Logging a session in 30 seconds (and why effort matters)

The best training log is the one you actually keep. Detailed spreadsheets with every hold, every rest and every grade are lovely for a week, then they quietly stop being filled in. Train Climb is designed around the opposite idea: record a few things, every time, in about 30 seconds.

What you record

When you finish a session, open the app and fill in:

• Type of session, such as bouldering, routes, fingerboard, strength or mobility.
• Date and duration in minutes.
• Effort from 1 to 10: how hard the whole session felt.
• Metres climbed, if it was a climbing session.
• How you felt, a quick indication of your mood and energy.
• Notes, for anything you want to remember: a move that clicked, a sore finger, a bad night's sleep.

If your coach planned the session, it arrives with its exercises, sets and targets already filled in. You confirm what you did, adjust anything that changed and save.

Why effort is the number that matters most

Of everything on that list, the effort score is the one we care about most. It is a session RPE, short for rating of perceived exertion, and it answers one question: looking back at the whole session, how hard was it?

Foster and colleagues (2001) showed that multiplying this rating by the session's duration gives a simple, practical measure of internal training load. In Train Climb that is exactly how load is calculated:

Load = effort × minutes

A 60-minute session at effort 7 gives a load of 420. A 90-minute easy mileage session at effort 4 gives 360. The numbers let you compare very different sessions on one scale, which is hard to do with grades or metres alone.

Rating effort well

A few tips make the number more useful:

• Rate about 30 minutes after you finish, not mid-session and not the next morning. Foster's original method used a short delay so the last few minutes do not dominate.
• Think of the whole session, warm-up included, not just the hardest attempt.
• Use the full scale. A 10 is a maximal effort you could not have continued. A 2 or 3 is genuinely easy. Many climbers stick to 6s and 7s for everything, which hides real differences.
• Be honest, not heroic. Nobody is grading you. An inflated or modest number only fools your own records.

There is more detail in our post on what RPE is and on session RPE training load.

What happens with your logs

Once you have logged a few weeks, the progress page shows your weekly load. After two earlier weeks of training it also shows the acute:chronic ratio, which compares the last seven days with your weekly average over the last four weeks. Up to 1.5 is shown as OK, 1.5 to 2.5 as Watch, and above 2.5 as High.

That ratio is a prompt, not a prediction. Gabbett (2016) popularised the idea that sudden spikes in load relative to what you are used to deserve attention, while later work, including Impellizzeri and colleagues (2020), questioned how much weight the ratio itself can bear. We explain both sides in the ACWR explained and its limitations.

Your logs also feed the injury-risk light, together with morning check-ins and any skipped sessions, and they let your coach see whether the plan is being followed.

Common questions

What if I forget to log? Log it later from memory. An approximate entry is far more useful than a gap.

What about rest days? You do not need to log them. The absence of a session already tells the story.

Do climbing grades matter here? Grades go in your climbing journal, which is separate from the session log. Both together give a fuller picture.

Try this

• Log your next five sessions, rating effort 30 minutes after finishing.
• Before saving, ask yourself whether the number would match what a training partner watching you would guess.
• After two weeks, open the progress page and look at your weekly load. Does it match how tired you have felt?
• Add one honest note per session. In a month, those notes will be the most interesting part of your log.