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I was honored and excited to interview the great Steve Bechtel, a long-time climber and trainer who knows his stuff when it comes to getting strong, honing in on individual training needs, and staying lean, among many other things. Steve runs ClimbStrong.com, a website where he writes articles and training programs for climbers. You can subscribe to the site to get full access to all of his info. He also runs a gym in Lander, WY called Elemental Fitness, where he works with climbers and athletes of all kinds.

I've been following Steve's stuff for a while, and I post his articles on our own Facebook page because I consider him an expert in a field that has very few experts (climbing training). But I wanted to interview him partially for selfish reasons - I'll be honest ;) We took a few minutes of the interview to use me as sort of a guinea pig. I asked him what he'd do with me right now while I'm trying to send a powerful, pretty short route at my limit. He gave me some great advice.

I also asked him as many other technical questions as I could, and tried to make those questions applicable to as many people as possible, so you can take some usable advice from this conversation. After all, that's the mission of TrainingBeta: practical training advice. Steve has worked with a lot of climbers through the years, so he doesn't have any problems rattling off big scientific words and answers to all of our common climbing training questions. Hopefully we'll talk again on the show soon!

• How and why he learned so much about training

• Steve's website is Climb Strong at www.climbstrong.com

• This podcast is made possible by the training programs on TrainingBeta here. Check 'em out if you need some help sending!

• Link to the TrainingBeta Podcast on iTunes is HERE.

Intro and outro song: Yesterday by Build Buildings 

Portrait of Steve Bechtel by Mei Ratz

Thanks for listening!