So I got you all thinking with that last blog on my theory about getting pumped. Let's dig into it a bit more, because I want to clear a few things up. This stuff isn't anywhere near as black and white as our brains would love it to be.
Confession time. I oversimplified in the last post. I made it sound like there's only one mode for good performance, and that's simply not true. Regulating your nervous system isn't on or off, calm or not calm. Our nervous system, like everything else about us, is ridiculously complex. There's usually more than one thing going on at a time, and all of it runs on a continuum.
So it would be easy to walk away from my last blog thinking coke bottle mode, the sympathetic system, is the enemy. That the goal is to get calm, breathe it all out and float up the wall like some sort of climbing monk. It's a lovely image, and it does happen sometimes but for most of us our projects are hard and we have to try hard. The sympathetic system is what lets us engage the try hard. Let's call that battle mode. If you're walking up to a hard redpoint, you're going to battle, and you want to be in battle mode. You want your body, and your mind to a degree, switched on and ready to engage. So the activation itself isn't really the problem. The trouble starts when it boils over. There's activated and there's overactivated. Activated is battle mode, and overactivated is coke bottle mode, where you're squeezing jugs like they owe you money.
So the skill in regulation is being aware of where you are on that continuum, what level you're sitting at, and where the thing in front of you actually needs you to be. Then learning how to get yourself there. That's what we mean when we talk about regulating your system. And it'll look different from person to person, and between a steep power boulder and a long pumpy route.
And this is where it gets tricky. There isn't one continuum for the whole of you. Your mind and your body can be sitting in completely different states at the very same time. I can have a mind that's overthinking, racing, about four coffees too switched on, sitting on top of a body that isn't anywhere near primed to pull hard. If someone told me to calm down in that moment (and please, never tell a climber to calm down), they'd only be solving half the problem. My mind might need to come down a notch while my body needs to come up a whole lot.
Here's an experience I had recently. I was on a route with a hard crux right at the start. I'd climb the intro, preclip three draws, then downclimb to a rest. In that rest I'd work on calming my nerves and my anxious brain, because both were definitely stopping me climbing freely. I ran that same mental routine over a few goes and promptly fell off the first hard move of the crux every single time. What I eventually twigged was that in calming my mind for the quiet focus I needed, I'd also calmed my body, right down to the point where I had basically put slippers on and was ready for the couch. When it came time to try hard, my body was in no state to go to battle unless it was with which series to chose on netflix. So on the next go I calmed my mind as usual, but right before I committed I deliberately psyched the activation back up in my body. I needed two regulation states at once, a calm mind and a body ready for battle.
So regulation is being aware of where you are, recognising where each part of you needs to be, and purposefully nudging a little closer to that. There's no master switch for the whole of you, and 100% calm is not the target. Rather the target keeps moving. A powerful single move wants a fired up body under a committed mind. A long pumpy pitch wants a body that isn't strangling every hold, with a mind that stays on task. A scary runout might be mostly about a calm, settled head. There's no single regulated setting you're aiming for, which I know is annoying, because one simple setting would be so much easier to sell you.
Which leaves the obvious question, the one everyone asks me. How on earth do you try as hard as you physically can and keep your mind relaxed at the same time, when those two sound like total opposites?
Remember Usain Bolt breathing his way down the 100m? That's what it looks like. A body going absolutely flat out with a head settled enough to let it. It's exactly what that effortless looking climbing on hard ground is made of. A ferociously busy body sitting under a calm head. Your body and your mind each get their own setting, and you can turn one up while you turn the other down. The two are not competing for one setting. They each have their own, and both can be true at once.
And the good news, I think, is that this is a skill, and nobody gets handed it at birth. The nervous system learns. The state you climb in can be trained, the same patient way you built your finger strength. Possibly with fewer 4x4s.
See you in the Lab
Kerrin