Jump to content

GripBoard Archives (2006) - Gym Training For Rock Climbing - Author Unknown


Bill Piche

Recommended Posts

Gym Training For Rock Climbing

Probably the biggest single training mistake climbers make is to just climb instead of practice climbing. You go to the gym and just have fun – climb routes you’ve done a hundred times and you don’t learn a darn thing.  It keeps you in shape maybe but it doesn’t make you a better climber at all.  It’s a lot like weight training that way; you go to the gym and you do the same things you’ve always done, and somehow you expect to get a different result.  You have to do either one with a plan – either to develop movement skills, flexibility skills, strength skills for either gross motor movements or specific foot or fingers skills.  It’s all about working your weak points, not just your strengths.  But don’t make the mistake of neglecting your strengths either. Work on back steps, lie backs, drop knees, and all the many climbing specific movement skills that are not all that natural for most people.   In the beginning of a climbers career, it’s very easy to get overuse injuries from using the forearms too much with poor or non existent footwork causing quite an overload.

            The biggest problem guys like us have is that we love the weight room and think we can climb better by just developing a wicked strong grip.  While that doesn’t hurt anything, climbing is a whole body sport; sure it hammers your forearms and fingers but the secret – if there is one – is to use your body movements in such a way as to take as much stress as possible off of the fingers and forearms, then you have their full strength available when body movement alone won’t get you through.  It’s also a strength to bodyweight ratio sport; good climbers are light weights and a few pounds can make the difference in going up – or not.  At some point you have to decide what’s important to you – lifting bigger weights or climbing better; it’s very hard to be a very good “big” rock climber.  Movement skills are more important than any other single thing in climbing and these are normally developed by practicing specific movement patterns either on the rock, a climbing wall, or a system board (recommended at higher levels).  Often flexibility issues must be addressed as well. 

Now guessing that you’re interested at this time in developing the “gym” or “weight room” aspects of training for climbing; I’ll give you my thoughts in a general way.  Fingers and forearms are for the most part used statically – that is not through a full range of motion.  While it’s still a good (no great) idea to train full ranges of motion for overall strength and health; you must develop strength in those positions that are most commonly used climbing.  Open hand, crimp grip, tip grip, and various crack size cams and locks, also individual fingers in each position, trained statically or in isometric fashion.  You must also develop “hard tips” or the toughening and hardening of the fingertips that is necessary for climbing.  If you live far from any climbing area in the winter – the weight room may be your only place to work on all these things for a recreational climber.  At the beginner level, the best way to train is to go climbing a lot.  There’s a lot to learn rope and gear wise that you need before you worry about gymnastic and strength goals – you know - the stuff that keeps you from getting killed out there.  This IS MORE IMPORTANT than how well you climb!  You can’t get better if you’re dead!

The first thing new climbers notice is the unbelievable pump that you get in your forearms.  While I don’t know of a way to eliminate this, there are things you can do to help in the training hall.  At a certain level of strength recruitment, blood flow pretty much stops in a muscle.  An example might be this – if you hold onto 100# and that is you limit strength, then you’re using 100% of your strength – but if you increase your limit strength to 200#, now you’re using 50% of you limit.  Much of what I’ve read says that blood flow slows significantly at about 60% of limit.  So increasing limit strength will certainly help with the pump.  It also means you will be able to hold smaller and smaller holds the stronger you get as well.  Increasing vascularity in the forearms can also be accomplished by high repetition work on those muscles.  Care must be taken to work the antagonists to prevent injury also.  Reverse curls and reverse wrist curls or opening the hands with rubber bands over the fingertips are a good start and a bucket of rice, beans, or sand is even better.

 One of the primary tools used to develop climbing specific strength is the hang board – a collection of various sized and shaped holds that you can hang from, using either positive (weights) or negative tension (bands) as needed for your goals and ability level.  An advanced method is the campus board – highly effective but NOT for beginners – it’s very stressful and can result in injuries if you’re not ready for it. High rep wrist curls have value for increasing vascularity but don’t get hung up on thinking this is the secret to anything related to climbing just because the pump feels the same.  Behind the back wrist curls seem to apply more specifically to the way climbing hits the forearms.   Levering can help, especially in crack climbing and injury prevention.  Maybe the best single weight exercise I’ve found for climbing is finger curls – arms straight with a curl grip – roll a barbell down as far as you can towards your fingertips, then roll them back up to a tightly closed hand, wrists and arms stay straight. World class climber Todd Skinner told me about these.  Do it in the power rack and push the weight – bodyweight should be easy enough – and more is certainly possible.  Keep the reps low – maybe triples.  It’s a good idea to do some all around work for the lower arms in the off season as well but it’s only going to keep you healthy and increase overall strength, not increase climbing specific strengths much, I mean any strength increase will help but nowhere near as much as specific climbing strength. 

Climbing uses a cross body pressure to keep you from “barndooring” or spinning like you’re a hinge.  To understand this, hold on with your left hand and stand on your left foot on an overhanging climbing wall and see what happens.  You want to move on your left foot – right hand and vice versa.  This X or cross body pressure involves a lot of core but not just straight ahead stomach work; one arm and one leg ab wheel work is a good answer for this, pushing odd angles as much as possible.  Also work the backside of your body the same way, doing one arm pulls in all different directions while standing – bands hooked to a power rack allow lots of different variations for this.  A somewhat harder way is inverted rowing.  You can do it on rings or a bar in the power rack (or whatever).  Lay on your back – stick your arms up in the air and adjust your setup so when you grab the rings, your back and butt are just off the floor.  Now pull yourself up – but with just one foot on the floor – work this back and forth between feet.  Next do swinging rows – as you come up, pull yourself towards the left hand, then the right, kind of swinging side to side.  Start on both feet, then go to one foot on the floor. 

These are just a few things I’ve found over the years that help the actual climbing muscles in a non climbing workout situation.  Try them, maybe you’ll like them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Unfortunately, your content contains terms that we do not allow. Please edit your content to remove the highlighted words below.
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy policies.