Rating: 
Summary: Very technical guide to improving your climbing abilities
Review: A toolbox of techniques, tactics, and strategies to improve your climbing skills. The authors cover a gamut of subjects aimed at both physical and mental conditioning for climbing. Some of their writing is a bit scientific (sounding more like a college textbook at times), but they offset this with amusing anecdotes and cartoons. Lots of great 'beta' on technique as well as being a essential training guide for all areas and levels of rock sport
Rating: 
Summary: High quality training manual for serious rock climbers
Review: Are you constantly thinking about climbing? Do you salivate when you see the clean vertical wall of your office building? If you are violently excited about climbing and are willing to seriously train for improvement, then this book is for you. This is not a book that details weight room exercises for building bulging biceps. Rather, it is a scientific analysis of the aesthetics of motion in the vertical domain. Let's forget about pulling the overhang with brute force. Let's concentrate on moving past the overhang in the most graceful, precise and energy-efficient manner possible - that's what the tenor of this book is. This book is a careful examination of the physical, biological and mental processes necessary to improve your performance on the rock. It is a serious and comprehensive training manual for serious climbers. As a bonus, it has a beautiful color photo section of climbers in action - looking at it makes me want to go out and get back on the rock!
Rating:
Summary: High quality training manual for serious rock climbers
Review: Are you constantly thinking about climbing? Do you salivate when you see the clean vertical wall of your office building? If you are violently excited about climbing and are willing to seriously train for improvement, then this book is for you. This is not a book that details weight room exercises for building bulging biceps. Rather, it is a scientific analysis of the aesthetics of motion in the vertical domain. Let's forget about pulling the overhang with brute force. Let's concentrate on moving past the overhang in the most graceful, precise and energy-efficient manner possible - that's what the tenor of this book is. This book is a careful examination of the physical, biological and mental processes necessary to improve your performance on the rock. It is a serious and comprehensive training manual for serious climbers. As a bonus, it has a beautiful color photo section of climbers in action - looking at it makes me want to go out and get back on the rock!
Rating:
Summary: GREAT
Review: If you buy only one rock climbing book, this should be it!! Great overview of training techniques and what you can do on and off rock to improve your overall conditioning and climbing. Explains physiology in easy to understand terms so that each person can customize workouts to their own needs and to fit their goals.
Rating:
Summary: Move forward now or get off the rock
Review: Imagine a pursuit that requires bloody fingers to excel at, a life or death commitment to succed in almost any areas of, and then take a look at this book. The cover alone conjures up teen romace rags, the horrendous pink and orange looks like some bizzare lesbian cookbook recipe collection. Don't let the cover deceive you about the content of this book. I've invested a lot of time and energy in texts that only added one more Everest story to my knowledge. NOT SO THIS BOOK. Concepts in this Performance Rock Climbing have been endorsed and used by most major climber you've read about. The back cover features an endorsement from a certain Mark Twight, and if you need any more information than that to take advantage of this book's massive potential for improvement, I suggest trading in your rack of gear for a bigger TV-you'll be more comfortable during your muscle decay, and that's one less person kicking down rocks on my head while answering a celphone halfway through a climb. To reiterate, this book is one of about five key texts that can supercharge your rate of growth if you'll invest the time to read it. Also get Heather Sagar's book, and Eric Horst, and any John Long from the How To Rock Climb series. And leave the celphone in the car next time, SUV guy.
Rating:
Summary: THE Climbing Technique Book
Review: Improving one's ability in any endeavor can be difficult once one has practiced for a few years. One might think that there's not all that much technique involved in rock climbing, since the climber has but two arms and two legs. But it's not that simple. Performance Rock Climbing breaks climbing down into a number of aspects, then teaches how to optimize each and combine the parts into a whole. When this book hit the shelves, I had stagnated for a few years, unable to improve. Within 6 months, my onsight leading level had jumped nearly a whole grade. I'd learned to channel my energy for climbing in a more efficient way, and to reduce climbing related injuries. Rather than just exercising the climbing muscles, I learned to better exercise my mind - perhaps the most critical muscle of all for a climber.
Rating:
Summary: THE Climbing Technique Book
Review: Improving one's ability in any endeavor can be difficult once one has practiced for a few years. One might think that there's not all that much technique involved in rock climbing, since the climber has but two arms and two legs. But it's not that simple. Performance Rock Climbing breaks climbing down into a number of aspects, then teaches how to optimize each and combine the parts into a whole. When this book hit the shelves, I had stagnated for a few years, unable to improve. Within 6 months, my onsight leading level had jumped nearly a whole grade. I'd learned to channel my energy for climbing in a more efficient way, and to reduce climbing related injuries. Rather than just exercising the climbing muscles, I learned to better exercise my mind - perhaps the most critical muscle of all for a climber.
Rating:
Summary: Belongs on every climber¿s bookshelf
Review: Looking back after buying this book two years ago reaffirmed to me that Goddard and Neumann achieved what no other climbing training book has: they combined the scientific principles of physical training with on-the-rock experience and captured it in a very readable form. The material is detailed and informative, blending research with proven results in the form of Goddard's own climbing performance over a decade. I watched him climb a 5.14 in Logan Utah in 1995, and it was nothing short of amazing. Applying the principles has helped me improve from climbing 5.11a to 5.12.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent resource
Review: This book will not tell you how to hold onto a tiny crimpy hold with one finger while your feet hunt for somewhere to stand. It WILL tell you lots of things about how muscules work, what good training looks like, and what good climbing feels like. This is not a recipe book, because in climbing, there is no recipe. Everyone climbs under a different set of constraints - strength, weight, skill, etc. This is a book that will give you the tools you need to watch your own climbing and improve it. Read it cover to cover.
Rating:
Summary: GREAT
Review: This is the definitive book on how to train for rock climbing. It includes various different types of training and how to incorporate them into workouts both on and off the rock. It's the sort of text that must be referred to repeatedly -- reading it once won't be enough! Performance Rock Climbing would benefit greatly from a detailed glossary for those of us who are not experts in exercise physiology, and some sections, particularly the one concerning periodization, are difficult to understand. Still, anyone serious about improving performance should buy this book.
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