Climbing techniques – a plan to raise your game: Week 3 – strength conditioning and grip

OK, if you haven’t been following this from the beginning:

3 weeks ago I decided to embark on a mission to improve my climbing techniques and climbing grades. I invited anyone interested to join me.

So far we have covered nutrition and weight management. In this post we’ll get stuck into the fun stuff – strength and grip training!

When designing a training program to improve your performance in rock climbing (or any sport), the best place to start is by looking closely at the demands placed on your body by your sport and try to replicate them in your training.

You’re probably thinking; why not just do the sport?

Well, you can get a long way just doing that, but there are advantages to using resistance training:

1. You can incrementally add more resistance

When you’re actually climbing, the resistance is your body weight being pulled down by gravity. The amount of resistance is usually affected by the steepness of the climb and your technique. Because you want to climb as well as possible, you’re likely to focus as hard as you can on your technique, thus lessening the load on your muscles.

Now imagine using that technique with the addition of stronger muscles – you will climb like a machine!

To achieve that strength you need to isolate those muscles and make them stronger by incrementally increasing the loads placed upon them.

2. You can focus on your weaknesses

The joy of resistance training is that you can isolate each of the movements that you’re going to need in rock climbing and use exercises to focus on improving them. You can focus on areas of weakness and make incremental gains.

3. It’s easier to measure

If you’re simply climbing, it’s not always easy to see exactly how much you have improved in any one aspect. The only time you can be sure you got better is when you start consistently climbing higher grades.

With resistance training you can measure your improvement in each aspect of your game.

For instance, your hang times on the fingerboard might have improved by 30%, or you might be able to do 10 chins where before you could only do six.

Strong rock climbing relies heavily on these important factors:

a) Strong grip

Whether it’s small crimpy holds or open handed slopers, finger and hand strength is vital.

b) Powerful legs

Good climbing technique comes from positioning your feet and driving the moves from your legs while using your hands to support your upper body. You need to be able to develop power from an extended or fully compressed position with either or both legs (think really tough rock-over moves).

c) Pull strength

You can’t always rely on a good foothold to push from. Sometimes you’re going to need to haul your body up just with your upper body strength.

d) A strong core

Have you noticed on overhanging routes that when you twist and push from your feet, pushing your hips up, that it’s easier to hold on? A stronger core will enable you to hold this position for longer, making it easier to handle sustained routes.

e) Cardio vascular fitness

It’s no good having all that strength if you’re out of puff halfway through the route! You need to have a good level of general fitness. We’ll focus on this after an initial strength training period.

I’m going to base the training on three separate workouts. If you can only fit in one or two, don’t worry, you can just reduce the number of sets.

This post is going to get really long, so I’ll give you the actual workouts in the next post. To make sure you don’t miss it, you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

As with all my posts, I would love to hear your views, please drop me a comment below if you have a minute.