The Self-Coached Climber: The Guide to Movement Training Performance

I've read and been through just about eery other training book for rock climbing. This is the first book that reads like a textbook for school. It breaks things down into a science, increasing your understanding and vocabulary of how climbing works enabling you to cognitively apply practical skills immediately. Unlike other books, this one instructs the reader how to actually construct a training plan and what excercises to perform for his/her level based on what level they are trying to reach instead of simply stating the obvious, "to get better you need to train." This book is a must read for anyone looking to train for climbing and a bible for any serious climber looking to amp up their training regime.

The Self-Coached Climber provides superb instruction on the subject of climbing movement, yet only limited coverage of the important subjects of strength and mental training (and no coverage of injuries, injury prevention, recovery, and nutrition). Read Self-Coached Climber as a complement to the more comprehensive Training For Climbing (which provides excellent coverage of the "missing" topics in SCC) and The Rock Warrior's Way. All three books are good reads that will help you climb better.

There are many rock climbing books, but none adequately prepares a beginner to understand the basics of climbing and how to improve like this one. The older standards, like Performance Rock Climbing, Climbing, and Rock Climbing, verbosely cover the material. Page after page of descriptions do not do it for me. This book provides great descriptions, reviews fundamentals, and contains excellent illustrations that make everything more clear. In addition, the DVD shows movement techniques and more. By following the book and video, I evolved quickly from a novice to an intermediate climber. Traverses and laps on all wall routes in my gym are now possible for me and easy.

This makes "Performance Rock Climbing" completely obsolete (great in it's day, way outdated now). And it blows "Training for Climbing" away with better content on movement training and a DVD that brings it all together. The authors have clearly put a lot of time and research into this book -- it's technical but very readable.

This is a must-have for anyone serious about hard rock. BUT it has zero content about nutrition or injury prevention and recovery; serious oversights that are covered best in "Climbing: Training for Peak Performance" (a great book but more for alpine climbers and weekend rock warriors). For example, it doesn't warn how easy it is to hurt an ACL doing a drop knee or even discuss an A2 pulley injury. And you really can't climb at your best if you aren't eating well. Despite these short-comings, Self-Coached Climber rocks!