I disagree with the notion of “beneficial imbalance” here. It’s likely that we may be thinking of the same thing when I’m talking about “optimizing or specializ

I disagree with the notion of “beneficial imbalance” here. It’s likely that we may be thinking of the same thing when I’m talking about “optimizing or specializing for a sport”, but I will never use my notion as an argument against training the essentials. You‘re not going to be a more successful (and more importantly, _safe_) rock climber, boulderer, or mountaineer without a baseline strength in the essential muscle groups because those will keep your whole body stable and your posture as it should be while you’re wiggling your body about vertical surfaces. Well-rounded baseline strength could very well spell the difference between life and death especially for the activities that you mentioned. There’s also the fact that should rock climbers, boulderers, and mountaineers have lives and real jobs outside what they do for recreation, then the reality is that they have a variety of bodily movements that just need to be generally done with, again, good posture, which you simply can’t have with an imbalance in the essentials.