Inadequate rest leads to exhaustion and poor performance, and it increases the risk of injury. Especially for beginners, daily bouldering is not recommended without careful preparation due to the high risk of overuse injury. It is much better to take a day of rest than to be off the wall for weeks with inflamed tendons.
To reduce the risk of injury when bouldering every day, always start with a warmup, vary the intensity and type of problems from day to day, limit sessions to 2-3 hours, and avoid bouldering to the point of exhaustion. Get a lot of sleep and use preventive skin care to assist recovery between bouldering sessions.
Why Beginners Should Be Wary of Bouldering Every Day
Beginners should avoid daily bouldering until their tendons have adapted to the sport. Muscles respond to increased demand much faster than tendons, which can take up to two years to build up the needed acclimation. Tendon inflammation can takes months to clear up, and overuse injuries have an annoying tendency to linger and recur.
On a more immediate level, the limiting factor to daily bouldering will likely be shredded skin. Two bouldering days in a row is usually the maximum that novice hands can stand up to. To help delay the skin damage, keep calluses well sanded, use finger tape, and moisturize between sessions. Depending on the type of rock, climbing on natural boulders may be more abrasive than gym holds.
Problems of Inadequate Rest: Poor Performance
Good technique relies on smooth and efficient flow between moves, with precise use of balance. Unrested muscles will be compromised. If you train tired, results will reflect this.
Also, bouldering every day does not provide enough recovery time. The two-fold impact of this are not only the higher rates of injury, but also a plateau on performance. If the body is chronically overtired from back-to-back bouldering sessions, performance will never be at its best. Continually using the resulting poor technique will have the effect of ingraining bad habits.
Therefore, an adequate rest period is indispensable to improving performance. Muscles mend during rest days, and improvement occurs immediately after the recovery period. Therefore, bouldering without rest days has you missing out on these improvement, or supercompensation, periods.
Supercompensation
Supercompensation is the improvement that comes after training. To lock in the performance gains, the next training session must occur after the recovery period, but before the improvement fades away.
Here is how it works. The stress of an intense training session will lower one’s base fitness level. The rest and recovery period will bring fitness back up to baseline. After recovery, the fitness level will be higher than baseline – for a while. If the next training session occurs during this higher-than-baseline period, the fitness baseline will lock in at this higher level.
However, if training starts too soon – while still in the recovery period – the body will return to its original fitness baseline only, and there will be no period of heightened performance. Conversely, if it takes too long until the next training session, the heightened level of fitness will fade back down to the original baseline.
Therefore, the supercompensation period is a window of opportunity that comes with a time limit. To avoid training during recovery, make sure that you feel energetic and physically refreshed before going back for another intensive bouldering session. And to avoid missing the window of opportunity, once you feel refreshed don’t wait too many days before training again.
Basically, the problem with bouldering every day is that it has you constantly training within recovery periods. This effectively eliminates all supercompensation windows, making it difficult to see improvements.
Recommendations When Bouldering Every Day
All that being said, there are times when the siren call of daily bouldering is just too hard to resist. Apply some of the recommendations below to reduce the risk of problems.
Long-time rock climber and boulderer Ben Moon advises that one can boulder every day as long as one varies the intensity (1). He recommends no more than three intense sessions per week.
It’s also probably fine to boulder every day as long as staying well below one’s maximum V grade. Ease off to easier problems as soon as the body starts sending signals. Pushing past warning aches and pains paves the way to injury. Attend to the signals by switching to easier problems or by taking a break.
To boulder several days back-to-back, you need to have built up endurance.
Peter Beal recommends building endurance by doing sessions consisting of repeated laps of 30 to 40 easy moves, performed non-stop with fluid efficiency. There should be complete rest between the laps. He advises against using traverses for this purpose because this leaves too many muscle groups unworked. The goal is to build up to an average of 500 moves per bouldering session.
Younger people can get away with more. Even as early as one’s 30s there can be a noticeable difference, so be in tune with your body. Have self-discipline and remember that it’s better to take a day of rest here and there than to be off for a month due to an overuse injury.
Here are some quick tips for safer daily bouldering:
- Make sure you are starting off strong and physically fit
- Start each bouldering session with a warmup
- The intensity of the climb is key: Peter Beal recommends no more than two days of strenuous bouldering back-to-back
- Change the types of problems you do from one day to the next; keep it varied
- Limit sessions to 2-3 hours, and stop before reaching a state of exhaustion
- Focus on injury prevention: use proper form, and avoid using more force than moves require
- If your fingers are injury-prone, use open-handed holds; place the load on footwork
- If elbows and forearms start to ache, switch to problems that work on balance
- If tendons or muscles start tweaking, time for a break
Keep sessions focused but short. For example, try climbing at peak intensity, then taking a 15-minute break and doing easy problems for the rest of the session.
Finally, be cautious about taking advice from people who have only been bouldering for 1-2 years, because tendon damage can take months to develop. These people may be well on their way to injury, and following their recommendations can lead you into the same trouble. A more reliable source would be a bouldering coach or someone who has 10-plus years of bouldering experience.
Alternatives to Daily Bouldering: How Long to Rest?
There seem to be as many training schedules as there are climbers. Here are several suggestions from eminent bouldering gurus.
Peter Beal, in his book Bouldering, suggests that rest days should be equal to the number of bouldering days. For example, two consecutive days on problems should be followed by two days of rest.
Eric Horst, in his book Learning to Climb Indoors tells us that while it only takes about twenty-four hours to recover from low level exertion such as cycling and running, an all-out, intense, extended bouldering session (e.g. 5-6 hours of bouldering) can take up to three days for full recovery.
John Sherman suggests alternating between training weeks and performance weeks. Training weeks are used for practicing on weaknesses, and for pushing strength and endurance limits. During these training weeks, performance will naturally take a hit because the focus is on intensity, diversity of problems, practicing problematic moves, and pushing strength limits.
John Sherman concedes that if he already feels tired during a pre-session warmup, he puts off hard training and gets some rest. He finds that pushing through the fatigue does not yield enough gains to be worth the longer recovery time that will be needed.
Elite climbers will boulder 3-4 days in a row before taking a rest day, but for the average person this is not recommended without a slow and careful building up to that level of activity.
Elite climbers tend to follow a regimen of alternating the intensity and type of problems from one day to the next. For example, they might do one day of short but very demanding problems, followed by a day of longer but easier routes, and then followed by a day of rest.
To apply this concept, say for example when switching up from a one-day-on/one-day-off schedule to two-days-on/one-day-off, if our first bouldering day is demanding and intense, the second day should focus on moderate to easy problems.
John Sherman suggests that taking a longer break, perhaps 1 to 2 weeks off several times a year, is a good way to allow a proper reset of mind and body. It’s also an opportunity to review one’s bouldering goals from a refreshed viewpoint.
What to Do on Rest Days
Watching videos on bouldering technique is an excellent, productive activity to do on rest days – and it will help soothe the urge to get back on the wall.
Other low-key activities can be used to help bouldering in a roundabout way. Hiking on rough trails will strengthen feet and ankles; cycling and brisk walks improve blood flow.
Maximize rest time with good nutrition and by drinking plenty of water. Healing occurs during sleep, so getting a solid eight to nine hours will assist recovery.
References
John Sherman, Better Bouldering, 3rd Edition. Guilford, Connecticut: Falcon.
Peter Beal, Bouldering: Movement, Tactics, and Problem Solving. Seattle, WA: The Mountaineers Books.
Eric J Horst, Learning to Climb Indoors. Guilford, Connecticut: FalconGuides.