Versante Sud Up Climbing #21 - training

The concept of training is as ancient as sport: in ancient Greece, there are countless examples of athletes dedicating time to specific preparation in their discipline, in gyms or outdoors. But even in the art of climbing, since the early 1900s, detailed and documented methods to improve performance on rock and, more broadly, in the mountains are well known: from Paul Preuss, attentive to psychological aspects, to Eugenio Fasana who trained with weights at Forza e Coraggio in Milan, to the specific gymnastics exercises of Emilio Comici in the 1930s, the common thread of preparation for the vertical gesture has never waned, and it is also quite easy to identify and follow.

In the 1960s, in the USA, John Gill surpassed everyone in this regard, developing an almost scientific calisthenics training, with many exercises imported from artistic gymnastics, and achieved extraordinary results in the field of bouldering. The advent of sport climbing in crags then gave a significant boost to endurance training, first with the bar and then with the hangboard, with endless pull-ups and hangs with body weight or with added weight. "Everyone in the world does a pull-up," the French said in the 1980s. Some were able to perform it on their pinky with their arm extended. How useful this was in relation to the grade is still to be seen...

Today, there is a strong need for clarity and order in a very delicate field, not only for inexperienced beginners but also for more advanced athletes and competitors, without forgetting the training of young and very young climbers. Thus, here is an issue of UP CLIMBING completely dedicated to the debate on climbing training, with many different opinions, proposals, methods, experiments, and suggestions, sometimes opposing but always very well motivated. For this issue, we have invited some of the best Italian experts to collaborate, from Alessandro Lamberti to Andrea Gennari, Tito Pozzoli, Roberto Bagnoli, Sergio Cocco, Fabio Palma, Eloisa Limonta, and Vincenzo De Luca, to name just a few, and several important figures in the international scene, from Eva Lopez to Arno Ilgner, Tom Randall, Ned Feehally, accompanied by the authoritative opinions of top-level climbers like Stefano Ghisolfi and Alexander Megos, not forgetting a segment on mountaineering with Sean Villanueva.

Thus, an issue of the magazine that aims to be a small but useful contribution for those who want to document themselves in a non-superficial way on the most recent ideas and methods related to training for climbing.

A specific focus is then dedicated to training injuries, with a dense and timely intervention by Mirella De Ruvo. As always, an enjoyable generalist part will take us around crags, routes, and reflections on the world of climbing, just to remind us that, as Patrick Edlinger used to say towards the end of the fabulous 1980s, the essential is still to "climb."