 Our first caller is Seth from North Carolina. Hey Seth, how can we help you? Hey guys, what's up? I have been weight training for about two years now, and I've definitely put on a good foundational physique and built quite a bit of muscle in that time. But in the past like six months or so, I've started rock climbing a whole lot. And what I'm trying to figure out is how I can supplement the rock climbing to continue like pushing my performance to the next level with like strength and physique. But also like a lot of the guys in my gym are very, very skinny. And I am not that. I'm a little more on the broad shoulder stocky side. And I didn't know if you guys had trained rock climbers before, if you knew sort of some things that could help like supplement that training. Yeah, that's a great question. So I've trained two rock climbers in the past. Now here's the deal with strength, right? So we can categorize strength a few different ways. One way is to categorize it as absolute strength, meaning the total amount of weight that you can lift. Like I can squat 300 pounds, and then if I train real hard and I can squat 400 pounds, my absolute strength has improved. Then there's relative strength. And relative strength is much more applicable to rock climbing. And this is the strength that you have in relation to your body weight. Okay, so let's just say for argument's sake, you were able to maintain your current level of strength. You didn't go down at all, but you lost 30 pounds on the scale. You'd be much stronger relatively speaking to your body weight, and that would make you a much better rock climber. So this is why when you look at really, really good rock climbers, they tend to be kind of skinny, super lean, wiry, lean-looking people. It's because they're strong, but they're also very light. They have a lot of relative strength. Then of course, there's the obvious stuff, which is a lot of grip strength. You also want to have really, really good shoulder, hip, and ankle mobility. Shoulder mobility is obvious. Obviously, you're reaching above your head, and you have to hang and that kind of stuff. You also want to have really good hip and ankle mobility because the feet, and when you're kicking your leg up, you want to get up to a really, really high foothold or whatever. Really good mobility is going to help. What does this mean for your workouts? Well, it means being big and muscular is going to be a disadvantage. You want to be limber, strong, and light. So that's the way you're going to want to model your training. Seth, do you have MAPS OCR? I do not. Doug, you're going to have to hook them up with that because I think this is the perfect program for what you're trying to accomplish. OCR obviously is geared towards obstacle course racing, but a lot of the attributes that you want as a rock climber are going to fit perfectly in there. The only thing I would tell you is, if you don't care about the running, because there's quite a bit of running that's inside that program, I would just supplement that out for my rock climbing. Do that, I've said. That program should be perfect. There's a lot of emphasis on grip strength and their enhanced strength, which is unlike the other programs specifically. One other case that I was going to present was more around prime-prime-pro, driven just because of what Sal mentioned in terms of mobility, but if you've ever done any kind of kin stretch where you've put heavy emphasis on isometric tension in these positions where, it's going to be more advantageous to you to be able to connect even further down from your fingers to your toes and be able to stretch that capacity, how much force you can generate in positions. Some of those moves in prime-pro are fantastic for that. So that's something that I would consider as well. Yeah, and Seth, I have another question for you. What is more important to you? Is it to look muscular and aesthetic, kind of like more like a physique competitor would look? You go ahead and say me. You can say me if I can see you. Right, right. Kind of like two-sided. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or is it more important to you that you do really well at rock climbing? I would say that it's more important to me that I maintain just a nice physique. It doesn't have to be big and muscular like physique competitor-wise. So I'd say the performance and getting better at rock climbing is more important. Okay, so if rock climbing is more important to you, then I would definitely focus on less on building mass, especially in the lower body and more on building that kind of relative strength and strength endurance. For the lower body, I tell you what, your split stance and single leg exercises are your best friend. We talk about barbell squats all the time and how awesome they are. But this is a case where I could easily make a case that single leg step ups and lunges and single leg deadlifts are probably going to be more... You're going to get more carry over to rock climbing than you would with a barbell squat. Awesome, right, man? Thank you, Seth. All right, thank you guys so much. Yeah, that's a hard trade-off for people sometimes, right? They want to look a particular way, but then their sport requires them to look a different way. It's just like, what do I do? Yeah, there's a point where it kind of inhibits what you're trying to do with your sport, so you have to kind of balance that and see what is the priority there. And if you're doing running, rock climbing, you're doing a lot of cardio, vascular things, it's inevitable that you're probably going to lose some weight and lean out, which a lot of times you'll lose a little bit of strength. I mean, we were just talking about this morning off-air. I was saying how I needed to lean out. The last week and a half or so, I've dropped about five pounds. Of course, a lot of that's water weight, but I dropped five, six pounds and came back to incline dumbbell press today, and I struggled with the weight that I moved relatively easy just a week and a half ago. And what you have to understand is you can't freak out. You can't go, oh, my God, I'm getting weaker week over week. I'm leaning out. And back to your point, Sal, it's all relative to my body weight. So technically, I'm as strong or stronger because I'm a smaller person this week than I was before. I ran into this when I was grappling a lot when I did judo or jiu-jitsu. I'm gonna get big and strong in the gym, and then I move up in a weight class. Now I'm against guys that are bigger and stronger and many of them bigger and stronger and easy in that weight class, whereas I'd have to push my body weight. They've lived in that weight. Exactly. And this is how it is for a lot of different sports, especially ones. Now, some sports, relative strength is important, but not as important as overall strength. I mean, if you're a lineman and you're playing football, your body weight is also important. You're a big, strong dude. You don't want to be a smaller, relatively strong dude. You want to be a big, absolute strong guy when you're on the line, so it depends a lot on what you want to do.