Tactical Training Workouts for Climbing:
The tactical day is the day in which you just go climbing or bouldering, outside or inside. The idea with a tactical day is that your primary focus is technique; it can be an easy day or a hard day depending on how you feel. However, the tactical training day is not the day to attempt to redpoint your project, (i.e. don’t take 2 rest days before a tactical day). It is a day to go climbing and climb as hard as you feel like, but focusing on technique above all else. This is not to say that you can’t try to climb something hard, it just means that your focus should not be on climbing hard.
A tactical day should be reserved for that day when you feel too worked or unmotivated to do a specific training day. There is one thing to note here, and that is that a tactical day is devoted to climbing (note the climbing part of that). Even though I recommend doing a tactical day when you are worked or unmotivated, you should not do the tactical portion of a workout when you are tired. Any training activity that requires a lot of focus and central nervous system activity, which will always be the climbing portion of the workout, should be done at the beginning of the training day when you're fresh. This means you should always do any type of climbing-specific work first, then do you weight training (if that's on your plate for the day).
Use the tactical day as a means to remind yourself why climbing is something you find a benefit in doing. If you feel tired, just warm-up and go home. That's it. On the other hand, if you feel like trying hard then try hard. If you want to practice doing drive-bys then practice doing drive-bys. If you want to practice dynos then do some dynos. You get the idea.
Schedule for including climbing days within a training week:
Scheduling what you do and when (within a climbing day) is an important aspect to developing a good training program. The time of day that you perform workouts is also very important. Doing too much on any one day can lead to insufficient recovery for the next training day, thereby reducing the efficacy of the next workout which in turn leads to continual sub-optimal workouts.
I would keep the total workout to less than 2 hrs with about 1.5 hrs being optimal. This doesn’t include the warm-up period, which should be around 30 minutes of gradual increase. So a long training day would be 2.5 hrs total and an optimal training day would be 2 hrs. This is one reason why training inside is useful; An 8 hr day at the cliff is extremely taxing and should really be saved for the peak phase when your fitness and ability to recover is at a peak. It is also important to do the exercises which require the most central nervous system activity and maximum strength first then move onto the ones that require less. For the climber this means doing the climbing portion of the workout first followed by the climbing specific exercises (i.e. fingerboarding) second and the weight portion last.
The other issue is rest days within the climbing week. It has been my experience that the amount of rest days needed is an individual thing and really can only be determined by trying different schedules and keeping a training log which can be looked back on to see what type of schedule resulted in the most ‘good’ training/climbing days. Recovery between climbing days is also very much an age thing. As we get older we produce less growth hormone and it takes us longer to recover between bouts of exercise. Another aspect that can affect how much rest is needed is the type of workout performed. It is generally believed that MxS workouts require more time to recover than do Endurance workouts, and recovery from power endurance workouts being somewhere in between.