [laughs] I’m like, ‘Sure. I’ll try that. Whatever,’ just having that confidence. I’ve found that as you get stronger and as you improve, it really does give you more confidence and that goes into the whole mental training thing which is very inextricably linked to the physical. They go hand in hand and it’s a cool thing.

Neely Quinn: It is. Well, have fun in Scotland. Good luck in Spain. Thank you for your wisdom.

Alli Rainey: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. I’m flattered to be a part of your TrainingBeta. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help you out, too, because I do think it’s an awesome idea and anything you need, contributions or whatever, just let me know and I’m happy to help.

Neely Quinn: Oh, that’s great. I will definitely be hitting you up for that. Thank you.

Alli Rainey: Especially, Neely, over the winter when I’m home, if you have any specific stuff that you want written on or discussed or whatever, I can try and help you with that. Winter is way more dead for me so I can usually get a lot more done.

Neely Quinn: Yeah, you probably want the distraction so that you don’t overtrain.

Alli Rainey: Totally. [laughs]

Neely Quinn: Well, for people listening, definitely write in the comments any questions or any topics you would want Alli to write on or contribute about.

Alli Rainey: Yeah, I would be happy to help out. That would be great.

Neely Quinn: Once again, www.allirainey.com is where to find you.

Alli Rainey: Yep.

Neely Quinn: Okay, thanks and enjoy your day.

Alli Rainey: Alright. You too, Neely.

Neely Quinn: Thank you so much for listening to episode 12 of the TrainingBeta podcast. Again, I’m your host Neely Quinn. That was Alli Rainey of www.allirainey.com. She is obviously a very knowledgeable trainer and I hope that you learned something that you can take away from this and start using right away.

I have Hans Florine and some other people up in the roster so hopefully I’ll have my next one up in a couple of weeks as usual. If you ever have anybody who you really want me to interview, just email me at neely@trainingbeta.com.

I love reviews on iTunes. That would be awesome if you could leave an honest review or just send me an email and let me know how I’m doing or how the podcast is doing in general.

Again, this podcast is made possible by our training programs at www.trainingbeta.com, which are our power endurance program, our endurance program, our nutrition program by Acacia Young, our strength program by Steve Bechtel, and soon-to-be our bouldering power and strength program that will be a subscription thing. That will be out soon.

I think that’s it. Until next time, happy climbing.

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TrainingBeta is a site dedicated to training for rock climbing. We provide resources and information about training for routes, bouldering, finger strength, mental training, nutrition for climbers, and everything in between. We offer climbing training programs, climbing training classes, nutrition classes, regular blog posts, interviews on The TrainingBeta Podcast, personal coaching for climbing, and nutrition for climbers.