Quarry Climbing Team: Slow Down, but Don't Stop

Have you ever been climbing, and ¾ of the way up the route decide you can’t finish? Or maybe you aren’t even that far, maybe after a couple of moves you are feeling fatigued and like you can’t possibly stick one more move? What if I told you that the belief that you must stop, is actually just a signal from your brain that you need to slow down? You have the energy, stamina, and power to continue, just at a slower pace. Would you believe me?

Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if you said no. Only recently popular science would have agreed with me. For many years, the Cardiovascular/Anaerobic Model has been held as the gold standard for explaining exercise induced fatigue and the cause of performance limitations. This model states that fatigue is an involuntary drop in performance caused by a loss of homeostasis.¹ Homeostasis is defined as the ability of the body to maintain a condition of stability within, while dealing with external changes.² A simple example of this is sweating. When our internal temperature rises either do to exercise or to a rise in ambient temperature, our body begins to sweat to remove the heat and maintain our internal temperature.

During exercise, a shift away from homeostasis is caused by a loss of energy stores in the muscles, a rise in blood lactate levels, or reaching maximum oxygen uptake (VO2 max). These and many other factors cause our stable internal environment to be lost, resulting in fatigue and the need to stop climbing/exercising in order to restore homeostasis. This model tells us that as climbers, hikers, or what have you, that once we reach our max, where our bodies are screaming that they are done and our mind says we must not go on, that we are simply finished and must stop. I find this very hard to believe, based on multiple personal experiences I will share just one example here.

Last weekend I went with the Utah Climbing Club to climb Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. It was my first time climbing something so high, climbing a multi-pitch, and climbing crack. Really, I am amazed I even decided to go. I struggled through pitches one and two, having not practiced crack climbing prior I was climbing very inefficiently and expending a lot of unnecessary energy, in other words I was becoming fatigued fast. When I was on the third pitch almost ¾ of the way done with the climb my energy felt like it was completely spent and I was thinking lots of negative thoughts like, “There is no way I am finishing this, I am done, how am I going to get off this wall, what was I thinking”. Despite all the negative self talk, I started to focus on my breath and calmed down a little bit. I then started studying the rock and the route and realized that I was so close to the top, and that finishing would not require too much effort. Now I am certain that if my desire to quit was caused 100% by muscle fatigue I would still be hanging off the side of that tower. However, research has shown that there is a mental aspect to physical fatigue.³

The Central Governor Model (CGM) is rapidly gaining support in the academic world of sports psychology. The CGM was proposed by Dr. Tim Noakes and claims that our “brain acts as a central governor when exercising, limiting our ability to push beyond perceived fatigue to ensure self-preservation.”³Fatigue in this case is a sensation sent by the unconscious mind to the conscious mind to prevent loss of homeostasis and complete exhaustion.³ So what you feel during a strenuous activity is actually the brain sending a message to slow down so as to avoid serious injury or death.”³When determining if the body has reached fatigue the mind/central governor takes into account feedback from the muscles and heart, external stimuli, knowledge of ongoing results, and past experience to determine if you are going to far. However, our mind has a tendency to throw in the towel early and be overly cautious. With a little bit of will power and proper training we can push ourselves past the perceived threshold our mind places on our potential. There are several training techniques that will allow you to do this. I will cover some of them in next weeks post along with references to find more.