Climbing Your Best: Training to Maximize Your Performance

by Heather Reynolds Sagar

Book Overview

Written by a professional trainer and climber, this guide is intended for climbers of all skill levels who want to move up a notch. It provides tests for assessing personal strengths and weaknesses;... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811727351
• ISBN13: 9780811727358
• Release Date: December 2000
• Publisher: Stackpole Books
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

As a beginner, I really liked it.

I was a casual gym climber in Boulder when I was diagnosed with cancer. During my recovery, I picked up this book with high hopes of training myself properly once I was able to climb again. "Climbing Your Best" turned out to be all could hope for and more. I've done some sports training, but have always been somewhat intimidated by climbing jargon. While quite technical, this book explained the terms and concepts in easy-to-use language (And I work as an editor, so I'm quite picky about this!). Lots of photographs illustrate the discussed training techniques, which went a long way to enhance my understanding of climbing.My favorite parts were the exercises for the system board and campus board. I couldn't wait to get well again so I could try them out. As an athlete, I love learning new, repetitive exercises that will help me improve my performance. I can only liken it to being a ballerina at the barre. Up until I read this book, the only climbing-specific exercises I did were pilates to increase my core strength. The whole book was very gym-heavy in its recommendations, but that worked well for me. My schedule (and budget) lends themselves much better to training in a gym a few times a week than attempting to go climbing outdoors that often. This book isn't the end-all of climbing, and it's hardly a substitute for learning in person, but it does delivers what the title claims: Training to Maximize Your Performance.

A decent guide

This book is a fairly decent guide to training for harder climbing. The best part about this book is the tests for grip strength, flexibility, shoulder power etc. it gives guidelines for each and for where a climber should be at various skill levels. if you fall below the recomended number in a certain category it gives you things to do to improve in that one category. all in all i'd go with the much superior "how to climb 5.12" or "flash training" both of which are also cheaper. this book has few pictures and diagrams and is fairly redundant, but the tests and charts are useful.