As you guessed from the title, I have a confession to make:

I’m terrible at training. In fact, it would be hard to argue that I train at all…

1. I have zero books, Excel spreadsheets, apps, notebooks, or pieces of scrap paper outlining possible training regimens.
2. I have never even attempted to follow one of the above training plans. The furthest I’ve gone is writing down what I’ve already done, and I don’t even do that regularly.
3. Despite listening to dozens of TrainingBeta and Power Company podcasts, I only implement roughly 1.59% of what they instruct me to do.
4. According to Coach Emmett, I climb too many days on and don’t climb nor try hard enough on any of those days.
5. I never plan out workouts more than 12 hours in advance, and even then I end up somehow changing or completely abandoning them once I get to the gym. 70 percent of the time the latter is because we’ve just set new boulders that I need to play on.
6. I do not do the same workout(s) every week. I seldom know what my work schedule will be a week in advance, so planning training and outdoor climbing days usually happens the night before.
7. I strongly dislike hangboarding and therefore have never done a hangboard workout longer than the mini 10-minute Metolius ones.
8. I know climbing outside, even following easy trad or lackadaisical “sports cragging,” isn’t supposed to count as a rest day.  I still try to count such days as my rest days. I also try to count days I didn’t climb but picked up weights and set them back down as “active rest days.”
9. I socialize during a significantly-greater-than-necessary portion of every climbing session, indoors and outside. I also enjoy lying on mats entirely too much.
10. Essentially, I have very little self discipline and like climbing for fun way too much to be good at training. Because who wants to train when it’s sunny with a gentle breeeze and the rock is dry? And who wants to do 4x4s when they just reset a new corner of the bouldering area? And who wants to do any type of workout involving heinous numbers of 5.12 laps? Wait, all those training fiends are actually good at rock climbing you say? That’s probably why I’m still a solidly mediocre climber–but heck, it’s pretty fun.

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