I told you so! I was never going to stick to the 30-day challenge. However, the good news is that I managed to incorporate semi-consistent pull-up training into my warm-up routine for bouldering and I’m still working on it. This is also why you are getting a week 10 update on a 30-day challenge 🙂
I realized around the two week mark, that I was further away from completing a pull-up with good form than I initially thought. The 30-day time window I gave myself for this challenge was not going to be enough. This was quite demotivating, and I fell off the wagon for a bit right before Christmas. I did not even bother to test if I could do a pull-up once Christmas came around. Thankfully during the time between Christmas and New Year I was working on my training plan for our next ultramarathon adventure in 2022. Upon some reflection I recognized that I could be more successful if I approached my climbing training just like I do my running.
Consistency over motivation!
This is by no means a new concept but one that I found to be not only true but also very advantageous for my own mindset whilst working towards fitness goals. Motivation can be fleeting and is a limited resource. Especially if you are a person with many interests, this limited resource could be divided between too many other things. Therefore, it is dangerous to rely only on motivation for your training and it is much more efficient to implement structures and routines which cut out the need for motivation. If you manage to eliminate as much friction as possible to get the task started in the first place, you are much more likely to complete your training consistently and you will see the results of that consistency.
For the pull-up training I can’t look at it as a separate training session from bouldering, because for me it is too much friction to add it somewhere else in my day/week. Therefore, I decided to add it as warm-up routine to most of my bouldering sessions. This might not be the ideal training design, but it is better than not doing it at all. I’m glad to report that I’ve been much more consistent with it since the beginning of January. I do feel stronger and I’m getting closer to sending a few 6B boulders, which I’m very excited about! I plan to do a testing session fairly soon though, so stay tuned.