Beastmaking is the World’s Best Training Book for Climbing

Beastmaker’s Ned Feehally has become a pillar of climbing’s international training community. Between both his 1000 and 2000 models, Feehally has co-produced the most popular brand of wooden fingerboards in the world. Although Beastmaker continues to build and rebuild training equipment, Feehally has more recently focused his efforts on a training book. This is Beastmaking.

The 200 page training guide carries 18 chapters and includes interviews with some of the world’s best climbers. Although Feehally may not be as instantly recognizable as Adam Ondra, he has followed what climbing has become over the last two decades. In that time, Feehally became one of the few to have flashed up to 8b+ or V14 and competed on the international circuit.

While these credentials alone do not make someone inherently well researched in the world of training, Feehally’s meticulous approach to progression, described through training logs and supplemental research have come together in this book. Despite Feehally’s pedigree in the sport, it is easy to feel skeptical. Could it be just another training book?

If you are like many boulderers or training fanatics, you have read training books in the past. Often, they are unresearched, anecdotal, and describe progression in worked-for-me terms.  Feehally’s book, admittedly, has elements that can allow a skeptic pause for questions. He embraces elements of the anecdotal. The difference comes in the form of research from the world’s best climbers. This research includes interviews with Alex Megos, Alex Puccio, Shauna Coxsey, Tomoa Narasaki and others.

He puts his experiences within the context of these high-end athletes and reduces the information to its most essential characteristics.  From the foreward, Feehally admits that he will leave the citations out of this book and recommends your following up with additional reading if interested.

Instead of writing an APA cited spreadsheet, Feehally has gone for something different. He has looked to communicate the basic information quickly and easily. The first thing to say about the book is it is easy to read. Basic vocabulary is described specifically so that you know what the author means when he references power or strength or any number of other terms over the length of the book.

Additionally, he appreciates the differences of the climber. He makes astute points such as: not everyone will climb V13 or harder and there are physical and mental limitations the prevent people from doing so and you are not a professional climber. Beastmaking sees the average climber and offers them a guide to training that exists within the context of the fully employed, family person.

Furthermore, he references body size and many other topics in nuanced manners that exemplify his experience . For example, athletes at either end of the height bell-curve, the extremes, will reach their peak strength quicker than athletes who fall below it primarily because they are so advantaged on those problems that fit their boxes. With that said, those athletes may also have less consistent progression finding plateaus when they run out of problems that suit their style.

These are the sorts of contextual details that lend strength to his book and describe the direction he hoped to head with it. Feehally said, “I just wanted to make a book that was so accessible to a normal person that couldn’t be asked to read a really boring book. I wanted to make it dead simple, and kind of interesting to look at: colourful, certainly not black and white, with photos in it, so you could just pick it up and flick through it, and hopefully pick something up. So that was that was sort of the idea. And it felt like at the time, there wasn’t really anything like that around.”

Although the book can be read in order, Feehally noted that the book does not prioritize a chronological order. Instead, he recognized that many climbers will want to turn to the chapter that best relates to their training query and then move on to the training itself. This is deliberate as every athlete has different needs from a training book. Beastmaking provides a reference guide to move through specialized content quickly.

As such, Feehally has eased the ingestion of dense training material into a small number of words written in a comfortable tone. While this has obvious usage, the question of methodology remains: why not make it researched?  Feehally said that a hyper-detail-oriented approach does not work for the average person. “The whole purpose of the book was to give your average person a decent set of training knowledge to use. The book doesn’t point you in any direction. Hopefully, it lets you figure out what you need to do. It’s not a training plan, but it’s a sort of guide. Basically, I just, I think if anything’s too prescriptive, in the world of climbing, it doesn’t really work.”

There is an element of magic surrounding strong climbers that Feehally manages to dismantle in his book. Where people look for a quick training fix, all progression takes a long time. Climbers face failure before they see success and those that improve do so through consistency and weakness identification.

Feehally noted that he does not address technique in his book due its nuance. With so many different types of moves, and the many moving parts of the body that all describe the technical, it is difficult to sum something like technique in 1000 words. Additionally, criticism of the book has described the included information as common knowledge, but this seems unfair.

While a lot of training knowledge exists online for free, finding what works within it is challenging and time consuming. Every claim is unsubstantiated, and many pieces do not admit their short comings. Beastmaking is a book written by a life-long climber who became one of the leading minds on strength training in the sport. He has amassed his knowledge in one space and has created one of the best training books in world. In the eyes of this editor, Beastmaking is the most enjoyable, accessible ingestible and digestible training book on the market and well worth your time.

Buy Beastmaking here.