Comment by tomxor
3 years ago
:D thanks for the illustrative insight. I don't have much experience with that one, but can recommend rock climbing, which I've been doing for most of my life, it exercises pretty much everything. As something that demands good power to weight ratio you tend to drop the useless stuff.
Don't get me wrong, climbing can help you build muscle that's very aesthetic - arms, core, shoulders - but the "useless stuff" that people drop is what's useless for climbing, not other sports.
The conventional training wisdom (I learned about it from the Anderson Bros in RCTM, but others advocate it too) is to avoid carrying too much weight on your glutes/quads etc. I.e. skip leg day. So that's probably in conflict with also trying to maximize MTB performance.
I was referring to fat, and when it comes to power to weight ratio it's utterly useless. However it's true there is a bias towards upper body in climbing, but probably not as much of a bias that some other sports put on the body like cycling or running. You don't really grow big muscles, relatively speaking, climbing makes you lean and works out your entire body, after a certain point larger muscles actually become a burden... though strong feet and calf muscles are vital to be able to stick around on tiny feet holds and execute high tension manoeuvrers.
I would agree that doing a lot of cycling/mtb would probably have a slight negative affect on your climbing ability, i'm not sure about the reverse though - what most people don't realise is that climbing is a very technical sport, and you are totally using your legs most of the time, in fact one of the most obvious identifying behaviours in novices is people hauling themselves up walls using their arms and getting tired really quickly - it's not constant cut loose campusing, those are only the most extreme moves, the crux of a hard climb or a boulder problem.