Two Sessions a Week Is Enough
June 15, 2025 · 3 min read
For most of last year I tried to climb three or four times a week, because that is what the stronger people at the wall seemed to do, and because more felt like it had to be better. What actually happened was that by the third session my skin was raw, my forearms were tight before I had touched a hold, and I was climbing worse than I had on Monday. I was also spending a lot of evenings away from home for the privilege of climbing badly.
In March I cut back to two sessions a week, a Tuesday and a Saturday, with at least two full days between them. The first few weeks felt like going backwards. I missed the routine of just being at the wall. But the Saturday sessions started to be noticeably better: fresh skin, no lingering soreness, and the ability to try something hard with genuine effort rather than just going through the motions.
Three months in I am climbing the same grade I was in February, which sounds like no progress, except that in February I was doing that grade on my best day out of four and now I do it on both days out of two. More tellingly, I have not had a tweaked finger or an aching elbow since the change, after a winter in which something always hurt.
Being in my forties is part of this. I recover more slowly than I did at twenty-five and no amount of enthusiasm changes that. Sleep turned out to matter more than I wanted it to: the sessions after a bad night are consistently worse, enough that I have started treating a short night as a reason to do easy volume rather than attempt anything at my limit.
The other thing that two sessions gave me was time for the boring work. Fifteen minutes of shoulder exercises with a band, some wrist curls, the hip mobility routine. None of that happened when I was climbing four days a week because I was always either climbing or recovering from climbing. I will not pretend that two sessions is the optimal number for everyone; it is the number that let me stop being injured, which for an average adult might be the same thing.