Greetings all,
P.S.- sorry for the shameless self promotion. I hope its not offensive to anyone.

P.S.- sorry for the shameless self promotion. I hope its not offensive to anyone.

Well I'm not offended and I am most likely the most uptight asswipe around here when it comes to blog promotion, so I think you are safe.

I never noticed you were fluxus. I will definitely be buying Redpoint, the SCC is a great book.

Well I'm not offended and I am most likely the most uptight asswipe around here when it comes to blog promotion, so I think you are safe.

I never noticed you were fluxus. I will definitely be buying Redpoint, the SCC is a great book.

Greetings all,

For those who don't know me I am one of the authors of the self-coached Climber and I have been posting here at RC.com since 2003, mostly under the name Fluxus. I started posting under my own name a little while back.

I wanted to just let everyone know about some news. First, our follow-up to the Self-Coached Climber titled Redpoint is going to be available for sale any day now.

Second, Dan has been working single handedly on our blog (http://www.selfcoachedclimber.com) for a while, and I have just started posting too, To kick off my participation I am doing a multi-week series on the topic of training program design. It will cover many topics including sport-specific training, efficiency, primary and supplemental training among others. We are also going to be posting videos, audio content and just trying to make it a great place for people who want to discuss and learn about training.


Here is an snipit from my first post:

"Good program design does the following:
1) Understands the proper uses of, and difference between training activities and how to organize them into primary and supplemental activities; between sport specific and more general activities, and conditioning.
2) Develops and refine the essential skills that are the basis of performance in the sport.
3) Is efficient, it should produce the largest possible performance gains with as little effort as possible. This might seem counter intuitive, after all we are supposed to work hard when training, right? Yes, working hard is essential to training but the question is, how much work is needed to make a specific gain? You shouldn’t work any longer or harder than necessary at each step of your training program.
4) Is as simple as possible; this is especially true for programs designed for climbers new to training. As a general rule complexity is harder to manage day to day, can take longer to provide results, and can be confusing. It’s often difficult to tell what part, or parts of a complex program are working and which are not. This is not a call to over simplify, it’s a call to only make things as complex as they need to be. . . ."

Please check out the blog, and feel free to participate. Thanks!

-Douglas

P.S.- sorry for the shameless self promotion. I hope its not offensive to anyone.

Why should I buy Redpoint? I loved the SCC, but it seems like twenty odd bucks is a steep price to pay for a book full of tactics. Sell me the book.

12c

[quote=urprofile]12c

you should be sold, bro

Why should I buy Redpoint? I loved the SCC, but it seems like twenty odd bucks is a steep price to pay for a book full of tactics. Sell me the book.

Shipped on October 2, 2011

delivery estimate: November 14, 2011

I don't get it.

AFTER ITS OUT- HAVE SOMEONE DOWNLOAD IT ON THE INTERNET FOR YOU LIKE A PIRATE DVD! i'M NOT SAYING IF THIS IS LEGAL BUT .....

This adds so much to the discussion.

I was joking that you are weak and should obviously try to improve your red pointing. Probably wasn't clear for the cheesetitting of the quote

your reply didn't really convey that message

Fair enough. While its true that the book contains many tactical suggestions, its not just about making suggestions. We address the challenges of applying tactics, and in the video we analyze my application of tactics on both an onsight and a second try redpoint. So you see the tactics in action in a way that is more difficult to do in other contexts.

Second, we wrote more about on-sight climbing than has ever been written previously. For me one of the challenges of writing about on-sight climbing is that no one has yet provided a good descriptive model for what the brain and the body are actually doing in an on-sight. I felt it was important to provide the best description of the cognitive challenges involved in onsighting as I could. To this end I took the model of motor learning laid out in TSSC and use it as a vehicle for understanding the really unique challenge that an onsight provides in the world of sport, and for understanding the different demands that are made of the climber at different points in the on-sight process. On-sighting is really unique and frankly a bit bizarre as athletic challenges go, and I really hope my description gets climbers more excited about onsighting by deepening their understanding and appreciation of its challenges.

Also we include history, and in the introduction we describe what was going on in climbing in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s that eventually let to the concepts of redpoint and onsight being so widely embraced by the climbing community. Placing the concept of redpointing within the greater context of climbing history is interesting. While I don't like to use the word evolution, changes in beliefs and tactics in the climbing community over time allowed for redpointing to arise as a type of ascent. Imagine what our thinking would have been like in the 1980s without someone like Gill applying the aestheitic model that he developed in previous decades. also the rise in the idea of projecting and yo-yoing in the 1970s created tensions and problems to which redpointing was a pretty good answer.

when it comes to redpointing our approach is a bit different from other authors whom I would say take an achievement based approach to redpointing, while our approach is learning and processed based. Further we describe different ranges of redpoint performance describing the difference in tactics, learning, fitness and expectations between a 2 or 3 try redpoint and say, a 15 try redpoint. They share the same name of "redpoint" but they are totally different performances and we describe why.

I don't know if that helps but those are some of the features of the book that I think are important and that really can't be found in other sources.


P.S.- shout out to Jason!

Good stuff, Douglas.

If I remember correctly, way back when I reviewed your first book, my chief complaint was that while it hit technique and the kniesiology (sp?) of it all in fine detail, it skipped around redpointing and onsighting like a 6 year old girl on a doll store. It needed equal attention, I said, or it should have been left out completely. I believe you or Dan responded soon after that you were saving it for a second book. I'm really glad to see it come to fruition! I can't wait to get my greasy mitts on this one, too.

Thanks for the long reply.

One of my favorite parts of the SCC was the training plans for climbers at different grades. Is there anything like this in Redpoint, hopefully with more detail?

SCC was great, looking forward to this.

Great if the blog will be more frequently updated as well.

Blog topic to consider:
Concurrent training. Which types of training should or should not be combined in a single session.

Maintaining vs progressing.
And how does it change the weekly training volume if you for example want to increase your anaerobic endurance, but you feel that you lose strength quickly if you stop bouldering. Or vice versa. How much is necessary to maintain compared to how much is needed to progress.

Tactics for volume.
How do you get used to 4-5 hour sessions indoors. Like 30 min warmup, 90 min submaximal movement, 15 min rest, 45 min fitness, and 30 min cooldown. Tactics and quick tips for getting used to doing that kind of volume om a regular basis.