Hopefully losing weight wasn’t one of your New Year’s resolutions. Because if it was, you may want to wait:

We all pack on a few extra pounds around the holidays. And good for you! You’ve earned it. It’s been one hell of year. Maybe you sacrificed pleasures over the climbing season to meet your goals. But now you’ve hit the sweets, pounded the alcohol, and taken a second helping of those sweeeet potatoes. Calorie counting? Not today! It’s the one time of year that you should be able to binge guilt free.

This is all a part of the training program.

I often fluctuate 5-10 pounds over the winter. Hell, I can fluctuate 5 pounds in a day.

Because rock climbing is a weight-defying sport, we often become weight obsessed. It always comes down to strength-to-weight ratios. That’s why little girls and teenage boys can crush so hard. Strap a bag of dog food to them and see if they can still send. That’s what we’re working with here.

Sport climbers are probably the most obsessive when it comes to counting calories. We get ridiculous. If you’re bouldering, you’re not on the problem long enough for 10 pounds to be that big of a deal. You’re either strong enough or you’re not.  But when you’re sending your sport project, you’re on the wall anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes. Hauling 10 extra pounds up the wall and hanging off of bad holds for that length of time starts to get really hard.

We all look for that competitive edge, for Ideal Conditions where everything aligns: temps, strength, beta, and weight. When we’re trying to send our projects, we try to get down to sending weight, the optimal weight where we maximize our strength to weight ratio.

But during the off season, during the winter months, it’s to your advantage to train heavy. It makes you stronger. That extra 10 pounds you gain is like putting on an evenly distributed weight vest.

Remember, if you want to get stronger, you need to increase the resistance. That means you need to add a little training weight. When you go back outside to send your project, drop the training weight (that’s the part some people forget to do).

For some motivation on the uses of training weight in climbing, check out this video my brother and I put together circa 2002 entitled The Pudgy Puller.