I’ve had a bit of a break from exercising, but I’m almost back at my normal level of fitness. Let’s re-evaluate my goals.
Frequency goals
- Go to the gym 1-2x per week (shorter bouldering session + StairMaster cardio session)
- Go to an actual bouldering gym 1-2x per week (longer bouldering session)
- Breathing exercise 1-2x per day – Buteyko breathing, Wim Hof, whatever
- Short home exercises on non-gym days – any of these routines
- Aim for 6 active days and 1 rest day per week
The first two I’m already doing. I’m starting with breathing exercises today, I think I should work on making that a routine before I pick up home exercises again.
Body parts I want to work on
- Improve big toe muscles (abductor hallucis and flexor hallucis longus), both strength and neuromuscular awareness. I need to work on these to improve my posture chain and prevent foot/ankle/knee/hip pain and injuries. For instance this exercise
- Finger tendons. I’m scared of injury so I’m very careful with these, which means that they’re most often the limiting factor in my bouldering sessions.
- Forearm antagonist muscles. Climbing strengthens some specific grip muscles in your forearms, and I’ve noticed that if I don’t work on the antagonist muscles as well, I eventually get elbow issues.
- Core strengthening. Working on this has improved my climbing much more than I thought it would.
Fitness tracking goals
I’m really not a fan of apps, but for bouldering, Toplogger is great. I would like to use it more consistently. Unfortunately my local gym is not on there, but the actual climbing gyms I go to are. I want to use this to track my climbing level.
Besides that, I want to use some sort of habit tracker for the following things:
- Breathing exercises: when, how long
- StairMaster: when, how long, how many steps
- Bouldering: when, where, how long
- Exercise: which routine, how many circuits, exercise specific things
Since I don’t like apps, and I always forget spreadsheets, I’m thinking of doing something on this website. Perhaps I can use a WordPress plugin or write something myself. To be continued.