EFFECTIVENESS, EFFICIENCY AND EVERYTHING ELSE

Professor. Juan Martin Miranda (Marvin)

I have long seen futile efforts to progress in climbing from improving isolated performance factors without a corresponding transfer to the sporting gesture.

It seems very easy to copy the videos of the large climbers training a campus, pegboard or gym and consider that one will be able to approach their mastery level if you follow the same plan. But in reality, all we see as a result are useless and dangerous efforts, since so much effort does not result in an improvement of its level of climbing and the risk of injury that comes with undergoing certain exercise without its corresponding methodological progression and load control.

How simple it seems to get on campus, do weighted pull ups, etc., but how difficult it is to progress when facing complex movements, and / or sequences that require not only pulling the arms, but locating the body in space to be able to execute the movements with the least power supply, thus getting over the boulder or reaching the top of a route.

But let’s get to the point I’m interested in showing. When we talk about effectiveness we mean the ability to realize the desired effect through an action (in our case make a movement, a boulder or reach the top of a route), but we must not confuse it with the term efficiency, since the latter involves the rational use of the means to achieve the objective. In relation to the body, or to climbing, efficiency is the relationship in the work performed and the energy consumed to perform it.

Let’s look at the image below, perhaps my friends pulling the cart with square wheels will be effective in taking it to their destination, but how efficient they would be by changing the wheels to round ones.

Every time I see climbers with a poor gestural background trying to progress from increasing their strength of arms, fingers, etc., in my mind this image appears, but not only by the fact that they believe they will have more strength to effectively take the cart to the finish line, but they do not realize that the resources to do it efficiently carry them around them carry them around , as in this case the round wheels in the carriage.

An inefficient movement is like driving a car with the handbrake on; you’re not going to get there too fast and you’re going to get worn out in the process. Unfortunately most people think the solution is to put a bigger engine.

The central nervous system will always try to become more efficient, but for them we need to show them what are the possible paths so that you can choose the most economical of all. This requires practice.

Efficient movements mean optimal technical gestures for each task, with the minimum energy required for its realization.

In climbing efficiency is everything, energy waste is paid very expensive.

With this I am not saying that the tensile force, the strength of the finger flexors are not a determining factor for performance. What I mean is that we must apply the resources as necessary, at the right time, without skipping stages.

Already a few years ago the Grand master Yury Verkhoshansky proposed to us the main law of the sports training process

The ability to effectively harness the body’s motor potential grows exponentially in the first half of the race to achieve sporting mastery, without the need for large training influences. At first what we have is enough to improve, just apply the right thing. For them we must strive to use our resources efficiently, without wasting the means and training methods that will be useful to us later.

We must consider learning and training the technique as the first content of the training, and if it is necessary to increase the levels of other capabilities to correctly perform the technique, we must evaluate it and put it into practice.

Improving any capability involves a modification of movement patterns. If we exclusively train the tensile force without a corresponding transfer to the technical gesture, we will become effective in solving by driving, but not efficient in the global movement.

To be efficient, the first thing we must remove are the barriers that prevent the proper gesture, it can be by a poor gestural background, a limitation of freedom of movement (mainly due to lack of mobility), and ultimately the limits of force and resistance specific to perform the gestures.

It all starts with the technique and for this you need practice; already MacLeod within his big four (technique, finger strength, endurance and body weight) raises the need to exercise the technique through specific driles, which allow, as a tennis player does by practicing hundreds/thousands of times his serve, generate the patterns of movements so that our brain can choose the next time we encounter the need to make a similar movement.

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