About Our Fitness Training Programs
Created with the urban climber in mind, the Tufas fitness training programs offer regularly scheduled small group and personal fitness training programs that cater to climbers of all skill and commitment levels. While both fun and effective, Tufas climbers learn how to incorporate on and off the wall training to their weekly routine.
At Tufas, we believe that strength training should be the focus of any fitness training program and should be done all year-round. Strength is the underlying quality all other facets of fitness are built upon, including power and endurance. Most climbers who “just climb a lot,” inevitably hit a plateau at which progression slows and injuries ensue. In general, the act of climbing is way too complex to develop complete functional strength on the wall alone.
“We train strength so that skills are easier to acquire. We train strength so that you can recover more quickly from intense bouts of climbing. We train strength so that every move you make on the rock and every step you take with a loaded pack are just that much easier.” -Steve Bechtel, Climb Strong
Our Trainers & Coaches
Harlan Ewers
NASM-CES, CPT, LMT, WSI, BS – Kinesiology
“Move well. Try hard. Climb harder.”
Harlan joins Tufas with over 10 years of experience as a health and fitness professional. He specializes in strength and metabolic training, corrective exercise techniques, and mobility coaching. As a Licensed Massage Therapist he also brings expertise in orthopedic assessment and sports massage.
Currently, Harlan is the Director of Fitness at The Rittenhouse Spa & Club, where he also coaches swimming as an American Red Cross Water Safety Instructor, and is a group fitness instructor in barre and adaptive aquatics classes.
Harlan’s real passion is climbing. When he’s not working, he’s on a wall somewhere – all across the country or in the gym. In his down time, he’s usually reading books about climbing, or watching every climbing video on youtube ever. Yes, he even attends climbing conferences, like The Climb Strong Performance Climbing Coaches Seminar.
At Tufas, Harlan combines this passion for climbing with his expertise in training to help clients identify and achieve fitness goals, leading to greater skill acquisition on the wall, and injury resiliency.