Dave MacLeod - E11 trad climber, author of two bestselling books on training for rock climbing, climbing injuries and climbing coaching.
For a wee while I’ve wanted to solo the popular line that runs the full height of Creag Dubh: King Bee Direct. I wondered if the new bolt belay that was placed halfway up the route, after pitch 2, might have allowed the top two pitches to become a bit dirty (I was correct!). So I cleaned them both first. Video of my solo on my channel now. As always, it was a fun challenge to climb and film at the…
A short video exploring whether carbs are essential for high intensity sport and training, and how people on keto or carnivore diets appear to defy the rules of sports nutrition. References mentioned in the video are listed below. 1. Burke, L.M., et al., Low carbohydrate, high fat diet impairs exercise economy and negates the performance benefit from intensified training in elite race walkers. J…
Stetind, a mountain I’ve wanted to climb for many years, hopefully via a new route. I was last in Norway for big wall new routing almost a decade ago. A new route on the excellent rock spire of Stetind was next on my list. But soon afterwards I decided I should stop flying for environmental reasons, so a return trip never happened. I thought perhaps if I one day saved up for an electric car to…
A few years ago I bolted a brilliant line across the big roof on Beinn an Lochain, but never got round to trying it. After I returned to the crag on a flying visit with Magnus Midtbø, I was a bit captured by the crag and bolted and climbed several other new lines, cleaned several more of the existing lines, and then got to work on the big roof. It was as much a battle with the terrible summer rain…
I’ve always tried to be an all round climber in terms of performance. But just because you spread yourself thinly across disciplines in performance doesn’t mean you should do the same in training. In this video about a lovely and hard project, I explore the results of an adventure in specialising to try and improve my skills as a generalist. It was a rough ride! My course on climbing technique is…
Some climbers don't believe me when I say I don't get nervous before attempts on hard routes. Here I explain how I do it. If you are interested in some more coaching content from me, my course on climbing movement technique on Magnus Midtbø’s platform Altitude is about to open: https://altitudeclimbing.com/davemacleod
Should you drink the green supplement drink AG1? Or is the obvious alternative actually far superior? In this episode, I discuss several papers linked below: https://doi.org/10.1016/S2352-3026(23)00160-6 10.1016/S2214-109X(22)00367-9 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00421-019-04157-y https://doi.org/10.3390/life13102007 10.1016/j.jsams.2019.12.027…
Social media is geared up to distort the realities of training, detraining and breaking through plateaus. Sure, skills and milestones can be acheived quickly and it's important to see demonstrations of how effective a singular goal and plan to achieve it can be. However, some plateaus (not those caused by lack of training) are not generally broken in this way. I just posted up a new YouTube video…
For about 6 months I’ve been working with Magnus Mitdbø on a course for his platform Altitude. My course is on movement technique for climbers and it releases in a few days time. If you’d like to see a free video series from the course, focused on footwork, you can check it out here . Anyway, Magnus said he wanted to come over to Scotland for a couple of days climbing. Despite a stormy forecast, I…
It has been a while since I’ve made a how to climb trad video. I think what the series really needed next was a collaboration with someone learning to lead. Mike Boyd had done a short lead on gritstone before, but is still very much in the early stages of his climbing. We met up at Polney Crag and had a great day climbing and the video was a good opportunity to highlight the key aspect that holds…
It's been a long time since I bought some new holds for the board. It was time for some fresh circuits and I go through my process for setting and designing the layout of the board.
Trad grades - they are inexact, hard to pin down and cause folk lots of confusion. In this video I discuss how I grade trad routes and how I insulate myself from the controversies that often accompany them. I also offer a grade for Echo Wall on Ben Nevis.
A few weeks ago I picked up a mild A2 pulley injury in my finger. As many of you know, I wrote a whole chapter in Make or Break about finger injuries, but I thought I would make an episode showing you how I work around it to keep training despite the finger injury. Obviously, copying exactly what I do here is not the objective - every injury is different. It's about the general principle of…
A film I made over on the Fort William Mountain Festival channel about Caitlin Connor - an ice comp and dry tooling specialist. It was pretty tough to film this and not join in with the training! Caitlin received the Youth Award for Excellence in Mountain Culture this year. If you would like to nominate a young person making an important contribution in the mountains for this award, you can do so…
The 'quality' of recovery from training will determine the size of your gains. But this is a tricky thing to pin down. In this video I explain what makes a good rest day activity and why rest quantity is always a moving target.
I thought it was about time I made some videos related to your questions about climbing/training. I asked my supporters on Patreon for their questions and picked a few related ones to tackle first: What would I change or revise in my book 9 out of 10 climbers make the same mistakes? How I organise and keep track of research? How I deal with moderation and fuelling on high and low carb diets and…
Back when you started climbing, finding motivation wasn’t really a big deal for a lot of folk. Yet for some, it becomes a real issue later on. In this episode I explore this and offer a simple (not not always easy) solution.
In June I had my fourth ankle surgery. I managed to get back to climbing E10 in a few months with a few key strategies and tactics I describe in this video.
In this discussion with Joe French, we explore what Joe did to recover from post traumatic stress and mental health issues. In my mind, the simple activities he describes, which can be practiced in many different forms, are a big missing piece of many athlete’s training programs and also of mental health therapy. We cover why the ‘barefoot’ part of barefoot running is only half the picture, cold…
Here is the first of several videos I’d like to make on supplements I don’t take and why. First up is collagen. I’ve seen sports nutritionists say that every climber should be taking it. In this video I take a look at the research and explain why I don’t. Below are the references from the video: 1. Thompson, J.C., et al., Origins of the Human Predatory Pattern: The Transition to Large-Animal…