Why tracking your training matters

Ask a climber how much they trained last month and most will give a confident answer. Ask them to write it down session by session and the confidence usually fades. Human memory is good at stories and poor at totals. We remember the brilliant session and the awful one, and forget the ordinary ones in between, which is where most training actually happens.

Tracking your training fixes that. Not with complicated technology, but with a few honest numbers recorded consistently.

What tracking gives you

A true picture of what you did

The most basic benefit is simply knowing. How many sessions per week? How long? How hard? Many climbers who start logging discover they train either more or less than they thought, or that their "easy" sessions are not very easy at all.

A way to manage load

Training works by applying stress and then recovering from it. Too little stress and nothing changes; too much, too suddenly, and the body cannot keep up. Measuring load helps you sit in the useful middle.

A practical method is session RPE, described by Foster and colleagues (2001): rate how hard a session felt from 1 to 10 and multiply by its duration in minutes. It is simple, it works for very different types of training, and it reflects the load on you as a person, not just the work done. Our post on session RPE training load goes into the details.

Early warning signs

Several lines of research suggest that rapid increases in training load, relative to what an athlete is used to, are associated with a higher chance of injury. Gabbett (2016) brought this idea to a wide audience with the acute:chronic workload ratio. Later researchers, including Impellizzeri and colleagues (2020), raised important statistical and conceptual concerns about the ratio itself. The broad principle that big sudden jumps deserve caution is widely accepted; how precisely any single number can predict injury is very much debated. We cover both sides in the ACWR explained and its limitations.

Load is only part of the picture. How you sleep, how sore you are and how you feel in the morning also say something about whether you are coping. That is why simple morning check-ins are worth considering alongside your logs.

Evidence that the plan works

If your climbing is improving while your load is sensible, the plan is working. If you have trained consistently for months and your hardest sends have not moved, that is useful information too. Without records, it is very hard to tell a plateau from bad luck.

Better conversations with your coach

A coach who can see your sessions, efforts and notes does not have to rely on a quick chat at the wall. They can see patterns, such as fatigue building over several weeks, and adjust before it becomes a problem.

You cannot manage what you cannot see. Tracking does not make decisions for you, but it shows you what you are deciding about.

What is worth recording

You do not need to record everything. For most climbers the essentials are:

The secret is consistency. A short entry after every session is worth far more than a detailed one once a fortnight.

Common pitfalls

• Logging only the good sessions. Bad days are data too.
• Treating numbers as targets. Chasing a load figure for its own sake misses the point.
• Over-reacting to one week. Look at trends over several weeks, not single values.
• Ignoring how you feel. If the numbers say fine but your body says otherwise, listen to your body and talk to your coach. Persistent pain is a reason to see a doctor or physiotherapist.

In Train Climb

• Log every session for the next four weeks, including the short and easy ones.
• After two weeks, look at your weekly load on the progress page; after a few more, the acute:chronic ratio will appear.
• Add your recent sends to the climbing journal so you can compare load with performance.
• If you are new, start with logging a session in 30 seconds.