How coaches plan a season in Train Climb

A good training season has a shape. It builds a base, focuses on specific qualities, sharpens for the climbs or competitions that matter and includes time to recover. That idea is old and well established, from Matveyev's classic work on periodisation to Bompa's practical guides and Issurin's writing on block periodisation. The hard part is not the theory. It is turning it into a plan that athletes actually follow, week after week.

Season plans in Train Climb are built to make that practical.

Phases: the shape of the season

A season plan is a sequence of weeks grouped into phases. Typical phases for climbers might be:

• Base: general fitness, lots of varied climbing, building tolerance for training.
• Strength and fingers: maximal strength and structured finger training.
• Power: explosive, dynamic work and hard bouldering.
• Power endurance: repeated hard efforts with short rests, for routes and long boulder problems.
• Performance: lower volume, high quality, focused on projects or competitions.
• Deload: planned lighter weeks to absorb the work.

You choose the phases and their length. There is no single correct order, and coaches disagree on details, which is healthy. If you want the background, see sport periodisation in plain words and linear, undulating and block periodisation.

A target load for every week

Each week in the plan gets a target load, using the same measure athletes log: effort multiplied by minutes. That lets you plan the overall rhythm of the season, not just the content of single sessions. For example, you might build load gradually over three weeks and then drop it in a deload week.

During the season, the athlete's real weekly load appears next to the target. When the two drift apart, it is a cue to talk. Maybe the athlete is doing extra sessions on the side, maybe they are ill, maybe the plan was too ambitious. The numbers do not decide anything; they start the conversation.

Week templates fill the calendar

Writing every session by hand for a whole season would take forever. Week templates solve this. A coach builds a typical week for a phase, with its sessions, exercises, sets and targets drawn from the exercise library, and applies it to the weeks in that phase. The calendar fills in, and the coach can then adjust individual weeks or sessions as needed.

Athletes see these planned sessions in their own calendar. When they log a session, the planned exercises and targets are already there, which keeps logging quick and makes it easy to compare what was planned with what was done.

Progression without spreadsheets

Exercises can carry a progression rule, for example a number of successful sets at the current target. When an athlete meets the rule, the coach is asked to approve raising the next planned sessions, or the club can choose to apply it automatically. Each athlete has a current level for each exercise, so a coach can see at a glance who is ready to move on and who needs more time.

A season plan is a hypothesis about what will help. The weekly logs are the experiment. A good coach watches both.

Seeing the whole team

For coaches with several athletes, the team board shows everyone together, and the week and month planners let you move sessions around when life happens. A plan built around a main event for a youth squad can sit alongside an adult athlete who simply wants to climb a little harder by summer.

In Train Climb

• Sketch your season on paper first: the main goal, the date, the phases in between.
• Create the season plan and set a modest target load for the first few weeks, based on what the athlete has actually been doing.
• Build one week template per phase from your exercise library and apply it.
• Review planned versus actual load with the athlete every week or two, and adjust the plan rather than forcing the athlete to fit it.
• Schedule at least one deload week in every block of hard training.