Rough guide to training for rock climbing - page 4

The nitty-gritty

It’s impossible to write down a formula for what to do to be a strong and fit climber, because a single one doesn’t exist. The only guidelines are the principles I described above and some aspects that nearly all climbers need to work on.

Finger strength

In rock climbing your fingers can never be strong enough, so working on finger strength is never wasted time unless you do it at the expense of other types of training or if it’s causing you injury.

• Up to a pretty high level, bouldering is the best way of getting stronger fingers because it challenges different gripping positions and works technique at the same time.
• You need to apply the basic principles – you want to get good at using small holds, so you need to find an angle and types of moves than allow you to do this. If you are a beginner this will be a slab.
• You can also use supplementary techniques to get strong fingers like campus boarding and fingerboarding. Even for the most ambitious climbers they should always remain just that; supplementary. They should be used in addition to real climbing, not instead of it. Otherwise they will ultimately make you a worse climber by several different subtle ways.
• It is easy to give yourself chronic injuries to the tendon supporting structures by doing lots of finger strength training. Your fingers are small structures and not designed for supporting your body weight – treat them as such (i.e. with care). It takes years of slow, steady improvement for them to adapt to hanging off small holds. Specifically, try to climb in control and be ready to let go if something nasty happens which might pull a finger. The most common cause of finger injuries is when your feet suddenly slip off giving a sudden loading on the fingers. If you do very repetitive types of training such as laps on problems or campus boarding, take care to vary the exercises and don’t be scared to take a few days off if something doesn’t feel right. Remember that good recovery from training makes a huge difference to your susceptibility to training injuries (sleep, diet and lifestyle).
• Fingerboarding is a very powerful tool for getting strong fingers because you can set up a very simple and cheap wooden rung above a doorframe at home and do short sessions frequently. This means more training but you don’t get as tired as when you do a full session at the climbing wall. Make sure you don’t replace your climbing with this training or your technique will suffer. You can use fingerboarding to tie in with endurance training by doing a short (20-90 mins depending on your standard) session before your endurance session (or an outdoor climbing day). It doesn’t work so well the other way round.

Fingerboard workout

There are many commercially available types of fingerboard to fit above a doorframe. You don’t need to go to this expense. A 20mm thick length of sanded wood with a slightly rounded edge is all you need. Remember you can also use holds on the bouldering wall or the crag. Make sure you use chalk as sweaty fingers can slip under big loads and cause tendon injuries. You must also hang with your elbows slightly bent as if starting to do a pull-up. Hanging from straight arms repeatedly causes elbow injuries.

Do several easy hangs and pull ups to get thoroughly warmed up. A bar is useful to start off with to increase blood flow and loosen the muscles, progressing to easy hangs and then pull-ups on the fingerboard itself. The warm-up should take between 10 and 30 minutes. Work through as many different grip positions as you can (this will depend very much on your current ability) including:

4 finger open-handed
3 finger open-handed
4 finger crimp
4 finger half crimp
2 finger pocket (middle fingers)
2 finger pocket (index + middle finger)
Mono pocket (middle finger)

You are aiming to perform each hang for 5-8 seconds at the limit of your ability. It should feel very hard to hang on. There are many ways to adjust the difficulty level to create the right intensity. You can use one or both hands. If you need to reduce your body weight you can stand in a suspended length of bungee, cord or a chair at the optimum distance in front of the board. You can work on different combinations of fingers, for example, 4 fingers with one hand and two with the other (swapping hands for each set). Wearing a weight belt or doing pull-ups while hanging on also increases the difficulty.

At first only a few hangs will be enough to improve. You will over time develop an awareness of how much volume you can handle. You will need to increase this volume in steps very carefully, sometimes staying at the same level for months. I have been training hard for ten years and I do 5 sets of each grip, on average 4 times a week for around 8 months of the year. You can vary the focus of your workouts to suit your ambitions and weaknesses at the time. For instance if you are going on a trip to an area with lots of pockets, you can do more open-handed and 2 finger pocket work.

Playing a CD or watching telly is a good way to prevent boredom while you do it. Because the sessions are short, you can build up to doing it quite often (several times a week). But it’s best to take breaks from it every so often as it is a very repetitive type of training. Finger strength is very slow to develop after the first few weeks so you need to stick at it for months and years to really reap the rewards. The plus side of this is that you will notice a slow steady increase in the difficulty of moves you can do and this type of training (if you are doing the other things right too) could be your passport to some impressive grades.

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